OmahaNebraska.com Interview with Omaha Mayor Jean Stothert
Special thank you to the Mayor for taking time for the interview with her busy schedule.
The thing I’m most excited about today is public private partnerships. How it is to work from your side? You said how great it was to work with the City of Omaha and then the different projects that you’ve been working on.
Well, I will say, and I said it in my speech, nearly everything that we do in Omaha really benefits from these partnerships that we have – public private partnerships – that are very unique for Omaha. It’s their financial support, their leadership and their vision that has really helped us move forward and you see it all over Omaha. You see it in the Arena Convention Center, the ballpark, the Luminarium. These three parks now that are known as the Riverfront are an amazing example [of] that the same step forward. We put in about 60 million, and they raised 400 million of private dollars. That is, is uniquely Omaha and you don’t see that in a lot of other cities. So those relationships and those partnerships have enabled the city of Omaha to achieve things that we couldn’t have done on our own.
Thank you. The streetcars are up next…
Well, the Streetcar is, is underway. So, you know, all the approvals that I needed from the Council have been done. It’s in design right now, and we will move forward with it and the great thing about the Streetcar is all these venues that we have downtown. They’re really not all close enough that you could just park your car and walk from one to another, especially if you want to enjoy seeing our Old Market [to] go down dinner, and the Streetcar is just going to connect everything together. You know, it’ll be down there right in front of the Arena Convention Center. It’s going to go through downtown and it’s going to go all the way to Midtown and back and people can hop on the streetcar say at Midtown, come into downtown, go through all the venues down here and get on the streetcar and go back to where they parked their car. So, this is just a way to connect all these things, and for those living downtown. You know, we just opened up the Brickline weeks ago at the Mercantile which is the ConAgra campus development. And so many of the new tenants work at the Med Center. They love it because they’re going to be able to hop on the street car and not use their car to get there. And so all of that is working together. And I think right now we’re seeing the results of a great partnership.
Thank you.
Thank you.
