Something from Nothing
There are a lot of sayings out there about business, like You need to spend money to make money. As best I can tell, Main Street America is apparently convincing small towns to spend money on their program on the theory that you need to spend money on them to make money by growing the town economically.
If you aren't going to spend money on them to try to foster economic growth, what are you going to do?
Ideally, you make something "from nothing." You want to invest a minimum of town resources and get results and if Main Street has been bleeding you and not delivering, you may be seriously behind the eight ball and have nothing you can invest.
When I asked myself if urban planning was really a career I wanted to pursue, I asked my kids to lend me their SimCity disk. They didn't mind because they didn't play it anyway. They got it as part of some bargain bundle of games.
The original SimCity and SimCity 2000 were very challenging. You got new funds like once a year and if you ran out of money, the first game had no way to borrow money and no business deals.
I destroyed a lot of cities learning to play these games. In most cases, once it hit a wall, there was no recovering.
One time, I managed to begin bulldozing excess water supply to cut ongoing costs and free up funds so I could start doing something else and that town gradually recovered.
Eclogiselle has Development Recipes that you should be able to benefit from at minimal cost to the city and without the heavy budgeting decisions involved in deciding to fund a Main Street program. So you can start doing course correction while going through what is likely to be a lengthy process for killing their funding.
If the town has a website, you can up your website game. That should be feasible using existing resources already part of your ongoing expenses.
You can decide on some style guidelines to help make your town more cohesive with minimal extra effort. A style guide is a recommended "basic" program the Main Street program suggests and doesn't actually enforce and doesn't seem to provide any existing templates or other technical support.
Add the style guidelines as a one page document to your existing website. This will take a little bit of time and effort but shouldn't require any voting on budget line items.
If you have a homeless problem, that link has the following suggestions:
1. Send the Brown Bag Lunches post to local homeless services.
2. Send the Shopping Carts piece to your chief of police.
3. Send Project SRO to local developers.
You can also put together information convincing local businesses that walkable neighborhoods are more profitable and encourage them to put up bike racks at their own expense, which shouldn't be a big out of pocket expense per business.
To get the most bang for the buck, I recommend doing a style guide and picking a color scheme FIRST, then include that information and recommend the color of inverted U bike rack you would like to see.
Some of this involves writing a few emails on your part and giving useful information to other people to help them succeed.