Pulling downtown together

Dave Kilbourne was one of the “young Turks” who took advantage of downtown’s cheap rents in the early 1970s to open a crafts business, Pyromania Tallow Works.

They and others like them—people who sold leather goods and used records, for example—met every week after work to talk shop and drink beer, and eventually they gave themselves a name: The Guild. Before long, they realized they shared the goal of making downtown more attractive by planting trees and cleaning it up.

After a while, members of the traditionalist Downtown Chico Businessmen’s Association contacted them to set up a meeting. The Guild said OK, but it would have to be at their usual haunt, the Red Dog Saloon on Second Street.

The meeting took place on Feb. 10, 1974. It was a little stiff at first—“like a gathering of cats and dogs,” Kilbourne says—but eventually the beer did its job, and everyone relaxed. “The mall is killing us,” the old-timers said. They wanted to do more marketing and push for better parking, but their organization had no source of funding.

The meeting, scheduled to last two hours, went on until well after midnight, Kilbourne says, and by the time it ended the participants were slapping each other on the back and had agreed to merge into a new group called the Downtown Chico Business Association.

Kilbourne had recently read of a new law, AB 103, that allowed business owners to form “business improvement districts” and assess themselves to pay for improvements. Three cities in California already had done so, including Sacramento, so he drove there and learned how it had been done.

As fast as it could, the group incorporated, drew up the parameters of the BID, and put it to a vote of the 300 business owners involved. It was not an easy sell: Opponents said it was “a communist plot,” Kilbourne says. “They called us all kinds of names.” But it passed, and the rest, as they say, is history.

Kilbourne soon became the DCBA’s first executive director, turning management of Pyromania over to friends. He hired Bob Malowney to design posters, created such special events as “A Slice of Chico” and “A Taste of Chico,” and generally worked to make being downtown a rich experience.

While doing that job, he earned a master’s degree in community development from Chico State. His thesis, “A Downtown Revitalization Manual,” is a how-to source for any community wanting to create a BID.

When it was completed, the university sent it to every city in California and every capital city in the United States. Kilbourne started getting calls.

To make a long story short, he became the pre-eminent authority on creating BIDs and downtown revitalization—so much so that he had to go half-time at the DCBA and then leave it altogether in 1990. Through the years, he has helped more than 100 communities go through the six-month process of creating a BID and setting in place the mechanism for revitalization.

It’s been quite a journey for a hippie candlemaker, he says.