A group of community leaders recently traveled to Mason City, Iowa, to gather ideas and inspiration for Marion and Grant County.
When the Marion, Gas City and Upland chambers of commerce merged at the start of the year to form Greater Grant County, part of the strategic plan was to visit other communities to observe what they are doing well and possibly adapt some of those ideas to fit Grant County.
“We started looking around for communities that might be a good fit for us to visit,” Greater Grant County President and CEO Kylie Jackson said. “The Mason City Chamber of Commerce in Mason City, Iowa, was named Chamber of Commerce of the Year by our professional organization, ACCE. So immediately, they were on my radar.”
Mason City, sometimes known as “River City,” is the hometown of Meredith Wilson and the inspiration for his musical, “The Music Man.”
“Once we started looking into it more, Mason City was a really interesting fit. They’re almost exactly the same size as us, they have a rural, independent hospital,” Jackson said. “They have a community college, they had an empty mall that they did a redevelopment project in, they had a low head dam that they had to remediate. It just was uncanny almost, the number of projects that they had that we also are facing here.”
A trip of 14 community leaders, including board members for Greater Grant County, leaders in local non-profits, local business owners and Rep. Lori Goss-Reaves, visited Mason City Oct. 16-18 and sped through a packed agenda to learn as much as they could. Each organization was responsible for paying for its own representative instead of it all being paid for by one entity like Greater Grant County or the city.
Iowa municipalities have a slightly different structure than Indiana’s do. A mayor and a city council are elected by the people and then the city council hires a city manager to handle the day-to-day operation of the city, Jackson said.
“Everything they are doing there hinges on their community’s collaboration. Everyone is singing from the same songbook,” Jackson said. “Like their mayor and city manager work in lockstep with their city council, who is working with the chamber and non-profits and the business leaders, and everyone is kind of rowing in the same direction.”
While Mason City has that level of collaboration now, Jackson said she found it encouraging to hear that it had not always been that way and that the community had faced challenges in getting to the point they were at.
“It was good for our group to see the end result of some of those things and say, ‘Okay, just because we’re kind of still in the middle of trying to figure out what our community, what direction we want to go, there is the end goal of this,’” Jackson said. “And just seeing the way that they collaborated was really inspiring for us. Their community has really taken the stance that if you make your community a place that people want to live, everything else will follow.”
Goss-Reaves agreed that the collaboration in Mason City and the clearly laid out plan was one of her biggest takeaways from the trip.
“I think we’ve got a good start of that right now,” Goss-Reaves said. “What we’ve seen happening downtown Marion has been has been pretty remarkable to see the businesses that have opened, and we continue to have growth there more as needed, I think because as people come together and see the changes, then more people will get on board.”
Mason City has undertaken a variety of long-term projects, including the restoration of a hotel that was designed by Frank Lloyd Wright and the transformation of part of the old mall space into a hockey arena.
“Another big, huge piece of all of their projects were grants,” Jackson said. “So every project we toured, the folks from Grant County are like, ‘How did you fund this? How did this get done?’ And the answer was always, ‘We got grants for it.’ They just were very, very good at knowing what grants were out there … and their city has a grant writer, their chamber has a grant writer, their county has a grant writer.”
Trips like this one are common in other municipalities, Jackson said, and are a part of developing as a community.
“On that trip, we saw what could be, and we were equipped with sound knowledge as to how to proceed in a strategic way that was going to get us the results that we’ve been wanting,” Goss-Reaves said. “I think it’s one thing to know what you hope your community will look like. But it’s inspiring to see a community that attained that and welcomed us with open arms and gave us a roadmap on how Grant County can also get there.”
The group is still debriefing the trip and working to formulate a plan with the next steps for how to adapt their findings and put them into practice, but Jackson encouraged anyone who has any questions about the trip to email her at kylie@gogreatergrant.org.