After a decade in NL, are Parsekian and co. up to the task?
Amid bottles of modestly priced domestic wine and hors d’oeuvres nearly 175 of New London’s movers and shakers crowded the Oasis Room at the Garde Arts Center last month to commemorate 10 years of New London Main Street.
But there was more to celebrate than just the success of Food Strolls past and historical plaques in front of the city’s architectural gems.
Just a few days before, the City Council gave the organization $77,000 from City Hall coffers and a new mandate: become the go-to group for downtown economic development.
“The city has committed to Main Street,” said Councilor Michael Buscetto, who emceed the event. “It will benefit the community, and its effects will be long term.”
The next day, NLMS Executive Director Penny Parsekian was in good spirits after the 10th anniversary celebration in which she was roasted by Steve Segal, director of the Garde.
Sitting at a cafe table in the atrium outside of NLMS’ offices, Parsekian was visibly excited about New London Main Street’s new role in the city’s economic development.
“If not Main Street,” she said, “then who?”
To hear Parsekian tell it, New London Main Street is a very different organization than the one she inherited when she assumed the executive director’s chair in February 2000.
“There was a lot of turnover in this job,” she said.
Parsekian is the third person at the helm of the organization formed from the rib of Connecticut Main Street, an arm of the National Trust For Historical Preservation.
The group was first sanctioned in 1995 but did not garner enough funding to begin work until the spring of 1998.
The Main Street Board of Directors hired a “program manager” that July who stayed only three months on the job.
In February 1999 the board hired Tana Parseliti to head the organization that had been tasked with coordinating downtown’s businesses in preparation for OpSail, the tall ships festival in the summer of 2000 that brought one million people to the city.
But in March of that year, just three months before OpSail, Parseliti resigned to take a similar position in Manchester.
That was when Parsekian, who hitherto had never headed up a nonprofit, came on board.
“When I took over we had to train 600 volunteers for that event, so I hit the deck running,” she said. “It was a make it or break it time for Main Street.”
Parsekian, who moved to New London in the early 1990s, already had an illustrious career in publishing with Scholastic and was a well-known, national award-winning photographer in her Greenwich Village neighborhood in New York.
Upon arriving in New London, Parsekian was part of a group that attempted to build a walkway from the colleges in the northern part of the city to downtown.
“OpSail was a blur for me,” she said, “but afterward we looked forward to doing some strategic planning.”
Parsekian then began to secure funding from the “major players in New London,” such as the banks, Pfizer, Electric Boat, and The Day Publishing Company, which owns this newspaper.
In the coming years, Parsekian was able to hire full- and part-time staff to assist in the promotion of events such as the wildly popular Food Strolls, a Valentine’s Day celebration, and the Christmastime “Living History” play.
Now, both the City Council and the city at large will have higher expectations for NLMS.
Buscetto said in an separate interview that the council and NLMS will draft a “memorandum of understanding” concerning New London Main Street’s expectations.
“We want to lay out their goals so it’s clear,” he said. “It’s not like we said to them, ‘Here’s $77,000, happy birthday.’”
The city investment in NLMS came on the heels of Democratic councilors’ vote to eliminate the head of the office of Development and Planning, Bruce Hyde, who will vacate the job he has held since the early 1980s in September.
The Democrats, who hold a 5-2 majority on the Council, also voted to eliminate the job of downtown development coordinator, held by Joseph Celli, who is held in very high esteem among New London’s cadre of underground musicians and artists, many of whom live in the city center.
While debate over Hyde and Celli getting the ax raged across the city, Main Street kept notably quiet.
“It was a political hot potato,” Parsekian said. “Maybe some change would help.”
Parsekian, nevertheless, praised Buscetto’s leadership on this apparent sea change in who would be responsible for marketing the downtown area.
“We have a lot of faith in Mike Buscetto,” she said. “He is smart and insightful and knows we have the capacity to do this.”
But the budget drama in New London is hardly over.
Last week, members of Looking Out For Taxpayers began circulating petitions to cut the $80 million budget.
“We’re not counting our chickens just yet,” Parsekian said.
While in the past NLMS has occasionally appeared before the City Council to apprise the councilors of upcoming events, its presence in City Hall will become a more regular occurrence.
Frank McLaughlin, the president of the NLMS board, appeared before the City Council last week to inform them that NLMS will provide regular updates on its progress this year.
Although NLMS received a boost in funding from the city, it did not get any money from the City Center District, a special tax zone in downtown New London.
In past years, NLMS had received as much as $15,000 from City Center District, though this year its commissioners voted to redo its budget and, for the time being, not fund Main Street.
Barbara Neff, the former Parade News owner, who now runs a festival promotion company, said she and two other New London stalwarts, Rick Rubenstein and Reid Burdick, were elected from the floor to the commission at CCD’s recent meeting.
Neff said the new commission then voted to “rework its budget.”
Neff noted that CCD is interested in lobbying for increased Shore Line East rail service to the city.
CCD is slated to vote on its budget June 12.
McLaughlin said it was “unfortunate” CCD did not vote to allocate funds at its last meeting. Nevertheless, both Parsekian and McLaughlin are already making plans for the next year.
McLaughlin said first and foremost NLMS wants to create and maintain a Web-based database of vacant storefronts and buildings for sale in the city center.
The injection of funds, McLaughlin said, would allow Main Street to reorganize the office to see how to get the most value out of its budget. “There might be some functions we can do in-house,” he said. “Others could be farmed out.”
McLaughlin, a downtown property owner, said NLMS will take a different approach to marketing the city than ODP.
“[ODP] was, in a way, conservative with marketing,” he said. “We want to put more of a commercial spin on it.”
Parsekian said downtown New London’s main competition are the malls, and NLMS is competing against not only the mall stores but their business models.
“They have a manager who is the go-to person for space, store hours, displays, keeping the parking lots clean,” she said. “If there is problem, businesses can go to the mall manager. What we have to is 10 times more difficult.”
It is unclear if the City Council’s boost to NLMS will become an annual occurrence.
“They have this year to prove themselves,” Buscetto said. “It’s not a guarantee they’ll get this next year; no line item is a guarantee.”