Bustling boutique stores, festival fun, and people flooding the streets to dine and kick back for happy hour. The place to be.

This is how new Downtown Tauranga chair Ashleigh Gee pictures the future of Tauranga CBD – and she's ready to hear the community's ideas too.

Taking up the role as chair back in April, Ashleigh says she's passionate about the city going through its transformation process. 'Seeing what has gone on over the last few years in the city centre with people moving out, Covid-19 and things like that – [becoming chair] was an opportunity for me to basically help revitalise the city centre and bring a bit of community feel to our city and bring the businesses closer together.

'The role of Downtown Tauranga is to support, promote and advocate for the city centre businesses.”

Miss Gee's

Ashleigh has had her own business in the CBD – Miss Gee's Bar & Eatery – since 2019. After developing a social network group called Initiate with a friend, connecting people for drinks and fun – this snowballed into Miss Gee's. 'I was quite enjoying hosting people, putting events on and things like that so an opportunity came up for me to launch my own hospitality venue, and that's how Miss Gee's came about with my love of electronic music as well.”

Since starting her business, Ashleigh says she's seen a lot of change in Tauranga City. 'There's been a massive shift obviously with people working from home. 'We're missing a lot of our office workers and with the access …there's been a shift in the way people are visiting the city centre.”

Yet she believes there's huge opportunities awaiting in Downtown Tauranga. 'We're seeing more and more people starting to take up businesses and vacant spaces in the city centre and launch their own little businesses. There's a little bit of a start-up wave starting to happen, which is really exciting.”

Plenty of potential

'For me, the potential the CBD has got with the investment the council's putting into the city centre at the moment – we're going to go from what we've got now, to a really cool place to be.

'I picture heaps of people working in the offices and coming out for lunches, happy hours and dinners, with the boutique retail...and festivals in downtown.”

She sees this happening with working alongside Tauranga City Council 'to give them feedback of how we can better structure the city and how it operates and making sure that the way all the bylaws that we've got to adhere to are actually trying to invigorate the city centre and not make it harder”.

Already in her role Ashleigh says: 'It's been really cool to get involvement from the council and having these discussions now before it's all set in place and we have to kind of roll with what we've got, so it's just about opening the communication”.

She thinks helping the city's transformation will take community backing. 'This is their city centre.” 'I think the good thing about me being in hospitality and working in a bar is that I talk to so many people every day and so many people have such cool ideas that I can then take to the table, so I think it's just getting more community involvement and backing with what we're trying to do in the city.”