Issaquah’s Olde Town is a nice place to visit, but you wouldn’t want to stay there. Or, rather, you couldn’t if you wanted to: the sidewalks are too narrow, the public spaces too spartan and there’s still plenty of room to grow social events.

The manner in which the neighborhood is used is currently being dictated by a design that “ushers people on through” to their errands and back home, city Economic Development Manager Andrea Snyder said.

Those were some of the findings presented Tuesday night by a group of city staff, downtown business owners, artists and other stakeholders tasked with identifying ways to reinvigorate Issaquah’s cultural business district. Tuesday night’s special city council meeting covered preliminary findings by the Olde Town Vitality Task Force, with final recommendations expected at the end of the year.

“City council submitted a number of goals in 2014 aimed at the Olde Town area,” Economic Development Director Keith Niven said. “… the idea was to consolidated those into a single goal.”

That all-encompassing goal — set as a goal for 2015 — was to “enhance Olde Town vitality.” The problem was, council members weren’t quite sure what that meant, Council President Paul Winterstein said.

It would be up to the task force to develop a concept of what vitality meant and how it might be achieved. The definition they arrived at was one that focused on an economy that served citizens’ needs first and fostered everyday social mingling.

A walking tour of Olde Town that comprised the bulk of Tuesday’s meeting focused on three locations: Pedestrian Park behind Jak’s Grill, the historic Shell Station that houses the Downtown Issaquah Association’s offices, and the Issaquah Depot Museum.

In the case of Pedestrian Park — a small courtyard connecting the Front Street corridor to a parking lot behind area businesses that’s bare other than its trellis gardens — the task force presented a concept that would dress up the sparse space with tables, chairs and hanged lighting.

It was modest improvements like those, coupled with cooperation with local business owners, that would help revitalize the area, task force members said.

“We want to bring new investors and new money into downtown,” commercial property owner Keith Watts said. “If we could make small changes to improve vitality, it would make a world of difference.”