More housing remains top priority in Greene County

By DOUGLAS BURNS
d.burns@carrollspaper.com

A parade of organizations, from Scranton Manufacturing to MidAmerican Energy to Jefferson Matters: Main Street, presented upbeat news Wednesday night at the Greene County Development Corporation’s annual dinner.

What’s more, with the presence of Wild Rose Casino and Resort, a thriving manufacturing base and the status as the state’s first Home Base Iowa community, Greene County is poised to unlock even more potential, said Ken Paxton, executive director of GCDC, in a speech at Wild Rose Jefferson attended by dozens of economic development and community leaders.

“We’ve already got an enormous number of things in place,” he said.

But there is a major hurdle yet to be cleared: a housing shortage.

One in four people employed in Greene County do not live here, Paxton said.

“The main reason they don’t is because of lack of housing,” he said.

Some possible solutions: working for development of slab-foundationed housing; taking advantage of new 3-D printer technology (now in use in China, for example) to quickly and affordably erect housing; and emulating the successes of other Iowa cities.

With regard to the latter, Spencer City Manager Bob Fagan outlined his city’s aggressive approach to developing more housing in the northwest Iowa trade center.

In a nutshell, that involved: a five-year tax abatement on the first $75,000 of a new residence; and down payment assistance of $15,000 cobbled together with the county ($2,500), local banks working together ($2,500) and the city ($10,000). The down payment assistance started with a limit of 40 homes per year.

In other business:

• MidAmerican Energy project developer Matt Ott said about half of the 85 wind turbines in the Beaver Creek Windpark will be in Greene County. The remaining will go up in Boone County.

In total, the project, slated for a spring 2017 construction start and completion in December of that year, will produce enough power for 68,000 homes.

The wind-energy towers, with the turbines at full extension, will rise 493 feet from the ground — making them taller than the Statue of Liberty (305 feet).

More turbines could be developed in Greene County soon as part of a second phase of the project, Ott said.

• Scranton Manufacturing vice president of operations Jim Ober said the Scranton-based holding company — which, in addition to its main business of manufacturing New Way refuse trucks, operates other enterprises such as Bowie International, a mobile veterinary operation in Lake City — plans to change its name to McLaughlin Family Businesses.

The McLaughlin family founded Scranton Manufacturing in 1971.

Ober stressed the need for strong vocational education in the local high schools, saying that 95 percent of his New Way manufacturing employees were involved in such programs at some point.

“It creates our future employees,” he said.