County still losing people

By ANDREW MCGINN
a.mcginn@beeherald.com

Will new estimates from the U.S. Census Bureau showing another population decline for Greene County be the last time the numbers point downward?

Possibly — but until there’s available housing to root new residents, hundreds of new jobs created locally could bear little fruit.

As a result, more housing is still the mantra of Ken Paxton, executive director of the Greene County Development Corp.

“Unfortunately,” Paxton said Monday, “a lot of people working in our community aren’t living in our community.”

There are “very few vacant houses for them to live in.”

“You look at John Deere in Paton,” he added. “Something like 70 percent of their workforce doesn’t live in Greene County.”

New census estimates released March 24 show a population decline of 3.3 percent in Greene County from April 1, 2010, to July 1, 2015, bringing the county’s estimated total population down to 9,027 from 9,337.

Of Greene County’s neighboring six counties, only Dallas and Boone counties saw an uptick in new residents.

Dallas County continues to be the fastest-growing area in Iowa, with the county’s population up 169 percent since 1990, and up another 21.2 percent between 2010 and 2015.

On the flip side, Greene County still experienced more deaths (613) than births (548) during that period, and lost 253 people to “domestic migration,” with 173 people moving out between July 1, 2014, and July 1, 2015, alone.

The county gained 14 new residents during the five-year period, according to the census data, from international migration.

Greene County was one of 71 counties to lose population since 2010, with Dallas, Johnson and Polk counties the state’s fastest-growing counties.

Paxton believes a stalled housing project near the Jefferson water tower could be a start in retaining employees who commute to work at the Wild Rose Jefferson casino, which opened late last summer, and Scranton Manufacturing, which has been in expansion mode.

Huxley-based JCorp owns land near the water tower, but its building plan stalled because of a funding gap. Neither the Jefferson city council or the Greene County board of supervisors was willing to bridge that gap.

Former Fort Dodge mayor Terry Lutz, CEO of McClure Engineering, a company actually founded in Jefferson back in 1956, has been making the rounds of local government in recent days to tout a private-public partnership to get a housing project off the ground in Jefferson.

The Jefferson city council in December named housing its No. 2 priority for 2016 behind economic development.

But is Greene County trying to fight the inevitable?

Population trends would seem to indicate that rural Iowa is getting to be a pretty lonely place.

In fact, 51.4 percent of Iowa’s total population is divided among just 10 counties, according to the data, all with metro areas.

Area population changes 2010 to 2015
Boone County: Up 1.3 percent to 26,643
Calhoun County: Down 3.5 percent to 9,818
Carroll County: Down 1.5 percent to 20,498
Dallas County: Up 21.2 percent to 80,133
Greene County: Down 3.3 percent to 9,027
Guthrie County: Down 2.5 percent to 10,676
Webster County: Down 2.5 percent to 37,071