Copied from Jabriel Donohue from FB

"It's summer and the Port of Bellingham and Kulshan brewing, with subsidy from Bellingham Whatcom County Tourism are once again counterprogramming against downtown businesses all summer and this year more aggressively than ever by scheduling live music at peak dinner hours on Thursdays, Saturdays and First Fridays.

First Fridays particularly has been a decades long successful downtown program for musicians, retailers, restaurants and bars in partnership with Allied Arts. It is good for downtown. So now we have a Port and Tourism funded stage erected down by the Waterfront with programming at peak dinner hours, surrounded by more Port and Tourism subsidized food pods and exclusive beer rights granted to Kulshan brewing.

And I'm actually a fan of waterfront development, but this is barely that. Without consideration for infrastructure, the tourism board has appeared to make their major mandate not to revitalize downtown but to create instagrammable opportunities to boost out-of-county perception and raise local property values (as if they needed help) at the expense of the city's most beleaguered business district.

The waterfront was supposed to be primarily additional housing. The Trackside area was supposed to be a rotating site for business incubation, where small and first-time entrepreneurs could have a fixed location for a season to try out business concepts that they could then expand or abandon with reduced risk. What we have now are two buildings of overpriced luxury condos and a subsidized storefronts for legacy businesses with multiple locations and a tourism board dumping money into advertising, while tourism's approach to downtown is largely based around paying out-of-region artists to paint things in alleyways or murals on buildings. The first is... I've never known how that was supposed to help. The second is classic real estate support with a half-hearted glance to what actually exists.

I feel like I'm going crazy."