Hosted by East Lansing Citizens Concerned, a grassroots organization of city residents, suggestions such as bringing in more entrepreneurs and retaining young professionals were offered as ways to sustain the downtown.

East Lansing Planning, Building and Development Director Tim Dempsey said one thing the city could work on is finding entrepreneurs who understand the commitment and sacrifice it takes to run a business downtown.

“One of the things that sometimes we’re challenged with is we get retailers that open up and they say, ‘You know what? I can open my business at 8 (a.m.) and go home at 5 (p.m.) because that’s what I did in the corporate world,’” he said.

“That’s not gonna work. It hasn’t worked, and it’s a reason why some of our retailers have failed. They don’t understand that you need to be open in the evenings. You need to be open on weekends.”

MSU Planning and Zoning Center Mark Wyckoff said to make East Lansing a more vibrant commercial center, it will need to work against the flow of recent graduates moving out of state.

“Every state loses its talented workers and graduates,” he said.

“They wanna go away from home and experience the rest of world. And there’s nothing wrong about that. But where you’re in trouble is when you’re not attracting your share of those that are coming out of the other universities and we’re not doing that. Lansing area could become an area for talent attraction and East Lansing could choose to be a place that specifically is targeting particularly that young talent.”

Despite wanting to see downtown East Lansing be successful, residents and panel members had differing views on how to get there.

East Lansing resident Dave Wiley said he sees a disconnect between what gets proposed to the community and to city management by LLC’s and what actually comes to fruition, although Dempsey said the city has always had the ability to place requirements in a development agreements to make developers follow through on specifications of a project.

“I don’t see that control, that inspection and that sanction for non-performance in enriching the city in terms of a larger plan,” he said.

Residents also questioned whether actions by city officials actually have stunted businesses’ ability to grow in the area.

East Lansing resident Jim Anderson said Spar-Thai, a pedicab service that closed in 2011, was shut down because of government rules and restrictions.

City policy requires cab drivers to pay an application fee which covers, among other things, city-mandated background checks and drug testing.

“There are too many occasions … where the city of East Lansing bureaucracy is a dead hand of entrepreneurship of various kinds who would be happy to be in this community,” he said.

Dempsey shot back, defending the decision and explaining the balancing act between regulations to make the city safe and potential restrictions on business.

“The city said we have to charge a fee to do a background check on every driver,” he said. “Why would we do a background check on every driver? Because you want your daughter being picked up by a cab driver at 12:30 in the morning when she’s drunk and he was convicted of a sex offense? I don’t think so. Those are the things that we have to balance.”

Despite challenges and disagreements, attendees seemed hopeful of the possibilities to revive downtown East Lansing.

Chair of the Downtown Development Authority Bill Mansfield said he’d like the city to take stock of its assets, such as the public library and MSU, and promote them.

“I think we have a kick ass farmers’ market in the summer,” he said. “What conversation is there to be had about turning that into a year-round facility?”

Dempsey said he wants to broaden the dialogue and get more residents and students involved in the discussion. Most residents present echoed similar interest in making sure planning is a community-wide effort.

“I see a lot of familiar faces here and that’s great and I want to continue to see those familiar faces,” he said, “But I want to see faces that I haven’t seen.”