When he joined the Downtown Community Alliance eight years ago, Chris Greenfield was part of a “tiny” staff of four that worked with an annual budget of about $500,000.

“We only had a few programs — the Farmers Market, Skywalk Golf and the flower pots —and that was basically about it,” said Greenfield, who has served as the DCA’s president and chief executive officer for the past four years.

As he prepares to leave the Downtown Community Alliance in September to become president of Grubb & Ellis/Mid-America Pacific, Greenfield said he feels he’ll be leaving the DCA in solid shape and with a good sense for its mission.

“I think I’m leaving the organization in a good spot,” he said. “I’ve got a very talented staff that’s very capable, and it’s in a very good financial position. I feel now is a good time to hand the reins to someone else.”

Officials with the Greater Des Moines Partnership, the DCA’s parent organization, say the search process for Greenfield’s successor is still in the early stages, because Greenfield has agreed to stay on with the DCA through August.

With a staff of 10, Greenfield heads an organization whose work has broadened beyond events into development and marketing issues. A large part of the DCA’s mission is nurturing programs until they become self-sustaining, he said.

“What we’re really trying to do is push projects (such as downtown housing) over the edge to the point where the market takes over, so that we don’t have to do a lot of hand-holding on them,” he said.

As an affiliate of the Partnership, the DCA currently has an annual budget of about $3 million annually, nearly half of which is funded through the Partnership’s five-year “Building on Success” fund-raising campaign, with contributions from about 200 Greater Des Moines businesses.

The Downtown Community Alliance went through a major organizational change early on by affiliating with the Partnership.

“Some considered it a big risk,” Greenfield said, “but it’s paid off in a big way. We have been able to leverage the local and regional agendas for downtown into what the Partnership thinks about every day. And our budget grew by $1.4 million by joining the Partnership, based on what the Partnership had been spending on downtown.”

The Alliance’s major program expense areas range from development costs associated with projects such as Gateway West and Riverpoint West, marketing, events, environmental investments such as Operation Downtown, and administration.

The biggest controversy Greenfield’s had to deal with?

“I would say clearly the most acute controversy has been the Court Avenue project,” he said, because the DCA recommended a developer other than Bookey-Hubbell.

“One of the things I think we prided ourselves on is we’ve tried to determine a vision for downtown and stick to it,” Greenfield said. “One thing I hope we’re good enough at is that we’ve articulated our mission well enough that people aren’t surprised when we voice our opinion on issues.”

In retrospect, he said, the community really hasn’t had very many issues large enough to divide it, and that includes casino gambling.

“While (gambling) could have been contentious, it wasn’t, because people knew our position and I don’t know of anyone who thought that gambling would work in downtown, whether it’s next to the Science Center or downtown housing.”

For someone who initially hadn’t planned on staying more than three years before moving on to another community, Greenfield said Des Moines quickly became his choice for raising his family.

“In all honesty, I didn’t expect when we moved to Des Moines that we would love it so much,” he said. “It’s one of the reasons I think I can credibly tell people about downtown Des Moines — because I love it so much.”

DOWNTOWN DISTRICT

Chris Greenfield was hired in 1996 by the Downtown Community Alliance by its previous president, David Feehan, whom Greenfield knew from their collaboration on several downtown development projects in Ann Arbor, Mich.

In Des Moines, “one of our key goals was to create a self-sustaining metropolitan improvement district, or SSMID” Greenfield said. “So (Feehan) asked me to move here to be the No. 2 person with the DCA to start that.”

Creating the SSMID was important because it created a more stable funding source for downtown programs, Greenfield said. “Our revenues prior to that were all program-based, and there’s only so much that you can grow that,” he said. The additional funding allowed the DCA to launch the Fire in the Sky fireworks show in the summer of 1998, along with the inaugural hosting of the Des Moines Arts Festival on the downtown bridges.