Plan Commission - Regular Meeting

We are now called to order the Land Use and Economic Development Committee meeting here in Council Chambers Wednesday June 17th at 4 p.m. and we'll begin with roll call Councilman Mudren Here Councilman Ibarra Here and Councilman Cardenas Here First we'll start off with the approval of the minutes I'm gonna get a motion I want a second

OK, I'll make a motion to approve.

Second that motion.

All in favor? Aye. Aye. Aye. All right, motion approved. Then we got citizens to be heard on agenda items. Is there anyone here that would like to speak on an agenda item? Seeing none, we will start off with a resolution authorizing a lease extension agreement for the snack bar at Gateway Transportation Center 90 East Jefferson Street with GG Suites LLC, TMP 9986.

Hello. I'm Diana Viveros. I am the new economic development specialist here at the City of Joliet. I am presenting a resolution authorizing a lease extension agreement for the snack bar at Gateway Transportation Center located at 90 East Jefferson Street with GG Suites LLC. GG Suites has operated the snack bar since June of 2023, providing candy, pastries, popcorn, and snack items and non-alcoholic beverages to commuters and visitors. The lease space is approximately 194 square feet within the transportation center, along with access to the common areas necessary for their operations. The current lease is set to expire this month and the tenant has requested a lease extension and staff is recommending approval to maintain the continued service at the facility. The proposed agreement includes a one-year extension beginning July 1st through June 30th of 2027 with two additional one-year renewal options subject to mutual agreement. The tenant will remain responsible for the metered electric service and their monthly internet fee of 50 um and their schedule goes as followed so since they will be starting in june it will be um the monthly rent payment of uh or sorry they'll be starting in july with their new uh monthly rent payment of 242.50 and that will run into um june of 2027. Then the increase will be for July 2027 through June of 2028 for their monthly rent of $291. And then the following year will increase to $339.50, and that will be for July 2028 through June 2029. this extension ensures continued food and beverage services for the transit users while maintaining an active commercial use within the gateway transportation center so our staff recommends moving this resolution forward to the city council questions question so the rent fee did you say 242 dollars and 22 cents 242 dollars and 50 cents for starting july 2026.

Why not a rounded amount? How did we come up with 240, 250?

So that was with our, sorry, Paulina Martinez.

Yeah, we calculated the amount per square footage. It's about $0.70 a square foot right now. On average in downtown Juliet, it's about $2 a square foot. We thought it would be a big jump if we, it would be almost double the rent if we did $2 a square foot. So we did a 50 25 sorry a 50 cent increase on their rent so to a dollar 25 for uh per square foot for uh the first year of the extension and then 25 cents increase thereafter and they have been this has been negotiated with them and they're they're they're accepting we've discussed this with them correct yes Can I ask a question? Absolutely. Do they do coffee there? They do do coffee, yes. Okay, thank you.

How big is the square footage that they take?

194 square feet.

It's not a big space.

So are they potentially the best coffee shop in Joliet?

I'm sorry?

So potentially are they the best coffee shop in Joliet?

As a non-coffee drinker, I will abstain from opining on that. She thought he loves to discuss coffee. So do I actually.

I have a motion to approve.

Another question no no I have no other we have a motion to approve a second that motion.

All right all in favor aye. All right motion approved TMP 9, 9, 8, 6, move on to the full council. Next we have a presentation of the heritage quarter destinations annual reports.

Sorry. My name is Kate Gilman with Heritage Corridor Destinations. Thank you for having me. So I just wanted to talk a little bit about, so Heritage Corridor, as I'm sure you are familiar with, we're the designated marketing organization for the city of Joliet. We've worked with the city for several years. We're looking forward to continuing that partnership. I just wanted to talk a little bit about, we're going to start with the visitor profile. So this is is it oh i'm so sorry okay um so we're looking at january 1st through december 31st of 2025. um so we we work with a company called zartico to get this information zartico uses visitor cell phone data as well as credit card spending we did put a little extra funding towards this research we spent about $2,500 the Heritage Corridor did we didn't charge the city to get this information and so we're gonna start with the objective was to gain strategic insight into 2025 visitor patterns and their transformative impact on the city of Joliet Before we begin, I'm just going to go over some kind of key points. So when we're looking at a visitor just in general, this is the US Travel Association. They say a visitor is someone who is 50 miles or greater from the location that they visit. This 50 miles has been used for several years. It's based because we figure they're more likely to get a hotel room to spend the night, heads in beds, that sort of thing. So when we say visitor, we're saying that they're over 50 miles from the city of Joliet. And then to get their data, they must visit at least one place of impact. So an attraction, a hotel, that sort of information. Now when it comes to their credit cards, their credit card zip code has to be 60 miles or greater from where they spent. And then we also talk about local visitors. So that's someone within the 50 mile radius, but they're not from the city of Joliet. So that could be Plainfield, Shorewood, that sort of thing. So we'll talk about both visitors as well as local visitor. so some key insights um 11 of people in 2025 in the whole of the city of joliet 11 were visitors um and then that is a a decrease three percent decrease from the previous year but then when we look at the visitor spend five percent of spend the city of Joliet came from visitors and that's equal to the previous year so it's kind of interesting to look at yes the number of visitors was lower but the spend was the same and we'll talk a little bit more about spend later Then 82% of our visitors were from out of state And this is an increase of 3% from the previous year. So that's really interesting to look at I also and this isn't in the presentation. I just pulled this before I came over our top local visitors so again, those are people who aren't from Will County and I looked at counties. So they're not from Will County, but they're within the 50-mile radius. They're from Cook County, DuPage, Kendall, and Grundy County. So those were our top locals. Then we have our visitor impact. 20% of visitor spending went towards local businesses. So on the previous slide, I said 5% total visitor spend, but when we look at 20% of their spending, it came to local. So that's not Walmart, McDonald's, anything like that, not chains. That's actual... you know, one stop, you know, the best coffee, like you said, the best coffee shop in Joliet, right? Could be Gigi's. Then we've got $56 was the average daily visitor spend. They spent – so 4% of the share of restaurant spend was from visitors, and that translates to about average $46 a day for – or $46 spent by visitors at restaurants. When we look at retail, it's 8%, and that's about 86% – or $86. And then arts and entertainment and attraction is 5%. And that's about $51 average spend. One thing to note, and you'll see this later on, but the arts, entertainment, and attraction, this is what they're spending that day that they're visiting. So if they've... purchased show tickets at the Rialto or the Forge, or if they purchased a tour of the prison ahead of time, which is probably pretty likely, or tickets for the Joliet Slammers, that's not going to show up on this report because they purchased it previously. So that does kind of skew our numbers. And I have a call with the company tomorrow to find out how we can better address that. So as I mentioned, 82% of our visitors to Joliet were from out of state in 2025. We're looking at the market areas. Chicago, of course, was one of the big market areas. But then we also see that New York was the second largest. So we don't know, if we look, we can look closer and we can look at specific weekends. So we can say, oh, maybe there was a band at the Rialto and they had a big New York following or a festival. It also could have been a wedding. But we do know that New York in 2025 was a large DMA. And then Peoria had a large market share as well. Now, this screen is interesting. What's one of my favorite things to look at, actually? Because you look at the percentage of visitors, but then you also have to look at the percentage of visitors' spend and their average daily spend. So again, the percentage of visitors high from Chicago, New York, Peoria. And that's great information. But if you look at the visitor spend, Champaign, Springfield, Decatur area, they're 8%. And same for Indianapolis. They're, again, 8%. As compared to New York and Chicago's, 2% and 1%. Can I interrupt for a second?

So assuming a number of these people would be family, so you really don't – Is there a way I know how many people were a visitor are you saying this is for a person and they could have a spouse children whatever or

So it is average. So that's a good point. So we are saying, you know, if I travel with my husband and we just put all the charges or, you know, everything on my card or his card, we're seeing that there's two cell phones. Right. But it's looking like I'm not spending anything, but he's spending a ton of money. So that is a good question. It is kind of just an average. OK. So that's a very good question. Very good point. But this chart is also helpful to look at so that we know who to market to going forward. So it's great that people are coming from Chicago and New York, but the people who are coming from Champaign, Springfield, Decatur, and Indianapolis, they have a higher visitor spend. And then that last column we look at, it does say the average daily spend for New York is $51. That's great. But if you go down and look at, again, Indianapolis and South Bend, they're at $61 average a day and $60 average a day. So they're likely getting hotels, going out to eat, maybe shopping, going to attractions. And so those are the ones that we really want to kind of market to in the future. We definitely want a lot of people here, but we also want people who are going to be spending their money with us and in our businesses. And then I do want to note that Detroit, that's a formatting issue. Their average daily spend is $56. I saw that and I was like, I can't leave my house for $5. How are the people from Detroit doing that? But it should be $56.

Thank you.

And then here we have the visitors spending time and money. So the first category is the percentage of people that are where they're spending their time. And then the second is where they're spending their money. So a lot of people are going to retail shops, but more of the funding is going towards food and beverage. And it does say specifically 72% of the retail funding is coming from the mall. And then food and beverage, they break down about 36% restaurants, 24% fast food. So those are just good to look at. And then again, this is the chart that you're going to look at and say, wow, the arts and entertainment and attraction, those numbers seem really low. But again, that's because it's very likely that they've already bought their tickets via Ticketmaster, Fair Harbor, whatever it may be, ahead of time. So that's why those numbers look so low. And again, we're trying to figure out how we can address that and see that a little bit better. Now, this has our breakdown of our local visitors, which are, again, within 50 miles, visitors, which are greater than 50 miles, and residents. The accommodations is very surprising to me because it's almost perfectly split. So that means that a lot of residents are probably doing staycations. It also could be that they're putting up family in a hotel. They don't want them to stay with them, so they might be paying for that. And then again, we do see residents are the biggest visitors to restaurants and retail. And then our local visitors are also playing a big part in that too. So local visitors contributed about 30% to accommodations, 18% to restaurants, and 21% to retail. So our local visitors are also very important to us. And then this last slide just talks about kind of where we're seeing the origin markets. Again, 80% were from out of state. So when we see that, we know, OK, maybe we need to focus on marketing to those locations. Again, especially those Indiana ones who are spending a lot of money, average daily spend. Our local visitors, again, they're within 50 miles, but they are contributing a lot to our retail and restaurants. And then with content and creative, we know that food and beverage and retail are bringing in a lot of visitors. But this report, again, doesn't totally capture the Ticketmaster customers. So there's that. And then is the other one on here too? or I can just talk to it. Sorry.

One second. Sorry. You can start talking about it, and then I'll open it up.

All right, sorry. And then my handouts, so I'll start with the FAM tour one. So we do have several FAM tours throughout the year. FAM stands for familiarization tours. So we work with the state of Illinois and their marketing organization. This year it's MMGY on these. FAM tours are important because we have travel, trade, and media. They're two different kind of brands, I guess. They're both very important, though, because it's, of course, it's easier to sell a location if you're familiar with it. And it's easier to write about a location if you've been there. So a lot of these, if you look on the back, it says the group, where they're from, if it's travel, trade, or media. It says where they go and then how long their trip was and if it had any overnights. So last year was a particularly large year because we had IPW. So we had several groups. It was an international trade show. So they came... They came after the trade show. We had several buses and actually two motorcycle groups come through town. So that was for the FAM. And then they do go on. We have seen several articles written about the area from these familiarization tours. And then we've also had a few different of the travel operators, we've had some groups come from them as well. So again, familiarization tours are really important because it's easier to sell a location or write about it if you've actually been there. And then my next one I can start talking about. So this is our partnership review. Again, this is January through December 2025. Nope. All right, so the first page we just talked about some of the um the website the social media and the event submissions um this year with event submissions they were uh important because we could do that's cool um it's the same information so um the event submissions were important for 2025 especially because we have the centennial of route 66 so people could enter their events to visit joliet as well as route 66 centennial and the america 250 sites So these were really important for especially going into 2026. Some promotions that the Heritage Corridor did digitally, we work with Sojourn. Sojourn is a company that We really like to work with them digitally because they give us really great feedback, specifically on who saw the ads, if they did any follow-up, if they booked through there. So Sojourn's a really good one to work with. We did the Old Joliet Prison, and then we also worked with them for the Red Carpet Corridor event, which is in May. We also did the first 100 miles, which was the general Route 66, and featuring also the Old Joliet Prison with Spearfish. And then we also work with a co-op with several other regions around Chicagoland called Visit Chicagoland. And we did the Joliet Slammers and Old Joliet Prison. We also worked with the CCP on digital campaigns for the Joliet area, or for Joliet Restaurant Week. We did some digital ads also in Morris, focusing with the Shaw Media in Morris. And then, of course, we did the scene. That's the digital, the e-blast for Chicago Magazine. So we wanted to reach all around the area for that. Then email marketing, as you can see, we did specific press releases and we featured several events coming up. Then we talked a little bit more about FAMS. We had 180 visitors on these FAMS from 17 countries. So some of our big stops in Joliet that we went to several times, the old Joliet Prison, the Rock and Roll Museum. They stayed at Harrah's and True by Hilton, which is really cool. They've got the new Route 66 mural. So that was a fan favorite. We went to the Rialto, Jacob Henry Mansion as well. And then I know you guys have this one. We also hosted the Route 66 Centennial Summit. That was last April at the Joliet Area Historical Museum. So we had people all throughout the state of Illinois come to Joliet for the summit. It was a two-day event where we talked about the centennial, what people were doing, how you could prepare, and also not just the last 100 years, but preparing for the next 100 years. We also, of course, hosted IHSA, which is a great weekend. And we also just finished that up this weekend. So that's always a good time. We had eight teams. Last year in 2025, 7,775 tickets. We think we may have gotten a little bit more this year. We don't have the final count yet, so we will present to council on that as well. So that's always a good time. IHSA loves coming to Joliet because of the turf. And with the turf, like we had a rain delay on Saturday, it really cuts back on the time of preparation for the field. Then we assisted the library with Star Wars Day. Every year we assist them with, they go to C2, E2 in March to market Star Wars Day. So we assist them with getting a booth, And then we also help them out with the lodging for the costumers for C2E2. So that's a lot of fun to see. Obviously, that's always a lot of fun to see all the stormtroopers walking around downtown Joliet. We also hosted a media night at the old Joliet prison. We invited influencers to come. We brought tacos out. Sorry. So they got to explore the prison at night. And they also got free food. So we did receive, we got two posts from that from social media influencers. It really didn't cost too much to do that, just the cost of food. And then the Old Joliet prison actually let them in for free. So that was really great. to get those local ones from Chicago, ones from Wisconsin. So to get those local-ish influencers in. We also worked with the city on the story of art in America, which we will be doing a premiere for that episode coming up this year. So we featured different artists around the city. So we had like the poet laureate at the Rialto, some sculptures, artists, we had clay. It was really interesting to see them film it and it's gonna turn out to be a really good episode. So that's a lot of, that's really exciting. And then, of course, we did print advertising. We did our travel guides. We print 100,000 total, so 50,000 of the Route 66 guide, 50,000 of the I&M Canal and Starved Rock guide. The city of Joliet is featured prominently in both. And then we distribute those throughout the state. We also go into the Indiana tollways. We distribute into Wisconsin. And then this is the main source of fulfillment. So if people call us and say they want information. So this guide has actually gone out across the country and also internationally. We have gotten a few requests internationally. Those ones we usually send digitally because mailing a physical copy overseas is a little difficult, so we send those ones digitally. But we did go through all 100,000 travel guides this year. Then we put ads in the Enjoy Illinois magazine, Global Heroes, Playbill, Travel Taste and Tour. So those are all places that are getting different reaches. Neighborhood Tourist is, of course, in the Chicago suburbs. But Travel Taste and Tour is domestically. It's nationwide. Chicago Magazine, again. is Chicago-based, but then you look at Rider Magazine, that's for across the country, anyone who rides motorcycles, that's their target, which of course is really good for Route 66. We also have a partnership with Shaw Media. So they focus on specific Route 66 stories. So we had 36 articles in 2025 that were focused on Joliet businesses, events, attractions, that sort of thing. It reached 170,000 online users through the first100miles.com. And we had print circulation of 19,000. So we do feature a few articles there. And then lastly, I know I'm saying a whole lot. Lastly, we did have the fiscal year 25 grant from Route 66. This grant is from the state of Illinois, and it has to be managed by a destination marketing organization, a certified. So that went through us. And for fiscal year 25, the city of Joliet received $80,000 towards the Broadway Street Greenway enhancements. Jacob Henry Mansion received $20,000 for their new AV equipment. And then if we look at the fiscal year 26 projects, which just ended, we did the new tire tower at the Chicagoland Speedway. We assisted with the baseball field, of course, for the big house ball game at the old Joliet prison. And then also $225,000 for the Joliet City Square AV equipment. So I know that's a whole lot does anyone have any questions?

Do you have a spanish-speaking version of this of this one? We don't destroy what I'm like what I'm getting is do you distribute it? Do you market to people that are spanish-speaking only? To give them a chance to come to the city to in a language that they can understand so we are

Our guides are only in English. Any of the Route 66 that we co-op with, we print those in several languages. So we do English, Spanish, Italian, French, German. I believe those are the five we did. In the past, we did Mandarin. But those are the five that they just printed. So that's more of the co-op that we do with the whole state. None of ours is specifically. We have been working on getting our website, though, to be translated. And then we're also working on getting it ADA, our website just in general, ADA accessible. So that's something that we're in the process of.

It's just my comment that this heritage destination page, it would be great if it was in Spanish. because that would be language equity, and there's a lot that this city has to offer, even to someone who speaks only Spanish. But how do we capture that market if we're not marketing to them in a language they can understand?

Absolutely. That's a great point. And I'll also find out if any of our commercials, I'm not sure, but I'll find out if any of our commercials are multi-language. Okay. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.

I'm happy to have you rather than Bob Bob usually brings us gifts though Thank you though we appreciate it Thank you Now we move on to any new or old business not for final action

If nothing nothing any public public comments you wouldn't speak no Motion to adjourn so moved second it on a favor. I mean adjourn. Thank you