Home / Archive / Yuba/Sutter: Main Street Makeover
Thursday, May 17, 2012
Regional Focus: August 2008
Main Street Makeover
Officials hope a revamp can awaken once-bustling Plumas Street
Story by Sukhjit Purewal
For much of Yuba City’s history, Plumas Street was at the center of the action. Locals came to shop, bank and dine. Times changed, the city grew and the street’s merchants struggled to survive as residents increasingly frequented big-box chains popping up on the outskirts of town.
But that was then.
As the city nears the long-awaited facelift of Plumas Street, merchants and city officials are betting residents will again find the heartbeat of one of the city’s oldest corridors.
“This is going to be a showcase for other cities,” says Don Covey, co-owner of Yuba City Florist and president of the Yuba City Downtown Business Association. “This is a major commitment to an urban area.”
The renovations are geared toward making the street more pedestrian-friendly. From street widening and adding benches to planting trees to create a canopy shade, the goal is to revitalize the city’s downtown — and boost Yuba City’s bottom line.
A proposal for the Plumas Street makeover was approved by the City Council in 1992, but it wasn’t until 2007 that an actual project was given the green light. After scaling back plans — including the number of giant palm trees to be planted — the City Council agreed on $11 million in improvements. Work is expected to wrap up next year.
Critics of the plan say the city was spending too much on renovating Plumas Street and too much — nearly $17 million — on turning the once-ordinary Gauche Park into a water park. But city leaders saw it as an opportunity to link two downtown points of entertainment within strolling distance.
“You have to have a Plumas Street,” says Councilman Kash Gill. “You have to spend money to make money.”
Besides, Covey says, the merchants were promised they’d get this kind of help some 25 years ago when the economic viability of Plumas Street was threatened by growth and the closure of the neighboring Del Monte Cannery.
For much of the city’s history, Plumas Street was the primary business hub. When Covey and co-owner Bob Bigham bought Yuba City Florist in 1975, there were two family-owned drug stores, three banks and stores for clothing and shoes. Bars outnumbered restaurants.
But when the city started expanding along Colusa Highway, the banks moved on and drug stores closed when pharmacists retired. And when the neighboring Del Monte Cannery closed its doors, workers who shopped on Plumas Street before or after their shifts went elsewhere.
With 22 acres of the former cannery open to blight, the City Council purchased the property in 1990, according to then-Mayor Bill Meagher. A redevelopment agency was created, and a wide swath of land — including Plumas Street and the nearby Yuba Sutter Mall, which also opened that year — was designated as a redevelopment zone.
Traveling south on Plumas Street, the road turns into Plumas Boulevard. This adjoining area is called Town Center. It’s not only where Gauche Park is located, but also where major medical provider, Sutter North Medical Foundation, decided to set up shop. And when the Town Center redevelopment project became the epicenter for new medical construction, it was a surprise, says Meagher, a Realtor and partner in Meagher & Tomlinson Co., a real estate brokerage firm in Yuba City.
“We didn’t envision a medical use. There was even some discussion that it may be a good spot for call centers,” he says.
Sutter North, a Sutter Health affiliate, found the location to be exactly what it wanted — a sizeable amount of real estate at about one-third of the cost elsewhere in the city, says Tom Walther, the foundation’s former chief operating officer and new CEO of Peach Tree Clinic in Marysville.
Featuring an urgent-care facility, an array of specialists, private-practice physicians, a pharmacy, the block between B Street and Franklin Avenue provides one-stop medical shopping.
The presence of the medical community and its economic impact has helped give Plumas Street a slightly more sophisticated feel. Consignment stores are giving way to shops like Posh Décor, which left downtown Marysville in search of a busier location. Rents are still a bargain on Plumas Street at $1.50 a square foot, according to Covey, compared to $3 in centers along Colusa Highway.
More than a dozen restaurants and bars are expected to dot the street by next year, and the Cookie Tree — located a block up on Bridge Street — will inch a little closer to Plumas Street by moving over one storefront. The store will radically boost its offerings with early-morning service and late-night desserts on the weekends. Covey says the Cookie Tree hours could spur other merchants to stay open later.
Cookie Tree General Manager Tiffani Williams says that by extending the store hours, “it will give people something to do after seeing a movie.”
However, the city’s only active theater, Movies 8, isn’t downtown. Plumas Street’s Sutter Theater was closed last year for health code violations. Efforts are under way to reopen the facility as a dual theater and performing arts center.
