Demand to Keep Bank of Books Open!

We, the undersigned, believe small businesses are important to our Ventura Community and should be treated with respect and support.
We believe developers and investors in this community should weigh their involvement with certain rules that need to be shown to our small businesses in our community. We do not want our small businesses being stepped over and destroyed.
We, the undersigned, believe that the 350% rent increase being put onto Bank of Books shows no respect to a business that has been rooted in Downtown Ventura for 60 years, one of the oldest businesses in the downtown area.
We would like respect shown to Bank of Books and especially one of the most active activists for years for small businesses in Ventura. Having campaigned for the restaurant industry for two years with the challenges they had, Clarey Rudd ate at over 150 restaurants to promote them on Facebook and encouraged the owners and staff.
He was the founding chairman of the Downtown Ventura Organization helping bring safety to downtown, making it a cleaner place and helping the homeless by bringing together different agencies to work together. He brought together the residents, businesses and building owners. The city manager thanked Clarey saying no one else could have pulled this off like he did.
Years later, the DVO got pushed aside by property owners creating the Ventura Downtown Partners who brought in the parking meters and then trying to take credit for what the DVO had accomplished in making downtown a better place and more of a tourist town. He has historically given over 300,000 books to the community for free, helping individuals with events and then helping ones who had lost their homes in the Thomas Fire.
Option to show respect to a historical small business location with the start of Noren’s Market and other great small businesses. We highly recommend building around Bank of Books. It contributes to more people coming to Ventura than the housing the developer has planned. If not that, there’s such a large inventory and hundreds of fixtures. The developer created an unjust situation for Bank of Books and should help solve the challenge he has put them in.
The development of the California Literary Hall of Fame was being developed for Bank of Books to bring more tourists to Ventura and now has a questionable future.
Bank of Books, voted #1 Independent Bookstore of Ventura County for 18 years, brings ones from out of the state and other countries. An internationally famous bookstore should not be destroyed because developers have their own interests in mind and clearly not the interest of the City of Ventura nor the literary world.
Small businesses are important to a healthy Ventura. We seek Ventura City Council to help show support to small businesses by creating protection for them and we seek that they help Bank of Books remain where it is.