I am of course aware of Billings Gazette editor Darrell Ehrlick’s column and some of the conversation downtown. Ehrlick’s description of downtown Billings on Black Friday, Nov. 28, was unfortunately true. One of my associates and I also noticed most of the problems Ehrlick mentioned around our office that day.
I have happily worked downtown since the late 1970s, the last 25 years on the corner of Second and Broadway. We have had our ups and downs and have seen some improvements. This past year, however, has been a real challenge!
We hated removing the bench in front of our office. It has, however, helped with my daily job of evicting drunks from our front stoop. We are still continually picking up single bottles and cans of cheap booze served by the same purveyors downtown. It has been widely reported what bars and convenience stores sell this rotgut to transients, yet not a damn thing has been done.
The DBA even sponsored Alive After Five with one of the dominant suppliers of cheap booze. It’s time for law enforcement, city and county attorneys and the Department of Revenue to finally get something done.
We have been very supportive of the two dedicated resource officers, but we need considerably more presence downtown. Regular beat cops could occasionally walk a bit downtown. Downtown businesses would love to interact more with the department. Even if they walked around for just a few minutes between shift changes it would be an immediate boost in downtown confidence.
Monday mornings in front of our offices can be particularly nasty even with our hardworking DBA workers struggling to keep up. I support Alive After Five, but more resources need to be applied. My daughter’s store was broken into after Alive After Five. I met with police officers around midnight and they told me of numerous problems associated with Alive After Five.
Ehrlick’s opinions have angered some downtown folks including people who work hard to improve things. Sometimes the truth hurts! I have had people object to similar problems who fear coming to the library, Yellowstone Art Museum or the Alberta Bair Theater. We have clients who don’t want to come downtown. They describe the identical problems in Ehrlick’s column.
Cold weather, while hard on transients and crooks, does slow things down a bit. A campus as proposed by our city manager is a good idea, but years away! The failure of the public safety levy only makes solutions much harder.
Let’s work on some immediate solutions for this spring and summer’s inevitable problems. Let’s do some immediate things to give our citizens a badly needed dose of confidence in our wonderful downtown. Not admitting to problems is a sure way of not solving them.
Gary Buchanan is the co-owner of Buchanan Capital Inc. in downtown Billings.
