Merchants Get Tips on Cleaning Up Shop : Ventura: The city has hired a consultant to give store owners advice. Some say it will help, but others call it a misuse of funds.

As part of an ongoing effort to revitalize its downtown, the city of Ventura has hired a retail consultant to dispense free advice to merchants about how to spruce up storefronts and attract more customers.

City officials said they paid $8,000 from the city’s General Fund to consultant Robert Gibbs for conducting some public seminars this week and meeting individually with 18 retailers.

“It’s an investment in the downtown,” said Pat Richardson, a city planner. “It’s not a lot of lip service, but a lot of real, practical things they can do to improve their business.”

Gibbs said he spent about an hour with each retailer, giving each of them suggestions on how to improve their window displays, redo their signs, change their lighting and alter their floor plans. He advised some on changing their inventory and others were told to redo their displays.

Store owners signed up for his services on a first-come, first-served basis and city officials said they had to turn away some merchants because of demand from the 363 downtown business owners.

But critics said that while Gibbs may have dispensed good advice, the city should not be spending taxpayer dollars to help boost sales of private businesses.

“Once you do that you set a precedent,” said Capp Loughboro, president of the Ventura County Taxpayers Assn., a private government watchdog group. “I just think that that’s a wrong use of taxpayer money, to teach someone how to do business. If they don’t know how to, they shouldn’t be in business in the first place. It should be a function of the Chamber of Commerce or the merchants’ association.”

Lindsay Nielson, another member of the Taxpayers Assn., noted that some downtown store owners had formed an assessment district to promote the area and said that Gibbs’ fee should have come from that assessment district.

“Golly, when you have an assessment district formed for that purpose, why would you go outside it?” Nielson said. “It doesn’t make a whole lot of sense to me.”

City officials said the proposal was debated by the board of directors that administers the assessment district’s Ventura Image Program, but that the retailers could not agree on whether to hire Gibbs.

Some business owners then approached city officials with the idea of hiring Gibbs, and the city decided to foot the bill from salary savings in the city’s General Fund, said Everett Millais, community development director for the city.

Councilman Gary Tuttle said he thinks the city acted properly in giving merchants some free retail advice, but criticized the cost.

“In today’s climate we have to keep businesses healthy,” Tuttle said, “But the next time, it’s going to have to help more businesses than 18 people. Eighteen for $8,000 is not a heck of a deal.”

But Gibbs also held several public workshops open to all downtown merchants to discuss his ideas about attracting customers.

In addition, the merchants who met with Gibbs said his comments were very helpful and were pleased that the city was reaching out to help their businesses.

At the Book Mall of Ventura on Main Street, Gibbs recommended redoing some of window displays, getting rid of some lights and adding some specialty displays. “And I would get rid of this ‘60s period,” he said, pointing to a brown vinyl chair.

“I could not afford to pay someone to give me the advice that he did,” said Diane Neveu, the bookstore owner. “It’s to the city’s benefit to keep small businesses successful in town.”