It began as a casual conversation between incoming Iowa State Bar Association President Marion Beatty and Des Moines attorney John Shors. Out of that discussion materialized a new bar association committee focused on advancing economic development efforts in Iowa.

Chaired by Shors, the committee of 17 attorneys has been working for the past several months on its first project: establishing an online guide to the myriad of public and private economic development programs available in Iowa. It’s working with the Iowa Department of Economic Development to establish Web portals that will be available on both the bar association site and IDED Web sites.

“We could name 50 programs in Iowa for economic development,” said Shors, a partner at Davis, Brown, Koehn, Shors & Roberts P.C., referring to a meeting he had last week with the IDED’s legal counsel, Melanie Johnson, who is also on the committee. “They’re not connected; they’re not under the same board or staff. … And unless you’re just a genius, you have no way you can reference all of them.”

The guide will not only list the programs but also explain how they work together, and ultimately, provide examples of completed deals, Shors said.

Jason Stone, also a Davis partner and a committee member, said the guide could provide the information needed to make a deal happen. When Northwest Airlines considered Sioux City for a major call center, for instance, it was only through luck that organizers learned of a federal tax credit program that ultimately made the project feasible, he said.

The committee, which also expects to lobby the Legislature on selected economic development issues, “will be the catalyst to make the difference between growth and what has become slow but certain death in many of our small, as well as large towns,” Beatty wrote in a president’s letter published in The Iowa Lawyer in November.