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Mitre - Ramirez, Norma From: Huizar, Maria Sent: Tuesday, April 07, 2015 9:09 PM To: Mitre - Ramirez, Norma; Trujillo, Rose Ann Subject: FW: A message for the City Council regarding Section 1 and Item B.6 of the Wellness District resolution Categories: Correspondence Please enter into the record, if you haven't already. From: Bob @PlaygroundDTSA.com [mailto:Bob @PlaygroundDTSA.com] Sent: Tuesday, April 07, 2015 3:02 PM To: Huizar, Maria Subject: A message for the City Council regarding Section 1 and Item B.6 of the Wellness District resolution Greetings: I would appreciate an opportunity to weigh in on tonight's proposed resolution to create a wellness district along Fourth Street. We, the Quinn family and our Playground businesses, all of which lay along Fourth Street between Spurgeon and Bush, are very excited to see a growing focus on wellness. We are aware of the statistics regarding the health of our neighbors and of many of the causes of poor health. We are proud to offer group health benefits to all of our full -time employees (most of our 125 employees are full- time). We are also committed to nutrition education and look forward to making use of the facilities in the 4th Street Market to educate school children about nutrition, foods that would be great alternatives to snack foods and to the art of cooking. So much as the draft resolution relates to these causes, we're very excited and you can count on our support. I am not supportive of the goal to rebrand Fourth Street and I am highly dubious about the goal to create — in the words of Voice of OC — "a Latino business corridor that focuses on bringing back customers who, despite living so close to the downtown, have been lost to big -box retailers." First, rebranding: Branding will not bring customers; compelling content will. Branding will not revive history, although it may honor it. I understand and respect the area's history. However, I think those who fail to recognize that El Calle Quatro is history, i.e., the past, are wishful thinkers. Those shoppers abandonned the downtown long before we became involved here. For example, our restaurant Playground sits in the former location of Mariscos Tampico, a restaurant that catered to the local, Hispanic consumer. When we first stepped onto the corner of Fourth and Spurgeon and wondered if this could be the home of our future restaurant, Mariscos Tampico had two employees, one who served customers and one who cooked and cleaned the dishes. I understand that the restaurant was far, far behind in paying its rent and I can't imagine how it even paid for insurance and other costs of being in business. I have not heard that the restaurant was particularly good or bad, but it is apparent that its customers — the same customers the City now wants to attract back to downtown — had abandoned it. Likewise, the space next to Playground to the south was empty, for lack of a tenant who could believed he could make a living selling to the paucity of paying customers.