Last spring, the Coronado City Council cut off funding for Coronado MainStreet’s longstanding community grant amid questions about its direction and purpose.
After a year of rebuilding, MainStreet won that support back: The council unanimously approved a $29,800 grant to get the organization moving again. Although it’s a fraction of the $99,000 originally requested, it’s a lifeline to get the organization back on its feet.
During last June’s grant cycle, during which the city allocates about $1 million in grants for organizations that serve the community, the council cited concerned about Main Street’s direction and deliverables after its longtime executive director departed. The council appointed Councilmember Carrie Downey as a liaison to work with the group through its transition.
“The MainStreet board has been working in the past year to reconfigure what they provide to the community,” Downey said during the May 5 City Council meeting. “The board has completely changed. The volunteers have completely changed — and they are all-volunteer.”
Gone is the paid staff. In their place is a small group of residents who have been pulling events together — and footing their bills out of the organization’s reserves. The grant will back fill the reserve spending and support future events.
Coronado MainStreet’s goal is to support and enhance Coronado’s historic downtown center, and it dates back to 1980.
The nonprofit hosts events such as Motorcars on MainStreet, MainStreet Goes Ghostly, and Shop Small Saturday. It also hosts Coronado Currency, a citywide gift certificate program that aims to promote local spending, among other programming. In the past, it worked with the city for downtown monitoring and outreach to merchants about code compliance, a program the organization hopes to reinstate.
The challenge the council had last year with MainStreet’s grant request was that the organization was in “transition,” Councilmember Kelly Purvis said, and city leaders wanted more clarity about what the organization would actually deliver before allocating funds.
Those concerns have evaporated.
“A month or two ago, I probably wouldn’t have been supportive of approving the funding request,” Mayor John Duncan said. “Now, I am.”
Duncan credited the car show, which he said impressed him both this year and last, and acknowledged that the organization had been through a lot. He also made a point of not blaming prior leaders.
The MainStreet volunteers who spoke at the meeting were candid about where things stood. One acknowledged that they couldn’t answer every question, noting the organization was still finding its footing without an executive director, even as it manged to pull off its slate of events this year. The council took it in stride.
Downtown monitoring
Mainstreet previously ran a downtown monitoring program that comrpised of volunteers walking the streets and letting business owners know when their A-frame signs or merchandise were out of compliance with city code. The program stopped after MainStreet’s former executive director left, in part because the city asked them to pause it without an active contract in place.
Although the agenda item was about the funding request, which was unanimously approved, much of the conversation focused on the future of this program.
Councilmember Mark Fleming, who has been vocal about downtown and business issues, said he wasn’t sure MainStreet was the right vehicle for enforcement.
“If we’re going to provide the money to hire somebody to go out and police our commercial business district,” he said, “it would make much more sense to hire a compliance officer within the city of Coronado.”
He added that asking volunteers to be the “bad guy” on matters of code enforcement with local merchants seemed like a mismatch.
Others were less worried about the arrangement. Councilmember Amy Steward said that education is usually enough, at least for the first contact.
“When you go in and say, ‘Hey, this A-frame is against regulations; somebody is going to trip on it,” she said, “I think that works out just fine. But when you come back the next week and it’s back up again…at some point the city ultimately bears the responsibility of having an enforcement officer.”
One of the MainStreet volunteers interjected from the public podium to mention that the organization has an app for logging violations and tracking follow-up contacts that has not been used since the contract lapsed.
“We do two knocks on the door, and then if it’s not resolved, it goes to the city,” she said. “We could, potentially, after today, starting using it and try it out to see how it works.”
The fine print
A technical wrinkle for the grant request was timing. Community grants are typically disbursed at the start of the fiscal year and must be spent by June 30. MainStreet’s request came in May, with six weeks left in the fiscal year, and the organization had already spent the requested money using reserve funding while waiting for the council’s decision.
City Manager Tina Friend noted that the council would need to decide whether the funds were retroactive reimbursement, a bridge into the next fiscal year, or some combination of both.
After considerable back-and-forth, Duncan made a substitute motion approving the $29,800 with explicit language allowing the funds to be used into fiscal year 2026-27 — covering both the expenses already incurred and any future programming, including downtown monitoring, once a contract is in place.
The motion passed unanimously.
“They’re just getting the amount for what we should have considered in June,” Purvis said.
