What is a Business Improvement District

What is a Business Improvement District?
A Business Improvement District, or BID, is a legally established, contiguous geographic area within which property and business owners elect to make a collective contribution to initiate, manage, and finance supplemental services for the maintenance, development and promotion of their commercial district. There are currently BIDs in almost 1,000 towns and cities in the U.S., and thousands throughout the world.

Your support is important!
Property owners working collectively can leverage their resources and make strategic decisions on programs and services that will have a greater impact on their community than any individual owner can accomplish alone, as well as focus those resources with their intimate knowledge of the District and its issues to more accurately target solutions that municipalities might miss. With the implementation of the BID, property and business owners become the stewards of the BID’s success and play an active role in helping to create a vibrant, sustainable Newmarket for the future.

Why a BID for Newmarket?
For a number of years, Newmarket has been negatively impacted by many acute issues that make it difficult to conduct business, live, or work in the District. Some of these problems are ones that might be encountered anywhere in the city, such as traffic and parking, but we have also been overrun with significant safety concerns. While police have done much to help work through this persistent issue and the city is making incremental improvements, unless we take control of our own destiny, we cannot continue to persist under these conditions and hope that the environment improves.

A Business Improvement District would change the dynamics of Newmarket by allowing for local management, accountable to property owners and area stakeholders. It would create the resources necessary so that instead of asking the City for something more to be done, we can make it happen ourselves. Under this system, owners will collaborate to create a better business environment in which Newmarket is cleaner and more welcoming, traffic flows more freely, and customers and employees can get to work safely and easily.