Main Street District Lighting Revitalization Project

Beautiful evening on Main Street. I'm Matt Kennel. I'm president and CEO of the Main Street District. And I'd just love to welcome you tonight to the heart of our beautiful Capitol City. Uh we are here tonight to celebrate a new lighting project on Main Street that will add to the character of the district and enhance safety. You may have already noticed the circular lanterns uh hanging in the trees at Main Street intersections, and you're going to see them uh here shortly in a much better way. Tonight, we're going to hear from some esteemed guest, followed by a countdown to officially plug in the four corners of this intersection. Following the ceremony, you will see the remaining intersections along Main Street from Jery Street to Laurel Street light up as our lighting vendor turns on each intersection. After tonight, the lights are going to come on at sundown and will remain until midnight each each night. But before we continue tonight, I would be remiss not to thank the following people. And first and foremost, I'd like to thank uh the Boyd Foundation for funding this project and continuing to help elevate public spaces in the Columbia region. George and Ford, we we could not we cannot thank you enough. Simply, uh we'd like to thank the city of Colombia for supporting our ideas, sometimes crazy ideas, uh offering guidance and providing great knowledge through their public works team. And we also want to thank Scott Edge and his crew at Carolina Landscape Lighting who have been out here in some really hot weather uh installing these and helping us uh figure this out. Uh we've been down here day and night with him uh to make this happen. And I'm want to do a special thanks to Heather Spires on our team, one of our vice presidents. Heather could not be here tonight. She's at the beach celebrating a a big birthday, but uh Heather has been instrumental in bringing this project to life after literally years of ideas and discussions. It's it's been quite a journey. So, we want to thank you uh thank her especially. But now, I get the great pleasure of asking George Bailey of the Boyd Foundation to the podium so he can say a few words. George, we thank you again. Well, let me just say it's been our pleasure to partner with the Main Street District in the city of Colombia and making this project come to fruition. Uh it, as Matt said, it's been a long time coming. Uh but we're finally here or we're here with phase one and we expect that we're also going to be doing um phase two. So, you have something to look forward to. Um, I'm a native of Colombian. I've lived here all my life. I've seen Colombia go through um complete cycles. When I was a child, uh, downtown Main Street was packed with people, packed with stores, people going into the stores. The 10- cent stores with the big cookie jars with the five- cent cookie in the jar. And then we evolved into I don't know what you call it, but when everyone started moving to the suburbs, all of the shopping centers out in the suburbs in our city just died. I my office was on in the Meridian building on Main Street. I could come to my office at night and the entire main street would would be totally vacant. U not a not a single vehicle parked. I could park anywhere I wanted to. Fast forward to today, where are we now? You can't get a parking space anywhere close to Main Street. We are a vibrant town now. We are on a roll and thanks in large part, I think, to our good government we have with our city council and most particularly our mayor. So, we are glad to participate in this project and look forward to working with the city to make this a better place to live. And we do have a great mayor. And it is my great pleasure to introduce the honorable Daniel J. Rickenman's the city of Columbia mayor to say a few words and lead us through the countdown of the plug-in. Um Daniel has been a tremendous supporter of downtown in so many ways. You can see the construction, you can see the cranes, you can feel the energy and we notice that mayor and appreciate it and we're just so happy that you're with us tonight to do the countdown. So on that Thank you. >> Well, first of all, welcome everybody. This is exciting. Uh, we've been talking about lighting up Main Street for what, two and a half years, George? Trying to get here, maybe longer. Trying to find a solution and everything we found ran into challenges and then all of a sudden we have this great opportunity. It's just going to bring people here. The warmth, the feel of Main Street is we've seen when I first came here in 1988, you literally could hit a golf ball down Main Street. Now there are people everywhere. Vibrancy, the restaurant choices. just was talking to the one of the residents right here on the street saying, you know, it's nice to come home and I got 30 restaurants to choose from to go have a great dinner within walking distance. But none of this would happen without collaboration and partnerships. And I want to thank the Boy Foundation for their continuing investment here in City of Colombia, not just on Main Street, but on our riverfront and our parks, really making us the city we want to be. This is our capital city. It's your capital city. and we're extremely excited about the opportunity that's going to be here. And this is just one little thing that makes a big difference. So, I'm not going to delay it anymore because I know we're all waiting to see it block by block lit up. So, if you all will join me in the countdown, we're going to start at five. So, let's count it down. Five, four, three, two, one. Light it up. >> Yeah.