MORGANTOWN, W.Va. — The City of Morgantown and a well known non-profit organization are looking to improve the exteriors of businesses in downtown Morgantown.
Main Street Morgantown is working with the city to offer downtown property and small business owners up to $10,000 for renovations on the exterior of their property.
“If you’re looking to do some paintings or rehabbing your windows, you can borrow, it’s a forgivable loan over five years, you can get up to $10,000 to rehab your buildings,” said Barbara Watkins of Main Street Morgantown.
The goal for this loan is to help create more opportunities for local businesses through “curb appeal,” giving potential customers a more welcoming atmosphere to spend their dollars.
Watson says an example of this change being implemented positively in Morgantown includes minor rehab work on Wall Street, which included a repainting of building walls and rehabilitated windows.
“And it looks so much nicer right there,” she said. “So you can see what just a little bit of rehab on a building can do.”
Through a forgivable loan, business owners will be given the opportunity to improve certain aspects of their facade. This will also include the opportunity of state tax credits as well, which would vary depending on the project.
“If a building owner really wants to do rehab to the front of their buildings, we have technical assistant Mike Giosio will come down and he’ll look at the building,” she said. “He’ll let you know, he’ll do renderings of what the building looks like to keep it in historic reference that it already is.”
So far, the downtown property owners have responded positively with the opportunity being presented to them. According to Watkins, four owners are currently considering ideas to help rehab their exteriors.
“So if we have a lot more interest in it, (the city) would say that they would evaluate that to look into giving us more additional funds. So, right now, it’s just $20,000. But if we have a lot of people in our downtown district, it could stretch out even more.”