Belfast — When a group of downtown business owners and volunteers formed Our Town Belfast a little more than a year ago, the organization's goal of getting Belfast accepted into the national "Main Street" program looked as though it could have been a decade-long quest.

Maine Development Foundation, which administers the program at the state level, was accepting one or two communities each year and had begun requiring applicants to go through a feeder program as a preliminary step. If Belfast did get in, the news would seem to have occasioned a major celebration.

Neither was the case. As it turned out, becoming a Main Street community didn't take Belfast long at all — the city was formally accepted on June 10 — and with an unprecedented surge of new businesses opening in the downtown commercial district, Our Town Belfast has been too busy to celebrate.

More than 25 new businesses have come to town in the past year, and nearly the same number have either relocated within the city's commercial center or expanded. Storefronts have been filling up so quickly that Our Town arranged to have a group ribbon-cutting event to celebrate all of them at once.

Even the celebration, held on a Tuesday morning, was businesslike in its brevity. The city closed Upper Main Street at 8 a.m. Shop owners crowded into Bay Wrap for coffee and pastries. Several TV crews conducted interviews on the street for stories on the seemingly magical business boom in Belfast. By 9 a.m. everyone was back to work.

Main Street is a nationwide program, including more than 1,200 communities, and is overseen by the National Trust for Historic Preservation's Main Street Center. At the core of the program is the idea that a healthy downtown, often characterized as the "heart" of the community, is the key to the sustained economic health of an area.

Statewide, there are nine Main Street communities, and another 17 in the Maine Downtown Network, a program that was created as a testing ground for aspiring Main Streeters. Belfast was the only community to be bumped up to full-fledged Main Street status this year.

According to Roxanne Eflin of Maine Development Foundation, the decision was partly a financial one but was also based on an evaluation of the communities in the Downtown Network.

"A lot of communities are very interested, but we're working with communities that are ready," she said.

Among the qualities that worked in Belfast's favor, Eflin said, was the downtown's relatively intact nineteenth-century architecture, Belfast's place as a service center, the city's "great sense of self," and the presence of a strong arts community, among other things.

"Belfast is such an extraordinarily strong architectural statement. [The city] is so well-known for its strong facade line downtown," she said. "Preserving and making sure you're taking care of that golden egg is all about what this program does."

But the idea of historical preservation is not meant to hamstring development, Eflin said; it's about "making sure the best of the best continues on in fresh new ways."

As the representative group for the newly-minted Main Street community, Our Town Belfast will get a contract in its first year for $30,000 worth of services that Eflin said would include a visit from a "resource team" versed in four core areas — design, promotion, economic restructuring and organization — for which Main Street organizations have corresponding committees. Business owners will also be eligible for discounts on certain kinds of professional training, she said.

Otherwise, Our Town Belfast's $75,000 to $90,000 annual budget will continue to come equally from three sources, as required by the Main Street program: the city, the community (typically in donations from businesses), and fund raising. The 2011-12 city budget already includes a line for Our Town Belfast.

The organization must also have a full-time executive director, but as with the three-part funding, Our Town Belfast is already there. Dorothy Havey came on board last April as executive director, replacing interim executive director Larraine Brown, who was with Our Town from its inception.

On the afternoon of July 5, Dorothy Havey was in the organization's office in the High Street Mall. She was wearing a T-shirt emblazoned with the organization's logo, in part, she said, because she was scheduled to appear before the City Council that night.

At the back of the one-room office, two windows overlooked the skate park and a slice of the waterfront — before the leaves came in, Havey said, you could see the construction going on at Front Street Shipyard.

In one corner stood a fiberglass bear from the Belfast Bear Fest. On the walls, various posters showed aerial views of the city and architectural elevations of some of the downtown's more striking buildings.

Havey put her business card down on the table. At the top it read "Our Town Belfast, A Maine Downtown Network Community." With a pencil, she crossed out the words "Downtown Network" and wrote "Street" next to the redaction.

On any topic relating to things happening downtown, Havey seemed to have relevant documents close at hand: a map of Main Street communities in Maine, information on an upcoming book festival, a map of a public art locations downtown and a booklet called "Keeping Up Appearances," about maintaining design standards in historic downtown areas, and others.

Earlier that morning, she had met with a business owner looking to relocate while his building underwent renovation. Later she talked to a gallery owner who wanted advice on restoring her storefront to its original design, which had once included a transom above the door. This would potentially entitle the gallery owner to historic preservation tax credits, Havey said, producing a flyer on "The Historic Rehabilitation Tax Credit Program in Maine."

Between visits to businesses, Havey had worked on organizing the upcoming Belfast Bound Book Festival (July 29 - 31) and the third annual Belfast Street Party (August 8). Somewhere in there, she had posted photos of Front Street Shipyard's recent open house on Our Town's Facebook page.

On another day, Havey might have been out chatting with merchants, or handing out maps to visitors coming off boats at the public landing. Our Town also continues some of the functions of the former Belfast Downtown Business Group, from which the group evolved, planting flowers downtown, putting out pumpkins in the fall and stringing Christmas lights in December.

The Our Town's offices have also served as a meeting place for outside groups, including the organizers of the Celtic Celebration and members of the Belfast Area Transition Initiative, with whom Our Town has been working to post signs for Waldo County Transportation's "Belfast Shopper" bus.

"It's really just being there for whatever's going on, however I can help," Havey said.

Speaking on July 5, Belfast City Manager Joe Slocum credited Our Town Belfast with helping to fill the city's downtown storefronts in recent months and being an important part of an economic development effort that has been years in the making.

One advantage to the Main Street program, he said, is that rather than trying to fill storefronts with any kind of business, the administering organization is likely to try to figure out what's missing and fill those gaps.

Havey spoke repeatedly of collaboration between groups. The ribbon cutting for new businesses was put on jointly by Our Town, the Belfast Area Chamber of Commerce and the city. The public art installation "Please Be Seated," featuring artist-designed chairs and benches was sponsored by Our Town and Waterfall Arts. The book festival is to be put on by Our Town and several downtown merchants. Other examples of collaboration appeared easy to come by.

"There are a lot of creative people and there's a lot of energy out there," Havey said. "When you get that together, I wouldn't say it's easy to pull off, but you can pull it off."