On the eve of the first dirt being moved for Rowland Construction’s Water Tower housing project, Andy Rowland was presented with Greene County Development Corporation’s first Entrepreneur of the Year Award.
Chuck Offenburger presented the award at GCDC’s community information event Oct. 2 at Wild Rose Casino. The event, which was open to the public, replaced GCDC’s more formal annual meeting.
Offenburger called Rowland an “MVP of this new era of housing in Greene County.” Since the summer of 2021, Rowland has built a dozen projects, starting with townhouses on a vacant lot east of St Joseph Catholic Church, then moving to duplexes and single family homes on infill lots.
The Water Tower project will add 12 townhouses and eight single family homes. That project was awarded state workforce housing tax credits.
“The message that’s important for us to carry out of here tonight is that growth is contagious,” Offenburger said in making the award. “When we started getting the word out that we’re serious about growth in Jefferson and Greene County, suddenly contractors started perking up and coming here.”
Offenburger said the award was in recognition of Rowland being the first out-of-town contractor to take a chance on building rental housing in Jefferson, and to honor his faith in the community’s potential to grow.
The meeting opened with GCDC president Sid Jones introducing Jefferson city administrator Scott Peterson.
Peterson thanked the 65 (or so) attendees for the welcome the community gave him and his wife Nancy. “We’ve found this to be an easy community to get involved with and we appreciate that,” he said.
He explained the Thriving Community designation given by the Iowa Economic Development Authority to Jefferson recently. Initiating and completing the application for the designation was top on Peterson’s to-do list when he started his post in Jefferson in July.
The application required Jefferson to show success in growth, plans for the future, partnerships between businesses and industries and the community; and the involvement of employers.
With the Thriving Communities designation, developers get “bonus points” on their applications to the IEDA for workforce housing tax credits and low-income housing tax credits. The workforce housing tax credit can amount to as much as $30,000 per unit (or door, in developer lingo), according to Peterson
The Water Tower project received workforce housing tax credits soon after Jefferson was named as a Thriving Community.
Peterson said Jefferson has a strong history of investing in the community, totaling $128.7 million in the past 10 years. That includes Wild Rose Casino, school facilities, an expansion at Greene County Medical Center, Jefferson downtown improvement, HyVee grocery store, new rental housing, single family housing units, and The Children’s Center. “I think that’s an amazing accomplishment,” Peterson said.
Offenburger spoke next, calling the evening “a celebration of all GCDC has done over its history and in recent times.”
He referred attendees to a 5,000-word history of GCDC he recently posted on Offenburger.com.
He then updated attendees on the Multi-Cultural Family Resource Center, a project of GCDC. He’s the volunteer steering committee chair of the project. He said his job has been to sell the community on the project.
According to Offenburger, the mission of the center is to grow the workforce, keep employers (both large and small) and service providers “growing, thriving, and right here, not moving away because they couldn’t find enough workers.”
The project recently received a $95,703 US Department of Agriculture rural development grant that will pay for the first year of operation of the Multi-Cultural Family Resource Center. Another $300,000 needs to be raised to fund three more years of operations. Offenburger said that longevity is needed to attract a director for the center. The steering committee’s goal is to raise the needed funds via commitments from industries, employers and organizations within the next few weeks.
GCDC is partnering with Greene County Schools to hire the director.
After the director is hired, an effort will be made to recruit entire families to move to Greene County. They will fill job openings now and in the future as Baby Boomers retire. They’ll add enrollment to county schools, fill available housing, and become part of local churches and organizations, Offenburger said.
“We’re going to become known as one of the most welcoming rural communities in this great nation. We’ve been schooled by other Iowa communities that have already been through this in the past. We’ve come up with a plan to make this happen in a good way, in a way that will help newcomers realize this is a really welcoming community. That will make this whole plan work,” Offenburger said.
Offenburger then introduces Karie Kading Ramsey, CEO of Kading Properties of Urbandale.
Kading Properties has projects in 23 Iowa communities. The company’s tagline is “Building workforce housing communities that bring people home.”
Kading hopes to build workforce housing in the northeast portion of Jefferson. The first phase of the project would be 80 doors, with the possibility of as many as 140 doors in the future.
“With workforce housing comes hard working folks” was a passion of her father, who started the company, Ramsey said.
She explained that workforce housing, sometimes called “attainable housing,” is in the “missing middle” price range. In developing the project, the company surveys the community and finds out what wages are paid by the larger employers, and then finds ways to build housing affordable by people earning fulltime hourly wages in the area.
Ramsey provided statistics that have reported previously, including the percentage of people who work in Greene County but live elsewhere. Twenty-nine percent of people who work in Greene County live outside the community; 60 percent say they’d live to live in Greene County if there were suitable homes. “Those are big numbers. We know there’s been a lot of effort to get housing here… A lot of you here have done a wonderful job of bringing housing here… but what we can provide is a little bit more.”
Greene County Development Corporation director Ken Paxton introduced owners of 12 new businesses that have opened in the county or will open soon: Murphy’s Meats, CHiRP Coffee, Warm Wishes, Midwest Missions, Re/Max Realty, Legacy Events, Vive Chiropractic, Chad Elliot Studio, Highlander Corporation of Churdan, Dollar Tree, and the 144 Corridor Housing Project.
