AABP EP Awards 728x90

Bits and bites from DMDC 2025

Central Iowa leaders share what they’re working on

https://www.businessrecord.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/12/Sarah-Diehn-11-24-scaled-e1736288885531.jpg

Earlier this month, I had the opportunity to go on my first Greater Des Moines Partnership DMDC trip to Washington, D.C. 

It was a quick but memorable two days taking in sights and meeting some of the more than 160 attendees. One thing I kept thinking about throughout was how the trip was, in a way, a home away from home and opened opportunities to form a different level of connection and relationships.

Among my conversations, I interviewed 10 attendees about one current focus for their organization. The first half of responses are shared below. The second half will appear in the June 6 edition of the Business Record.

Responses have been lightly edited for clarity and length.

Brian Buethe, president and CEO, Grimes Chamber and Economic Development, 16 years on the trip

What is one project or issue your organization is focused on?

buethe brian

What’s top of mind right now is we’ve just completed a process that we’ve been working on with the state of Iowa to come in and do a downtown assessment study. A lot of what we work on in economic development in Grimes is on the edges — the new, shiny stuff, development of ground that has never been developed before. But we also have this community core, our old downtown area. We call it the Governor’s District. We’ve worked with our colleagues, the city of Grimes, and this group from the state of Iowa to come in and do a downtown assessment study where they come in with a group of five experts from outside our community to ask questions and observe everything that has been happening in our downtown area and then they give recommendations on how we might improve things. It was a great experience. 

The state gave their initial thoughts, and then they’re going to come back in about five or six weeks with a full-blown study where we’ll be able to see their recommendations. That’s very important. It gives us a chance to engage with people that have been in our community and running businesses, or just participating as citizens in the community for a long time. It’s about preserving our history, but also reinventing ourselves, too. Grimes is going very quickly from a small rural community to a blooming suburban community, and we’ve got a lot of new, shiny stuff but our downtown has some good things, but we’d like to add to it. 

As Grimes evolves as a community, why is a focus on the downtown area important?

Our focus has been on new roads, new buildings, new development and new housing all over the community. It’s not that we haven’t done anything with our downtown over the years. We came through probably 15 years ago now, and redid the Main Street and did some streetscaping, but we have grand plans down there that over the course of many years will hopefully come to fruition. We have a large roughly 12-acre parcel that will be a Wallace Park — it was owned by the Wallace family. They have some concepts on how they’d like to see that develop out, which we think will be a destination driver to bring more people down there. We know we need more capacity in that area of town so what we’re looking for is more shops, more experiences, maybe more dining options, entertainment venues. We also have other areas where we want some of those things in our community, too but this is more of the historic, small downtown feel, which is different than shiny new stuff on the edges of town. And there’s an emotional component to it too, especially for those people whose families have been in Grimes for generations. That was their town.

Anything else on the horizon for Grimes as you look a little further into the future?

One of the reasons we’re on this trip is that we know we’re going to have major infrastructure costs coming up in years to come as we make improvements to Highway 141 and Highway 44. We’ve been out here and been successful in getting federal assistance to improve what was, but as we continue to grow, and the communities around us continue to grow, traffic counts increase. We know that we’re going to have to continue to increase the size and capacity of certain roadways through Grimes, so transportation infrastructure is a big one for us. We’ve knocked out some huge public projects here in the last few years with the Wastewater Reclamation Authority to help with wastewater treatment, so we don’t have issues there anymore. They invested millions of dollars in our water treatment facility and now we’re becoming part of the regional water group in Central Iowa, too.

I hear the people at the city talk about how these are career-type projects, and we’ve done them all within a few years so we’re set up really well for the future. We have room to grow to our west. There’ll be some commercial areas, but a lot of that will be housing, a mix of housing, primarily single family homes. The city’s going through a process right now of updating their comprehensive land use plan, so we’ll have a better idea as to what their vision is by the end of the year.

Tami Madsen, executive director, Central Iowa Water Works, First year on the trip

What is one project or issue your organization is focused on?

Tami Madsen CIWW 1

Right now, Central Iowa Water Works is working on expanding our capacity in the system. We have a couple of requests for qualifications out for water treatment plants. One is a plant on the west side of our system around the West Des Moines, Van Meter area. We are expanding our Grimes plant as well.

What all is entailed in building capacity in those plants?

The west plant is a brand new facility, so we will be designing new wells and building a new facility from the ground up. Right now, we are entering the planning and design phase. We’ve hired an engineering firm to conceptualize and help us figure out the technology for those wells. The Grimes expansion would be expanding the plant at its current location and adding some more reverse osmosis treatment capacity, just making that plant bigger to add more capacity.

Any goals you’re looking toward a little further down the road?

We’re always looking toward water quality issues. That’s a big concern for Iowa. As the water has nitrate issues or any other kind of emergent contaminants such as PFAS, those are things that we like to keep an eye on. Water affects everybody. We all drink water. It’s important to our health and hygiene as well as recreation. It’s not just treating water, we all enjoy water as well, so that’s something that’s really important to us. Building out the system as a whole and regionalizing and collaborating is such an important thing for Central Iowa, and we’ve proven that with the Wastewater Reclamation Authority. Now, we’re doing it with Central Iowa Water Works.

Rachel Wacker, executive director, Greater Dallas County Development Alliance, Three years on the trip

What is one project or issue your organization is focused on?

Rachel Wacker

There’s been the announcement of ADR Axles’ first location in the United States in Perry. We are seeing a lot more activity in the area as it pertains to shovel-ready sites, and Perry’s done a great job of setting themselves up for success in that way as far as their industrial park goes. We’ve been seeing a lot of activity in that area because of the time to market. Everybody’s building timeline is so short and there’s a lot of other components that go with that, so if they can just make sure the land is shovel ready it really does shave quite a few months off their timelines.

I just met with Dallas Center and Brown’s Shoe Fit, which is relocating their headquarters from Shenandoah, on the transition and how grateful they are to be adjacent to workforce. They shared with me that the majority of their workforce actually lives in other areas in the region, which I think is very telling of the talent we have in the region and the proximity to each market. Dallas Center is not that far away.

We’ve been focusing on certified sites or shovel ready opportunities, marketable land, and then we’ve also been working on the workforce component of it, which ties into a lot of the things that we’re talking about on this trip — workforce, child care, which plays a big role in workforce these days. Immigration, again as it pertains to workforce, because in Perry we have that third generation of the Latino population that was displaced by the Tyson closure. 

Data centers are still calling. A lot more developer-style ones. It’s not necessarily end users, but partners that find end users and build it for them and then either lease it or sell it back to them. We still have some pretty good opportunities throughout Dallas County. Granger has a couple really cool sites that we think would be a good fit and I know of a couple others in the county that are poking around.

What’s on the horizon as you look a little further into the future?

We actually just launched a small business grant fund for Dallas County. We’re really trying to encourage applicants on that side. We know our strong suit is on the industrial and the development side. The alliance itself was founded on development and scalable economic development, but as I’ve gotten into this role and seen the diversity of the rural, suburban and urban populations, we’re seeing that in our smaller, rural communities small business is their economic development. So we surveyed our small businesses and realized they don’t really know who the alliance is to begin with, which we feel is on us. This is our way of raising awareness of the organization, raising awareness of the resources that we might be aware of that can support small business. We used to have a revolving loan fund at the organization. The funds have been depleted over the years, and so now we just have an amount where it feels manageable to just grant where it matters most, which is at the small business level. 

Dylan Mullenix, executive director, Des Moines Metropolitan Planning Organization, 12 years on the trip

What is one project or issue your organization is focused on?

Mullenix Dylan

The big project that we are working on is Future 435, the effort to have highways 5 and 65 designated as an interstate. There’s efforts that have to be done at both the Iowa Legislature and the federal Legislature. In the Iowa chamber this year, things have been moving along very nicely. [The bill in the Iowa Legislature passed both chambers after the trip and was sent to Gov. Kim Reynolds for her signature on May 12.]

Then it will go to the federal side. That’s really what we’re here to do is to get them primed to do the part that we’re asking them to do, which is insert language for a weight exemption into the next transportation authorization bill, which will happen next year. They’re very aware of it. They’re very supportive of it. It’s just more making sure that we’re all on the same page of what the next steps of that process to get the designation will be.

Are there any other efforts at the MPO that you would like to highlight?

We have over the last couple of years developed a comprehensive safety action plan through the U.S. DOT Safe Streets and Roads for All Program, and now we are applying for implementation dollars, so we have a meeting with U.S. DOT here, where we will say, ‘Hey, we’re applying for this, what do we need to keep in mind with the changing administrative priorities?’ Just understanding what they’re looking for, how can we be better partners to them? That’s another thing that we’re doing here on the trip that will impact something we’re doing back home.

Toby O’Berry, executive director, Polk County Housing Trust Fund, Two years on the trip

What is one project or issue your organization is focused on?

Toby OBerry

With Polk County Housing Trust Fund, a lot of our initiatives are around amplifying the need for affordable housing and then working regionally with all the communities within Polk County for solutions around affordable housing. Every city can have different issues or struggles, but all cities are grappling with the need for more affordable housing in their community. I think, maybe 10, 15 years ago it wasn’t on everyone’s radar, and now it is on everyone’s radar. It’s a bipartisan issue. It’s an issue that I think is affecting everybody, so that’s the good news that we progressed to that level but that just means the need is greater, which is not good. 

The trust fund allocates dollars into the community. We’re excited for some projects that are coming in the pipeline like the Old Finch Lofts project on Ingersoll. But I think another element is looking at data and research to help decision makers come up with solutions. One thing we’re looking at is creating a preservation database where you can combine all the federally funded projects into one searchable database that you can understand their affordability, the terms of when it expires, how many units. The trust fund will have that project completed by July of this year, so we’re excited for that. 

We’ve also hired a consultant to do a project called Sites of Opportunity, which in the fall will be completed, where we’re going to look at underutilized vacant land, we’re going to look at land that the faith-based community owns, and we’re going to look at how can those lands be repurposed or utilized for affordable housing. Almost all those parcels are infill locations, which means they’re in the middle of cities, maybe not utilized. You could have, for example, a church that has a large parcel of land, a large parking lot that’s underutilized. Can you use that parking lot and build six townhomes on it with a portion that are affordable to help be part of the solution?

https://www.businessrecord.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/12/Sarah-Diehn-11-24-scaled-e1736288885531.jpg

Sarah Diehn

Sarah Diehn is editor at Business Record. She covers innovation and entrepreneurship, manufacturing, insurance, and energy.

Email the writer