By Megan Kelley

Review Writer

Lake Orion’s Downtown Development Authority board members heard from Matt Wagner, vice president of Revitalization Programs at Main Street America, during their Jan. 12 meeting to discuss recovery planning.

This meeting was the first of eight meetings Wagner will give the board in the coming months, according to DDA documents.

“With COVID-19 and some of the straying within the world of downtown revitalization across the country, organizations need to really rethink, sort of forecast, what might be the new norm considerations post-COVID. What was going to remain relatively sticky in terms of maybe consumer habit shifts, what programs…are still relevant moving forward,” Wagner said. “Thinking more strategically in both the mid-term to the long-term, I think, is ever more important in consideration of the crisis that we’ve been through.”

According to Wagner, companies are, and need to be, operating under five stages: resolve, resilience, return, re-imagination and reform.

While the pandemic has had organizations bouncing between some of them, the re-imagination stage is where most have found themselves, currently.

The idea behind re-imagination is that organizations must now re-imagine what the new normal looks like and the changes they must make to best work with that shift and how to reinvent, Wagner said.

Wagner also provided data that can be utilized by the DDA and downtown businesses to continue to make the shift necessary to make it though the pandemic and beyond.

The presentation opened the door for board members to share their ideas on how to help the downtown thrive.

The presentation was posted on the DDA’s business partners’ Facebook page and sent out to downtown businesses via a newsletter.

This part of the presentation is also expected to be discussed at the next business partner’s meeting, which will take place at 8:30 a.m. virtually on Jan. 21.

Part two of this eight-part meeting is expected to take place virtually at 8:30 a.m. on Jan. 26.