For almost 50 years, a state program has been working with Kentucky's cities to create vibrant downtowns and build stronger communities through preservation, Foundation based economic development.

The results of those efforts have brought billions to Kentucky's economy.

Your downtown is really the heart of a community, and when anybody comes, whether they're coming to look for a new home, whether they're coming to relocate a business or an industry, your downtown is the first thing they're looking at.

And we want to make sure that it's inviting, it's clean.

And they it's a place that they want to raise their families or bring their business.

People will say to me quite often, they can tell when they've come into a main Street community because it just looks different.

So we are a part of the national program, which is known as Main Street America.

And all of our organization has operate on what we call the four point approach.

We have organization, design, economic vitality and promotion.

When we talk about those things, we talk about quality design.

What does your downtown look like?

How can we assess and help with historic buildings?

The Main Street program provides us with a framework to do preservation based initiatives and projects.

They offer us training opportunities, grant resources, technical support for facade and renovation, projects that we do downtown.

I will never forget the morning of March 1st, 2021, when I received a text message that said, your downtown is flooded.

Every building on our main street was impacted by that flood.

So I sent a message to our state Main Street correct coordinator to get.

And I said, what in the world am I supposed to do?

We talked and we worked out a plan to establish a live local fund.

It's a fund where we can put it in the hands of our business owners and building owners immediately.

So the communities that are involved with Main Street right now, most all of them are 10,000 people or less.

And we're still having returns.

This year it was $63.7 million.

Overall, we have contributed $4.7 billion to the economy of Kentucky.

We're creating new jobs.

We're opening new businesses, say, provide us with a support group of like minded people and a network of people that, you know, we enjoy working together and sharing our ideas with each other.

In Main Street, we have this phrase that we call rip off and duplicate.

We're not competitive with each other.

We don't care to share ideas.

If somebody has a really good idea that works in Shelbyville, you know, maybe we can do that in baby baby ville on a smaller scale.

We had a vacant space on Main Street where a building had burnt down, and we started going after funding to do a town square.

And we have now completed the construction of a new town square in the heart of our downtown, where we host all of our Main Street events market events.

It's a place for our community to come together and, you know, just enjoy each other's company and listen to live local music.

So one of the things was we now have a, our sixth street, we have a sixth street between our main and Washington Street is now this pedestrian walkway.

What that has created is this amazing backdrop for photos and for people to come and gather.

And I always tell people to think about the places they like to go on vacation.

Now, you know, going around the beach, you might a little bit, but what do those towns look like?

And then come back and be a volunteer and have your community look like the places you want to go, because you should be in that place every day.

I always think about even children that grew up going to the mall when they talk about their memories, they don't talk about the mall.

They talk about, oh, I went downtown to this event, or, you know, my mama took me to this ice cream shop downtown.

So we're making memories on Main Street.

They're going to last a lifetime.

The Kentucky Main Street program was created by the Kentucky Heritage Council and the State Historic Preservation Office.