Faceoff

When you wanna get something done, sometimes you gotta fight fire with fire. To put it another way, sometimes you gotta use the same tactics as the other side.

Okay, so the haggling over an arena and events center in downtown Kalamazoo isn’t really a fight as such. Still, one side hopes that by organizing their desires they can balance out the business interests behind the arena proposal.

Their purpose is simple and straightforward: They want to set up something called a Community Benefits Agreement.

It’s basically a contract between a community group (such as ISAAC) and a developer (such as the county) to do certain things in the interest of the community.

The group is developing a bullet list of stipulations:

• Construction
• End-use jobs
• Community usage
• Impact on local business
• Environmental standards

There may be more once they get things more formalized.

The discussion during a meeting on Friday afternoon mostly circulated around the first item. Folks want to be sure that the tradespeople building this thing are from around here and that most of the money stays around here.

They also take issue with the notion that downtown doesn’t need more parking to deal with the people coming to the arena. And they want to make sure that community groups have regular access to the space so we don’t have a big ol’ building sitting empty like they have in Grand Rapids.

The group is hammering out the details under each of those bullet points. No word on when the next meeting is; I’ll post it when I know it.
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