SUNBURY — Business owners in the 400 block of Market Street are pleased to see the city making improvements to the Edison Plaza and Stroh Alley.
At least one business owner hopes the improvements, including increased lighting and a video surveillance system, will prevent crime in the previously darkened alleyway.
“The more light, you’re going to hold down all the riffraff, people who like to do bad things at night,” said Ken Romberger, owner of the Jasmine-Aire Boutique. “They don’t want to come around so often.”
When the project was first brought to the table about four years ago, city officials expressed concern about opening up the covered alley, and accordingly recently removed the awning that used to cover Stroh Alley in an effort to prevent crime.
Beyond that, the project is aimed at making the area look nicer.
“I’m thrilled and happy that there’s so many different improvements coming,” Romberger said. “It’s keeping our town on the map. When people go through it and there are improvements, it just helps in the long run for everybody here.”
It was on Wednesday the City Council approved several contracts to continue work on the Market Street project.
Those contracts will be with Central Builders, of Sunbury, concrete, at $77 per yard; Spring City Lighting, of Spring City, Pa., street lights, at $17,934 for LED lights or $14,850 for CFL; and Keystone Communications, video surveillance system, at $2,945.
Work began last week to demolish the old concrete running through Stroh Alley in preparation for laying a decorative, stamped concrete walkway.
Other plans to improve Stroh Alley include new lighting, plantings, decorative arches at the alley’s exits onto Market Street and Woodlawn Avenue and a video surveillance system.
The city is using $93,960 in federal stimulus money for the work. The money has been funneled through the Community Development Block Grant program.
“It’s beautiful,” BPM Hobby Store owner Bruce Sisino said of the work the city already has completed on the Market Street side of the Edison Plaza.
Work under way now on the parking lot is the second and final phase to work that began there in 2006.
The earlier landscaping project, designed by Dogwood Hill Nursery and Landscaping, of Sunbury, brought vegetation and a wrought-iron arch to the area to act as a buffer between the street and the parking lot.
The city also plans to remove the parking lot’s existing meters and install a single parking meter machine.
“It’s nice to look at and it should be there,” Sisino, in business for almost four years, said. “Any time the city makes improvements it makes the town look nicer.”
Work on the Market Street project stalled briefly in the spring when Councilman Kevin Troup questioned the propriety of the city’s plans to improve the Edison Plaza and Stroh Alley while three sitting members of the council are among 12 shareholders in the 430 Market St. property, the former location of CVS, which was purchased in 2004 under a corporate entity known as Sunbury Real Estate Development LLC.
The state Department of Community and Economic Development eventually ruled there was no conflict because the property is publicly accessible and city-owned.
Among the property’s shareholders is Janet A. Tippett, former president and publisher of The Daily Item and The Danville News.
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Liz Rohde/The Daily Item
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