Amy Schereck
Tiffany Kenney, the new BID executive director, hopes a consultant study will identify “what people want to see downtown.”
Tiffany Kenney, the new head of Madison’s Central Business Improvement District, recognizes that the city’s downtown could be undergoing a dramatic transformation. The possible shift away from retail toward more and more restaurants and bars has both city officials and business owners fretting.
But Kenney, who was named executive director of the BID on Jan. 4, believes data will show the way. The city is assembling a request for consultants’ proposals to study the downtown business market.
“What we’re looking for is what people want to see downtown,” she says. “I think it will be good for us to have that information, so we can actually respond to the trends. Not to get super-cliché about it, but obviously there’s a trend with millennials, who are saying they want more ‘experiences’ than ‘things.’”
“So if that’s what we hear, and if that’s what downtown might mean, then we would go in that direction.”
The Central Business Improvement District is probably familiar to most from its information kiosks and free “Visit Madison” guides with maps of the isthmus. BIDs are enabled by state statute, allowing property owners and businesses to share the costs of addressing problems and advancing economic opportunities.
“The main goal is to create a welcoming, safe environment for people, to keep retail growing and strong, to keep restaurants busy and full,” says Kenney. “As I’m getting my feet wet here, I’m definitely seeing how the marketing background that I have can help drive that, because a lot of what they were missing was just a way to communicate.”
Kenney replaces Mary Carbine, now managing director of the UW-Madison Alumni Park Place and Pier project, adjacent to the Memorial Union.
A native of Fort Atkinson, Kenney studied at UW-Madison from 1995 to 1999, earning degrees in marketing and public relations, with an emphasis on women’s studies. Her husband, Vincent Kenney, works at Catalyze, a health care technology startup based downtown. They live on the southeast shore of Lake Monona, near Paunack Park, just inside Madison’s border with the city of Monona.
Kenney served for seven years as communications director for the Madison Area Builders Association. She worked on local events such as the Home Products Show and Parade of Homes. She credits the association for giving her experience in political communications, though she herself did not lobby.
“During that time I got to meet with a lot of people who were in development, a lot of people who were property owners, property managers, people who, well, were developing the downtown, as well as home builders,” she recalls.
From there Kenney moved to the marketing team at Morgan Murphy Media, which includes Madison Magazine, WISC TV3 and Channel3000.com. She served as the magazine’s director of marketing and special events, developing Madison Restaurant Week and the Madison Food and Wine Show.
“All those experiences gave me interaction and really great relationships with people within the city leadership and within retail and restaurant communities,” she says. After eight years she took that experience and formed Locavore ROAR, which provides marketing, promotion and special event services for “the local food industry.” (The firm’s activities continue, at a reduced level, serving only non-Madison clients to avoid conflict of interest.)
Kenney was not looking for a new job, but then the BID position came along.
“The chance to work with the downtown community...and really make a difference in the downtown — growing it, making it a safe, fun place for everybody — this was appealing to me,” she says. “And so I went for it.”
Though she stresses that she’s still settling in, Kenney and her board are on top of some upcoming concerns, including the impacts of reconstruction of the Capitol Square over the next two years.
Also on their radar are the pressures of development.
“We’re talking about things like the projects coming in with larger [population] density,” she says. “How are you going to put another condo development in there if you can’t even get water to them?”
