June 1, 2021

The longest-serving leader of the downtown Sioux Falls organization, Carole Pagones, has died.

She was 81.

Pagones served as executive director of Main Street Sioux Falls, now Downtown Sioux Falls Inc., from 1989 through the early 2000s.

“If you knew Carole, you knew she was a force to be reckoned with,” DTSF president Joe Batcheller said in a statement.

“She got people to move mountains for downtown. People began to start believing in downtown again because of Carole — something that was missing for decades.”

Looking back on the early 1990s, Pagones used the word “dismal” to describe downtown in a 2014 interview with the Argus Leader. There was a nearly 70 percent vacancy rate and loitering was a problem, but she saw a different future. She left a job in the Twin Cities, took a $40,000 pay cut and began leading Main Street Sioux Falls.

“I believed downtown Sioux Falls was a special place with potential. There were big employers and small retail. I felt there was a way to blend them,” she said in that piece.

She mentioned how she would sit on a bench downtown with then Mayor Dave Munson and envision what downtown could become.

“She was dynamite. I just give her so much credit for what happened downtown,” Munson said. “And she was tenacious. She never quit.  She was a wonderfully supportive partner for me when we were working on a lot of things together downtown. If she was your friend, she was your friend.”

At the time, locating a business downtown wasn’t the easiest sell.

“They would say, ‘Well, we heard Western Mall is all filled, blah, blah, blah,’ and I’d lie and say, ‘Oh, we’re getting calls too.’ I maybe had one a month,” Pagones said in a 2019 interview with KELO-TV. “You had to create the excitement. You had to show that things were going on.”

When the Parade of Lights debuted in 1992, it was Pagones’ baby.

“That was a big deal,” Munson said. “It got to be something that just grew. And she had such a relationship with the retailers and the business owners downtown. Many of them stayed wonderful friends with her forever,” Munson said. “She had that personality to make you believe you could get things done.”

Pagones also served for a decade on the South Dakota Board of Regents.

When she retired from Downtown Sioux Falls in 2006, the 70 percent vacancy rate that existed when she began had been cut to 7 percent.

In a tribute to her on the U.S. Senate floor, Sen. Tim Johnson noted how Pagones had “wielded her personal charm to persuade individual businesses to return to the area.”

He continued: “Today, any visitor to downtown Sioux Falls can immediately sense the wonderful results of Carole’s efforts. Numerous shops, restaurants and other businesses now operate in an area that is once again one of the city’s most desirable locations.”

Information on funeral arrangements hasn’t been released yet.