Developing Union County

Union County Development Association released its annual report for fiscal year 2019, the first report as part of the UCDA’s three-year plan.

“This report provides an understanding of what our local economic development efforts have been in the last year,” said UCDA executive director Wayne Pantini.

Featured businesses

The report provides examples of businesses the UCDA has provided services to, such as guiding Justin Cole on available spaces for his new office and assisting Vanmark Equipment with finding financial assistance opportunities for expansion.

“Through our business support services for local and expanding businesses, we provide guidance of different financial tools to help with expansion,” said Pantini. “Whether it be a revolving loan fund, tax abatement or other state programs. There is a wide variety of tools out there, so they call upon us to go through the different programs.”

One project Pantini said the UCDA is particularly proud to have partnered with is the student-run retail store The Crossing, which was conceived and opened in 2019.

“We provided business and financial planning services to them to get them started out,” said Pantini. “We also connected them with different resources in the community and helped with project implementation and fundraising.”

Websites and social media

With the launch of the new website, the UCDA is now capable of monitoring the site’s usage and interactions. In the last three months, the UCDA website has had 641 visitors and 10 exchanges providing information and resources initiated through their website messaging portal.

“With our new website we can view analytics and track how much traffic we get,” said Pantini.

Social media activity has been on the rise, with over 1,300 following the UCDA on Facebook. Pantini said the UCDA intends to become more involved with social media activity and has a plan to do so by involving the Creston High School Communications and Service Technology students.

“They would help us generate content and images to promote the area,” said Pantini. “They would go out to different parts of the community and county, get good photographs we can use and provide content management.”

Business development

The Small Business Development Center, a service in part funded by the UCDA and other county development associations, counseled 42 clients last year, with a total of 166 counseling hours. Free services by the SBDC were responsible for the creation of 42 jobs and one business in Union County last year.

“A lot of people don’t know that there is free services available to help with business counselling,” said Pantini.

Economic growth in Union County has spurred a rise in sales tax and hotel/motel tax collections. Likewise, the unemployment rate continued to decline and is now at 2.3%, just above Iowa’s rate of 2.1%.

Pantini said the UCDA wants to further their tracking and listing of available investment opportunities in the area. Commercial and private listing data is provided to the public by Location One Information Services, a tool on the UCDA website. Pantini said there are plans to add virtual tours created by CAST students to the listings.

“We hope to add tours of each building to the profile on LOIS,” said Pantini. “This would give people an idea who aren’t from here and can’t quickly tour it. The students are going through and providing the video for the tours.”

Projects

In 2019, UCDA directly assisted eight start-up businesses ranging from site selection to financial guidance and providing labor market data. UCDA provided services to 12 existing business, with a large focus being on expansion opportunities. These projects resulted in 17 new jobs and $80,000 in capital investments.

In addition to the above figures, the UCDA consulted with 22 potential new businesses or projects of the last year, with five startups and four existing businesses looking to expand or diversify. These pending projects would contributed a combined total of $37,280,063 in capital investments for Union County.

“These projects are in activity right now but have not come to fruition yet,” said Pantini.

The UCDA continues to support community development projects such as the Gibson Memorial Library’s capital campaign, the McKinley Lake Restoration project and the McKinley Park Aquatic Center project.

Looking Forward

At the end of last year, the UCDA created an introductory entrepreneurship program called ‘just start’. Pantini — in coordination with regional director of the SBDC Ethan Pitt — facilitated a three evening workshop highlighting ways to proper start a business venture. Pantini said the UCDA intends to do more of these workshops for the community.

“A lot of times you have a business idea but don’t know how to get started,” said Pantini. “The workshop takes you through the first several phases of questions and uses the business canvas model. This allows us to work with those individuals and ask the right questions about their markets, their management teams and financial projections to give them a good solid foundation to take a business idea to a feasibility stage.”

With the completion of the downtown assessment of Creston’s uptown, the UCDA has supported strategies to transform the area into the “living room of the community.” Plans include a gate that can temporarily close a portion of Maple Street to hold outdoor events, the implementation of an art alley and facade work to update 11 store fronts. In addition, Pantini said there are plans to declare a historic district as a way to capitalize on the uptown improvements while celebrating the heritage of Creston.

“Earlier this year, the City of Creston, per the report’s recommendation, appointed the UCDA as the lead organization for the project,” said Pantini. “We most recently met with our uptown business owners and property owners to roll out things currently in the works and things we want to be working on, breaking that up into different task forces and getting those individuals signed on and engaged with the activity.”

If there are any questions about the report or services provided by the UCDA, call (641) 782-2003 or visit their location at 301 W. Montgomery St.