City Notes: Charles City Area Development Corp. strategic planning findings

In May of 2017 the Charles City Area Development Corp. (CCADC) opted to engage in a strategic planning process for the first time since the 1980s. Planning was facilitated by the Institute for Decision Making at the University of Northern Iowa.

Please accept my sincere thanks to those of you attending the planning sessions and enabling a cogent plan with a great deal of utility.

A primary ingredient in the plan is establishing an official Business Retention and Expansion [BR&E] Program. We seek to visit major employers annually and gauge how their business is doing, what we can do to help and anticipate future needs. We hope to make 35 visits in 2018.

Accompanying me on visits are BR&E Committee members Chris Garden, Randy Heitz, Cathy Rottinghaus and Tami Vetter. This proactive approach provides a service to existing industries commensurate with their importance to our community.

Another goal is Land/Site Acquisition/Development. We have a Property Search Committee, chaired by Frank Blaine, actively working to facilitate a new development park. This is also a goal of the city of Charles City, eventually leading to enrollment in Iowa’s Certified Sites Program.

A certified site is “shovel ready” and has all the preliminary engineering and due diligence and infrastructure components addressed. Our goal is to have a certified site in Floyd County by June 2020.

Business attraction is another plan ingredient. To this end we inventory all the existing buildings and development sites in our service territory at our website as well as Location One Information System (LOIS).

LOIS is staffed in our office by Cathy McGregor. It is a nationwide database managed by various utility companies.

We also respond to Requests for Proposals as appropriate, and hope to develop a new business via the 2018 Business Plan Competition.   

Perhaps the most challenging facet of our strategic plan is work force development. This is an extraordinarily complex issue involving a multitude of agencies and partners.

We have formed a Workforce Development Committee which ideally will be active in trying to find solutions.

We are in a situation similar to the rest of America, facing critical workforce challenges — resulting from either lack of skills or mismatch of skills and employment position.

To me, the most surprising aspect of our strategic plan is that CCADC emerged as lead agency for affordable housing. Our initial task is to commission a Floyd County-wide plus Nashua housing needs assessment. The deadline for this product is June 2018.

Once the results are in from the housing needs assessment, if appropriate we shall try and identify developers willing to invest in our housing market.