Clock is ticking on Creston’s $1.75M grant

This part one in a two-part series about plans and updates to the Community Neighborhood Revitalization Grant.

Deadlines are looming in a multimillion dollar Uptown project. Yet council approval has been delayed to hear more community feedback.

Project leads Austin Smith, Mindy Stalker and Jeremy Rounds presented history and updates on the Community Neighborhood Revitalization Grant to Creston City Council Tuesday, with hopes of possible action following the presentation.

“We’re pretty much at a point where we’re looking for some feedback on what to move forward on in terms of final design and submittal for amendments to IEDA to reallocate funds if needed,” Smith, an engineer with Garden & Associates, said.

Stalker, Union County Development Association director and member of Update Uptown, added that IEDA is pushing to get designs in, since all parts of the grant must be completed by July 2028.

The $1.75 million grant from the Iowa Economic Development Authority was awarded to Creston in July 2024. Since then, the Update Uptown committee has spearheaded efforts to apply this grant toward various projects.

While there are plenty of designs ready, the cost for the various projects currently exceed what funding is available, so the council must decide where cuts are to be made.

Smith, who is actively working with on other city projects at the same time, said the goal has been to coincide CNRG projects with updates to water mains on Adams Street.

“We’ll be Uptown with the water mains within the next two to four weeks, just so everybody is aware,” Smith said. “It’ll save the ratepayers or the property taxpayers in the town close to the tune of $100,000 to $150,000 if we don’t have to pave that twice and tear it out, essentially. We’ve been in discussions [with Waterworks] for this I think five or six years.”

Before construction can start on any CNRG projects, the council and IEDA must approve the designs and bids must go out.

“The longer we put it off, the longer we’ll have granular surfacing,” Smith said about Adams Street construction.

Despite the approaching deadline, Creston Mayor Doug Daggett said his plan was for the presentation to simply act as a work session, with decisions to come later.

“I have not been involved in these discussions in the same way that you have. I haven’t been involved in the committees. I haven’t been involved in all of those things,” Daggett said. “First time I heard about it was when Josh [Thompson] was saying something about it during candidate forum. I’ve been trying to pull out information because it wasn’t available.”

However, Stalker pointed out the multitude of meetings already had with the public.

“There was opportunities for public input,” Stalker said. “Lots of different groups came in, voiced their opinions on what they would like to see in the uptown district.”

“It’s been about a 10-year process. She helped out a lot, but there was a lot of other voices in this,” Smith added. “So when I hear from the general public that they never heard of what was going on or they don’t know about the input or what all is happening, there’s been quite a bit of history on just getting to the point where we’re at right now.”

The most recent meeting was held Feb. 28, with a majority of Adams Street property and business owners in attendance, according to Daggett.

However, the mayor said he wanted more time to get feedback from community members before a decision was made, something that confused some council members.

“I’m not against us putting more information out there. I just don’t want us to be continually putting information out there and not getting any feedback and not getting anything new and then delaying the project so that we miss our deadlines to coordinate with the water project and those kind of things,” Council member Kiki Scarberry said. “I want to make sure that we’re still moving forward because we owe an obligation not only to inform them and to put information out there, but we also have an obligation to people to keep things moving, even if we don’t get any feedback.”

Eventually an agreement was made to have designs come back for approval at the next city council meeting, scheduled for Tuesday, March 17. Three days beforehand, on Saturday, March 14, Daggett will host a public discussion on the project. Project leads will be present and council members are invited, so there may be a quorum.

How Creston’s revitalization began

Though Creston received the grant in 2024, plans for the revitalization of Uptown Creston began many years before that.

“All of this started with the housing study in 2017. There were comments even in the housing study that people wanted to see beautification, more pedestrian-friendly spaces,” Stalker said. “We often refer to places that look like Adam Street as kind of a concrete jungle, so there’s interest in breaking that up. A big part of this was actually finding ways to create outdoor seating for our restaurants uptown, even our retail spaces.”

A few years later, an IEDA grant allowed Creston to employ RDG Planning and Design to do a comprehensive overview of the community. RDG staff took tours in and around Uptown, held various meetings with community members and business owners and even sought information through a booth Uptown during the Fourth of July in 2023.

After RDG’s assessment was brought to the city, the information was used to apply for IEDA’s CNRG. Creston competed against various Iowa towns before receiving the award in 2024.

The $1.75 million grant also requires some matching funds from the city. Rounds, a senior planner for the Southern Iowa Council of Governments, has also worked to find a number of grants that can go toward the various CNRG projects. However, excitement over updates has brought the total cost quite over budget.

“We’re a million dollars over, so we’re not going to do everything that’s on here,” Rounds said. “And so we’re hoping for a little bit of direction on, OK, what is more of a priority for the council, knowing that not everything on here will ultimately be submitted to the state of Iowa.”

Even once designs are final, construction itself will be tough on the high-traffic Uptown district.

“It’s going to be a difficult year, no matter what we end up doing, just so everybody’s aware. There’s going to be a lot of disturbance,” Smith said. “The water mains alone are from 1890. A lot of them are lead services through the uptown, so it’s quite the undertaking.”