EDITOR’S NOTE: This story was written in response to a reader-submitted question through Open Source, a platform where readers can ask Ashland Source’s newsroom to investigate a question.
ASHLAND — Are there any new restaurants coming to Ashland?
The short answer is no, there are no new restaurants with plans to open in Ashland in the near future, according to the Ashland Chamber of Commerce, the mayor’s office and Ashland Area Economic Development.
Other than restaurants, there has been recent interest in developers opening a car wash on U.S. Route 250, a potential hotel and a gas service station, Mayor Matt Miller said.
In terms of business expansion in the area, Ashland Area Economic Development is working to expand Lippert Enterprises, Heffelfinger’s Meat Market and the vision development complex by the OhioHealth facility, said economic development coordinator Aaron Pauly.
While there are no restaurants set to open at the moment, there are multiple behind-the-scenes efforts in the works to attract future restaurants, as well as other businesses.
“I do not know of any particular restaurant that is planning to be constructed here in an immediate time frame,” Miller said. “But I’ll tell you now that does not mean we aren’t reaching out to restaurants.”
The city has three main ways it goes about recruiting service industry businesses, specifically restaurants and retail.
“We may just reach out to the corporation,” Miller said.
For example, Miller said he recently emailed a restaurant in California after seeing an ad the restaurant put out seeking a possible franchise owner for Ohio. While the aforementioned example has yet to go further than initial conversations, it could amount to a new opportunity down the line, Miller said.
Direct outreach is not necessarily the most often-used method, however.
“The more common way is by working with developers who represent different restaurant chains,” Miller said.
For example, Miller has reached out to developers and potential investors to try to find someone to take over Jake’s Steakhouse, the site near Buehler’s Fresh Foods Ashland that has been vacant since 2019.
Miller said he often hears residents’ desires for certain chain restaurants in Ashland, but the city’s small size often hinders those establishments from choosing Ashland as another location.
“(Chain owners) will look at Ashland, draw a circle on the map — and maybe it’s a 15-mile radius or maybe it’s a 15-minute drive or a 20-minute drive — and they’ll see how many people are living in that area, what’s the population base they can grow upon,” Miller said.
“The challenge for Ashland is today if someone draws that circle on the map, that circle overlaps with the area that’s serving Wooster or that’s serving Mansfield,” he said. “And in many instances, they already have those chains, so it’s too close to build another one, at least with our population as it stands today.”
However, Miller expects potential population growth in the coming months and years could change this outlook. Several apartment complexes have recently been constructed in Ashland, including Union Lofts, Montgomery Crossing, Latitude 40 Flats, units behind the newly-installed OhioHealth medical facility, and Miller expects more to come.
“My hope is that as these new housing units become occupied by individuals and families, that is going to create enough of a population base to attract the interest of some of the major chains that people are wanting to see come to Ashland,” Miller said.
While outreach to current businesses and developers with ties to current businesses are strategies the city uses, Miller said local entrepreneurs are the key to growth.
“The most success we’ve experienced here in our community so far is with our own local entrepreneurs coming up with an idea for a new restaurant,” Miller said.
An example of that is Uniontown Brewing, Co., which opened at the end of 2017 and is run by a local couple, Doug and Anna Reynolds.
Uniontown was part of the first wave of increased growth downtown in recent years, including the addition of Ohio Fire, Fig and Oak, Coffy Space, Rise Studios Wellness Collective, and South Street Grille. The city and community organizations have also spruced up the outdoor areas downtown, including the recent completion of Foundation Plaza in 2021 and the addition of hanging flower boxes in 2020.
In 2015, Ashland Main Street received a $300,000 downtown revitalization grant from the Ohio Development Services Agency to address code violations and make facade improvements at 25 properties in the Central Business District.
There are also financial incentives for businesses that want to open downtown, Miller said. Through community reinvestment agreements, businesses can get subsidies that lower the cost of owning property by reducing the taxes the business pays on it.
“Basically, if you come into a downtown building and you remodel it and increase its value, you are eligible for a 10-year, 50% abatement,” Miller said.
The mayor’s office works closely with Ashland Area Economic Development, which operates under a public-private partnership structure to improve business retention, expansion, attraction and entrepreneurship.
AAEP coordinator Aaron Pauly said AAEP receives business leads from Jobs Ohio, which is a private, nonprofit corporation designed to drive job creation and new capital investment in Ohio through business attraction, retention and expansion efforts.
“So what will typically happen is for a lead, a business will say ‘Hey, contact the state of Ohio. I’d like to move there.’ Then, (Jobs Ohio) will send out, you know, where would you love to have your business located, and then if we fit that criteria, they’ll send out a notification to all the economic developers that fit that criteria and we will submit for that.
“So we’ll say ‘Hey, I have a job, or a site in the industrial park. I have a site Loudonville,’ so on so forth.”
However, similar to Miller, Pauly said the most success AAEP has seen is within the existing community in Ashland, with a specific focus on expanding existing companies and writing tax abatements.
“Word of mouth is probably our largest grower in Ashland,” Pauly said.
