My civic pride says my help is needed, but the the louder more realistic voice says you would have to be nuts. The climate isn’t going to change without a few more vacancies.

The cartoon would be funny if it weren’t so serious. I love our town, I did when I moved in over 30 years ago and I do still but we need to focus very hard on basics and a long-term plan, without it we are going to lose our character and strength. We have a lot to be proud of – schools, fire, police, employees and volunteers. I would love to see a long term plan put together as we need water, we need waste treatment, we need town wide sewer, we need more facilities as we keep growing due to our great community, we need to increase revenue which means businesses brought into town that we will support. I don’t know the best way to get things pulled together but we need to greatly increase our town center density to make people want to spend time in town spending their money and those businesses willingly paying taxes to support the community without stressing our services (schools primarily). The four corners of Main street/route 85 need attractive multi-story buildings that have shopping and professional services to bring in and keep people in town. I would love to see 3-4 story buildings with ground floor shopping, second and third floors with professionals – lawyers, doctors, dentists, perhaps something that kids can hang at – a mini movie theatre or something. The point being we need to look to see what can be done to increase income without a greater increase in costs which means businesses. Businesses need more traffic – someone who goes to the pharmacy and meets up for a cup of coffee and visits a doctor and basically spends time in money for several hours in Hopkinton center. The area needing investment is all private so how it can be encouraged and developed is beyond me but the need and options are generally clear. I read with interest that we lose something like $1,000,000/year in uncollected water charges and the solution would cost something like $1,000,000; seems like a no brainer, spend the money once and get the greater return for further investment after year 2. Anyway, my thoughts and probably worth every penny I was paid to put them out here ($0.00).

I agree that down town needs more business, but why add new building when we could use current ones more effectively . .
Move Town Hall over to Wood street area where the DPW building is . Town Hall would make great space for restaurants and small business. And of course there is old Center school currently used as a large file cabinet .. .And yes both would cost allot to rehab and bring to code , but Center school is just sitting there costing money to maintain anyways ( there is gym that could be used to start a youth center instead of CVS 🙂 .Hey the Town could be the landlord and use the money to get Quick Books so they can keep track of the 1000 vendors and etc . :)) J/K maybe .

and what about seeing a blue and red Domino’s Pizza sign soon in the “Nice ” freeway stretch we call downtown. Face it, it will never have an 1800’s community based walking downtown(not that I’d remember it) with a couple of highways intersecting. It’s been years since I tried parallel parking on a highway- it’s not easy or fun or safe. Plus now I’d take some of the 100 foot telephone poles back not to see a Dominos sign. Strip malls with parking sure looks more inviting. Maybe that is what HopDrug was.

Those of us who drive gasoline powered vehicles find that having a gas station in town is very useful.

I wonder what kind of thinking considers gas stations useless. Perhaps folks who only drive EVs or ride bicycles?