The Kam Wah Chung State Heritage Site, seen here, in John Day.

JOHN DAY — City officials are working with downtown business owners on ideas for making Main Street a more inviting place to be.

Of course, projects like this take money, and the city is working on a two-pronged approach to financing.

Up to $200,000 in competitive grant funding is available this year from Oregon’s Main Street revitalization program, and owners of businesses and properties within the Main Street revitalization area are being encouraged to collaborate on an application for that money.

In addition, the city has a $1 million grant to make infrastructure improvements in support of the planned expansion of the Kam Wah Chung State Heritage Site, and some of that money could be used for Main Street improvements.

Ideas for Main Street improvements were kicked around in a meeting on Jan. 12 at the John Day Fire Hall.

Among the suggestions were new signs, exterior lighting, façade improvements, awnings, better street lighting, and murals.

The Oregon Main Street grant program shut down temporarily during the pandemic but has now been restarted. Communities participating in the Oregon Main Street Network, such as John Day, can apply for grants of up to $200,000 for revitalization projects.

The last grant John Day got went toward the remodeling and expansion of Len’s Drug at the intersection of Main Street and Canyon Boulevard in 2019. Prior to that, the city obtained a grant to help with renovation of the Weaver Building at 131 W. Main St.

The consensus at the Jan. 12 meeting was that, this time around, the grant application should go toward improvements at multiple businesses and the Main Street corridor as a whole.

“One business gets $200,000 or whatever, that just doesn’t seem fair to me,” said Janet Hill, owner of the Floor Store and Java Jungle. “I really would like to see it kind of be distributed through downtown.”

City Councilor Heather Rookstool said she’d like to see better streetlights to improve downtown safety since the city shut down its police department.

“Lighting needs to be a priority,” she said.

City Manager Nick Green said that, whether the Main Street grant application is successful or not, the city plans to use some of the $1 million in state funding it received to make infrastructure improvements in support of the Kam Wah Chung expansion to enhance downtown.

Prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, the Kam Wah Chung State Heritage Site attracted around 10,000 visitors a year to John Day. But now the Oregon Parks and Recreation Department is planning a major expansion on the former Gleason Park property, including a multimillion-dollar interpretive center, and visitor numbers are expected to double or even triple when that happens.

“That’s what we’re planning for, but the reality is it’s anybody’s guess,” Green said in an interview.

City officials want to take economic advantage of the influx of tourists by making it easy for foot traffic to move back and forth between Kam Wah Chung and the downtown business district a few blocks away. And once they get to downtown, the city wants to make the Main Street corridor as inviting as possible so visitors will spread their tourism money around.

“There’s definitely a nexus between visitors coming to that site and visitors coming to downtown,” Green said.