Rural Economic Conference: Keynote Address

SPEAKER: Tonight, when we were thinking about what we were doing in the evening, we were thinking about a reception and whether or not we wanted to have a keynote speaker. And we were-- Dustin and I and David, we were doing some investigating and vetting, and we came across Nick.

And Nick checked all the boxes for what we're talking about-- banking experience, real estate experience, economic development experience, so touching all of those different things, and even building on the last panel talking about housing, we'll be able to talk about real estate some more with Nick. So we're lucky to have him here to come tonight and talk to us for a few minutes. So please give round of applause for our keynote, Nick Glew.

[APPLAUSE]

NICK GLEW: Thank you. All right, everybody. So this is probably the most interesting speaking time of the day that I've ever been asked to talk.

[LAUGHTER]

You all have sat here all afternoon. I was able to join you for about half of the afternoon and heard just some really good, engaging dialogue. You're all thinking and talking about the right stuff.

But then you get to the end of the day, and you're tired. And then you go have-- that was, like, heavy appetizers. Those appetizers were amazing.

And you have adult beverages in front of you, and now you have to listen to a keynote speaker. And all the keynote speaker is doing is watching heavy eyes in front of him, probably. So anyway, let's talk about these things, right. Is anybody excited?

[CHEERING]

Labor, zoning.

[LAUGHS]

[APPLAUSE]

AUDIENCE: Woo! Zoning!

NICK GLEW: [LAUGHS] Zoning.

[LAUGHTER]
 
Let's do the wave for zoning, right. [LAUGHTER]

[CHATTER]

Well, anyway, I don't know, what I talk about here tonight might be a little bit unexpected, but it's my perspective on really what we're talking about when it comes to these things. Right, so when we talk about these things, maybe we should look at it more like we're talking about, How do we collaborate with our neighbors? How do we attract employment and talent?

Right, we all want that. Maybe it's, How do we reimagine our community? Or, frankly, it's simply about connecting people and, How do we make people feel when they come to our communities, when they live in our communities? People are what matters most.

It was interesting. I had a chance to talk with a few of you out in the hallway. I love that we have ISU students here, OK. You guys--

[APPLAUSE]

Yes. In fact, there's a couple folks that are economic developers by profession, and we just had our kind of big annual conference here in the state of Iowa last week.

And I was talking with a couple of folks from the Chicago Fed, and I'm like, man, we do a really good job of doing conferences in our lanes with the folks that we are professionals with, but how cool is it I can go to this conference, I can go talk with some students and learn about what they're interested in and what their perspective is all about? That's really cool, so thanks for being here.

But another interesting conversation that I had was actually with the city manager of the city of Fremont, Michigan, and I said, we go to Michigan every year. We love going to South Haven, Michigan, which I'm not sure is all that close to his community. But the reason I think about that is because I like going to that community because how that community makes me feel as an individual.

Right, we can get very academic and specific and share programs and initiatives and strategies and use this big phrase, economic development, and we're attracting companies and-- but we're creating jobs for people. We're building communities for people. We're doing quality of life for people.
 
And so what I'm going to do today is share with you different things that I have been a part of in my economic development career, even though now I've moved back into the private sector and work in banking, doing business lending. But my challenge to you all today is that you'll hear the stories that I'm going to share, and you're going to see some of the projects that we've done in the community that I was an economic developer in. But my stories are going to revolve around the community of Marion, Iowa.

I was the economic development there for 12 years. The population of Marion, Iowa, just to set a reference for where you are all, our population was 42,000 people, so we were a suburban community. We had a main street program. We had a chamber of commerce. I led Economic Development, and we were working on things like certified sites and attracting industry and workforce.

But I want you to think about how you can apply these stories whether you're a city of 400 people or whether you're looking out the window when you walk down the street and we're in downtown Des Moines, OK. At the end of the day, it's all about how we're working together as people to execute these various strategies. The relationships we build as educators, as economic developers, as bankers, it is all working in totality to really move communities forward.

So just briefly, a little bit about myself, let's start here. I grew up on a farm in Northeast Iowa, the city of Delhi, Iowa. I believe the population, according to the 2022 census, in Delhi, Iowa, was 427 people.

My family, we were involved in everything. We were involved in our communities. We were involved in our church.

My dad was on the school board for many years. I had an uncle who was a board of supervisors member. We were a tight family, and community was woven deep into everything that we did.

In seventh grade, I knew what I wanted to do. I wanted to be a news anchor.

[LAUGHTER]

So that's me, seventh grade, sitting on the old news set in our TV station in Cedar Rapids, Iowa. So I knew what I wanted to do, but then this happened. I met my wife.
 
OK, and then this happened. We got married. And then this happened, and we had a family.

And this is actually a picture from a couple of weeks ago when our daughter went to homecoming, or-- yeah, homecoming. I was like, yeah, it's homecoming season. And so all of this happened, and all of a sudden, my world wasn't focused on necessarily what I wanted to be when I grew up, but who I wanted to be and where I wanted to build community with my family and those around me.

So long story short, I spent the last 12 years of my professional career in economic development really focused on building relationships and building community through those relationships. You guys, this is really what economic development-- and it's what things like zoning and housing and labor-- it's all about people, and it's all about relationships.

And so everything that we do as developers, as bankers, as policymakers, it comes down to people, so let's talk more about people. How many of you, when I talk about economic development and I use the acronym BRE, does anybody in this room know what I'm talking about? OK. Business Retention and Expansion.

For economic development professionals, that's kind of a fundamental task of what we do. It means we're spending time in our communities listening to the executives and the leaders in our communities about what their challenges are, what their opportunities are, and what programs or strategies we as economic developers need to develop to keep this company happy so they employ people for a long time.

So a couple of years ago, I sat down with the executive of this company, Timberline Manufacturing. You can look up that company in Marion, Iowa. They manufacture wire harnesses.

Boring, right? Nothing overly exciting about this company, but they're really good at what they do. They work with some really big companies across the United States.

We spent an hour talking about all the things that you talk about in business. What's the next year look like? Are you going to hire people?

Are you going to lay off people? Do we have enough housing in our community to support your company? Yada, yada, yada.
 
And this is a good journalism question. The last question is always, Is there anything that we talked about-- or is there anything that I have not asked you about that you'd like to add to this conversation? OK. That's how you get all the best answers.

And he said, yeah, actually, I had a really crazy dynamic that played out in my company last week. I was hiring an individual for a pretty significant role in his company, and this individual talked about how he had done all kinds of research on the community that he wanted to live in and found this town called Marion, Iowa, and moved there, was excited about living in the community and everything that he read about that that was going on, and then he figured out what he was going to do for a job. How backwards is that from traditionally how people have chosen communities in the past, right?

So the question to you all is, How do we create communities where people want to live? because in today's world, it's perhaps more important than anything. We use the phrase quality of life, right, and for economic developers, when you talk about quality of life or we go to the state legislature and we say, hey, we need to talk about some quality-of-life programs for our communities to attract people, oftentimes that is viewed as the most frilly, soft, untangible investments ever, in quality of life. But today, when it comes to growing communities, I would argue it's perhaps almost the important thing of what we do.

So how do we create communities that people want to live? We ask our communities. So here's our story from Marion, Iowa.

When I was a journalist, OK, right out of college-- I did do that, by the way. So I graduated from college, and I actually even worked for that TV station where I had a picture in seventh grade. I did that because I knew what I wanted to do, right, when I grow up, and everybody always follows their plans that they set, right?

So anyway, I had done that for a year, and I developed a relationship with the city manager in the city of Dubuque, Iowa. His name is Mike Van Milligen, one of the smartest guys I've ever met, OK. So in the year that I was in Dubuque, I got to know him, worked with him, obviously interviewed him, established some rapport with him.
 
Well, fast-forward to 2009-- actually, I think it was 2007 or 2008, I was in the city of Marion. I had actually served a term on our city council, another just weird, random resume builder, but great perspective for anyone, so please consider running for public office. We need good, solid leaders in our community, right.

I knew that they had done a vision plan in Dubuque, and it was called Envision 2010. OK. They hired a consultant to come in and facilitate a community visioning process, What do we need in the city of Dubuque to drive us forward, right? Spent a bunch of money doing it and did this really great plan.

So we went up there, met with Dubuque city leaders, and said, How do we do this? And he and his wife, who was president of the community foundation at the time, said, well, we'll show you. We'll come tell you. We'll share our playbook, and it won't cost you anything.

And it's really grassroots. You can do it on your own. It doesn't matter if you're a small town or a big town.

It doesn't take resources to do this. It's about sitting down with people and asking, What do you want to see in your community? Sometimes, it's a lot more effective than when you bring an outside consultant forward.

So fast-forward to 2009, and in the city of Marion, we unveiled what was called the Great 8. We facilitated a community visioning process, and these were the five-- these were the eight projects that we were going to focus all of our resources together with our city partners, our private sector businesses, to drive forward to create that community that people wanted to live.

So in a very short amount of time, we deployed free Wi-Fi in our parks and public gathering spaces. We had a public library that was grossly undersized for our community, and we very quickly rallied around a plan to construct a new library in our downtown. We said trails mattered, and so we not only adopted a master trails plan, but we incorporated public art into those projects. And this actually used to be an old railroad bridge, that almost seemed like a wall as you entered Marion, that is now a very prominent, well-thought feature that's incorporated into our trail network.
 
We needed to develop a program to build the future leaders of our community, not just invest in folks that were in leadership positions today. So we very simply launched a community leadership program. Our visioning process said, hey, we need more splash pads and aquatic features. And so we passed a local option sales tax to help invest in those assets. And when you have a plan that's rooted in community and you put that in front of a community to vote on, it's amazing how quickly people say yes, but it started with asking people what they wanted.

And fast-forward to today, our community is actually in final plans-- and this will go to a referendum in the next couple of years-- for a new aquatic center in our community. Sounds crazy, right? These are big assets.

But we started with grass roots, asking people what they wanted, and that process generated 1,800 unique ideas in our community. We put committees together, we put neighborhood groups together, to sort through those to get to what we called this Great 8. And at the end of the day, our community members could see their hands in that process, and it was amazing how quickly we were able to execute this and all of these other projects.

Investing in our parks, you'll notice that was one of the final ones. Today, we have assets like this, that are really community hubs around great pieces of art. Our downtowns, our uptown artway-- we were able to secure a $350,000 ArtPlace America grant, something rarely seen in the state of Iowa, but it's all because we engaged our people, and they said, we want this in our community. We didn't have a YMCA or a community center. Today, we have this brand new YMCA.

So how does your community plan for quality of life? is the question. Oftentimes, we can overthink it. We can think we need $150,000 to bring in a consultant to facilitate this very fancy proprietary process.
No, you just need a structure and neighborhood leaders who are willing to sit down with condo associations and rotary clubs and business groups and sewing groups and you name it, to come up with, really, an intentional plan. Community planning does not happen by accident.
 
OK. So, again, we go back to this story of this guy, right. We know there's a guy in that picture who moved to our community not to work at Timberline Manufacturing but to live in the community that we were building that was attractive, right. So let's talk more about-

- this is labor. This is talent.

So let's shift gears, because one of those other big words on the first slide was labor, right? So let's talk maybe not about individuals that we're trying to attract to our communities, but let's talk about other people who are already in our communities. And they're the people that are at this back table.

Whether you like it or not, or you like to be labeled this or not, you are our future workforce. You actually are the future leaders of our communities. So there's a big opportunity for you guys to step up and lead and, at the same time, know that there are so many people around you that are cheering for you.

I had a conversation with a guy out there who wanted to be an architect. I don't know, where did you go? There.

Good. You didn't leave after meeting me. That's good.

[LAUGHTER]

How did we end the conversation?

AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]

NICK GLEW: Yeah, where you were studying. I said, hey, I know a guy-- this is about relationships-- let me know if you want to do a job shadow.

Right. Anyway, so here's a question to you. When you're hiring entry-level talent at the companies that you work for, how many of you find that talent by posting a job description on Indeed.com or whatever local job board that you utilize? Yeah, it's kind of crappy, right? You get-- eh.

How many of you pick up the phone and call your high school counselors? You can't call them guidance counselors anymore, your high school counselors. Anybody? Has anybody hired entry-level talent?

Well, what I want to share with you is a program that we developed. Here's a little bit of setting the stage.

[VIDEO PLAYBACK]
 
[MUSIC PLAYING]

- What if?

- What if?

- What if?

- What if my community invested in me not just as a future employee but as a future leader?

- What if I didn't see my future here but uncovered new pathways to reach my full potential?

- What if my internship led to a job offer before I graduated high school?

- What if every student in our community was on a pathway to having education or training beyond high school?

- What if my parents encouraged me to pursue my passion, not just check the college box?

- What if we created an environment that built community loyalty and was contagious to talent recruitment?

- What if Marion was a national leader in creating a talent pipeline that became a competitive advantage for the community?

- That is the vision--

- Empowered.

- --of Community Promise.

NICK GLEW: So what if, when it was related to labor and talent recruitment-- [END PLAYBACK]

--what if we stopped spending so much time trying to attract people from outside of our communities, and instead intentionally investing time in making sure the people that we have equipped to be successful in life are connected with opportunities in our own backyard?

AUDIENCE: Woo!
 
NICK GLEW: That's a strategy that we deployed through our program that's called Community Promise. And you can go to that website right now, CommunityPromise.org, because I can't even begin to touch on all the things that are happening in our community through Community Promise.

But a couple of examples-- this is a picture of some students out in our industrial park, that our economic development group owned. And we had some wetlands out there, and we needed to hire a consultant to come out and evaluate our wetlands. So why not have the students go do that with the professional and learn about that in our backyard?

When students studied challenges and recommended solutions through a high school program called Venture Academics in our community, when they needed a place to pitch their findings and pitch their ideas, they came to our economic development offices, and we brought business leaders around them so that they could feel valued and connected in our community. It's all about relationships, right?

This is the website that I would encourage you to check out. If you're looking for just ideas on how you can connect with the talent that's right in your own backyard, go here and steal ideas. It's called R&D, Rip off and Duplicate, OK. But anyway, I'd encourage you to learn more about that Community Promise, so.

Here's my challenge to you. If we're at a conference talking about labor, at even a very grassroots level, what are you bringing to the table to drive change? because I don't think we're at a point where just posting a job on Indeed or wherever is going to move the needle in a huge way to really solving the labor conditions that exist in our communities.

One more topic-- let's talk about housing. So if we're building attractive communities, figuring out ways that people will have successful careers in our communities, the question is, just like we were talking about in the last session, do we have places for those people to live? I know there was a session earlier that talked about, eh, data is tricky, right. Sometimes it's useful, sometimes it's not. Sometimes it's hard to get.
 
I would challenge you, when it comes to housing and all of the programs that exist, we need to have some fundamental data, OK. It might mean we're hiring a consultant to come in and do a housing study. That does not have to be that expensive, for those of you that are coming from small communities. There could be opportunity to partner with your local university and do more of a dashboard housing analysis that could provide impact and really understanding what your needs are as a community.

In some ways, me, as a banker, I have great interest in housing being constructed in my community, right. People moving to the community, I'm going to do new mortgages. They're going to spend money at businesses.

Guys, if you don't have a funding source for some of these, go knock on the door of your local bank and say, we need a partner. That's the thing-- I was talking with some of the organizers of this conference-- that I really like about this, is the audience here is not just economic developers. There's not just bankers. It's not just educators. What can we do as people collaboratively when we try to bring solutions forward together?

So in Marion, we had some data. It said, hey, by 2030, this is the housing we need. So then we moved forward and started putting plans together that was informed by that data. This is actually a master plan that was done with a local developer, paid for by the city of Marion.

Are any of your communities partnering with local developers and actually paying for their master plans that they will then execute? Well, in the city of Marion, we did that. We'd utilize tax increment financing to fund those, because when the city was at the table collaboratively with the developer, you could make sure that zoning, housing needs, all of the desires of the community were incorporated into that master plan of the developer.

And then it simply becomes executing it, not fighting every time a final plat is presented in the city says, no, that's not what we want. Why don't you have more public space? Why don't you have-- whatever it might be. We're working together in relationship with our private sector to do this for the benefit of the public, do it for the benefit of people.

So we did all kinds of that. We did master planning on mixed-use developments. We understood hospitality needs.
 
This is higher-end housing. We needed some of that. We're continuing to build more of it.

When we built our YMCA, it was on a site right in the middle of the community. And then the YMCA left, and we said, hey, we know we need this kind of housing. So it just happens so much more quickly because we had the plans and the processes and the buy-in to drive that.

Anyway, we had a really good run in the city of Marion with new construction projects over the last 10 years all supporting housing needs that were data driven. Any time a housing developer would come to our community, we could show them what we needed, and when they brought it forward, we would sail through council approvals because we had already done the work to know what we needed and wanted in our community.

But one big question, especially in some rural communities and even in older urban communities, is, What are we doing to take care of our existing housing stock, right? So we developed a program, that was kind of under our Community Promise initiative, that we called Marion Community Build, and it was focused on identifying deteriorating housing in the core of our community that needed to have fresh life in it.

This is a picture of the first home that we bought. And what we did is we would turn these homes into classrooms. We didn't do this alone as economic developers and as one city working together, but we brought both of our school districts together to collaborate to address this challenge.

The challenge was-- everybody has this, you all have this issue-- deteriorating, older core housing stock, stagnant values. Right, so tax base in a fully built-out community isn't going to grow when your housing stock is deteriorated and ultimately losing value because of deferred maintenance.

We had one of our school districts that had no more room to grow. They didn't even have places where teachers, as they hired them, could get a home in their community. We definitely had a lack of affordable housing for young families and individuals.
 
Guys, it's interesting, when we talk about workforce housing in the state of Iowa, we can award workforce housing tax credits all day long, right. Do not be fooled, workforce housing and affordable housing are a long ways difference from each other. There is workforce housing that's coming to market that is more than twice what my monthly mortgage payment is. So we have a major affordability issue when it comes to housing, and so this was a challenge that we were trying to address.

Our high schools-- and many of you might have a program that you build new housing. Maybe you get a lot donated to you and the shop class builds a new house once a year, or maybe it takes them a couple of years to do. Well, in a growing community, it's hard to find new lots that the private sector is willing to give up.

And then we also had this opportunity to connect a need back to workforce development, our trades needing more people. So we created a new LLC. We formalized agreements with our public partners.

We turned these homes into classrooms. We had a teacher that instead of teaching in the classroom taught out in these homes how to do various tasks of improving them. And we would buy a home, sell a home, take the profits, reinvest it in the next project.

And so this is a classroom out in the field. These guys, this is the teacher on the left. That kid, I'm not sure if I'd be standing there if I was the teacher. He's looking there like, What is this?

[LAUGHTER]

No one has been hurt so far. And they just, they poured into these homes. And yes, they are learning a trade.

They're learning a skill. They're maybe learning what they don't want to do through this. But at the end of the day, they're pouring into community.

This is kind of a before-and-after of an old home that we found after a newspaper article was run in the Cedar Rapids Gazette. I got a phone call from a lady. She said, hey, we own this home. It's in kind of a high-profile area. We haven't lived there for 10 years. Nobody had lived in this home for 10 years.

So we got a pretty good deal on it. At the end of the day, the house looked like this. It was absolutely beautiful.
 
So think back over the past several minutes on the just, people, relationships, future generations of leaders we're talking about. All of this work is happening alongside current business leaders in our community, OK. When I say that, I want to share Jim's story.

Jim is a business owner in our community with the right mindset about the importance of relationships and reinvesting in community. He's been a huge supporter of our Community Build program.

Here's Jim's story. [VIDEO PLAYBACK]

- I grew up about a half mile away from there--

[MUSIC PLAYING]

--to the east and, when I went to middle school, would walk by that house every day. I really didn't pay attention to the house, but that was right on the path where my friends and I would walk to school or occasionally ride our bikes to school. And I had many friends right around that area as well that I would hang out with.

Suburban Lumber is a building material supplier primarily supplying lumber, but we also handle an awful lot of other products in our community. A lot of our staff in the sales, of course, is compensated based upon what they sell. When it comes to us donating, they really aren't getting extra compensation for that.

So it's amazing, and even when we have worked with the garage and especially the cabinets, there's never been a question from our staff of, Well, am I not going to get anything out of this? They're really just, Sure, what you need? and go on and help out.

- Basically a two-stall garage.

- When I think of Jim, you think of Suburban Lumber first, and you think of materials. It's like, OK, Jim, can you help us out with some siding? Can you help us out with some shingles? Can you help us out with some lumber?

But what he also brings to the table is the relationships that he has with other people. Lumber specialties, he brought them to the table, and they ended up donating the trusses for our garage. Huge relationship, filled a gap that we didn't have, just a big deal.
 
And then also, not only the material side, but Jessica, who works for Suburban Lumber in their designing department, I mean, without her and her knowledge and what she does and has done on this property, our previous property, our future property, as far as a design standpoint, she comes in, looks at the kitchen, looks at the living room, looks at the dining room, and puts these 3D renderings together that really help us people who don't do that every day just really vision it for us. And then we can kind of put the pen to the paper with what she provides.

- To be able to be part and give back a little bit to Marion, where I grew up and have so many fond memories, but more than anything, too, it's, as everybody has a struggle to find employees and good people in our industry, we really do as well. So I entered in not with the direct thought to get involvement, to get somebody knocking on our doors and coming in. That wasn't really the point. But I guess I would really recommend to anybody to show up at some of the kind of open houses that you have and listen to members speak, but more importantly, the kids speak.

NICK GLEW: So, guys, this very broad world that we call economic development-- [END PLAYBACK]

--that has to do with housing, labor, zoning, we can sit here in this room and get very technical very quickly, and I could talk very technical about even the logistics of a program like that. But look at Jim's story. It's about relationships and giving back to a community that has invested in him and his business his entire life.

A couple more, a couple more stories-- these are two students that worked on one of our first homes. One of the individuals went through this and said, you know what, this was a great career opportunity, and the opportunity told me I don't want anything to do with the trades moving forward. The individual on the left today owns his own successful landscaping company. And he was exposed to a lot of that work through Community Build and through reinvesting in the kids that are growing up in our community today.

So this was just a great project. This was our first project. The program has now done three and is in the process of scaling and figuring out how they even partner with Habitat for Humanity to deliver more homes to the market on an annual basis.
 
But here's a pretty personal story of mine. When we put these on the market, we partner with our local COG. We actually got a housing grant that would allow us to provide down payment assistance for AMI-qualified individuals.

And we worked with our COG to really administer all the technical parts of that. So we put it on the market, got several offers immediately, and the home sold, was a great success. The project looks great.

And then the school year started. My daughter started seventh grade that particular year, and about two weeks into the school year she came home, she said, Dad, my teacher was talking about just her experience in moving to this community as a first-year teacher. She didn't know what she was going to do, where she was going to live. She couldn't afford much, first-year teacher salary.

Dad, she bought this home.

That's the first time I actually finished that without getting choked up while I was still talking. Just a really good thing about what we're doing as economic developers, as bankers, as policymakers. At the end of the day, if we lose sight on the fact that everything we're doing is about how people are impacted-- you're probably tired of hearing me say that-- then we're not doing our job through the correct lens as community builders.

Our community's had a lot of great success. It really started back in 2005, even before that, when we pulled our community together and said, What do you want our community to look like? What assets do you want our community to have? What do you not like about development in the past that you want to see in development today?

We put crazy pictures and concepts like this out there and think, there's no way in the world that our city council ever approves something like this. This looks like a bunch of foof in the heart of our community. An ice loop? What? What are we doing?

Well, a few years later, we're rallying around that, and we're breaking ground on it because we started by asking our community what they wanted to see in Marion, Iowa. This is actually a picture of what that looks like today. It started with grass roots. It started with intentionality.
 
This is boring. But this is why we do this every day. Don't lose sight of that. When you go home and start thinking about the things that you've learned, just think about who we're doing it for and why.

Thanks, everybody.

[APPLAUSE]

OK. So since, really, that presentation lacked all technical aspects on purpose, I'd be happy to answer any questions that you might have about different programs that I briefly featured, or anything else.

SPEAKER: [INAUDIBLE] Steve's got one here, by the front.

AUDIENCE: Just a-- do we have a mic?

SPEAKER: He's coming. He's coming.

AUDIENCE: Oh. This is just a basic thing. Marion C-A-N, what is that? It was on one of the slides.

NICK GLEW: Marion CAN. It was an abbreviation for Citizen Activation Network. Do you guys ever have issues in your community that there is a topic, a discussion, and it gets run over with negativity by you name the group that came out of nowhere to say, that's horrible, right, and you have nothing to do to combat that?
Our Citizen Activation Network, one of the outcomes was that leadership program, but the idea of creating a more intentional way of connecting people with city leadership, with planning processes, so that when we had things come up that we didn't traditionally have mechanisms for engaging our citizens, we had a much more robust and intentional network for getting people involved.

AUDIENCE: And then just a bigger-picture question, Why do you think Marion has been able to do this? Was it, like, one or two individuals leading the way, or something in the water?

NICK GLEW: So, in two-- it's nothing in the water. Our water's actually not that good.

[LAUGHTER]
 
Back in 2005, we had a group of people-- our city manager, our chamber director, our city planner-- a morning coffee group of just people that loved Marion, that were also really good friends, and said, we're just kind of-- we're a community that as you look at our growth over the last 15 years, it's been good. We've built a lot of homes. We've always ranked as one of the fastest growing communities in the state of Iowa.

But we just kind of let development happen to us, right? If a developer wanted to put a subdivision here, planners would say, great. If a commercial development would go here, great. There was never any common element or plan driving that together.

One thing I didn't talk about, we brought in a community branding expert. His name was Roger Brooks. He had his run maybe about 10 years ago. It's like he was everywhere talking about community visioning or community branding.

So we brought him in. Long story short, we adopted this tagline, reach higher, achieve more, in business and in life. But "reach higher" is something that even today our mayor uses.

And when a developer brings a project forward, the first thing he will ask is, Is this your best? which sounds a little arrogant, and sometimes, you have to be careful in the way it's delivered. But it's asking, you've seen the work that we've done, Is this project you're bringing forward your best effort at coming alongside this vision that we've developed as a community?

So I think it's really that attitude, that original group of people that today, many of them, including myself, are not in the roles we were in 15 years ago. But it was that collaborative process of bringing a community together that really, I think, has continued to maintain the momentum we have today.

AUDIENCE: I have a question-- [COUGHS] excuse me-- about the East Marion sub-area plan that you talked about. You said that TIF was used in developing that. Can you talk a little more about that and how that was structured? Was it a TIF that was larger than the residential development, or what was the funding used for?
 
NICK GLEW: So I believe you could still go to Marion Economic Development's website today, and you could find essentially their TIF policy-- which, man, I wish every community would do a better job proactively communicating to the outside world when or how they will partner with the private sector. Communities that have standard "if you do this, we'll give you five years, 100%," you are not helping the case in protecting that tool when it comes to talking with public policymakers at the state level. I'll step off my soapbox there.

So anyway, within our TIF policy, we say if a developer with more than 15 acres of ground will master-plan their property, the city will come alongside and offer tax increment financing to support that. So this is a project, just from a structure standpoint, it's located in a very large TIF district that has existing capacity today. So they have the ability to draw some increment before the development itself has happened.

So I think it's relatively simple. The city enters into a development agreement and draws a little bit of increment to pay for that process. Then, of course, moving forward, at some point-- in our community, it would be more along the commercial development-- if they're following the plan and they're doing their best, that's where the city would probably partner for more development assistance as they're executing kind of the vertical construction of that.

But the beauty of doing things that way is if you would dig deep into that plan-- and you could find that plan publicly if you go to the City of Marion's website-- is it very carefully and intentionally incorporates commercial development, low-density housing, high- density housing, park land, schools, transportation infrastructure.
You can just look at it, the picture, and nothing's just chink, chink, chink, chink. It's very thought out.

It's very different than if a developer would just bring, well, here's my next five acres that I would like to final-plat forward, right? So we found a lot of success in engaging at a deep level for those larger projects early. Yeah.

AUDIENCE: Hi. Congratulations on the work that you're doing in Marion. I actually, I work in the extension, and to me, the project, the community project that you're doing, seems to be working pretty well. And so I'm trying to figure out ways in which I can help the rural part of Texas where I'm working.
 
But I have three questions, just basic, simple questions. One is, Is the program basically run on a voluntary basis? Two, how do you get business buy-in? How do you get the businesses to actually fund some of the operations of your project? And then the other thing I have an interest in is whether or not you have done an economic impact assessment of the project on the community or your county area.

NICK GLEW: That's a great question. Working backwards, we have not done, like, a global economic impact analysis. We probably have some specific projects like sports tourism-type projects that have happened over the last 10 years, that we can study those-- hotel rooms, spending, geography people are coming from-- but probably not overarching for that.

The question about business buy-in, I would say, from the beginning, the Imagine 8 process-- and what I didn't even tell you about is four or five years ago, we did that process again because we achieved those eight, and we said, let's keep the momentum going. And so we did Imagine Next. [LAUGHS]

But our businesses really sponsored those. Our businesses are the ones that when we're having kickoff breakfasts, they're sponsoring those events. Our businesses are the ones that are advertising engagement opportunities to their customers.

That plaza project, I mean, yeah, I mean the hard part is getting a Destination-- or, no, the easy part sometimes is getting a-- we call it Destination Iowa. It's a quality-of-life initiative here in Iowa, a grant program. The easy thing is maybe getting a city match, but the hard part sometimes is that private-sector fundraising piece.

What's really cool is if you go through our library, you go through our uptown artway, you go through that park project, that amphitheater that I showed you in our big park to the north, most all of those projects have donor walls in them. And I think, over time, that attitude of giving becomes contagious across the community.
 
I don't know about you all. I've been in communities where you can clearly see that, and then I've been in communities where you have to look hard for that. We're blessed that we're in a community I think we've built a culture over time, probably through the grassroots nature of how we did this, that has brought business investment to the table alongside public dollars. Maybe we're just lucky. Yeah.

AUDIENCE: That first Imagine 8 process, do you have any statistics on the proportion of citizen engagement you had?

NICK GLEW: I don't know about proportion. I was trying to see-- I'm not sure if I have a note in here. I don't.

AUDIENCE: It looks like a full room.

NICK GLEW: I do have those-- what?

AUDIENCE: It looks like a full room.

NICK GLEW: That's Dubuque. That's not our room. But what I will show you is when we kicked off our process, we had it in a very similar hotel banquet-type environment. We made it a big party. It was a breakfast.

And it was packed. It was packed because we had never done anything like it. And so we launched the initiative, and then we dove into, table by table, brainstorming ideas, What do you want in this community?

I know we had 1,800 unique ideas, but when you count the number of times we heard from different people, I mean, the numbers are very impressive. But then it's just, we would-- we did not have a staff person that really led it. We had a committee that was really designed to coach different idea facilitators, group facilitators.

No one was paid to do it. It's a very easy process to apply to any size of community. I'd be happy to follow up and share that with any of you, because somebody shared it with us.

AUDIENCE: I guess I'm making an assumption that the level of citizen engagement that would you'd be getting is what helped to mitigate, like, the nimbyism--

NICK GLEW: Yes. Yep.

AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]
 
NICK GLEW: Yep. We-- yup. We saw this play out. We were a community-- how many of you, when it comes to your local counsel elections, you always have these people, like, not in my backyard, that are always running, right? One issue, people hate this, we're wasting money over here.

One of the things we noticed about five years ago is we haven't had any of those people running for public office. And I can't help but think that because we engage such a broad number of people, these individuals that would say this is a horrible idea, they started losing an audience, if that makes any sense. But maybe it's just a season, but it's something we've noticed in a big way the last several elections.

AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE].

AUDIENCE: All right, Nick.

NICK GLEW: I wear you all out?

AUDIENCE: This is, I think, the last one.

NICK GLEW: Good.

AUDIENCE: All right. For the trades program that you have, how early in their educational [INAUDIBLE] do they get exposure to it? So before they're out in the project?

AUDIENCE: Yep.

AUDIENCE: Then how do you break into the traditional public school culture to be able to give them either the early exposure or get them out there? because teachers have barriers and are they willing to accomplishing them, people who haven't been doing it for very long. How many kids that are working are staying--
NICK GLEW: Yeah. That's a hard number. We don't have any good data on that yet. But we start engaging students in eighth grade.

So you think about high school students today-- we have a sophomore daughter-- before they're even done with eighth grade, they're doing surveys and filling out four-year plans that suggest they know exactly what they want to do the rest of their lives, right, and it's overwhelming.
 
So we, when they have kind of a career readiness course-- I think it's called high school prep in our school district-- that they have to take, our team was incorporated into that curriculum. And we were doing the career assessments alongside the teachers, and we were showing them how, through Community Promise, hey, we're here in eighth grade to do this. In ninth grade, these are the things to work on, 10th grade, 11th.

We tried to design that whole pathway. We actually even had some-- if you could go to the Linn-Mar Community School District-- a very large district, one of the largest in the state-- if you go to their course of studies right now, you could actually, within that document, find career pathway documents that would outline the classes that a student would take if they were interested in pursuing a career in advanced manufacturing, whatever it might be. That material is incorporated into their course of study.

But our superintendents both served on our economic development board. We had advisory teams of all of the school counselors. We were there to be partners with them. Their jobs are hard, and we just were able to build the trust and rapport to have classroom doors wide open for us. It's pretty cool.

SPEAKER: Let's give round of applause for Nick.

[APPLAUSE]