Rural Economic Conference: Session 1

SPEAKER 1: We are going to now start with our first session. So we're looking at strategies rural communities can use to attract and retain labor. We're thankful to have Jason Brown to not only moderate this panel, but also present a level-setting presentation for us.
Jason is the Vice President and Economist from the Kansas City Fed. And this presentation, I think, will do a good job of keeping some things in mind that we should all be thinking about as the conference goes along. So, Jason, thanks for being here and it's all yours.

[APPLAUSE]

JASON BROWN: I'm not sure if the slides are put up, or how we're handling that, but.

SPEAKER 2: For who?

JASON BROWN: For Jason. Yeah, for me. And if there's a clicker. I'm not sure if there's a clicker up here either.

Well, while we're waiting for that, I'll just give a brief introduction. My name is Jason Brown from the Kansas City Fed. I appreciate the opportunity to be here with you today.

The Kansas City Fed has a lot of rural areas in its region, and so we spend a lot of time thinking about how-- thank you, David-- how conditions are changing across the economy, particularly with an eye of how are things progressing in rural versus urban areas. So what I hope to do today is briefly touch on a few things that we looked at over the past few years. And hopefully that will help set the stage for some of the rest of the panel discussion.

So I'll just start off by saying these are going to be my views and not the views of the Kansas City Fed, or the Federal Reserve System. As was mentioned, these presentations will be made available. And so I've hyperlinked the different articles that I'm going to be pulling information from. If you're interested in more details, you'll be able to go and look at that, those materials on the Kansas City Fed's website.

So what I want to do today is just talk about structural change and the economy. And structural change is where it's an ongoing process of the economy continuing to evolve. And as the name implies, structural change impacts the way people produce things, the way consumers demand things. It impacts where things are produced and how they're produced. And so what we're going to focus on today, or I'm going to talk about today, is more on how things might be changing in rural areas compared to urban areas.

So three examples I'm going to briefly touch on are long-term decline in business entry and exit rates. That's simply the rate at which new businesses come into the economy or exit the economy. And I'll explain a little bit in a minute why that matters.
Long-term decline in domestic migration, meaning the rate at which people are moving across the country has slowed over time. And then the rise of hybrid work model post-pandemic, and what that potentially means. So those are going to be three broad things I'm going to touch on fairly quickly.
 
So let's talk about firm entry and exit rates, or sometimes the turnover rate is the rate-- the combination of entry and exit. So here on this chart, I've plotted the entry and exit rate of businesses. Those are the blue and black lines, respectively, measured on the left vertical axis. And then the turnover rate is that green line measured on the right vertical axis.

And you can see that really, prior to the pandemic, we had been on this long secular decline of slowing entry and exit. And the reason this is important is because there's a longstanding economic theory called creative destruction developed by Joseph Schumpeter. The idea that as new firms come in, they create the competitive pressure on existing firms to innovate, to continue to produce better goods and services, or they get pushed out of the economy.

So the fact that we have this long decline, it also has occurred over a period where we've seen productivity growth in the economy slow. And so this competitive pressure of new businesses coming in and causing new or existing businesses to have to innovate, that's thought to increase productivity over time. So the fact that this is declining has been one area of concern.

What's interesting, though, is if you look at these-- here, it's just a turnover rate. So this is entry and exit rates. It's the same series, but now I've broken it out for micropolitan areas in blue, all the way up to the largest metro areas in the country in yellow.

And so if you look at the very beginning of the series, you can see that there was a level difference. Turnover rates were higher in larger areas compared to micropolitan areas, which obviously would be very rural in nature. But now go all the way through to 2021 and you can see that gap in these turnover rates has actually widened.
So what that's telling us is that rural areas have become relatively more static compared to the largest urban areas over time. And these turnover rates tend to be highly correlated with either population growth, or employment growth, or output growth over a longer period of time.

What's interesting is this gap in turnover is not just in one sector. These bars represents the change in the turnover rates between the largest metro areas and the smallest. So here, a positive bar is telling us that that gap has widened more in the favor of larger urban areas compared to smaller. And you can see outside of utilities, all the other sectors in the economy have experienced an increase in the relative-- a relative increase in turnover rates in the largest urban areas, compared to the smallest micropolitan areas.

So I'm going to shift now and talk about the next structural change. This is domestic migration. And you can see that the rate of movement in the economy has also been on a steady decline.

It's kind of similar in concept to firms. When people move, we take our ideas with us. And so this has been kind of an area of interest in the economy. Well, why are domestic migration rates kind of slowing and what does that really mean?

If we think about the concept of people moving in and out, kind of like businesses moving in and out, we'll call that population turnover. So on this chart, the horizontal axis is the population turnover by metropolitan area in the year 2000.
 
And on the y-axis is the annualized population growth over an 18-year period between 2000 and 2017. So this upward sloping line tells us that places that initially had higher population turnover in 2000 experienced faster population growth over that subsequent 18-year period. And so these rates of turnover really do matter for longer term growth in the economy.

The last thing I'm going to briefly touch on is just hybrid working. We all experienced some form of this earlier on in the pandemic. And so now it seems that the share of workers reporting work from home has kind of stabilized around 25%. So that statistic hasn't really moved much in quite some time.

So it seems that this is becoming a more common feature of the economy or labor market and probably is not going to change. Well, the question is, who's benefiting the most from this change in how we work?

The chart on the left looks at annual income measured on the horizontal axis. And here is the share of paid working days work from home. So basically, higher income workers are working from home more often compared to lower paying jobs. And on the right chart, it's population density of residents.

So people that tend to live in more densely populated areas, which we know population density is higher in larger urban areas, they also tend to work from home a larger percentage of time. So higher income, more densely populated areas. Those are the places that are reporting a higher percentage of work from home. It doesn't mean to say that there aren't some rural areas that are benefiting from it. It's just that disproportionately, we have more people in larger places that are able to probably take advantage of this flexibility in the labor market.

The last thing I'll show you here is related to also work from home. That's commute time. So similarly-- sorry about that. Similarly, commute time increases on this axis and the share of work time here. So the longer commute time, it tends to be more correlated with working from home.

Obviously, we know commute times tend to be higher in largely populated areas. And then minimum internet download speed. Places that tend to have a higher download speed also tend to have-- report workers that have a higher work from home, compared to places that have slower internet.

So what am I trying to say here? What am I trying to set the stage for? Basically, smaller places, in a lot of ways, have become more static, relative to large places over the past 20 or 30 years.

And if these trends persist, rural areas are going to probably find it increasingly difficult to adjust to future downturns in the economy, but also kind of maintain the economic base that they have. And while a hybrid working model may provide greater flexibility, it does seemthat in larger urban areas, they're more able to take advantage of that, so meaning rural areas are going to have to work harder to leverage that flexibility.

And so despite the challenges of these structural changes, some rural areas have experienced longer term growth. And what I hope to hear from you a bit later today is what are those examples of success where areas have been able to pull in more workers, or pull in more people. And the last thing I'll point to is just in the literature, they've asked-- researchers have asked this question.

Why do some rural areas grow while others don't? And rural growth in the knowledge economy is really dependent on our ability to utilize that knowledge. And so there's been some researchers that were at the USDA Economic Research Service several years ago that identified what they called the rural growth trifecta.
 
They find that faster areas-- rural areas grow faster if they have greater prevalence of entrepreneurship, if they have higher prevalence of creative class occupations, and particularly in areas that have natural amenities.

These three factors tend to really explain a lot of the variation in growth in rural areas.

So with that, I'm going to-- those are going to be the end of my comments. And at this point, I'll just say-- I'll just introduce very briefly the three panelists, and then I'll invite the first one to come up.
 
STEVEN DELLER: So the first is Stephen Deller, who's a professor in Community Development Extension Specialist at University of Wisconsin-Madison. Then we'll have Lisa Leedy is Executive Director of the Builders Exchange of Northwest Michigan. And then Keri Navratil, City Manager at Storm Lake, Iowa. So with that, Steve, I'll turn it over to you.

[APPLAUSE]

We could go to the next set of PowerPoints. 10 minutes. I'm an academic. It takes me more than 10 minutes to pass the title slide.

I'm going to share with you-- OK. What I'm going to share with you is some observations that I've had in terms of my academic research, looking at rural communities and also my work working with rural communities across Wisconsin in terms of my role as an extension specialist.

And one of the things that I want to start off with is that I was involved with a study, a colleague at the University of New Hampshire, John Halstead. We were looking at the role of infrastructure, things like access to highways, railroads, air transportation, things like that for rural manufacturers, small rural manufacturers, small being less than 100 employees. We're looking at Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont, Wisconsin.

And in that survey, we kind of wove in some questions about quality of life. And in the survey responses-- this isn't back before we had the internet. It was a paper survey. And one of the respondents wrote that on the margin of the survey.

Find a place that you want to raise your family and that's where you start your business. We found through studying the responses to the surveys that quality of life was really popping up as pretty important. The second thing is we were doing a series of workshops with small rural communities across Wisconsin trying to do strategic planning-- strategic economic development planning.

And one of the community members made this statement. Why are we trying to generate more jobs when we can't fill the ones that we have? And that's reflective of a lot of communities across rural Wisconsin, and I think across a lot of rural areas.

And this kind of is showing a kind of a shift in terms of how a lot of communities are thinking about it. And to give you an overview of how we got here, when you think about economic development and economic growth, what's the first thing that pops into your head?

Generally, it's recruitment. How can we get businesses to move in here? And this is kind of-- we can trace the origins of this back to the Mississippi Balancing Agriculture and Industrial Act of 1933. This is a very old way of thinking about economic development.
 
Now what came out of a lot of this work was this notion of a business climate. What's a positive business climate? When you think of what makes for a positive business climate, what are the first things that pop into your head?

SPEAKER 3: Low taxes.

STEVEN DELLER: Low taxes.
 
SPEAKER 4: Cheap labor.

STEVEN DELLER: Cheap labor, limited regulations, cheap land. That's from the 1930s. It's rather dated.

The second thing that happened is that starting in the 1970s, there was a lot of research that was starting to come out that says that economic growth, job growth in particular, does not come from the Fortune 500 companies. It comes from new business formation. It comes from entrepreneurship. So the engine of economic growth, defined as job growth, is really new business formation.

So that one trend that Jason was sharing, that downward trend, that's-- red flags are going off. Warning bells are going off. So out of the second wave of economic development came this notion of business retention and expansion-type programs.

Rather than spending our time trying to recruit businesses, we should really be focusing on new business formation. The other thing we found out from that manufacturing survey is that over 90% of the survey respondents are in the same location as when they started. They don't move around.

Subsequent research that we've done using national data sets, we have found that 95% of businesses are in the same location as where they started. If they moved, they moved down the street. They moved to the other side of town.

So this whole idea of trying to recruit businesses, businesses just don't pick up and move around that much. The idea of entrepreneurship and focusing on small business development within the community is really vital.

The third wave is-- how many of you heard of Michael Porter? All right. He kind of entered-- well, actually, us regional scientists are a little jealous here because it's not a new idea. The idea has been around for over 50 years.

But he-- maybe it's because he's from Harvard-- had something to do with it. But anyway, what he basically said is this notion of shoot anything that flies, claim anything that lands is not very strategic.

You really need to think about what is a community's comparative advantage? What are we good at? And we should focus our energy on those, the notion of economic clusters. But note that all of those are job focused.

I think we're in the fourth wave. There's been a paradigm shift here. Some people refer to it as placemaking. What's in a name?

But the idea here is that the shift is away from jobs, jobs, jobs to people, people, people. Now what does that mean for a lot of rural communities? What are the implications here?
 
It raises the question, why would people want to live here and perhaps start a business? Why would our youth want to return? We send our youth off to the University, hopefully to UW-Madison. They experienced the brightest of the lights. And then what can we do to get them to come back?

So the types of questions that we want to ask then is that quality of life. Well-being,or livability, whatever you want to call it, really becomes extremely important. Why would people want to live here?

Why would people want to stay here? Why would our youth want to come back after they've gone off to college? Things like quality schools.

We invest in our schools, not necessarily to produce labor for the labor force, that's still important. But we invest in our schools because people are attracted to good schools.

If I'm relocating and I have a choice between different communities, what do you think is going to be one of the top things on my list? Do I want to send my kids to these schools? So investing in schools to make the community more attractive is extremely important.

Recreational opportunities. Things like parks, bike trails, reusing riverfronts, lake fronts. What can we do so that people want to come here because there's recreational opportunities?

Public safety. This is extremely-- can I walk my dog at midnight and feel safe? Cultural activities, things like farmers markets, arts fairs, live music, farmers markets.
I've done a lot of work on local foods. And when you come down to farmers markets and things like that, yeah, that's important to a lot of local farmers, but that's not really their lifeblood. The investment, or the benefit of having a farmer's market is really that it contributes to the quality of life of the community.

Arts fairs, things like that make the place a better place to live. Quality and affordable housing. A lot of the communities in Wisconsin came to looking at housing issues because they were essentially raised the question, we have all these jobs. Why aren't people coming in and-- why aren't they moving in to take these jobs?

Well, one of the positive things that came out of is the realization that $15 an hour with no benefits is really not a very good job. People are not going to move for that. But what they did come to is housing.

Housing is either too expensive, or, excuse my French, it's really crappy. So a lot of communities that are coming to housing through labor issues. Affordable and reliable broadband.

Before COVID, I would talk to rural leaders and would ask about broadband. And they'd go, oh, we don't need broadband. That's what my grandkids play video games on. And then COVID hit, and suddenly, access to broadband is extremely important, particularly when you start talking about remote work and entrepreneurship. Access to broadband is really extremely important.

What are some other factors? The Iowa Small Town Project. I'll go through this quickly. But this is something that's in-- for those of you that are from Iowa, this is really a gold mine of information and research.
 
They think they've found-- what they've done is they've studied rural communities, small rural communities, 5,000 or 10,000 people in Iowa for over 35 years and they think they've found the secret sauce in terms of why some rural communities are doing quite well. In the academic literature, we call it social capital. And there's really two types of social capital.

One is bonding, which is kind of internally looking. Think about your immediate network of friends and family. Perhaps your church, perhaps a club that you belong to. That's kind of internally looking.

But what they found is the secret sauce is bridging social capital. That's looking outside of your network. Now what that really means for rural communities is that if we're trying to attract people to move into our community, are we welcoming to them? Do we embrace them?

We're looking for new ideas, new ways of thinking about things. Those people moving in have different perspectives. Do we welcome them? Do we embrace them?
How many of you have heard somebody in your community say, well, you don't really understand because you're not from here? That can be the kiss of death. That's the opposite of what we should be doing.

Entrepreneurial. We're willing to try new-- this is not entrepreneurial in the sense of starting businesses. This is entrepreneurial in the sense of trying new things. We learn from our mistakes.

And the last one, it's not showing up here, is we celebrate small successes. A lot of these rural communities, they're making small incremental changes. And sometimes, it doesn't look like there's a lot happening. And that's why it's really important for these communities to celebrate these small incremental changes that they're making.
So the fourth wave doesn't abandon economic growth, economic development. It doesn't abandon worrying about businesses and job growth. But rather it does is that it broadens the discussion to include people. Why should people want to live here? What makes us really unique and what can we build on?

Local businesses have really kind of embraced this idea. They've really kind of embraced the idea that I'm willing to pay higher property taxes if that means we got better schools, if that means we have better parks, we have better recreational opportunities, because I know that those kinds of investments will draw people here, and that's my labor force that I can tap into. I'll stop with that and look forward to the panel discussion. Thank you.
[APPLAUSE]

JASON BROWN: All right. Thank you very much, Steve. Next, we're going to have Lisa Leedy, executive director of Builders Exchange of Northwest Michigan.

[APPLAUSE]

LISA LEEDY:  Hello, everyone. It's exciting to see so many young people here in attendance. I'm really appreciative of that because I love that. I am Lisa Leedy. I'm from Northern Michigan. So I represent the area kind of surrounding Traverse City area in rural Northern Michigan.
 
Aside from my role as the Executive Director of the Builders Exchange, I've served in a couple of different capacities in economic development in our region, but I'm also an elected Township official. I'm the Township Supervisor of a Township that has 1,536 residents. So I am kind of the example of rural Midwest area.

I also lost my largest employer in 2017 that left my community without a plan. And we had kind of a mass exodus of people leaving. The average age of my community is now almost 50 years old because we lost a lot of our youth, based on following the jobs.

So I am serving in my third elected role. But when I took my first elected role, I was the youngest person on that board, which was a library board. I took another elected role and I was Village President. I was the second youngest person on that board.

I just became Township Supervisor last year. And when I became Township Supervisor, guess what? I was the youngest person on that board. So we are trying to make a concerted effort in my community to address all of these things that we're going to talk about in the next-- today and tomorrow.

I appreciate all Steve's comments, because I think that we all understand that we're having some challenges in these areas, and it's nice to hear each other's story and each other's background to understand what other communities are doing to overcome those. When I started in economic development, we called it smokestack chasing, as far as chasing the jobs for manufacturing and things like that to bring it to our community.

We have had a mindset change or shift into more of a people-centric economy trying to attract people. For my community, we have a lot of barriers to that. But we also have a lot of things that were mentioned in Jason's presentation, as far as the-- we have the placemaking.

Our region has excelled in placemaking, because I live in Northern Michigan. There's trails, there's water everywhere. There's all kinds of recreational assets. We have the creative positions, the creative careers available.

We have a lot of those assets available to us in our region. And I think every rural area that's outside an urban center collaborates better than anyone else. I think that rural areas excel because they need to. They have to work together to move ahead and move the needle.

So I think it's important to recognize and appreciate how well we all collaborate. But we're fortunate enough to have a regional prosperity group that is a 10-County area and helps lead the way for communities like mine. In my Township, I have zero full-time staff. I have-- we're all part time. We're part time elected officials. I have a full time job and I have a business.

All of us have something else. I have a part-time zoning administrator. We've moved the time up so we have more hours available. I think that's an example of a lot of our communities around where we don't have a full- time planner. We don't have a part-time planner, actually.

So I think understanding all of these challenges and understanding there needs to be some change. But for us, capacity is our biggest barrier for a small community. So putting on my Builders Exchange hat, we are working toward some of these labor issues and trying to attract people into skilled trades.
 
And our state has done a great job of offering incentives for grants and scholarships to get people into skilled trades so that they can get the training they need and not have to pay those costs. And there's programs to help offset other labor barriers and things like that.

That's a great program. But getting the word out is important and trying to make sure people are utilizing, that's important. But at the end of the day, we're kind of all going after that same labor pool. We're all going after the same people medical are going after and the same people manufacturing are going after. So how else do we look at that?

We're also very good at industry 4.0, and that's another thing that our state has really pushed that we're trying to innovate and use technology to try to offset those impacts by having workforce issues that we have. So I think our state and our region has done a good job of trying to get things together and put plans forward. But getting that down to that granular rural community, sometimes, it needs a little extra push for communities like mine.

And as far as in construction, we're seeing right now-- we're all sitting in this room in comfortable temperatures outside and all that while a portion of our nation is struggling and suffering. And they're going to have significant construction needs. When the weather situations down south settle down, there's going to be a lot of rebuilding.

What's going to happen to all of our construction workers? Because we're going to have to share. How are we going to overcome that? So there's a lot of things to think about, I think, on that front.

For us, in the construction side of things, we've been collaborating with our partners at some of our agencies, trying to attract people that are changing jobs into construction, someone that might be not a traditional what you would think construction person. Not a student per se, but re-entering into a different career field or things like that.

So we're trying to utilize some of those programs. I'm anxious to hear what other people are doing in that area. I'll say that I recently graduated with my master's in community engagement in May and I did a completely online program. And I got to engage with students, like all of you.

And it was so impactful for me. One of the reasons I went back for my master's at this age was because community development is very important to me, and helping drive our-- to bridge the economic gaps and things is important.

But it was so awesome for me to just learn what other people are doing. I was kind of inspired by some programs that are happening throughout our state. Our small business association of Michigan has come up with some workforce and community development programs, such as they have an Immigration Council.

I think that is a great step in trying to reduce some of the regulatory barriers to utilizing legal immigration to solve some of our workforce barriers. I'm very passionate about that. And so much so, I actually wrote my capstone on that, because I think those-- we have no other people.

Our birth rates are down. Our death rates continue to rise in most of the Midwest. So I think we're all in the same boat as far as there's just-- we're just attracting from the same pool of people.
 
So I think programs in Michigan, actually one that inspired me, is called First Choice by Cornerstone Alliance in Southwest Michigan. I'm not connected to the organization, but I researched this program quite a bit. But they have a wraparound service trying to attract legal immigrants for transition into citizenship legally to work for-- it started out just to be for the Whirlpool company, and they were attracting people out of South America, basically.

What they offer is they offer wraparound services for trailing spouses. They offer-- they fly people in for the interview and they bring them to all the schools, and the hospitals, and let them see all the assets of the community to help provide that-- kind of showing their caring community. They have all of the assets to offer, as far as the recreation, or the different things that people would be looking for.

And then they help that trailing spouse find work or whatever it is to find housing, or things like that. I think that program is so-- I'll say under-celebrated, maybe. I think that program has offered a lot of benefit to that region of our state and it could be replicated in other areas.

So I think that is one of the stronger programs in our area. I think that if we could look at that-- we hear a lot about legal versus illegal immigration, but I really think we need to focus on how can we remove some of those barriers to provide an easier access for legal immigration.

I think that is one of the things that really we could focus on and really benefit because babies aren't being born fast enough, I don't think. So anyway, with that, I'm looking forward to the Q&A. And I hope that all of you have some really awesome questions, I'm sure. Thank you.

[APPLAUSE]

JASON BROWN: Thank you, Lisa. I look forward to hearing more about some examples of successful placemaking. So lastly, our last panelist here is Keri Navratil. She's the city manager of Storm Lake, Iowa. So I turn it over to you.

KERI NAVRATIL:Good afternoon. Oh, I'm sorry about that. I'm a little bit shorter than everybody else here.

Storm lake, Iowa, here we are. A community in Northwest Iowa, a rural community. We have a population of about 11,269, according to our census. I'm going to tell you that is wrong. We're about 13,500.

What makes us unique is that we have-- 87% of our education, and our students in public and private institutions are non-Caucasian. In rural Iowa, that's unique. And so we were one of the most unique, diverse communities, small communities in Iowa.

So our unemployment rate, I know we talked about that. It's super low in Iowa. We're about 1.48% and our County unemployment rate is 2.6%. Our largest industries are manufacturing, education, local government.

But we're here to talk about what have our community-- what did our community do to bridge that gap for employment. So I want to talk a little bit about our higher education solutions. So we have an amazing school district and a superintendent who does think outside the box.

One of our-- when we were talking to our local employers, it's a skill gap that everybody was missing. And how do we fill that skill gap? And so what our school district did is they went to our Iowa Central Community College.

They have a very small, or I should say they had a very small office in Storm Lake. It's a much bigger one now.
 
But what the school district did is they did a five-year charter program. So what that means is that you have some students that will graduate the traditional way in four years. But with the school district did is they offered a fifth year.

And with that fifth year is they partnered with a community college in that the school district pays for programming and educational materials for that student to go that fifth year to get a technical education. Some of them actually graduate with an associate's degree. And so what happens is those students that are going here to that community college are staying in Storm Lake and they're filling some of those positions that, in the past, were not traditionally able to be filled.

Now we also have teacher shortages. I'm sure everybody has a teacher shortage in their community. We're fortunate. We do have a four-year private university, Buena Vista University.

Again, our school district reached out and they have a partnership with our University. And it started with COVID, like post-COVID. How do you get students back in to working together, getting back into large groups.

Because I know specifically with my daughter, when she was in kindergarten when COVID started, you go to first grade and she was afraid to be around people. And so how do you integrate that back into your school system?

And so what the school district and the university did is they partnered with the BVU School of Education. And so they started a summer program. And so the students, they put together the summer programming.

It's always fun stuff. I mean, there is some math, science, all of that good fun stuff, too. But to integrate them. And it gave those students the opportunity of what it's going to be like to run a classroom and direct activities.

Students who were through BVU actually got to stay on campus at no cost because we all are struggling with housing as a situation as well. So if you're going to have these programs, where are you're going to put people at if they're going to offer these other alternative programming opportunities? So BVU had a benefactor that paid for those students to stay on campus.

In addition, the school district is partnering with instructional assistants. So if there is an instructional assistant who wants to become a teacher, you can go to BVU at a low reduced cost. In addition, you can go back and you're going to have a teaching position in the school district.

They've been doing that for about three years. I can tell you my daughter has had a teacher who has attended that program and graduated from BVU, and they're going back into that school district. And so I know with the last three years, there's been at least five or six teachers she's had that's gone through that program.

So you're able to keep people home, you're able to keep your residents there. You have a quality education and you have fantastic partnerships. We all struggle with the challenges here.
Now traditional employee recruiting. I was just at a meeting probably about a month ago where they still do that. It doesn't work. So what do we do now?

So I'm going to go through a few stories here. Educational opportunities are key. As an employer, make sure that if there is something that your employees want or you need to have a certain certification, pay for that. And then you can have a contract. You can work through that with your employee.
 
Utilize your community colleges for training. Our large employer-- largest employers, they utilize our community college and they put people and they pay them through a maintenance program so that they are trained up so they can take over for maintenance in the future. The biggest thing that I can say is be seen in the community. And that means every employer, put your best foot forward.

Even though you may not be hiring, you want to keep your employees. So if you have any events, like the city puts on Kids Fest. We have major employers show up. It's just so they can be seen in the community so that when you're looking for employees, that it's somebody that they want to participate and be with.

Employee retention is our biggest thing. Have opportunities to volunteer. Right here, you have our-- this is Breakfast with Santa. We have-- that's run through the city. And so our city employees volunteer excited.

We call it volunteering. We also pay them because of all the Workers' Comp issues there. But we also have other people-- yeah, I know. But we also have other entities who want to participate. They want to be part of it. They want to be seen in the public.

Outreach coordinators. We have-- one of our largest employers, they have about 2,600 people. They have what they call an outreach liaison. And that's all they do, is outreach.

Why is that? Because they want to keep their people. They want to be seen publicly. They want to be known as a good employer.

Transportation is another situation, just that I've been hearing about. Just look at your local, maybe Enterprise. Enterprise has a program that as an employer, you can go rent a car, have a fleet program, and that you can be able to pick people up from your certain locations.

Be flexible. I was just recently at a manufacturing place and I did not realize-- they have about 50 employees, but they have a flexible schedule. They make frost-free hydrants. So they can come in whenever they want.

They need to work their time. They need to get their quota done, but they can come do it whenever they want to work. I was like, that's amazing. I mean, who knew in manufacturing you could do that? So, I mean, you're looking at and being more creative on how you're being flexible with your employees.

I'll get to that in a second. I have a couple more stories here. I know, 10 minutes wasn't a lot.

One of our largest employers, what they found with some of their employee needs is that they needed health care. And so part of that health care is they started health insurance on that first day. And then they also built their own-- they also built their own health care facility to get those employees there to get that needed health care.
And so when I talk to employers about how do you recruit for your open positions and they say social media, don't ever-- they don't ever utilize the LinkedIn. They do, but they're not having luck with that. So be creative in your social media announcements.

Sometimes you might be on the edge of that, but they're actually getting really good quality applicants locally by using social media. And again, you're bringing in people from-- if you're a good employer, you're bringing in people that you want to work with. You're bringing in people that you'd want to work with, and then you're also recruiting some of your family members also.
 
And I just want to do a couple seconds on-- I know we've been talking about employment, on immigration. We've done really well in that. It took us a long time to get there. When you start working through hiring immigration, and through immigrants, our-- I have a city council member, that this is what she does for her job.
And she said, just make sure that you are ready to hire non-English speaking individuals. You've got to be prepared with that. Work with your community. Work with your city, because you can start having those conversations. You want to be that inclusive community that people want to come live and they want to come work. Thank you very much.

[APPLAUSE]

JASON BROWN: So Martin, I'm not exactly sure how you want us to do-- do you want people to come up there? So I guess I'll invite the panelists to come sit and we'll take questions.

And I might start with the first one. I wondered, Steve, if you could share a little bit more about examples of what that bridging of social capital really looked like. If you could think of one or two that can make that concept a little bit clearer.
 
STEVEN DELLER: I think you-- is this on?
 
SPEKER 1: Yeah, it's on.

STEVEN DELLER: When you made the comment that you were taking an online master's [INAUDIBLE] your comment--
 
SPEAKER 5: The mic's off.
 
STEVEN DELLER: It's not working?
 
JASON BROWN: Yeah. One second.

STEVEN DELLER:
 
When you were talking about getting your master's degree online, and you made a comment that I learned so much from all the other people that were on that program. That's an example of bridging social capital. That's an example of listening to people that are outside your normal network, of tapping into those people and learning from them because they give a different perspective.

I'll give you an example. My brother-in-law was career Navy. Retired as a Navy officer and they moved back to their hometown, which is a little town, about 2,000 people, North of Peoria, Illinois.

And I won't say which town it is, because I'm going to trash them. They moved back in. And Frank and I've had lots of discussions about this kind of stuff. And he came in with lots of really interesting ideas.

And it's an old manufacturing town. Caterpillar was the engine of everything. Well, caterpillar's not there anymore. But the community was bent that the way that they were going to save themselves was to get another big manufacturing plant to move in. And it's like, that ain't going to happen.
 
So Frank went in and said, we're kind of within commuting distance of Peoria. We could become a bedroom community of Peoria and move that way. They looked at him like he had grown horns out of his head.

After he kind of got kicked a couple of times, how involved do you think he is? Not at all. He basically washed his hands.

That's the exact opposite of what they should be doing. When you have new people coming into the community, they come in with a different perspective. They have different ideas. They have different ways of doing things.

Embrace that. Listen to them. The other thing is this community working together. I think this is-- one of the good things that came out of Michael Porter's Economic Clusters is that a lot of rural communities realize they're not in this alone. They're part of a larger regional economic system.

And the fact that they're working with their neighboring communities, they're learning from their neighboring communities. That's an example of bridging social capital. Looking outside your normal network for information and being receptive to that. That's why that comment, well, you're not from here, so you don't understand, that is the antithesis of bridging social capital.

JASON BROWN: I'd like to open it up for questions here. If you have a question for any of the panelists, please raise your hand and I'd like to get you guys involved in the conversation. So maybe-- yes, please.

SPEAKER 6: Actually, my question is for you. One of your slides, you showed-- you talked about those percentages and the bar chart working from home. And it looks like everything kind of plateaued about 25%. What was that percentage before the pandemic?

JASON BROWN: Yeah. We don't have as good data on that, but the estimates that are available put that number between, say, 10% and 12%. So almost, essentially, a doubling, compared to the pandemic. Other questions?

SPEAKER 7: Just a definition of rural communities. What is the definition of rural, depending on what sector you're in? Is it 200,000? Is it 20,000, or 2,000? Is it based on number of housing per square mile? On this particular forum, what is the definition, please?

JASON BROWN: Well, I'm just one opinion, so I'll ask, what's the rule?

KERI NAVRATIL:Thanks. We look at our population growth here and your size for rural versus nonrural, and you look at how close you are to a metro area. Storm Lake in particular, our closest metro area is either Sioux City or Fort Dodge.

We're over an hour, hour and a half from each one. And so we really look at-- we have to provide all the retail, all the education, all the shopping, any food source, anything like that. So that's what I-- you can't go drive 30 minutes to go to a grocery store. You get that all into your community. I know we have some other cities' individuals here, so if they have a better answer than that.

JASON BROWN: [INAUDIBLE].

LISA LEEDY: I'll say we're rural with 1,536 people, and a 30-minute drive to get to any Home Depot, or Walmart, or anywhere like that. But for most of us, it's population based. And I'll say infrastructure.

And I don't just mean water/sewer infrastructure, I mean services to your community. I am 30 miles from my closest urban center, which is Traverse City. Our entire county that I'm in is 100,000 people.
 
Traverse City only has 15,000 people. And if you think about that, that's not very large. So I would say that most of us think of it in a population, but I also think of it as resource-based and infrastructure-based.
 
STEVEN DELLER: It's a matter of perspective. I was born and raised in Chicago. Madison, Wisconsin is rural to me.

It really is. But it's a challenge, because definitionally-- I mean, for us to do the research, we have to have a definition so that we can organize our data. And if you look at the Office of Management and Budget's definition of a metropolitan area, I would imagine that there are probably counties around Des Moines-- what County are we in?
 
AUDIENCE: Polk.
 
STEVEN DELLER: Polk. I would imagine there are counties around Polk that are part of the Metropolitan area, but they're pretty rural. And the reason is because the way the OMB defines metropolitan. So if you look at how the Census defines rural, they just changed their definition with the last census.
It was a place of-- they were based-- they're place-based, which would be municipality-based. It's that if you have a population of 2,500 or less, you're rural. They just changed that to 5,000.

Why? Who knows. But it's a matter of perspective. It really is. It's in the eye of the beholder. Madison's rural. [LAUGHING]
 
JASON BROWN: So if you want a more, I'd say standard definition, one of the things I've used for years is actually a classification that USDA Economic Research service has developed. They've developed what's called Rural Urban Continuum Codes, and they basically classify a county.

They give it a number from one to nine, where one would be a very large urbanized population of, say, 30,000 to 40,000 in a particular area, all the way down to nine is, like, less than 2,000 or 3,000 urbanized population and non-adjacent to a metropolitan area.

So I think one of the things that we all probably recognize about rural areas is that there is no one rule. There is a lot of heterogeneity in rural America. I'm from a place called Prairie Creek, Indiana. It had more people at the beginning of the 20th century than it does now.

But yet, if I were to describe my community to you, there would be some common elements that would be consistent with probably what you have in mind, but other parts that might look very differently. So I think the context matters, but definitely population-based is always a key part of that. Other questions?

SPEAKER 8: Thank you. Hi, my name is Crystal Thomas. I'm with Texas A&M Agrilife Extension. And I have a question based on what you presented, Jason, where you noted that a lot of persons are now looking for remote-type work.

And so my question is to Lisa and Keri. Y'all are from rural parts of Michigan and Iowa. And so I'm interested to know, how, then, do you attract workers, especially younger workers, who might be interested in wanting to work in a rural part of the us, but they have a better interest of wanting to stay in a more urbanized part of it as well?
 
And I say this because I'm aware of some of my students at Texas A&M, where they got a job in a rural part of the US, but they were able to negotiate working remotely. And so to me, as an economist, there's a lot of disadvantages to that, because the rural parts are not really getting the person living there and spending. So the economic activity is not growing as much as you would expect it to. How are y'all dealing with stuff like that?

LISA LEEDY: So for my community-- I'll qualify this answer by saying I've been Township supervisor for almost one year, but not quite. And I'm up for reelection and I'm running unopposed.

But in working on trying to rebuild my community from the loss that we experienced from the economic aspect, one of the big things is-- I'll use the word "infrastructure" again, meaning broadband. We are a community that is devoid of broadband for most of our square miles of our community.
I will say for the people that would be a hybrid or an in-person, it would be transportation. We have a public transit network. When I was serving in a different elected role about 10 years ago, the public transit network decided that they couldn't afford to service my area. And one night, or one morning at 5 o'clock in the morning, they came and removed the bus stop and didn't tell anyone.

So I'll say being a good partner and being present. And so making sure that I'm advocating for my community in all areas of infrastructure, of whatever the support is needed. Janie McNabb over here, she's the CEO of our Workforce Development and our Council of Governments, which are combined, working with their team to make sure I have the support system in place for my community to support workers that might be from somewhere else, that have a language barrier or have something else.
So I will say all of that, I would lump under infrastructure, meaning I have to have those resources to support those. I can't personally put that out there through my community. I don't even have a full-time person.

So I need to be a good partner and advocate, and make sure I have some resources to either match fund, or somehow get the employers connected to these resources to make sure that we're building out broadband, and that we're advocating for funding, and that we're making sure that our bus stops remain active, and making sure that our road network supports things, and make sure our education system is there. So I would say that collaboration piece is the most important piece for me, because I don't have a lot of financial resources.

KERI NAVRATIL: That's a very good question, and one that I always get, wherever I go. You talk about broadband and working at home. We do, in Storm Lake, have that opportunity that people are able to work from home. They choose to work from home. They may have a job here in Des Moines that they have to go to maybe once, twice a week.

The biggest, I guess, comments I hear is we have nothing to do here as a young professional. So what can we do in Storm Lake? We have recreation. We have a lake, but we don't have the nightclubs.

We don't have the-- I don't even know what-- I don't even know what young ones do anymore. [LAUGHS]

But that's the biggest hurdle, is that when they go to school, they want to experience that very large urban experience where you have the malls and all of that. But what we're seeing, though, as they get married, have children, and they need another support network, they're coming home.
 
And so we're seeing some growth that way, where the kids are coming home needing additional assistance from parents, for daycare purposes or whatever. But we struggle on that ourselves, on how do we get our young ones to stay, because we just don't have the same opportunities as a large community.

JASON BROWN: I think that's a great question, because one of the things I've been thinking about is what's the limit of the opportunity for remote work. And you really have to go to, well, where does the idea start from? Where does the idea for the product or the service originate from?

And the example that you just gave was about the job being in Des Moines, but being able to be remote. And so that's the challenge, I think, of rural places, is that the concentration of ideas is in larger places. And so what can communities then do to generate their own ideas for their area and try to work the problem from that angle?
Because if rural areas are solely dependent upon the ideas being generated in larger places, they will get some flows. But there's going to be a limit to how much they're going to actually be able to attract, unless they know what younger people like to do. Other questions?

SPEAKER 9: Thank you. I have a question for Keri about your ability to have the visitor visas and the non-English speaking employees that are kind of filling that gap there in your community. Can you tell us a little bit about how that got started and how other places could replicate that?

JASON BROWN: Sorry.

KERI NAVRATIL:I can talk, you guys [INAUDIBLE].

JASON BROWN: I forgot. Yeah, I'm running the mic, too. Is there a way we could get, like, a second mic. You guys have one?

KERI NAVRATIL: Fortunately for Storm Lake, we've had immigrant employment since like the early 1980s, 1990s. We have had a lot of individuals that migrated from Mexico and Laos.

And so we were able to work with-- I'm going to tell you, it was a rough start. Our former police chief just told me stories about if you do not communicate well with your employers, that there's going to be situations and conversations that you're going to have to have early on, because you're going to be working with and providing services on the city side to non-English speaking, and that you, as a community, and you, as an employer, have to be prepared to have translation services. You have to understand the documentation process. You have to be able to provide some sort of transportation.

If you're housing, how are you going to provide housing, if you're already in a-- if you already have a lack of housing provided? And it just depends on the type of document status as well. You have-- I'll use-- in the tourism J-1 status, so you can bring in employees short term, but they have to be in a certain job specific the employer has to pay for.

You have to figure out transportation, you have to figure out housing. So there's a lot on the employer side that you have to work with. If you are having individuals coming from US territories, there is a different type of documentation that recently we just learned about that is not-- that you have to provide this form. You may not necessarily need a certain visa.
 
And so we've been working through some of that piece as well. But it's just having conversations early. And be prepared to have translation services, having your application process, and all of your employment papers in a different language.

We do a lot, again, with Facebook. Our website, you can go ahead and select the language of choice. We have 32 languages that are spoken in Storm Lake. And so we cannot obviously provide a translator for every one of those situations.

So for example, if you're coming in to set up a utility bill with water and wastewater, you may not have that language. So you're going to have to have somebody who is in your front office who's willing and able, and be patient.

When you start working through that translation process, it's not easy when you're using your LanguageLine phone. A lot of times, individuals are coming from a completely different place than what you have. So lack of trust of government is another one.

So seeing your police officers, maybe not maybe as a positive experience for some individuals, but seeing a police officer on the road waving at you may be a totally different type of interaction. And so what we've done is we've pushed community outreach. That's one of our biggest goals.

In 2018, that was exactly what-- 100% of what we've done as a city, is the going out, meeting with individuals. And we meet with them in a particular place. Nobody wants to come to City Hall and see us.

Nobody wants to go to the police station and meet with somebody. And so what we do is we go to these safe places. Where do people go? It's not uncommon for the police chief, myself, and the mayor to go to the temple.

It's not uncommon for us to go to a particular church to meet with certain community members. And what we're finding is that you just need to find that one community member who is that leader, and you just start to break in there. But it takes time.

It takes time and it takes willingness as an employer and as your community to make those changes. But it's amazing. I mean, all the people that you get to meet is so, so cool. The food, everything. It's a very open and fun experience.

SPEAKER 10: Thank you. Hi. So I'm from North Dakota, very far away. But I'm in a business school. And North Dakota is a very rural state.

We have a problem, like labor shortage. And now we have a discussion about AI, which I'm sure all of you have heard about. So can you envision maybe in the future-- like, for example, like a teacher shortage. Maybe we can use AI to help with teacher shortage? Is there anything that could happen when it comes to AI?

KERI NAVRATIL:Absolutely. We've been having those discussions in our office as well as our community about what advantages AI has, as well as disadvantages. It's very interesting. We have some individuals who are gung ho. They want to have that interaction just with-- they don't want to interact with individuals.

And then we have some who only want to talk to people. And so I think that will never get away from that. But there is going to be an opportunity specifically in our organization, in our school district, that we're going to be able to take that opportunity. I don't know what that is yet, though. That's to be determined, right?
 
LISA LEEDY: I think in our region, there's discussions of how to best utilize AI because we are so, I'll say, remote from some of our bigger urban centers. Detroit, and Lansing, and Grand Rapids are all the bottom half of our state.

We're all kind of toward the top, almost to the bridge. So we don't have as many resources available for some of the technology things. But we do have a program that's supporting any type of technology or innovation industry.

There was a thought process for a lot of our schools when AI was first a thing, that they were trying to ban it. You can't have it. But I think there's a mindset shift now where it seems to be how can we best embrace it.

How can we best utilize it to spread our capacity? So I think we've gone through a little evolution over just the last couple of years of community members who were scared of it at first and thought this was going to-- I don't know. I don't know what they thought.

People were going to cheat because they're using AI in school or something like that. But I will tell you that it's just like any other technology, that it's only going to make us better if we learn how to best utilize it.
 
STEVEN DELLER: No comment. I don't-- all I know is it's instructors at the university are really concerned with then how are you going to make sure that the student actually wrote this? It didn't ask-- that's the level of the conversation so far. Other than that, I don't know. It's too new.
 
JASON BROWN: Yeah, I think there's-- I mean, within the broader Federal Reserve system, we're doing a lot of work to try and understand this technology and how disruptive will it be, what the adoption will be. And it's just too early to know.

There's some sense that it's making a difference initially, more in financial services. And so it's impacting-- there's evidence that it's impacting, disrupting in that sector or information services in general. But what is-- how that translates or what that means for rural areas, I think, is still a very big question mark.

I think it's going to be probably like any other technology around labor-augmenting, or labor-saving technology. So I'll give you an example. I heard this about 10 years ago.

I was meeting with some people in Manhattan, Kansas, where K State is, and a farm equipment manufacturer was telling me, I've been trying for years to get welders. I can't find them. I can't keep them.

And so he eventually made the decision to invest in a robotic welder. And so he said, now I get the same weld every time and I don't have to worry about the person not showing up. And if I need to hire another one, it's easier to adjust that margin of their output through the robot.

So I think AI will likely be-- like any other technology, how does it augment labor, or in some ways displace it? It seems like it's going to be labor augmenting, where people are still going to have to interact with it, first and foremost.
 
STEVEN DELLER: If I can follow up on that, dairy is big in Wisconsin. And about 20 years ago, this notion of robotic milking machines was introduced. And a lot of the folks in the College of Agriculture where I'm at were like, oh, yeah. That's Star Wars, Star Trek. Yeah, that ain't going to happen.

Well, guess what. A lot of Wisconsin dairy farms now have robotic milking machines. One, it's because with any new technology, over time, costs start to come down.
 
People start to see what is happening and they feel more comfortable with it. But one of the primary motivations is it's a substitution for labor. They would rather hire workers, but they can't get them. So they're investing in the technology.

And in terms of AI, the amount of information that comes out of that robotic milking machine, they can actually tag cows that are struggling and they can-- I mean, the amount of information that they're getting out of those machines is just mind boggling.

Think about precision agriculture in Iowa. The amount of detailed information that a farmer has on their fields, they're getting the exact same kind of information per cow. So I think farmers-- and they're open to that idea.

They're willing to try new things. They're willing to experiment. They're being entrepreneurial. But like I say, 20 years ago, everybody thought yeah, that ain't going to happen. Well, we were wrong.

SPEAKER 11: Hi. I'm Alex from Iowa State University. One of the things that Mr. Steven mentioned in his presentation was the quote of you're not from here, so you don't get it, which I thought was a really interesting.

Something that I've noticed in my time with the university, and also in some of the jobs that I've worked, is that there's a very pervasive philosophy among these smaller rural communities of wanting to preserve their sense of identity. And a lot of times, that sentiment of wanting to preserve their sense of identity will get in the way of a lot of progress that us as planners can do to help them. I wanted to ask you guys, what are some things that you guys have found most effective in broaching that controversial subject and inspiring change among these communities.

STEVEN DELLER: As an economist, I feel very uncomfortable talking about things like that because that's the culture of the community. As an economist, how do you-- it's kind of like the community has this glass half empty attitude. How do you convince them to become glass half full?

As an economist, I struggle with that. But it's-- one of the things that you raised is preserving a sense of who we are. This is something that I think is an economist, we tend to focus on growth. More jobs, more people, more businesses, more houses, more, more, more.

I'm finding that a lot of communities in Wisconsin, they really don't want to grow. They want to be dynamic. They want to have a high quality of life. They want to be dynamic, but they don't necessarily want to grow.

We're seeing this with remote work. We tend to think about remote work as either it's 100% remote or not. What we're finding is that it's hybrid work. You have to come into the office one day a week.

If you only have to come in one day a week, what does that do to your commuter shed? It really expands your commuter shed. So we're seeing a lot of communities that are kind of normally not part of the suburbs of Madison that are now becoming suburbs. And we're seeing tremendous growth in some of these communities.
And there's actually warning flags going up, saying, oh, we don't like that. We like the way we are. We want to be dynamic, but we don't want to necessarily grow. How do you deal with that?

And this is something that we've been working on, is how do you make that mindset shift away from growth to quality of life? And it becomes very-- it becomes-- you can measure growth.
 
It's easy. You can point to it. But when you look at a dynamic community, a high quality of life community, that's much more nebulous and it's more difficult to put your hands around. So I'm curious. How many folks that are from rural communities are like, yeah, we want a dynamic economy.

We want a dynamic community, but we don't necessarily want to-- it's almost like, yeah, we want to promote tourism, but we don't want to become like the Wisconsin Dells. And it's like, how do you have your cake and eat it, too? And I think that's what a lot of communities are really struggling with.

LISA LEEDY: So my answer to that is for all of you young people to get involved. That's the first thing I would say. First of all, the NIMBYs can't win. I'll just say that.

Secondly, when I said I was the youngest person on my board, I went out and I recruited-- my very first vacancy, I found a younger person to bring under my wing. I had met this person one time.

And I met this person, I gave them a chance. I taught them on the inner workings of government, and then they got appointed to a vacancy. Then I brought another young person in. I have another vacancy coming.

I met this person. I felt like this person was dynamic, a good fit for the job. I am recommending this person apply for this next vacancy. So one person at a time, I'm trying to get these young people involved in my community.

But what I'll say is, as young people, how many of you are stepping in and volunteering to go on your planning commission, which is probably the most powerful group in your entire community, or go sign up to be a city council member or a Township Board member, or a Zoning Board of Appeals member, or a Library Board member.

I would challenge the young people to just put your application. In worst case scenario, you're up against 10 other people and you don't get it. But if you keep applying, eventually you will get put into some of those positions.

You will have a seat at the table. You will have a chance to shape the future of the community, because I know that the culture of the community may look one way, but we're all aging and you might have a different view of what you want the culture of the community to look like when you are in those seats. Because eventually, you're going to be in those seats.

It'd be nice to get your name out there and get in there. When I was in college in my master's program, I don't think I had a single class that I took that I did not encourage people to go work the election polls. Go sign up for your planning commission.

Go sign up for pretty much anything. Work at the county level, work at your city level. Try to just get involved, because as soon as you start being present, you start having a voice. And I think that's going to be really important for the future of our rural communities.

[APPLAUSE]

KERI NAVRATIL: When you made that comment earlier, it just brought me back to-- I'm not from the state of Iowa. I'm from the state of Wyoming. I am a diversification hire, and I say that because I was at a conference in the state here, and they said, you should look at hiring people from outside the state of Iowa as your diversification program.
 
And I was like, OK. And I'm sitting next to our assistant city manager, who is not from the state of Iowa, and then our Hispanic city clerk. And they're like, maybe you should look at hiring and promoting city clerks into city manager positions.

And it just changed my viewpoint because, again, I was-- I'm not from Iowa. I only understand and know mostly about the Northwestern piece. But it kind of gave me a viewpoint of what everybody else is learning and what their challenges are as well.

But to get to your point of getting additional people involved in your community, we are-- when we have our planning or anything that's open with the city, or any other organization in the community, we are very proactive on who we want on there. We have the application process. Anybody can apply to be part of it.

But nobody is. And so what we're doing is we're actively going out and saying, OK, well, you have the qualities that we need to have on this committee. Will you participate?

Most often, I'm going to tell you, we are not placing individuals on those particular committees, boards, and commissions who are negative, who have that old mindset, who don't want change. Because we are not-- I mean, we're going to change, regardless if they're on board or not.

Our community is growing. There is nothing we're going to be doing to stop it. And so we want to have a positive experience. We want to have somebody who has the vision and the ability to see, OK, the changes that we're making now are going to affect our community 20, 30 years from now.

The other thing that we're doing is we're going into high schools, because what are we hearing from the high schoolers? We're trying to build the community that they want, that they want to come back into. I go there, the mayor goes there.

Now we also bring in other individuals from our staff who more are in line age-wise to go in there and talk to them, because they have that communication piece. They're more comfortable with our employees. So we do have-- we have an outreach coordinator in our water/wastewater department.

He's really exciting, very great. But they relate to him. And so that's how we get a lot of our information, is by picking somebody who is relatable, people are going to talk to, and that we're really, I guess, selective on how we put our boards and commissions together.

SPEAKER 1: All right. That'll do it for this session. Let's give our session a nice round of applause.

[APPLAUSE]

And thank you to Jason for moderating.