Maureen Sweeney-Smith’s job went from promoting to rejuvenating Ellicott City
INTERVIEW BY Martha Thomas PORTRAIT BY Mary C. Gardella
December 2016/January 2017
Maureen Sweeney-Smith has been the executive director of Ellicott City Partnership since February, 2016. She served as the executive director of the Catonsville Chamber of 
Commerce from 1997 to 2000 during Catonsville’s streetscape project. Sweeney-Smith worked on the Partners in Paradise Volunteer Team to make improvements to the Paradise commercial area and co-founded Catonsville Rails to Trails, among other community projects in the Catonsville/Ellicott City area. She is a graduate of Towson University and has a master’s degree in Human Resources from Johns Hopkins University.
Q The Ellicott City Partnership did a pretty big pivot after the storm. Can you talk about that?
Usually our mission is to work on the vitality of the town, issues like economic development and historic preservation. We’re a Main Street Maryland community. For example when that Pokemon Go thing came along, we were helping merchants with that.
Then all of a sudden the flood hit and catapulted us to a whole different level. The night of the flood I set up a donation site, and it’s taken off. We’ve raised more than $1 million to help, as we say, get Ellicott City back on its street. We want it to come back better than ever. We’re working with Howard County Economic Development and have a consultant working one-on-one with returning merchants to look at their retail mix. We’ve also been helping people to get into more e-commerce. A lot never learned how to do it. You’re open 24/7 on e-commerce. It’s another tool to being successful.
Q In what ways can Ellicott City improve?
We do a great job attracting tourists. The streets are filled on weekend days. But there are 209,000 people who live within a five-mile radius. We need to attract them to town. We want to do more with the retail mix to attract the local crowd as well.
Q What would attract those locals?
The consultant said, ‘Look at local companies that are successful in your area and try to attract them.’ Big chains aren’t coming because we don’t have square footage. I don’t think Crate and Barrel is coming to Ellicott City. But a place like Park Ridge Trading, which had just recently opened, is a great addition. The shop has infused olive oils, food and culinary things. We want to keep the people we have and make sure they are successful.
Q Will there be any major updates to attract millennials?
Some buildings are now using the second floors for incubators and small businesses; we’ve got a whole bunch of hot tech firms. The millennial age group wants to work in a town, not an industrial plaza. We’re trying to create an atmosphere where it’s a good place to live and work.
Q So is there a silver lining?
This has been a terrible, terrible episode. Three people have died. But looking forward, we have a great opportunity to rebuild the town, using federal money and private investments and donations. We’re going to come back and it will be awesome.
Q What is being done to improve Ellicott City’s infrastructure so this won’t happen again?
If the Ellicott brothers rode in on their horses today, planning and zoning would never let them build here. But Main Street is so special, and so many people want to come back, it isn’t an issue. It takes three to four months for FEMA to declare you a disaster area, so we’re looking to maybe December or January to find out if we’ll be getting money from that agency. If we get it, we can go full force. This would include putting in water retention ponds. The county has a group working on this.
Q It seems that flooding is always a looming threat with the Tiber River literally running beneath the town.
We’re pushing resilient design architecture in rebuilding. Don Reuwer, one of our biggest property owners, didn’t put drywall back on the exposed granite walls and he’s using polished concrete floors instead of wood. Everybody wins on that. It looks beautiful. He says he’s going in with a hose next time. This could happen again, so how do you make it less costly to repair? Maybe it’s putting your electricity on the second floor, things like that.
Q It all sounds so promising, like the Phoenix rising from the flames.
Somebody said, it’s kind of the rainbow after the storm. There was a rainbow the next day. Very few towns get the opportunity to rebuild.
Q Right after Ellicott City, Louisiana suffered a terrible flood.
I think of Baton Rouge a lot. We have 90 affected businesses, 107 households, 190 residents. All told, fewer than 500 people were affected by the flood. They had 60,000. I can’t even imagine what they’re going through. I think we’ll have more disasters. In both cases, Louisiana and here, it was heavy rainfall, not a flood. It was just a Saturday night rainfall. *
