City Council - Regular Meeting

$200. Yep. button. Yeah. I clean this. Yeah. That's why I think

There's Um, you know, you know the old. So, walk around. Hell yeah. I'm still test. I sit on Wow. That's enough.

That's why Hey months. Okay, that's it. Hello. Middle

arms. Okay. I will call the April 20th meeting of the West City Council to order. Invite you all to stand and join us for the pledge of

allegiance to the flag of the United States of America and to the republic for it stands one nation indivisible with liberty and justice for all. Okay, please sign in.

Five members present. Uh Ryan, have there been any changes to the agenda? Uh no changes, your honor. Can I get a motion to approve the agenda as distributed? Second move and seconded. Please vote. Five. Yes.

Okay. Um we are going to start out tonight. Um we have a representative from Mid-American Energy here tonight and we're going to start out with a present check presentation of a check um from them for the trees please program. So come on up. Thank you everybody. I'm super once again my favorite things every year present you here to the US Bank Council. This check is $5,000 this year. We'll be giving out 60 of these checks across our service territory and giving out more than $120,000. But here West Morning is one of our top grants and I'm just excited every year to be able to do this as home cowboy. I really appreciate it. I know kind of odd. Thank you. Awesome.

You know, we are so lucky so lucky to have such great uh corporate citizens like Mid American Energy and a lot of other great corporate citizens that uh you know, we we couldn't do what we do without them. You know, they've contributed to quality of life amenities. They've helped us on environmental projects like this one. Uh, and I just can't say enough about all of our corporate citizens and all they do for us. So, Tim, Mid-American Energy, thank you so much for always partnering us on with with different things that we do. Uh, really appreciate it. Thanks for being here. Okay. Um, moving on. Um, we've got three presentations here. We're going to be doing three proclamations. We've got one for the week of the young child. um April 11th through the 17th, one for National Library Week, April 19th through the 25th, and one for foster care month uh for the month of May. Can I see a show of hands for those who are here for the week of the young child proclamation? Okay, way more than five people. That is impressive. Can I get a show of hands for National Library Week? Okay. All right. And Foster Care Month. Okay. Now, I'm I'm just gonna let you know. Usually, it's our our new policy is if we have five people here, we will pull the proclamation. We'll read it separately. We'll take a picture. It looks like we might be a little bit light for a couple of these, but we're going to do these three anyway. Next time, we're going to be very firm on this. All right. With that, I hate to disappoint the people that are here, but

I don't. All right. I support. Appreciate it. Okay.

Okay. All right. One, two, three. There were some Tracy's in the back and All right. Okay. First, we're going to do uh Week of the Young Child, April 11th through the 17th. Whereas the Iowa Association for the Education of Young Children and other local organizations in conjunction with the National Association for the Education of Young Children are celebrating the week of the Young Child Y or WYC April 11th through the 17th, 2026. And whereas by highlighting the need for highquality early care and education for all children and families within our communities and the state, these groups are committed to the early care and education system in Iowa that will ensure each and every child beginning at birth is healthy and successful. And whereas based on the latest research of brain development and how children learn and what we know about the return on investment in young children, we fully support the need for access to highquality early care and educational services. And whereas the future of our communities and the economy of our state depends on the quality of early care and education experiences as well as access to the highquality early care and education programs provided to young children today. And whereas we must recognize the vital work performed by early care and education professionals express our gratitude for their important services and support efforts to see that they are fairly compensated. Now therefore, I, Russ Trimble, mayor of the city of West De Mo, Iowa, do hereby proclaim April 11th through the 17th, 2026 as week of the young child in the city of West De Mo, Iowa, signed this 20day of April, 2026. Okay. Now, we're going to do the other proclamations and then we'll bring the groups up in the order that we did the proclamations to take a picture uh and receive the proclamation down front. All right. National Library uh week and National Library Workers Day 2026 proclamation. Whereas public libraries serve as a cornerstone of knowledge and

opportunity, providing essential resources, services, and programs that empower individuals to live, learn, and thrive in the 21st century. Whereas public libraries have long served as trusted institutions for all members of the community regardless of race, ethnicity, creed, ability, sexual orientation, gender, uh, gender identity, income, social class, or socioeconomic status. Whereas public libraries strive to develop and maintain programs and collections that are as diverse as the people they serve and ensure service and access for all. Whereas public libraries adapt to the everchanging needs of their communities, continually assessing and evolving uh their collections, services, and partnerships. Whereas librarians and library staff connect individuals with a world of information, offering expert guidance, digital literacy training, and critical access to books, technology, and research materials in person and online. Whereas public libraries are accessible and inclusive places that promote a sense of local connection, advancing understanding, civic engagement, shared community goals, and common ground. Whereas recognizing the invaluable contributions of library workers is essential to appreciating the role they play in play in providing a neutral venue for free exchange of information and the respectful exploration of differing viewpoints and ideas for all. Whereas libraries, librarians, and library workers are joining library supporters and advocates across the nation to celebrate National Library Week and National Library Workers Day. Now, therefore, I, Russ Trimble, mayor of the city of West De Moine, do hereby proclaim National Library Week, April 19th through the 25th, 2026, and National Library Workers Day, Tuesday, April 21st, 2026. I encourage all residents to visit their library and to recognize the efforts of library workers. take advantage of the invaluable resources offered by libraries and express their appreciation for the essential role libraries and their staff play in enriching our

community and our nation signed this 20th day of April, 2026. Alrighty. Now, finally, we've got the foster care uh proclamation. Whereas the city of West De Moines recognizes that nothing is more precious in our community than the growth and development of our children and every young person deserves a safe, loving, and stable home. And whereas foster care plays a vital role in providing safe and nurturing environments for children and youth in need. And whereas foster, kinship, and adoptive families open their hearts and homes to children whose families are in crisis, uh, play a vital role in helping children and families heal and reconnect, thereby launching young people into successful adulthood. And whereas a strong network of community partners, including local nonprofits, volunteer mentors, educators, and government agencies help create a a support system that uplifts youth in care and promotes long-term stability and well-being. And whereas the city of West De Moines acknowledges the essential work of these individuals and organizations and encourages more residents to become involved whether by fostering, advocating, or supporting families in their community. Now therefore, I, Russ Trimble, mayor of the city of West De Mo, Iowa, do hereby proclaim May 2026 as foster care month in the city of West De Moines, Iowa. And I urge residents to recognize the significance of foster care and honor the individuals and organizations committing to improving the lives of children and youth in foster care signed this 20th day of April, 2026. And with that, if we could get the three groups. Uh let's do um first uh the week of the young child uh down in front with me, the council, city manager, and others.

I did your part. Who do you want in front rows here? Oh, yeah.

Yeah. How do we get it? Okay, that's good. Thank you guys. Wow. Okay, now libraries, right?

All right, libraries are next. All right, library folks, come on down. One minute. Go ahead. two.

All right, last but not least, foster care. like it all.

Everybody ready? Two more. Oh, it was Thank you.

CM Punk against somebody. That's what it was, man. Who? What? CM Punk against somebody. Yeah. Nick said to me today is Matt coming this time of year. Why don't we like coffee? Yeah. For the bridge. Um still. Yeah. I'll keep you posted. All right. What's up here? The bridge. No, I was I told him you I do I'd like to be there. Okay. Oh, yes. Yes. Right. Right. Right. Right.

Okay. Moving on to uh item two, citizens forum. I'm going to start with uh people in the chamber that would like to uh address the council for citizens forum. It's anything that is not either part of uh public hearings or new business items six and seven. So, if you have an item you want to discuss that's not a part of those two, come on up. All right. We'll we'll start off with you, my friend. Thank you for being here. Thank you. want to give us your name and address for the record and you can get five minutes.

Got it. My name is Robert Greenway. At the present time, I'm from Greenville, Iowa, but uh I've got a mailing address in Dodto. Half wall. I'm also a candidate for the West De Mo District number one uh for Dallas County Supervisor. This is not a campaign speech. Okay. I have again been attending Dallas County Supervisor's meetings. Um there is a proposed $6.5 million bond revenue bond is being considered for the new EMS building in Adel Iowa. Uh the present one was built in 1996. The bond is proposed uh the bond is proposed to be paid with local option sales tax revenue. At the present time uh Dallas County is getting 6.9. Half of it is uh designated to property tax relief.

You're welcome. Thank you. And by the way, that's in there here a little bit. Yeah, cuz we know where we know I know where the money came from. A lot of them don't giving you heck.

This uh is the reason it's appropriate now. Tomorrow at the county supervisors meeting, they will make a decision to put it on the ballot. It's got to be in by April 23rd uh to go in the ballot. Um in no way, shape or form to my knowledge that this affects any of your West De Mo local option sales tax money. Uh this is uh and the reason I'm here is to give you all a heads up that there may be some misconceptions when they see it on the ballot or hear advertisements for it. um both the council and the administration probably will get some people calling. So uh as you all well know you all West De Mo Clive Urbanddale had their own EMS paid for through other means. Um FYI, the existing three county supervisors did oppose the local option sales tax years ago and um they uh a group just a little history very little. They opposed it. 2400 signatures were presented. Myself and 25 to 30 other people got it. We put it on. They were really forced to put it on the ballot. Of course, they're pretty good about spending the money now. So, anyway, I want to thank you for your time. Um, those of you who have social media or in your newsletters, if you can put out there me voting for five county supervisors this year because we're going from three to five. Um, it's June 2nd is the primary. Um, trying to think. I think that pretty well covers what I know there's no time for questions. Um, most of you are

We do actually have time if people have questions and once you're done presenting if there done like I said this is a miss uh I'm more or less giving you all a heads up. I appreciate you being here Robert um giving us this information giving us a heads up in case we do hear from constituents on this and I'm sure we will. And I appreciate you uh putting your name on the ballot and stepping up to serve as well. and I wish you the best of luck. Thank you. And by the way, I got a great opponent, too. He actually signed my petition. Oh, hey, that's one for the books. Your opponent is supporting you. I like

Hey, I didn't say he was going to vote for me, but he signed a petition. Uh, there is one other thing, too. This is a statement of fact. Julia Helm has run unopposed. She was a former auditor when the local option sales tax was put through. She was my go-to lady. Um, total respect for the girl. Okay. Okay. and she works more than most the other supervisors put together. All right. Well, thank you for being here, Robert. Again, thanks for stepping up. Uh any questions at all for Robert?

No, Mr. Mayor, but it's a good reminder uh that we have a new uh going from three to five county supervisors out in Dallas County and they did the redistricting or just the districtricting I guess it is for these five zones and one of them is almost exclusively for the residents of West De Mo. Correct. And so West De Moines is going to have uh a member of the well not from West De Moines but most likely from West De Mo because there's I think a couple little slivers that aren't little slivers but not much. But likelihood we will have a representative on the Dallas County Supervisor who lives in West De Mo most likely. So thank you for putting your name out there. Appreciate it.

And I do have to move into West De Mo. I'm not in here now. Okay. By the way, I am familiar with the entire county. It is at all at large. And that was kind of the ballot that they put forward and I disagreed with it, but that's beside the point. All right, got two of them, but that's beside the point. Thank you very much. Thank you, Robert. Appreciate it. Anybody else for Citizens Forum? All right, come on up. Ebikes. All right.

Thank you, your honor. Members, council, I'm Dick Staer, 5411 Ponderosa Drive here in West De Moines. Uh few weeks ago I was confronted with luckily I had a dash cam uh video going and some of you have received an email from me. I appreciate the responses that you had. I just wanted to follow up and see if there's um any discussion that you've had and I know that there's no laws quote for that but being the driver of that vehicle and then having those kids surround you like that put you in a real precarious situation and

it was very disrespectful for sure and it was dangerous for them to do what they were doing. And it looked like the one kid I couldn't see the video at first, but then I finally got it to open waving his friends on to come alongside the vehicle and you guys had to really pay attention. But I know Councilman Trailion responded to that and uh wanted the uh police to look into it. I think we're going to have uh probably a conversation at a future uh public safety um committee meeting about this about this issue. We are doing an educational and awareness program. Uh we may need to look into doing more than that. I know that uh city of Ankenany has put forth an ordinance that they're considering um oddly something that's in their ordinances uh a speed limit for these uh bikes which is New York City had that as well. It's almost entirely uninforceable. So I'm I'm not sure what they're going to do in that regard and Councilman Loz I think you found that article and sent it to us all. We we will look into it and see if there's something more that we can do. We were kind of hoping that the state legislature would address this so that we don't have a patchwork of laws across the the metro in regards to ebikes and um but it it doesn't appear that they're going to address that. So,

are they licensed? Are they are they licensed? I don't I don't think they are at this point in time. Should they be? And that is something that I think we've discussed in the past. I can tell you where I'm originally from, we had bike licenses for all bikes and there was a fee that was paid. A license plate the size of a car. Yeah. No, these were just like stickers that you put on the bike, you know, but um but when you're trying to identify somebody, but the one that you the video you sent with the I think it was a had the license plate had a license plate on it. And that's why I asked and I yeah

have not heard if the police did actually you know do anything with that but uh to me it was an easy thing to do just go out and find talk to the registered owner and the face was very clear. I'm guessing it was probably their kid and at least have a conversation with them and let them know that they're being watched. If you're having a committee meeting need some input I'd be more than happy to help out. But we definitely need to get that under control because there there's there's the electric bikes, there's the electric dirt bikes, and then there's I don't this one being licensed, I'm guessing it's some kind of electric scooter type thing that,

you know, they're just all over town um causing problems. Um I've got them in my neighborhood. They zip up and down the sidewalks and somebody's going to end up t-boning a car as they're backing out of their driveway because they don't pay attention. They just zip up probably 30 m an hour or more. Well, they zip up on the sidewalk and then they clip back down again. Doing wheelies down the streets and all that. So, somehow we've got to get this thing under control. We share this with our new police chief, uh, Craig Bellamy, who's sitting in the back there. And, um, so he's aware of the issue. Uh, we're giving him a little time to settle in and get adjusted, but

we will have a conversation at a public safety subcommittee meeting to try to figure out there's something more that we can do that makes sense. But appreciate you uh sending us that video. Like I said, absolutely. Couldn't open it at first, but when I opened it, it was like, wow. I mean, there must have been what do you think 20 of these kids at least? Yeah. Yeah. At least they kept passing you on the left side. One of the kids was stalling you in front and then waving his pulling you back and waving his kids on. Another one was doing wheelies on the opposite lane of traffic down the road like that. It was a scary I mean I something could have happened. Seriously, absolutely. Yep. Yep. All right, Dick. Thanks for being here. Good to see you. Yeah. Take care.

I know that we had uh we had a public safety subcommittee meeting on this when uh council then councilwoman Hardman was uh still the chair. And I think we have another public safety subcommittee meeting coming up on June 5th. So, in a few weeks, if we can maybe talk about it then. I know we already have uh flock cameras on the agenda to talk about then, too. though be a big meeting with I believe our new public subcommittee chair over there, Councilman Lot.

Looking forward to his service, seeing the difference he's going to make. All right. Uh, anybody else for citizens forum in the council chambers. All right, come on up to the podium here. Give us your name and address for the record, please. And you've got five minutes, and we ask that you be civil and respectful.

Noted. Um, my name is Thomas Shurmer. My address is 17:30 Southeast Walnut Woods Drive in West De Mo. Um, good evening, mayor, council members. Uh, my name is Thomas Shurmer, and I appreciate the opportunity to speak tonight regarding the proposed feasibility study for the trail connector over in West De Mo. I know that it's part of the budget for next year uh, that is on the block for approval this evening. I wanted to have a discussion about that. as the homeowner, the trail, one of the proposed routes for the trail goes through my property. Um, and that is obviously a concern for myself. I want to begin by saying I support parks and trails. I I think it's great for our public system. I truly encourage it. Uh, in this situation, it just so happens to be going through my land. So, I'd uh like to understand what's going on. uh what the current plan is, if there are any alternatives. Um I want to also make the statement that I'm not interested in selling at this point in time and uh we're pretty fast on that. We're very uh my daughter's a wildlife rehabilitation individual. We have natural prairie on the property. Uh it it's what our home is. So, um, let's have a discussion and figure it out.

Yeah. So, my understanding is the item in the budget, uh, for tonight basically allows parks and wreck to do the feasibility study to study uh, the feasibility of putting a trail connection to the Great Western Trail from the Athen pedestrian bridge. And they're going to look at all kinds of different options there. One of the the paths is, you know, around your property, but there's, I think, two different paths that they're looking at to see what might be feasible. um you know, approving the budget tonight and the money in there for this uh certainly doesn't mean that this is going to happen, but it allows them to do the study that they need to bring that back to the council to show us the pros and the cons of the different routes that they're looking at. Um I understand that we've got some push back from you and maybe some others. And so I've asked parks and wreck to uh try to be as creative as possible and look at some out of the box, outside the box ideas on how to get that trail connection made. And I um have every confidence that they will work to get that done. But um the money in the budget is to do the study to try to figure out what might be feasible and what's not feasible. But it certainly doesn't uh mean that they're going to come back and and uh the council is going to greenlight that. We will have another discussion at a future date as to um whether or not this is something that we want to pursue. So you will have another option to come and talk to the council again once we know. I mean the path that they're looking at that goes near your place may not even be feasible. And the path that I think that you see right now on the map is um is not certainly not an exact location. Uh if it was, then they wouldn't have need the money to do this feasibility study. So uh and the connection is an extremely important one, but uh we certainly respect private property rights and uh there will be another time for you to come and and have more of a discussion with the council after they

do that study to determine whether or not it's feasible and what route might be feasible. Okay. Um, would it be possible for them to actually have a conversation with us before bringing it up to city council? Sure. Sure. If you want to sit down uh one-on-one with uh parks and wreck and get some more information as to what they're looking at um what they're trying to get done and and some of the pros and cons of the different routes, I'm sure they'd be willing to sit down and have a conversation with you. But, you know, until they do this study, then they may not have a lot that they're able to share or the possibility is that the study is not necessarily done if we're not interested in selling the property. I'm not sure what other conversations

have. It may not it may not end up going on your property. I mean, because they got to figure out what the path of this trail ends up being, which is why we have money for the feasibility study to determine what the route is going to be, right? And there's two different potential routes. And even those two routes that are on the map, they could be they could go one way or another. And you know, I don't know if it's smack dab in the middle of your property, uh, or what, but this is what they're going to be studying to try to figure out if there is a a path that makes sense. Okay. Um, if you want to get together with them before they do that, I would have no problem with you meeting with them and having a discussion.

I I we had the discussions over the last five years. That's why I was surprised to see it on a map at all because it was actually there was an agreement made a personal agreement made with our neighbors that they would uh have conversations about that uh that the land or the trail would actually go on their land. So when it's been brought back up over multiple maps over multiple years, it tends to lead me to believe that nothing's actually changed and I'm trying to figure out why. Russ, I had a meeting with uh Ryan and Marco because I got a few phone calls about this as well. So, tonight before the council meeting, I met with them. And part of the problem is, you remember the comp plan with Linda Roble?

That's where we're at with this, right? They've they've got point A and point C and they need to figure out how to get line B to connect those two points. So what they've done is they've put some proposed right paths on this map. But I can totally understand their concern because as you look at this, much like the comp plan, it shows that there's a trail going through the middle of their property. I wouldn't like it if I was a property owner, but nothing is is set in concrete. It's just that somewhere

multip but from from this point to this point we need to get a trail put in there. Now whether that is a is a figure eight route to get there maybe. Is it a straight line? Maybe. Does it follow property lines? Maybe. So, I've what I've asked Ryan is that going forward, we don't put lines on a map. We just say that here's a connection and here's a connection and somewhere in this area, these two points are going to connect so we don't run into this again. It's it is 100%

the Linda Roel issue when we started on council in 2010. And I get it. I I wouldn't like it if I'm looking at this map. You think right now it's been decided and you know my property is going to be split right in half and what do I do? Yeah. And to Kevin's point, uh we had you know we had two lines on a map. It was over 35th and you know 35th over the river and and 50th over the river. And uh we ended up taking those lines off of that map and years later we did a feasibility study this last year. Was last year, two years ago. Last year. Last year we did a feasibility study and guess what? Neither 35th nor 50th were feasible at all. Understood.

So, you know, they're they're going to do this feasibility study and figure out if there's a route that might make sense. And at that point in time, we can have another conversation. If you want to sit down with them and have a conversation, I think that would be fine. Except for that, I don't know that they're going to have a ton of information to share with you until they do this study. I understand that. I spoke with Marco from the public or parks and rec department this afternoon. So, okay. Yep. Ryan, this map that you gave me before about what an hour ago, would you forward that on to all of the council members so they've got that, please? Thank you. Hey, Thomas, really quick question for you. If this was south of your property and not touching your property, would you have an opinion on it?

If it was south of my property, Yeah. And whose property would it be then? Um, whatever. I don't have the plot map in front of me right now. So, I think you have I assume you have a rectangle, right? Uh we have two rectangles. Actually we own two plots. Okay. So and it subdivides both plots. Sure. I mean guys the bottom line is we need to do the feasibility study and we will have a conversation to see what's feasible and not. Like I said with the two projects over 35th and 50th neither of them were feasible. Yeah.

This could be the case here. But we need to do the study and figure out what it looks like. and they are going to try to get creative and try to come up with an alignment that uh makes the most sense possible given topography, given residents homes, uh natural resources, all of that stuff. And it could be that this route going near your home is not feasible and maybe the other route is feasible. Could be that neither of them are feasible. So, um but totally understand your concern. I wouldn't like the line on my uh on my property either. Um, but I promise you we will have that discussion and uh uh back and forth uh debate and you will have a time to have more conversation with the council once that study comes back. So, okay.

And your wife's got my phone number, so don't hesitate to give me a call, email, text, whatever, and I'll keep you guys posted where this goes because I'm going to stay uh in touch with parks and wreck as this thing moves forward as well. All right. I appreciate your time. Thank you. All right. Thank you for being here. Thank you. Okay. Okay. Anybody else in the council chambers for citizens forum before I go online for citizens forum. All right, come on up. And thank you for taking the pictures. Appreciate it. You're welcome. Uh when did you say that clock meeting was? The June 4th. June 5th. June 4th. Whatever the Friday morning is.

You got your elbow on today. overhead. Okay. Uh my name is Jonathan Aubberg and my address is 6565 Wisful Vista Drive. On April 16th, I presented eight findings and the city indicated it would follow up. No response has been received. I'm returning tonight because the public record still contains no answers and because some of those findings have since been independently corroborated. One, the April 8th police department response stated the departments has department has no owl cameras. A January 13, 2022 city engineering document names 11 across six parks. A field visit April 14 found the two owl positions at Jamie Herd Park occupied by Axis panoramic drone dome cameras, four sensor heads, continuous 4K with no disclosed contract policy or council authorization. A council member stated in March the city does not capture video. True of flap cameras, not of the axis domes at Jamie Herd Park. In January, a caller invoked Carpenter verse United States. That case concerns persistent surveillance. These cameras changed that calculus. Two, the 2023 flock contract was placed on a consent agenda April 3rd. Flock counter signed April 4th after the vote. Post vote, Hayes emailed Flock, quote, "We just got the approval for the expenditure. work your magic on the contract price. End quote. I processed five years of council meetings on record

using automatic speech recognition software running on my computer's graphics card. Over a 100 meetings in roughly 2 hours. What that produced on April 3rd, 2023 was a timestamped transcript showing the flock contract consumed 34 seconds. No discussion. The word flock was never spoken. Finding three. The West De Moine flock audit log mutates at 2.6 to 7.1% per day. Independently published April 8th by HC Vanpel. In February, 39% of queries had no documented reason. The latest export shows that figure has not improved. Johnston, Walke, and Urbandale, the same pattern. This is not a local anomaly. Finding four 16 right-of-way permits, fees waved, signed by a flock employee, physical construction in public right of way. April 16, Iowa Dial confirmed in writing, "No license found for flock group in Iowa." Dial directed West De Moine as the authority having jurisdiction to enforce. That letter exists. The city has said nothing. Questions. Question one. Will the city provide a written reconciliation of the April 8th police department denial of owl cameras with the January 13, 2022 city engineering document naming 11 of them? Two, who authorized removal of the owl and condor cameras and when? Three, why was the 2023 flock contract placed on a consent agenda and executed before the council vote? I'm moving to De Moines in May. This is my final appearance as a West De Moan resident. More chapter 22 requests will be filed soon. This investigation will continue. The record I've built here does not leave when I do. Thank you, council.

So, when is that? Uh, the meeting is June 4th. June 5th. June 5th. June 5th. And typically those meetings are 7:30 a.m. I believe. Um, so Jonathan, I think we have I would assume we have from the all the foyer requests that we have your email address, right? Yes.

Okay. So, let's make sure that Jonathan gets an invite to that meeting and uh Jonathan, you can have all the discussion you want at that meeting. Ask any questions that you want and we will get you whatever answers we possibly can. As Councilman McKenna said, uh your privacy, our residents privacy is uh extremely important to us, but so is our residents safety. And these flock cameras have proven extremely valuable. Uh I don't know what kind of camera we have in the park, but I can tell you that I know a local valley kid that went down to the park and got into some trouble and some drug dealers uh beat him up, kidnapped him, threw him in his car, stole the car, and uh dumped him out. And if it weren't for these cameras, I'm not sure we'd be able to find him. And I know that family is very grateful. Also, the 13-year-old that was abducted and taken down to Tennessee, without the flock camera, we wouldn't be able to get her back. She may be dead today. So, we got to make sure that we respect people's privacy, that uh the data is protected and and I promise you that we're making sure that that is the case. Um, but these cameras are absolute lifesavers and make sure that our public is is safe. And not only that, but they're a huge deterrent from criminals coming into our community and committing illegal acts. So, I am a strong proponent of these cameras. And if there's an issue in regards to uh people's data and privacy, then I'll tell you right now, we will get on top of that. But um I'm not sure if you're looking at the benefit of these cameras when you are presenting to us on the privacy side of things, but I assure you we will look at both of those sides. So, so plan on being I don't know if you're going to be around June 5th at uh is it 7 a.m. 7:30? We will make sure that we get that to you so you can participate uh in that meeting. So, thank you for being here. Appreciate you bringing this forward.

Okay. Anybody else in the chamber before I go online? Okay. If you are online for Citizens Forum, hit star six, not the pound six, not the tic-tac-toe six, but star six to unmute yourself and give us your name and address for the record. Is there anybody Amy, how you doing? If you can start off with your we know who you are, but if you want to give us your name and address for the record, we would be appreciative. Sure.

Sure. Amy Buer Mill Civic Parkway. Okay. I listen to a lot of things here that other people had to say, but I'm going to first start off that that's wonderful that the flock cameras are catching people that are committing crime. Uh, but what I want to add to that is I saw a flock camera uh that I thought belonged to the West De Mo police or whoever law enforcement, but there the camera that I that looks exactly like a flock camera is on private property of a corporation. And I'm wondering if that's going to block uh people from g getting evidence since it's on private property that happens to be a corporation. So we need to look into that. And then I would also like to say because I heard Linda Roel's name get mentioned. God bless her because some corruption that happened I know shortened her life. So, uh, Linda Ro, uh, Robo, God bless you for being the far first fighter against public corruption, um, in in the West De Mo area. Now, about the ebikes, uh, I didn't understand what that was all about. Uh, the gentleman didn't explain anything. Maybe it's none of my business to know what happened. I don't know. But, but, um,

he's asking for license plates to be put on ebikes uh, because of something. And I don't know what. We've had all across the metro some issues with ebikes and you know who's who's able to ride them? Are they how are they defined? Are the ebikes? Are there really motorcycles? There's all kinds of different uh electric vehicles that are going on around here. What should the age requirement be for people if they're not pedal assist but they're more motorbikes? All kinds of issues uh Amy that we're looking into. So, we'll continue to explore that.

Okay. Because because like I said, we really got a problem with license plates on uh on cars, trucks, construction vehicles, and then we're going to take time to go after ebikes, you know what I mean? When we can't even get uh, you know, cars are like tanks going down the road and they don't have license plates. And I mean, what happened that What are these people on these uh bikes doing? Are are they hitting people with their bikes? What are they doing?

Well, it's like a motorcycle gang of young kids driving around just uh having fun, but maybe causing some problems for pedestrians and motorists out there. Oh. Oh. So, uh are they underage? They're usually pretty young kids. I would say, you know, 10, 11, 12, 13, somewhere in that area. So really, it should be the parents keeping an eye on their children at that age. They shouldn't even be let out of the house alone at 11. You see what I'm saying, Mr. Mayor?

From your lips to God's ears. So, uh, yeah, I think we need to look into those parents that, uh, are not keeping a good watch on their children instead of maybe, uh, punishing disabled people or something that might use these uh, ebikes. Well, you're bringing up some of the issues, some of the difficulty with regulating them is that some people need these and some people need that pedal assist and you know, it's it's it's a big issue. It's pretty complex, but we'll look into it. All right. Well, thank you, your honor. You have a day. Oh, hey, one more thing.

Okay. Go ahead. Is uh is police chief uh Craig Bellamy there today? He's here again. He's got a perfect attendance record. So far, we're gonna keep them. Oh, hello. Hello, Chief. Uh, are you getting my emails that I send to the uh West De Mo Police Department? I just wanted to verify that you are or otherwise I'm going to need your email address. I believe that he is. I believe that he gave me the thumbs up. Taking a bad guess. Yep, he gave me the thumbs up. He is. Thank you, Chief, and everybody. Have a great evening. All right. You too, Amy. Have a good one. Take the time to speak. Bye.

All right. Take care. We'll see you. Thank you. Bye.

Yep. Bye. Bye. All right. Anybody else online that would like to address the council, uh, please hit star six again, star six, not pound six, to unmute yourself and give us your name and address for the record. Is there anybody else online for citizens forum? Is there anybody that knows Lint Tweet that's been working with Lint Tweet that may be online for citizens forum? Okay, hearing no one. I will declare the public hearing closed or the uh assistance forum closed and we'll move on to item three, mayor, council, manager report, other entities update. And I'm going to start this time mixing it up going down to my right with city manager Tom Hatton. Any reports? No report, your honor.

All right. Thank you, Tom. Uh, Councilman Hudson, any report?

Yes, Mr. Mayor, just a quick report. I am happy to report that was in the news that West De Moines has been awarded the National Curling Championship, and I think that's due to a couple of people who should be uh recognized. Number one, our parks department. So led by Ryan Penning and uh Shane Radcliffe down at the at the Mid-American Energy Company Reclex. The work that uh those folks do down there to bring events is amazing. And plus I want to shout out to Trina Flack and Catch De Moine because I think when the city of West De Moines and our conventioners visitors bureau work together, we can bring amazing events such as the National Curling Championship. I love watching curling during the Olympics. It's super fun and I'm so excited that we're going to have the championship right here at the RecPlex on January 24th to 30th, 2027. So, that is exciting. Uh,

also don't forget the chair of Catch De Mo did a phenomenal job in in not only getting that, but keeping it secret from all the rest of us, too. I wanted to tell you all so badly for weeks, months to be honest, but it was really exciting to see the announcement finally. And we got some other exciting stuff that is coming, but

ah, okay. can't share right now, but the work that Catch De Moines does is tremendous. They're going to come and present to us in the coming months, too, and they're going to be able to share some great stuff. I'm proud to serve as chair. Um, on a I guess a somewhat personal note, I did want to recognize Mary Brooks who is in the audience tonight because she has served for many years on the library board of trustees. And uh in addition to appreciate her service, I really want to shout out her kindness because she is such an important member of this community. She is uh the epitome of community focused citizenship. When I look at Mary and uh and on a very personal note, when I was just a first year teacher, she was uh one of my mentors and she came into my classroom and magically said to me, "Greg, you're actually not doing that bad." And

I question her judgment now, of course. But uh the work of of Mary just not just serving on the board, but just being a community member is Hello. Hello. Uh yeah, I'm I'm sorry. Were you here for citizens forum? Uh yes, and I was trying to get in, but I couldn't get in. I apologize for bar barging in like this, but yes, I've been working with Lynn Tweet on this proposal. So, I don't know. You want me to You want me to call back in two weeks? What do you want me to do? Nope. Nope. We're going to just go out of order here. We're going to uh take a pause here on Councilman Hudson's report and uh uh I am just about done. I'll just I'll just finish up.

Why don't we let him finish up and then we will go to you for uh whatever you'd like to present. Bottom line, Mary, uh thank you for your many years of service, not just on the library board, to the entire community of West De Moines. And um thank you. You're very welcome.

Yes. Yes. Yeah. And I, you know, I'm not going to try to outdo that because that was uh an awesome job recognizing Mary for her work in the community. Um I I think we got to work together on the library friends group uh when I when I first served on that. They didn't know when they brought me in that I couldn't read. But it was an honor to be on that friends group and uh I got to witness firsthand the uh the work that Mary did and the dedication she had to the city. So, thank you for your service and I I suppose we will accept your resignation tonight. You've you've put in your time. You've done a lot of work.

So, all right. And we'll keep watching you on the spelling beef, too. Right. So, you do great work there as well. Okay. We're going to go back um to our citizen online that would like to address the council. If you want to please give us your name and address for the record and you've got five minutes. My name is Kathy McMullen Pudzales. I grew up in West De Mo and now live in Cedar Rapids. My address is 2511 White Eagle Trail. Okay, go ahead Kathy. You've got the floor.

Okay. Thank you for allowing me to speak with you about what I want in a name of a street uh either a change or a new street that would be going in. and I've been speaking with Lynn Tweet about various possibilities. My um what I would like to have is a street named McMullen Parkway. My rationale for such a change is based primarily on the contributions made by Richard McMullen, my father, when he was the West De Moines city attorney in the 1950s. The details of his work are documented in a file of newspaper clippings that my family has. After graduating from Drake Law School and becoming a partner in the de mo firm McMullen test and Baird, he took the West De Moines position in 1952. Working alongside Elmer TR, McMullen was instrumental in a number of developments which expanded and strengthened West De Moines. One important contribution was his work to annex land, expanding the boundaries of the city north to University Avenue and south to the Poke Dallas County line. He worked on the development what of what was then known as Annie's Bottom, establishing Holiday Park, as well as designating an industrial development area close to Holiday Park. In addition, McMullen helped to establish a mobile voter registration to register residents to vote. As the secretary of the West De Moines Development Corporation, he worked on negotiations with De Moines, leading to a sewer agreement between the two cities. He also established an industry appreciation dinner as part of the citywide progress work. Several of my father's actions continue to ensure that the residents of West De Moine have a healthy city to live in. McMullen helped write a

fluidation ordinance ensuring residents have safer water. In my opinion, one of his most long-ranging contributions to West De Moines is his work on a substandard housing ordinance. The ordinance he proposed addressed new housing as well as existing housing units. In the West De Moines Express, he is quoted as saying, "There's just no reason why a city like ours should have any substandard homes in it." My father was also a vocal advocate for calling the city junction. He recognized the historical importance of the railroad and did not want the city to be just an extension of De Moines. He would be proud to know the old name is still used to describe parts of the city. His civic involvement reached beyond city hall. He helped initiate a boy scout troop in West De Mo. I believe it was 1962 and enjoyed leading the troop on fishing and camping trips and holding car washes. He was, as one person described him, a good man. After my father's untimely death from a brain tumor, my mother continued to live in our house at 92513 Street, owning the house for over 50 years. All five of us children attended Clover Hills, Stillwell, and Valley High School where we were involved in many activities. We represented West De Mo in statewide speech contests and performed in many high school plays and musicals. We often went as a family to Val Lanes and we participated in many activities at the Valair Ballroom. We played softball and taught swimming lessons at Holiday Pool. I worked part-time for the West De Moines Library. My mother continued to live in West De Moines until 2002. As a family, we will always visit West De Moine to honor our parents who are buried in West Haven Cemetery on a hillside overlooking the Swan Pond. I feel that the McMullen family has a long and significant history with West De Moines. I feel that my father's many

contributions as city attorney especially warrant this street naming. Please consider establishing a McMullen Parkway. Thank you. Okay. Thank you so much for presenting uh on your father and his accomplishments and everything he's done for the city. He sounds like an unbelievable individual and appreciate everything uh that he did to help make West De Mo what it is today. Um we do have a street naming policy. Uh it it is something that uh I think we've only done one honorary street. I know we've only done one honorary street uh with exception I suppose of before we had a policy and we did Mil Civic Parkway and EP True Parkway. But um

I don't I wasn't really proposing I'm familiar with the two different methods of street naming. Okay. Uh Lyn Tweet has um given me the documents to read. I'm not interested in an honorary street naming. I am interested in naming a new street or an existing street McMullen Parkway.

Okay. Well, the individuals uh whose parents have a street honorary street named after them also would have liked to have a regular street named after them, but uh there was quite a discussion with public safety aspects and a lot of different things that went into that. But this is something that um I would uh recommend go to uh sorry public safety to the public safety city council subcommittee. Maybe not as early. Well, maybe if you can get it on the on the June 5th agenda. I know you'll have you may have other items you need to talk about, but this is something that probably needs to be discussed and vetted uh there. Councilman Doug Lo is the new chair um of that um committee. So, um we will work through Lynn and let you know when this issue gets taken up. Um, I can tell you that there was some discussion after we did the first honorary street naming to kind of tighten up the policy and uh raise the bar even higher uh because uh this this really I think needs to be done uh very rarely to honor people that have done unbelievable things. uh and otherwise we're going to have, you know, 5,655 streets named after people and um and that that really becomes a public safety nightmare then for our first responders. So, we're going to I I promise you this, we'll take it to the public safety city council subcommittee for discussion and we will let you know when this will be on the agenda. So you can participate uh I would assume via phone uh or uh via Microsoft teams at that time but uh this will be something that we discuss uh there.

All right. Lynn Lynn's tweet has already taken it to um the streets department and they a uh showed a map um they offered a map where there were several things that were either proposed streets or little sections of streets. Again, I'm not looking for the to go through the honorary naming process. I'm just asking for the other process of naming. Uh I I hear you loud and clear and we will we will take a look at that. And I'll I'll be honest with you, driving around the city and seeing some of the names of the streets that we have out there. I would much rather prefer McMullen than uh some of the streets that uh we've got out there. I don't to this day I sit there and scratch my head and say, "Who the heck is responsible for naming some of these streets?"

Will you give us some names? Well, there's some pretty bizarre ones lately that really have made me think. I mean, I'm telling you,

uh, and and maybe we need to look at that as well. I don't know if, you know, somebody on staff opens up a phone book and throws a dart at it, uh, or or what's going on, but we've got some very interesting street names. So, McMullen, uh, Parkway or Drive or Lane or whatever, uh, would certainly be better than a lot of the streets street names I've seen out there. So, thank you for calling in. Appreciate it. I would ask you to ask Lynn to send you the map that the street department sent her wi which shows um I think proposed street that's going to be going through. Of course, it will be dependent on the development and the developers that that are around that street. But anyway, I think there's something that's possible.

Well, I will guarantee you that that information will be before the public safety city council subcommittee. Uh Lynn will uh probably even be there since she's part of the addressing committee. All right. Great. Well, thank you so much. Yep. Thank you. Take care. You too. Byebye. All right. Byebye. All right. Back to our regularly scheduled program with Councilman McKini. Hey, thank you, Mayor. Um you know, I don't We'll go ahead and move on. There's nothing I need to report here. Thank you. Much appreciated.

Thank you for your brey. Appreciate that very much. Okay. Uh moving on to our new city council person. Uh city council woman Elliot speech to me.

Thank you, mayor. Um I do have things to add, things that I've done. Okay. I want to start by um I had the opportunity to attend the community engagement institute that is being ran by Audrey Kennes and there are actually three individuals back there who are also part of this institute and what it is is the purpose of the CIE is to educate residents about local government's role and functions foster trust between the community and city leaders and provide city officials with insight um into residents needs. The very first um it's a series going until May the 20th, but there is weekly topics every week. The first one was um our honorable mayor and our city manager. um they attended. Um our mayor explained the role of the mayor and why civic engagement is important. Um our city manager explain the role of the city manager. There will be a series every week there'll be a different topic giving those participating an opportunity to understand the different departments that we have. And I could read them but I won't. But um I decided to participate because it gives me an opportunity to more hit the ground running to understand all the various departments and so I welcome the opportunity to be um a participant. Um I attended the uh finance and administration subcommittee. Um I also um had the opportunity to meet with Ryan Pennington. He is the director

of parks and wreck. And my gosh, it opened up my eyes. There is a lot. You know, there's more to it than the Rex plex, which we are actually actively enga engaging and expanding, but there's just so much that goes on in parks and Rex. So, I was very happy to have that overview. And then the opportunity to go out to the Rexlex. I guess I could go out to the parks and the trails. I could use both of those, but um I was very um fortunate to be able to really get a holistic view of what goes on at Parks and Rex. And thank you, Ryan. Uh let's see. Put my glasses back on. I'mma hurry up. I'mma hurry up.

Take your time. Take your time.

Okay. I also had the opportunity to meet with our new chief of police, Craig Bellamy. Thank you, Craig. And I'm going to look forward to some dish additional um meetings. Um just basically an overview. Um you know, Chief Scott, love that man. Um but I hope to establish that same type of relationship with you, Greg, and I know I will. Um, I also had the opportunity to, um, there is this group called the Greater De Moines Supportive Housing. Um, I had an opportunity to get, um, brought up to speed as far as what the group is. Um, right now, West De Mo and Urbandale are in talks with this group. I'm saying in talks, nothing has been decided. I don't want anyone to think anything's been decided, but it's basically to take facilities and then renovate them. Um, particularly here in West De Mo, it's the extended stay at 28th and Westtown Parkway. Um, they're looking at that. There are 90 efficiency apartments. They also provide wraparound services for individuals who do sign up, pay rent, and um, they'll be supported. I also had the opportunity to um attend a ribbon cutting um at Waterworks and once again Ryan was there. Um it was the opening of the new distribution shop partnership between West De Mo Waterworks and the city of West De Moines. And I think that's all that I have to report.

Well, that was an excellent report. I also want to mention that uh Councilwoman Elliott and and Councilman Travillian were also at the community engagement uh meeting and um I didn't unfortunately I didn't get to hear Councilman Travillian present but I got to hear the end of Councilwoman Elliot's presentation and I just want to applaud her. She's jumping right in, hitting the ground running like she says, excellent report and you know having meetings and really engaging. So, it's you're a great new member of this team and appreciate you jumping in uh feet first and getting going. So, all right, Councilman Travillian, any report? Nothing this time. All right. Uh, Councilman Lokes,

nothing at nothing tonight, your honor. Okay. Thank you, Councilman. All right. Uh, moving on to uh item four, consent agenda. Are there any items that any council person would like to have pulled and voted on separately? Otherwise, I would take a motion to approve the consent agenda as distributed. Motion to approve. Second. Okay, it's been moved and seconded. Please vote. Five. Yes.

Okay. Item five, uh, old business. We don't have any old business, so we will jump right into item six, public hearings. This is a time and a place for a public hearing to consider 202627 FY operating capital budget initiated by the city of West De Moines. Ryan, would you please read the date the notice is published? April 10th, 2026 in the De Mo Register. And we receive any written comments at this hearing? None, your honor.

Okay. Anybody in the audience would like to address the council on item 6A, please come to the podium here. Give us your name and address for the record. Anybody online, hit star six. Again, not pound six, but star six to unmute yourself and do the same. Is there anybody either in the council chambers or online that would like to address the council on item 6A? giving people a chance to hit that star six. It can be tricky sometimes. I've tried that myself and it can be frustrating. All right, hearing and seeing no one, I'll declare the public hearing closed and we've got a resolution approving the FY 2627 operating capital budgets and there are no outstanding issues. So moved.

Okay, it's been moved and seconded. Uh is there any discussion in the dis Okay. Hearing none, please vote. Five. Yes. Okay. Item 6B. This is a time and place for a public hearing to consider issuance of not to exceed 4.5 million general obligation bonds or capital loan notes initiated by the city of West De Mo. Ryan, would you please read the date the notice is published? April 10th, 2026 in the De Mo register. And have received any written comments to this hearing? None, your honor.

Okay. Anybody in the audience like to address the council on item 6B? Please come to the podium. Give us your name and address for the record. Anybody online, hit star six to unmute yourself and do the same. Uh would anybody like to address the council on item 6B? Okay. Hearing and seeing no one, I'll declare the public hearing closed. And we've got a resolution instituting proceedings to take additional action and there are no outstanding issues. Motion to approve. Second. It's been moved and second. Is there any discussion in the DAS? Okay, please vote. Five. Yes.

Okay. Item 6C. This is a time and a place for a public hearing to consider 2026 digital enterprise network expansion initiated by the city of West De Mo. Ryan, would you please read the date the notice was published? April 3rd, 2026 in the De Mo register. Have received any written comments at this hearing? None, your honor.

Okay. Anybody in the audience that would like to address the council at item 6C, please come to the podium. Give us your name and address for the record. If you're online, star six to unmute yourself and do the same. Is there anybody either online or in the council chambers that would like to address the council on this item going once going twice sold to the lady in the red okay declare the public hearing closed and we've got two resolutions and a motion we can take at the same time and there are no outstanding issues. Motion to approve. Okay, it's been moved and seconded. Is there any discussion on the dis hearing? None. Please vote. Five. Yes.

Okay. Item seven, new business. Item 7 A, Cross Creek, 2475 Southeast First Street. Approve final plaque creating 23 lots for single family residential development, one out lot and one street lot, Savannah Development LLC. Uh we've got a resolution for acceptance of public improvements and approval and release of the final plat. There are no outstanding issues, but there is one condition of approval regarding the city council granting a waiver of the 30-foot landscape buffer along Veterans Parkway and in lie of that requiring tree plantings in the back of lots 11, 12, and 13 in the public rideway. Uh the trees are to be planted before issuance of final occupancy permits uh for residencies on that lot on those lots. Move approval.

Okay, it's been moved. Is there a second? It's been moved and second. Is there anybody either in the council chambers or online that would like to address the council on item 7A? Is there any discussion on the dis? Okay. Hearing none, please vote. Five. Yes.

Okay. Item 7B, Jordan West Plat 4, 270 Jordan Creek Parkway. Approve permanent access license and final plat to reduce previously platted setback along the southwest property line of lot 6 Jordan West Plat 3 Ryan Company's US Inc. We've got a resolution for approval and release of the final plat and approval of permanent access license and there are no outstanding issues. Move approval. Okay, it's been moved and seconded. Is there anybody in the council chambers or online that would like to address the council on this item? Is there any discussion in the dis? Okay, please vote.

Five. Yes. Okay. Item 7 C, Lounsberry Plat 1, South of Grand Avenue and southwest of Interstate 35. Approve final plat creating one lot for commercial development and one out lot, West Grand Properties LLC. We've got a resolution for approval and release of the final plat. And there are no outstanding issues. Somebody want to move approval? Motion to approve. All right. It's been moved. Is there seconds? moved and second. Is there anybody in the audience or online that would like to address the council on this item? Any discussion on the dis? Okay, please vote. Five. Yes.

Okay. Item 7D, the Sterling Villas at King Kings Valley, west of 60th Street and north of Beach Street Drive. Request to plat 10 single family lots, Paramount Homes of Iowa LLC. We have a resolution for approval of the preliminary plat and there are no outstanding issues but there are two conditions of approval. One condition of approval is the city council allowing public utility easements in uh in the front of lots 1 through 10. The second condition of approval involves the applicant providing a private off-site storm sewer easement prior to beginning grading and utility work. Motion to approve. Second.

Okay, it's been moved and seconded. Is there anybody uh online or in the council chambers that would like to address council on this item? Okay. Any any discussion on the dis? All right. Please vote. Five. Yes.

All right. Item eight, receive, file, and or refer. Item 8A, we will receive and file the internal financial reports that are provided in our handouts. Uh item nine, other matters. Are there any other matters that any council person would like to raise for the good of the order? Okay, hearing none, we are adjourned and we will begin uh in on our workshop here uh in let's take a three minute break. Is that too much? Two minutes. Let's just

Good to see you guys.

All right, let's uh let's get let's get going on our workshop here. We've got New Mark in the house. uh talk about our economic development plan and I am very interested to hear uh what they have found out. So we will start here with Ryan Moffett, our community economic development director. Brad Mumford is here as well. All right, Ryan, you've got the floor.

Okay. Good evening, mayor and council. Ryan Moffett, community economic development director. So uh this evening, Newark is here to uh present the findings of the economic development strategic action plan. Uh, as you'll recall, last time we did one of these concluded back in 2017. I think we can all acknowledge a lot's happened since 2017. The world of development and real estate. Certainly, our economy in West De Mo has seen transitions and changes during that time, too. So, we really felt it was an opportune time to basically come back and take this effort on and really create a plan that's going to help shape our direction from from an economic development standpoint over the course of the next decade. A lot of hard work has gone into the preparation of this plan. I know our team's excited to see uh for them to present to council tonight and then to get to work on really implementing the findings of this plan. Uh New Mark's going to lead the presentation for you all tonight and for the sake of just getting through the presentation as efficiently as possible, if you could just jot down your questions at the very end, we'll have plenty of time for discussion here too. Uh that'd certainly be appreciated. Before I turn things over, I just want to acknowledge and thank all the people, the businesses, the regional partners, you all as elected officials, uh, everyone that had input and dialogue into this plan. Uh, and I do want to thank the Newark team, too. They've been great to work with. Uh, they put a lot of work and uh, partnership with us in this process. So, with that, I'm going to go ahead and turn it over to Brian Peterson. He's the managing director for the project and, uh, have them get us kicked off here. Thank you.

All right. Again, save your uh, write your questions down, save them to the end. We'll let uh these guys present all the way through for efficiency. All right. Hey, Rod. Hello.

Well, I want to say um thank you to the mayor and to the council. Uh this has been a a long process. Uh it's been nine months of talking with folks in your community, having boots on the ground, offering insights into economic development challenges and opportunities, and really trying to think and help the city think about what's next when it comes to economic development and growth. Um it's it's a pleasure to be here and to share some of these results. Um the process itself, you know, it's not really possible to uh consolidate nine months of work down into a 45 to 50 minute discussion. Um, so what we're going to be presenting today is the executive summary from the report and some of the key findings, recommendations from our work. Um, but excited to have uh the full report in the council's hands right now. We're in the process of finalizing that full report and wrapping it up. Uh, so I'm sure Ryan and his team will be able to share it with you shortly. Um, as I mentioned, uh, this is a a large report. Um, we have over 400 pages of documentation for your team uh to to go through and to look at and understand. Um, I just wanted to put this up here. Again, not going to go through all of it. Um, but we really spent a lot of time crunching numbers, spending time in the community engaging stakeholders from economic development all the way at the elected level uh to higher education, K12, private sector, employers, etc. to really understand what does the business climate look like here? aware of the challenges and opportunities that the city's facing and how can we make sure that the city is primed to move forward and to attract industries that are set to grow in the next 5 years. Um, so you know what do we know about this project and what about what the city was looking for? We understand that the city last completed a comprehensive strategy in 2017. As Ryan mentioned, a lot of things have changed since then. Uh we understand that the city wants to know where it stands when it comes to economic development. What is your current economic composition look like?

What are the growing and declining jobs and industries both here in West De Mo in the West De Mo metro and nationally? Um you also asked a question about do you have the right proper staffing levels when it comes to economic development. You're a growing city. The way that business has been handled in the past might be different than the way it is moving forward into the future. So we spent a lot of time thinking about that. Um, all of the data that you'll see in the report, it's not just for West Mo. We've also benchmarked West Mo against a set of competitor communities. And that's really important because as you think about ways that you market yourself, it depends on who you're competing with. And there are value propositions that work when you're competing with one community, value propositions that work when you're competing with another. So everything that you see in this report is going to show West De Moines versus the De Moines metro and a set of peers that we identified in conjunction with uh the West De Mo economic development team. Um we also know you wanted to develop strategies to support small business growth. Uh this isn't all about large site selection mega projects. It's also about uh you know the bricks and pavers and the mom and pop shops, the lifestyle service and startups and entrepreneurs. So really covered everything here from top to bottom. Um, just a little bit about Newark. You guys know us because you hired us, but we're one of the world's largest uh growing commercial real estate firms. We have 9,300 professionals all across the world. Um, we have a a team of consultants like myself uh and my two colleagues here who are with me who provide a whole host of services to businesses that are either looking to expand or relocate. Um, so that includes helping businesses find a location through our site selection service, helping them make sure they have the right type of real estate in the right type of space. Geopolitical consulting, we all know how important that is in today's world. Economic incentives advisory, so helping businesses negotiate incentives for relocation orary expansion. Uh, and then uh my team here uh the team that I'm part of, economic development consulting, going into a community, helping it understand

those challenges and opportunities and strengths and ways to move forward. uh for this engagement um you know this slide actually is really exciting to me. You guys had 11 different folks uh in your community from the Newark consulting team looking at the community talking with businesses assessing the business climate understanding where those challenges and opportunities lie. So um some of these folks are site selectors, others like myself are economic development consultants. Um but you had a lot of exposure uh throughout this engagement. Um, as we think about economic development in general, um, you know, things have changed over the last 5 to 10 years about how economic development works. Um, everything now from a site selection and development process is is process driven. It's time, it's speed to market, it's how quickly can I get a project up and going? You know, what are the costs of not doing it now versus doing it tomorrow? Um, economic development is fast and competitive. The way that cities are using incentives is changing. Cities are inventing new ways to use incentive programs uh to help create jobs and job growth. Um you know, you also need to think about coalescing around shared goals, right? Um when it comes to economic development, it's not just a city function, it's a regional function, it's a state function, it's a higher education function, it's K12 function. All of that needs to work and fire on all cylinders so that when a potential project is looking at your community or looking to expand in your community, they decide that they want to stay in or locate in West De Mo. Um, we also spend some time talking about economic diversification. You know, it's it's no surprise that when we think about West De Mo, what we hear uh is data centers and finance and insurance. And this community, frankly, has won time and time again in in recent years when it comes to those types of projects. Those are your areas of strength. We encourage you to continue working uh and making sure that the businesses in this community are are healthy when it comes to finance and

insurance. Uh but we also wanted to talk about diversification. Uh when we think about growth in the future, the growth in the future that's going to happen isn't necessarily in the industries that are currently here in West De Moines. So what does that look like 1 2 3 5 years down the road? Um so our team uh we kind of separated this project out into a series of six phases. Essentially what you need to know is we crunched a lot of data. We talked to a lot of people. Uh we looked and we saw the community. We looked at the sites, the development opportunities that exist at those sites. What are the challenges and opportunities there? Uh we looked at your incentive policies. How do you benchmark against other states? How do you benchmark against other communities? Where are those opportunities for improvement? And finally, we took all of that information and formulated in a set of recommendations. Uh, and that's where I'd just like to say, you know, we talk about our work is kind of concluding. We're wrapping up with the city of West Moy with Ryan and his team. Um, but your work is just starting, right? This is day one of executing the playbook. We're not going to talk through the whole playbook today in the interest of time, but we are going to talk about some of the recommendations that we think are the most critical uh for your community moving forward. So, um what do we see when we when we think about West De Moines as site selectors who are locating projects all across the country? I think that there's a lot of strengths. Um and I know some of these are probably self-evident to your team, but I can tell you we work in communities that don't have these strengths. And so a lot of what we're talking about today is marketing, making sure you have the right messaging when a site selection project comes into the community. You guys are doing great on infrastructure. There has been so much planning on infrastructure, making sure you've got roads, sewer, water capacity. Um that is really one of the core strengths of your community and it will be into the future. Also strong quality of life. You know, I think almost all

the marketing materials I've reviewed from the city of West Moy talk first and foremost about quality of life. I think that's great. I also think that there's an opportunity here for you guys to start marketing yourself as a community for businesses. Um, you've had so many wins in the past few years. Let's start thinking about how we're marketing ourselves not just as a great place to live, but as a great place that top brands that household names choose again and again and again. Development process. This is another critical one. Um, you know, our team sat through a really lengthy development process discussion with your city and I think that, you know, we're happy with how the development process works here in West De Moines. Um, sometimes we have a site selection project and you know, we can't figure out the development process and we need to move away from that community. That's not you guys. You guys have strength. You're willing to work to get permits, planning, zoning done in a in a reasonable timeline uh to help develop projects. That being said, you know, it it's there's sometimes challenges. Um I think the first one that we saw economic diversification. This is to say not to say that you're not diversified, but when you think about growth, it might not be coming from those industries that are currently here. Um we also think that there's opportunities to think a little bit more strategically about future land use. You know, want to acknowledge that you do have a long-term land use plan. Uh but a good example of this is when we start to think about the south and west side of the community. You know, we spent a lot of time looking at the reclex, looking at DMU, uh looking at that massive Microsoft data center that's down there. You guys have an opportunity to think about what the future of that area looks like because I can tell you what DMU told me they wanted, what the RecPlex wants, and probably what Microsoft data center wants are all three competing things. I can also tell you as a site selector when I look down there I see infrastructure I see rail I see power lines I also see very large houses. So

what's what is the opportunity there? It's not my job to tell you guys what it should be but it's my job to tell you I think you need to have a conversation about that and make sure that you're thinking uh thinking strategically about land use. Um some other challenges you know your economic development part department I think the organizational structure is best described as flat it's often times reactive um it's it's relation relational relationship building I think that that's a great format and that has worked well and has led to wins in the past but I think as you think about a community that's growing 70,000 one of the fastest growing uh in the de mo metropolitan area you know what does that look like for the future of your economic development department. Are there opportunities to add staffing? We've made some recommendations around that as well. Uh so as I mentioned, um you know, the communities that we reviewed and the data that we crunched, not just for West De Mo, but incredibly important to look at West De Moines versus who you're competing with. Uh so we worked you know hand in handinhand with uh De Moine Economic Development, West De Moine Economic Development to identify who those peer competitors would be um and to really start to sus out, you know, as a site selector, we're pulling data when we're when we're comparing communities. So all the data that you'll see in the report compares West De Moine again to those those sets of peers. Um, and so what you'll see in the report again is what we would we would take a client through if we had a corporate client that was looking at your community versus a set of peers. Um, and you really start to see areas where West De Moines starts to stand out. We already talked about, you know, fast population growth. You're a young, well-educated community. As we think about the value proposition and marketing for the future of West MO, those are the areas that we need to build on and to make sure that that's front and front and center when it comes to courting new projects. Um, we also, you know, heard a lot about cost of living. I know it's a concern

locally. The cost of living is going up everywhere. That being said, you guys are still an affordable community. And I can tell you from a site selection perspective, it's not just about can I get a building, can I get a project, it's about what's the cost of living for my employees because I don't want to relocate from a lowcost to a high-cost area. Right? So when we talk about marketing, it's affordable, well educated, high quality of life. Those are all critical pieces about how you market your community. Uh we didn't just pull data, of course. We spent a lot of time talking with economic development stakeholders uh all across the community. We talked with private sector businesses. We talked with your universities. Uh we talked with K12. We talked with workforce development providers. Uh we also spent 25 days here, right? That's why this project took 9 months because I wanted to spend time in here experiencing the community, making sure that we talked to everybody we needed to talk to and do a thorough job. So, um, you know, again, it's hard to boil down nine months of work into one or two slides about, uh, what we heard from stakeholders, but I think overall there's a lot of strengths, you know, here to build on. First and foremost, strong business environment. You know, quick permitting timeline, a city where the departments work together to help get a project up and going in a reasonable amount of time. Um, your businesses are overall happy. And again, maybe this is not a surprise to you, but I can tell you I've worked in so many communities where I hear so many negative comments, and everybody here is generally happy with the business environment. So, kudos to the city for for building a business environment where the businesses that are here are happy. There are some realities though that we need to think about. Uh first and foremost, utility constraints. Um you know a few years ago power capacity was not a challenge. We talked to your electrical utility. You might have water and gas right now but electricity is a major major constraint and that's going

to impact who you can go after uh when it comes to new economic development opportunities. Also heard a little bit about the small business environment. Not a lot of space for entrepreneurs. Um, I heard a lot about entrepreneurs working in their basement, at the library, or at Starbucks. That's great. Um, but where are those opportunities to have co-working space, to have maker space, to have opportunities for entrepreneurs to get together and network with one another and to build out that ecosystem? Uh, regional alignment. Uh, we know that you're a very competitive municipality. I know that you guys want to win and that's great. Just make sure you're not tearing down the competition, whether that's Norwok, Walke, whoever. Right? This is a regional effort. Um, it's you, it's the airport, it's Iowa State University, it's the Greater De Mo partnership. So, make sure that you're all singing the same song and telling the same message. Um, at the same point, you know, it's not clear to us how regional and state leadership is telling the West De Mo story. I think there's a lot more to be told and I want you guys to make sure that state and regional leadership when they go to trade shows, conventions that they're telling the full West Mo story. talent pipeline. Um, you know, really strong at the entry level. Obviously, you've got a lot of colleges and universities producing that entry- level talent. There are some challenges at the the mid to senior level. And this is important because as you think about growth of businesses in your community or relocation of businesses, finding that mid to senior level talent, you're going to have to go outside the community to find it in some cases, right? And I talked to so many people that said, "I didn't think anything about Iowa." And then I was asked to relocate here and I thought it was a joke and then I came and I came to West Mo and I loved it and I'm never going to leave again. Right? Those are the stories that you need to be telling. Uh when you hear issues about finding senior level talent, well you can bring them here and they're going to love it. Um you know there's other realities that the city just has to deal with. Limited

outsider understanding. It's a flyover state, right? Uh don't really think about it. Um but overall again really strong family appeal. um great diversity of housing options. These are the things that should come out as you tell your story. Um we didn't just talk to people and crunch data. Uh we also spent some time looking at real estate conditions in the community. Uh we really did three different work streams, two of which we're going to talk about in detail here. Uh first of all, we spent time looking at what's actually listed and available online. So, if we were here today with a corporate client that was looking to relocate, one of the first things that we would do is look online to see what's available. Do you have sites? Do you have buildings? Do you have land? Where are those opportunities? That is our first step. And if you don't, you get eliminated. Um, so we'll talk through some of that. Uh we also spent some time looking at 13 different sites all across the city to understand where are they at in terms of development readiness. What are those challenges and opportunities and how can we make sure that when a big project comes to the De Mo metropolitan area, they see sites in West Mo and they get excited about them. They want to build there because there's no uncertainty that the city will help that project move forward. So, in terms of desktop um listing review, you know, uh we looked at what's listed as available for sale or lease in terms of office, industrial, and land in Western Mo. And I can tell you that what we saw online is probably not commensurate with what is reality in West De Moines. Um I think that there's a lot in here that's not necessarily listed. And I want to say that that's not necessarily West De Mo economics development's job. Um, but it is, you know, an opportunity to work with brokers, to work with people who are actually marketing their property to make sure it's listed not just on a local brokerage network, right? On a national network. If you want to be nationally competitive, has to be on a

national network like CoStar. Um, so again, limited supply and visibility of what we see in terms of supply. Um, industrial properties, there's two in the entire city, West Mo listed online. I don't believe that for one second, but that is what we see when we take that site selection perspective. Land. I know that this is a a gross again a gross misrepresentation. We looked at 13 sites that had over 40 acres. Only three of those sites were actually listed on a national brokerage database. So, you know, when we drive through the community, I see development opportunities left and right, but when I look online and when a site selector looks online, they're not seeing those. Uh, I'm going to turn it over to my colleague Alan who's going to talk a little bit about those 13 sites that we looked at.

Thanks, Brian. Um, I'm Alan Reeves. Uh, I lead our site selection team at New Mark. I was leading the site selection uh and site readiness analysis portion of this workstream. Um, to Brian's point, there's a lot of opportunity that we see in West De Mo. There's no question about you being poised for growth, but a big part of the question becomes where do you put that growth? and you've built out so much so far and there's still a lot of new green field opportunity for you, but so much of that will come from the redevelopment and those new site opportunities. And so when we started the first desktop portion of it, we started to see this lack of sites, lack of buildings, where do you put these new companies that are coming? Where do existing companies that are in the West De Mo area actually grow if they do need to expand? what we didn't see what we wanted to see online. We want to take a more critical eye at it and start to approach it from a more uh intensive true site selection approach and analysis. Uh we have iterations and different variations of site analysis, site selection process that will run. Uh we tried to approach this in a more general way to make sure that we were eliciting the most robust response and really trying to capture all the different opportunities that were going to be available for us. To that end, when we think about the process that we took, it was exactly like we would do for a corporate end user. And so our analysis, our scoring, our our definitions of what a good site is, what is not is really uh it's we it's a learned process from all the work that we've done with our corporate end user clients. Uh just in the past 12 months, we have assessed over,200 sites across the US. So we know what makes a good site good. We know what makes a bad site bad and we know what some of the mitigating factors that you can take to make a bad site or an average site good. And so that was really the lens that we wanted to approach this process with to make sure we understood one what potential options are out there and then two where there may be deficiencies and what steps you could take to try to uh erase or mitigate some of those items in place. First step for us was to send an RFP to the economic development team. Uh typically we would have specific project specifications in place for it. Uh talking about specific square footage

requirement, acreage requirement, utility requirements. Again, because we were trying to be more general and make sure that we're able to capture everything, we had base requirements in place, 40 plus acres, uh marginal power requirements, marginal water requirements. Again, all things that would change project by project, but wanted to make sure that we're going to be able to capture everything. Uh typically, you're not going to hire a corporate site selection consultant for anything under 40 acres. Uh the more niche, the more uh intense it gets, that's when we start to come into play. uh where can you find the big power load, where you can find the big water, where you can find waste water, where you can find the big acreage. That's when we start to get involved in that. And so that's why you start to see some of the requirements we're looking at were relatively uh robust, but not going to be the the the big gigafactor project that we're talking about. for that. When we first got the sites in, uh, we started doing just a desktop review of that simple one through nine rating based on what we were seeing online using our layers, using our access to different filters that are going to be in place that most other corporate site selection consultants are going to use as well. Now, the issue for you right now is that you're often getting cut before you ever even have an opportunity to talk to us. If we send out an RFP and you respond to it and you send us sites and we're looking at it on desktop, because of the layers that we have, because of all the access to different databases that we have, we may see some sort of risk upfront and say, "Hey, we're going to cut you." At the end of the day, we talked about talk about ourselves as being sight selectors, but the reality is we're site eliminators. I'm sifting through hundreds of different responses for any given project. I am looking for the smallest thing to eliminate you on. If you're not appropriately zoned, if you don't have the right entitlements in place, if you're shy by six months on the timeline for utilities, I'll probably look to cut you and move on to the next one. So that's how competitive it is out there in the landscape of the US. Sight selection right now. And so when you think about how you have to perform and where you have to be, you have to be pretty exceptional when it comes down to it. I'm going to get into the scoring and how we got to that point. Couple of caveats and guardrails I want to put on

this. Again, one, we did not have specific project requirements attached to this. it was more general in nature. To that end, we had sites that were ranging from 40 to 50 acres all the way up to 400 plus acres. I typically would not consider those two in the same class and would not be ranking those against each other. So, when you see the rankings, these aren't really ranked uh relative to each other. They're ranked relative to other sites across the nation in that same subset. So a 50acre site in West De Moines is really more compared to a 50acre site in uh Oklahoma or whatever it may be, not necessarily within West De Moines. And we also did not look at any other regional sites within the larger greater greater the De Moine area. Um we then further segmented how they performed based on three factors. Competitive uh regional opportunity or challenge. Competitive means that you have a good site. This is a site that right now can compete on a national level against other sites that are in that competitive subset. Regional opportunity means that there may be some deficiencies in place that if I were looking at this for a truly competitive site selection project, you might fall behind on one or two factors and you may get eliminated before the cut. But that doesn't mean that the site can't work or the site can't be a good opportunity for a company that may already be in West De Moines. Company needs to grow, needs to expand, they need to find another 50 acres. they need to go into a new space for that type of company. If they're not looking outside of the region, that could be a great opportunity for them, but still opportunities for you to improve and put that site into a more nationally competitive set. When you look at challenge, it's not to say that that site could never work, but relative to the other sites we're looking at, it's going to take a lot more work. And so, when you think about your resources, whether that's time, effort, money, people, may not be the place you really want to focus as much of your time and effort. Not to say it couldn't work, but just going to be more challenged than that.

The first thing I want to say is to not be discouraged by all the yellows you see right now. You know, we did not see any truly nationally competitive sites as part of our analysis. What we did see though were multiple sites that were regionally competitive and regional opportunities and then some sites that were challenged, but nothing that could potentially be overcome. I think the thing that I see is really encouraging if you want to break apart what is starting to drag down some of these scores. There's a big difference between structural site issues that may be more difficult to fix like topography. If you've got a mountain for a site, you can get take it down, but that's going to take a lot of money and it's going to take more time. If you've got a massive river running through your site, if you have huge flood hazard risk, if you have massive wetland issues, those are all going to be things that are challenging. Other things that are more easy to fix, proactive zoning, uh making sure that there's a willing seller, we know what the asking price is, uh making sure that it's a site that the community is excited about for that type of process, that type of project. Those are all big things that I think about as nonstructural issues that can very quickly start to pull that up. You see some of the lowest scores in due diligence reports. Again, I talk about myself as a site selector. I'm a site eliminator. I am trying to avoid risk where possible. Now, every single site that we're going to look at is going to have some sort of trade-off. There's going to be a challenge that we have to overcome, some sort of issue we have to mitigate. When we're going into a big site, a big project like this, again, we're talking about 50 acres minimum. Sometimes it's going to be 500, a,000, 5,000. There's going to be issues. There's going to be a lot of unknowns. I want to see as much work up front as possible about additional due diligence been done. Have there been geotech borings? Do you have a wetland delineation report? Are there endangered species on site? Do you have any sort of other outstanding risk factors that I need to know about? It may be that these sites have absolutely none of those things and are great, they're wonderful, but because there aren't those due diligence reports in place right now, I

don't know that. And so I could just as easily come here, think this site is great, start doing my own due diligence, and suddenly something pops up and 6 months of my client's time is wasted on this. what you're up against right now. Other print places in the country are investing a lot of money in proactive due diligence to make sure that these studies are in place to make sure that when those clients come, when those potential corporate end users come, that they have a certain level of confidence that this is going to be a site that isn't going to have any hidden risk attached to them. So things like that, that those are those lowhanging fruit opportunities that you can really start to infect and impact. Now, is it you who does that? Is it working and coaching the the land owners who are there? Those are questions that we'll have to discuss. Uh and there's definitely different pathways for that. But to have some more of those proactive activities in place, that really is going to be such a key factor for West De Mo when you think about continued growth. I'm not going to go through all these. I'm not going to go through all the sites that we looked at. Um what I want to do is just orient you to what we have from a site profile and a site scorecard. And this again is very very much what we would present to a corporate end user who we're taking through the site process. the primary criteria that we're thinking about uh those top level factors that we're going to be talking to them about and how we summarize a site and also some of the layers that we have. Uh you see flood hazard risk, you see electric lines coming through, you see other potential issues that if you're just looking at this in a snap and trying to understand, well, this is site going to work. I'll look at this one and say, well, no, it doesn't. When we talk to the developer, they say, oh, well, there's a plan to to raise this out of flood risk. Okay, that's great, but we didn't know that ahead of time. We also don't know what the actual plan is. We don't know how long it's going to take, and we don't know the cost. So, that's great that it can be done, but we don't know how it's going to be done or how long it's going to take. Things like that. That's what we're looking looking at internally, and you're competing against on a regular basis as other site selectors are looking at West De Mo and your potential

sites. So, we have the site profile and then we have the site scorecard. And we're going to have this for each one of the 13 sites. just gives more detail uh overall evaluation some more of the technical characteristics that we're thinking about um opportunity strengths and challenges throughout and then also just some more detail around what the actual rationale for scoring was. Uh obviously again not going to go through all these tonight. Uh if you have any questions about these after you have a chance to review we're obviously more than happy to go through that. Uh but again I want to leave you with a note of optimism. Uh when you see a lot of yellows and reds I know it's easy to say oh shoot we don't have anything. Uh again, I I see West De Moines as an area poised for growth, and there are some small steps that can be taken to take some of these potential sites and take them from land into true sites that can be opportunities for companies in the future. Brian,

uh thanks Alan for that. Um you know, just just just some key takeaways. I think um first of all, we would encourage you again make sure that your sites are listed. Um make sure you've collected as much information as possible. And what Alan didn't mention is that we've created a database of all 13 of those sites that we reviewed. That's data that you have now that you can work with brokers to make sure the site is listed online, listed, that it's available, make sure there's an asking price attached to it. That's going to help you get recognized when it comes to national and even local expansion projects. We looked through what's available. There's very few buildings. There's two industrial properties, right? If you don't have a product, you don't have a project. So, as we think about growth, we really need to start thinking about site readiness, making sure that a site is ready to support development. Um, you know, when we talk about redevelopment, uh, again, only two industrial properties listed. You're going to be challenged when it comes to industrial development. And I think industrial development is more likely to happen in some of those green field areas that we talked about already, some of those 13 sites that we reviewed, rather than redevelopment uh happening in other parts of the community. Uh we didn't get a chance to talk through a lot of the GIS analysis that we did for the third component of real estate analysis, but we did do some corridor analysis and um spent a lot of time looking at the Valley West Mall and the redevelopment opportunities around there. When it comes to commercial redevelopment, we do think that that is the strongest opportunity for the community. I know that there's a lot of challenges with that. There's been a lot of fits and starts, but I would encourage you again to to keep working at that and unlock that as a as a primary development opportunity. Um, overall though, again, um, a lot of reason for optimism. You are a development friendly community. Um, that is a great thing to hear and it's a great thing to see and we certainly saw it during our time in market. Um, just some other considerations. you know,

West De Moines is becoming an older community uh in terms of housing stock, in terms of uh real estate. Think about redevelopment. Um there's a lot of aging office buildings. The way that folks are using office buildings today, it's completely different than they were pre- pandemic. Right? Today, it's class A. It's flight to quality. It's how many amenities was my office building have? If you've got an office building built in the 70s and 80s, it's not going to have what office users are looking at. So, it's time to start thinking about where the redevelopment opportunities are. Are they repurposing it for future office use? Is it converting it to some other use?

Um, I'm going to hand it over uh to Kim to talk about some of the incentives analysis we completed. Thanks.

Good evening. Hi, I'm Kim Moore. I lead our economic incentives advisory practice as well as our economic development consulting practice here at Newark. And prior to joining Newark, I did economic development at the city level. So, I very much understand what you guys are facing and how you guys can be creative and wanted to really turn that to our specialty of about incentives. Now, this is the part where I geek out and I could spend a lot of time talking in this space. Um, there's about a hundred pages worth of programs that we evaluated not only for Iowa but also against your peer states and peer communities. You can definitely read through that if you just need a good night cap before you're ready to head to bed. Uh but basically it's my job is to take this every day and turn apples and oranges and bananas into apples to apples comparisons. And so wanted to kind of really start setting the pace here of understanding for the end user. That's how we look at everything when we do our economic development strategy work is what does the end user think of it and how do they envision it. So I wanted to touch base on how they think about incentives. So you guys have done a lot of work in site and infrastructure which has been great for the big large projects that you've been working on because that's what they need. they needed mostly infrastructure, but as you start to transition into redevelopment, some other things, some other incentives may become more appropriate for the end user and what they'll be looking for than tax increment financing districts. So, first of all, when you're working in, especially if you're looking at headquarters projects, cash is king. Uh they always want to have cash on the table. Um sometimes it's just to prove to their board that you want them, and it can be as simple as that. So finding a way to have a type of discretionary cash fund is something you'll hear us mention again site and infrastructure you guys have that down there's nothing really I need to tell you about that but that is really important when you're looking at big capital investment projects and especially nowadays when a lot of these uh your power companies and others are actually not able to participate in infrastructure expansion and that is either falling on the company or falling on you to help them to make sure that they can get to development readiness. Um, tax credits. Tax credits are great, but there are

rankings to tax credits. Uh, refundable, transferable, always the favorite. Non-transferable a little harder, especially if you don't have a tax liability in the state. So, that's where there can be a little bit of a misunderstanding. We'll talk a little bit about how that kind of impacts Iowa um with because of the fact that your main incentive is a nonrefundable tax credit. So when you come to a number and if a company doesn't have a tax liability, you tell them you're going to give them $30 million and it's non-refundable tax credit, that really equals zero. And so that's kind of a big point to to understand. Um tax exemptions and abatements. So kind of after the tax increment financing process is kind of worked away, you're coming back to redevelopment, it may be better for a company to be thinking about a tax abatement or a tax rebate to do some of the redevelopment of a process because they don't need infrastructure anymore. the infrastructure is at the site already. What they're working on is how do they bring that building up to what we call super class A space which is what most companies are looking for now or how can you transition it into something else maybe R&D labs maybe even housing and that capability. So to look at that, this isn't in necessarily a an important order. Um I would also bring uh workforce training up probably a little higher if it were only because so many of our companies are looking to workforce development training programs. The reason it kind of falls on the bottom is most workforce development programs are what we consider inind which means there's no actual money transferring to the company. it is just some free training or some paid for training that can be tied into your universities, community colleges or trade schools. Um, so for that there's a little it's a little difficult to get a cash value to that for a company. It's also sometimes a little difficult to make sure that you can get their people into training following the the rigor of the restrictions that come along with those types of training of trying to create a class of 30. It's hard to run a manufacturing facility if everybody is in training. um utility incentives are becoming more and more important um

because again a lot of utilities for a while were actually helping and insisting in providing that type of infrastructure. They're not. It's getting more and more expensive. It's getting harder and harder and that is falling either to the company to actually capture that um or to a local government to help them support and in getting those utilities done. We talked already about the non-refundable tax credits and then of course anything about speed. Brian mentioned, you know, it's all about, you know, speed to development, working at the speed of business. So any types of expedited permitting, fee wavers, those types of things that can kind of help expediate that is a way that you can look at the incentives. So this just gives us a little bit of a playing field as we kind of go in and talk about the comparisons. So as I mentioned, we did look at you compared to your uh peer cities. Um, this the the incentive score at the top is a a team score that we put together every year on who's got the right types of incentives. They're using them in the right creative ways and they're actually becoming a good bottom line enforcer for uh our projects as they come through. And as you can see, Iowa ws ranks the highest out of all of the areas that we considered. Um, and only one community um, which is Minnesota actually does retention incentives that they can claim are full retention incentives. Everything else requires new job creation, new capital investment, R&D, or to be located in a special zone. With that, most of the time you are right in there with everybody else. Um, as I mentioned before, non-refundable tax credits is the main state incentive. So, that is a little bit of a challenge if you don't have a tax liability within the state. However, there are ways that you as a city can help mitigate that and support that from a different perspective. And we'll talk a little bit about that in our recommendations. Um, and then I, you know, when we look at this and you actually look through the report, you'll see some comparisons and Iowa shows very competitive, uh, in the space as it goes to look for different projects. A lot of them has to do with your data center um, incentives and how those have been

supported in the past. Now, it's maybe time to be a little creative and see what you can actually do with some of your incentive policies to start maybe working on some of the R&D and other things that'll align with some of the target industries that we'll be mentioning. All right. So, here are our takeaways. I'm just going to hit on a couple here. Um, you've historically incentivized infrastructure. Again, that's great when you have a very large project looking for heavy water, sewer, power. Um, but for some of the regular, what I would say not as invasive, uh, uses of manufacturing, there could be some other ways that you could use incentives that could support them, would encourage them to look like that. Even with your TIFF, you've done some really creative things. in fact using it to actually do some paper job grants that have come through your tiff's districts. Um that's really what wonderful and a great way to use and be creative in that space. However, there are some things you could do to improve the valuation of that to a developer if you so wish to make them more competitive. And one of that is really looking at the base value years of when you actually start the base value. Um if you looked at that you can make some changes to that that would actually increase the valuation and actually make that more lucrative to the end user. So for that project you really really want you have some space that you can be a little more creative. Um new target industries we're going to require a little bit different approach um probably not only in the way that you look at them from an incentives perspective but also how you look at them from a return on investment perspective. Um you'll hear us talk a little bit about agratech here in the the future. So those types of R&D projects, those types of more small business startups kind of incubator type situations where they're growing really fast and could be your next unicorn here known to be grown here in West De Moines. You might have to think about that a little differently. They're uh you know, their financials are going to look a little different than what you're used to from a big giant corporation. um the types of incentives that'll be useful to them will be a little different than you know a large tax and

financing district or even something to that nature. So thinking about how you can be more creative for some of those newer types of industries that are coming into the market, I think is going to be something that you can take a look at. Which leads us into when you're competing with certain types of projects. We did mention cash is king. You know, it would be wonderful if you guys had it in your budgetary com uh abilities to find a way to maybe create a discretionary fund that you can use for cash grants. It's a special deal closing fund that you guys can do. Other cities have done that with different using funding entities, whether it's a penny from their property taxes, a penny from their sales taxes. Um, you know, even just you got a little bit of left over in the general fund and you want to put a half a million dollars towards that and you start to build that up. I would make it rolling over that way if you don't use it in a year, you can continue to build that fund up. And that way when you have a really big project that you want or even a small project that you want to help support, you have a discretionary fund that you can pull from um in order to support that through a cash grant of some kind. Um child care. This is a big deal and this has been a big deal come growing no matter where. This is not something unique to you, but people are coming up with creative incentives to help support child care. Not only does it help with your workforce development initiatives, it helps bring people back into the workforce that maybe can't work because childare isn't available or it isn't affordable. Um, so finding an incentive that could work with a corporate user. Not saying you fund it for them. I'm saying you work in partnership with them in order to support some type of child care initiative um through an incentive would be a really new creative use to use that fund. Um, lastly, um, encouraging, um, your developers to keep office stock up to date. Uh, this also goes back to the TIFF challenge. A tax increment financing isn't really great for when you're trying to redevelop an office building. A tax abatement or rebate might be something really more encouraging to a developer to help bring that along. That means you can bring that up to a class A space that fits

along the lines of what they're looking for in development these days. um and and office tenants or other uses. Could you turn it into lab space? Could you turn it into research space? Could you do something different with it? Um but that will take a different usage than the tax room and financing that you've been using in the past. And then last is to just do a local incentive at the West Point that can encourage some of these other types of development that we talked about briefly um like R&D or a tech or smaller businesses as they come into growth. With that, I'm going to turn it back over to Brian. Oh, still.

Uh, thanks, Kim. So, um, we've talked about a lot already about real estate, about business, climate, um, about sites, infrastructure. We really spent a lot of time trying to to put all of that together. uh we did an exercise we call asset mapping which is basically looking at if we are coming into this community again with an industrial project or an office project what are the factors that are critical for those businesses when they choose a location and how does West De Moines rank according to those factors. Um so we used about 25 to 30 different factors. The factors are different for industrial than they are for office but really wanted to kind of again show where West Mo ranks from a site selection perspective for some of these opportunities. Um so before we look at the ASM map, let's just look at first how to read it. Um if you look left to right from the bottom, uh that's showing the importance of critical location factors for offices uh or sorry for industrial activity. So on the on the right there, you see sites and land, industrial space. Again, you need those things if you're going to grow. Uh on the on the top left, you see things like fiber. That's still critical uh for an industrial project, but it's not as critical as sites or land. So left to right, we're looking at increasing level importance. As we go from top to bottom, we're looking at where we think West De Moines ranks in in terms of national competitiveness. So when we talk about uh your industrial value proposition and how to court an industrial tenant when it comes in here and looks, it's telling them about how well you've done with infrastructure planning for water. It's showing them the roads and the quality of your your highway and freeway network, right? Um it's talking about things like market access. At the same time, you know, there's work to be done. Um, you need sites. The site readiness needs to be improved. You need space. Um, those are really two things that are are constricting you right now. So, start thinking about ways you can encourage those developments.

Uh, when we look at office, you know, it's probably not a surprise. We think your community generally scores a lot better when it comes to potential office projects. Um, there's just a lot of really great things going on in West De Moines. uh you've got a really strong talent pipeline, really strong quality of life, colleges, universities that are producing the talent that's needed. Um really the only thing that I think we could say that's a negative for the community is just public transit. Um and some of it's just an exogenous reality that you're you're a suburb. Um and it's a public transit system isn't necessarily concentrated uh in suburban areas. Um, you know, up to this point, we've talked a lot about larger scale development, large development opportunities, but this report isn't just about how do you attract or grow businesses that are here. It's talking about small business development. So, those businesses from 5 to 50 employees. How do you help them take the next step? And not only take the next step, but make sure that that next step happens here in West De Moines. Um, we talked a little bit about um, you know, strong support of the community. I think everybody supports small business development. Um, you've got a really strong concentration of finance and insurance, small-cale finance and insurance firms. Um, obviously really strong retail component. You know, all the small businesses that are there in Valley Junction. Uh, but one of the major challenges that we saw is your small business ecosystem is fragmented. When I say fragmented, I can't tell you how many small businesses that I talked to for this project that were bootstrapping everything themselves, which is really too bad because I know that West Mo has a ton of assets when it comes to small business development. You've got an amazing SBDC. You've got a really great chamber. You've got networking events going on, but what I'm hearing from small businesses through these discussions is, "I don't know where to go. I don't know where the resources are. I can't get through to to city planning about my permitting issue. Um not really sure who to talk to. Right? So, as we think about small business, what are the ways that we can encourage that ecosystem to grow to

encourage entrepreneurs to get out of their basement, to get out of Starbucks, to start interacting with one another and make sure that that ecosystem is strong. Um you know, retail space is a challenge. again, uh, Valley West is what 95% occupied or sorry, not Valley West, Valley Junction, 95% occupied. Really great space. Um, you know, when I see that, I say, "Wow, let's have more of that." Like that's creating an identity um where one doesn't exist in a lot of other communities. So, you've done a really good job, but like let's start thinking about growth and expansion uh down in that part of the community. Um, again, also just more opportunities for co-working maker spaces. there are maybe one or two, but I don't think any of the small businesses that we spoke to really understood that those spaces were available for them. Um, we also spent some time thinking about again where's the future of growth for West Moy? Um, is it in the industries that you have right now? Is it in going after something new and finding those new opportunities? Um, and we really took kind of a multi-pronged approach to identify what we call target industries, those that should be focused on uh by Western One Economic Development. Um, first of all, we spent a lot of time looking at what's here now, what's growing, what's declining. Uh, but we also spent time looking nationally, um, and developing an econometric model that we use that looks at all 300 industries, their presence in the West De Moines, De Moines metropolitan area, uh, and what's happened to those industries over the last 5 years. Uh, spent a lot of time, engaged nearly 70 stakeholders to hear what their vision for the future of the community was. Uh, and also, you know, bringing in our site selection team. We're working on projects in specific industries that we know are hot, that we know are growing, that we know are looking for spaces to expand and relocate. So, kind of taking all of those uh four components into approach. Um we identified a set of target industries for the community. Before we talk through them, just want to talk about how we think about target industries. Right? Target industries are industries where you're going to win

because you got a really strong value proposition, but the way that you treat them is not all the same. um we really put them into three different buckets. There's industries that should be targets for attention and that means these industries are here now and today. Um you know, we've got the the quote up here, do no harm. That does not mean do not engage. Um but what it does mean is work with those businesses that are here that are your bread and butter right now. Make sure they're happy and when the time comes for them to expand, make sure again that they're choosing West De Moines first. Um, we also talk about accelerate and attraction. Accelerate might be an industry that has a lower concentration uh in West De Moines, but it's growing. Maybe you have some small to midsize firms that are looking to take that next step to scale up. Again, make sure it's in West De Mo. Uh, attract is kind of the the final one. Um, you're going to have to go outside of your community to start attracting this target industry because it doesn't exist here right now. That doesn't mean you don't have a strong value proposition, but for whatever reason, it's either been overlooked uh or the time has become right now for you to start attracting that industry. Um so the two uh target industries that we think are really strong areas of retention focus, data centers uh and finance and insurance. Uh again, it's not do not engage, it's do no harm, continue to engage, make sure that those businesses are happy. You know, we heard a lot about uh the Microsoft data center training program at DMAC, all the great partnerships that have come up through that. Let's make sure that that continues, right? And let's make sure that we're doing retention visits with Microsoft every quarter to make sure, oh, they're thinking about expansion. Oh, they're thinking about this. Oh, they need this supplier to come into the community. Let's make sure we have a space for that supplier to come into the community so that Microsoft is happy and when the time comes for expansion, they

can expand in West Point. Uh similar story with finance and insurance. Um sorry, similar story with finance and insurance. Um we think that that's a strong target for retention. Um when we talk about growth of this industry, uh really the strongest headwind is the impact of artificial intelligence and automation on future job growth. Um if you looked at the new Mark website uh we actually came out with a report uh a couple days ago where our economists forecasted demand for office space and office occupations over the next 5 years um amidst the rise of artificial intelligence. Our forecasts say nationally we're projecting a.3% growth in office related occupations for the next 5 years. Now, that doesn't mean new jobs aren't going to be created, but there's going to be new job loss because of AI, because of automation. So, what does that mean for West De Moines? It's probably not going to be putting up largecale office buildings in the south and west of your city, but it is going to be going and working with JP Morgan Chase and every single other finance and insurance business to understand what their AI implementation policy is to understand what that means for workforce. It might also be saying, "Hey, let me get you to partner with DMAC to provide AI training to the employees here, right? How can you make sure that you're staying relevant amidst an industry that is projected to decline?" Uh, continue to engage with them, make sure that they have what they need. Um, there are some industries that we think would be great opportunities for acceleration and attraction. Um, we talked a little bit about eggte already, um, but there's a lot going on in this space. When we talk about eggte that can be anything from designing robotics for harvesting plants to crossbreeding through different biological processes uh to sending genetic material all across the world. Um it it's really all

of the above and for each of these industries we have developed a full uh you know multi-slide business case that you can kind of see exactly what we're talking about. Um, but when we talk about eggte, that's an industry that's taken off, not necessarily in West De Moines. Uh, but West De Moines has so many assets that would be attractive to an egg tech company. You're right near the airport. You've got space. You've got power and water. Maybe not power for a data center, but power for a smaller scale, high R&D operation. Um, that's the opportunity when it comes to eggte specialty food manufacturing. This is an industry that we've seen grow uh nationwide time and time again. Um, you know, we're not talking about making cereal or processing uh hogs here. We're talking about making things like neutrauticals, uh, highly specialized one-off things, protein bars, nutrition bars, uh, different types of powders, neutruticals, and and things that are used as health foods, al also often times called functional foods. There's water here, there's power here, there's workforce here, there's really smart people already doing this at the ISU campus. you need to be going up to the ISU campus and saying, "Hey, did you know that West De Moines has got sights, power, water, and we're willing to support you as we grow?" Uh, third one, regional sports and recreation. You know, this isn't just about the reclex. Um, but when we came and we saw the reclex and we heard the success story, uh, there is opportunity there. Um, you know, youth sports, amateur sports growing incredibly fast. Um, you know, for this one, we've actually identified a few different communities for the city to look at when you think about where those growth opportunities are. I think the Reclex is great. Um, I think that there's opportunities to build around it, but the real question is where do you want to go with it? Do you want to be the youth sports capital of Iowa? Do you want to be the youth sports capital of the United States? Do you want to be the sports tech capital of the United States? Do you want professional sports? Do you want amateur sports? You know, we

know you're getting curling. um how do we make sure that we're focusing on what we're doing there and use it not only as an amenity and a quality of life to attract people but as an economic development engine for the community. Um last industry and uh cold chain logistics and innovation. This isn't something that's here right now uh but we know that cold chain and cold storage has looked at your community in the past for site selection projects. This is a little bit complimentary to egg tech and specialty food manufacturing. But as we think about manufacturing food, neutruticals, agricultural u agricultural products, some of those are going to need cold storage. Um so there's a lot of opportunity here in West De Mo, especially around the airport to have cold storage, to manufacture a product, put it in cold storage, send it to the airport, and send it out to customers across the world. So again, great opportunity that we see there. So um you know after completing all this all this analysis looking at these potential target industries um you know that's a lot of work uh but the work is not done and in fact our team identified a number of different recommendations that we think the community can undertake in order to make sure that you're well positioned uh to address some of those deficits that we identified but also to leverage some of the assets that your community has. So when it comes to those target industries, whether it's retain, accelerate, attract, you're ready to do it and to support growth moving forward into the future. Um each of the recommendations that you'll see uh have been assigned a category. So business retention, business expansion, marketing, things of that nature. We've also worked with uh the economic development team to identify the appropriate stakeholder to undertake those recommendations. So um you know, this is not just homework for West Mo economic development. This is homework that might be for your K12 system, for higher education, for your corporate uh philanthropy, for your corporate

members, uh for the business community. So, um we came up with uh just over 50 recommendations or 56 recommendations for the community. And I know sometimes people see that number and they they freak out. They say, "Well, that's 56 things I'm doing wrong." No, that's not the case. In fact, we work with communities that can't take 56 recommendations, execute. We think you guys can take 56 and you can execute all 56 of them and those will position you for future success. Um, so I know as much as you'd like to hear me talk through 56 things you should all be doing, um, we had a lot of debate. I we tried to get it down to 10. Uh, we couldn't. So, we're going to talk through uh the top 12 recommendations uh that we think would improve the community's competitive position. We're going to take this as a team.

So, um I think the first thing that that really stands us out to us as we look at West De Moine, your community has always sold itself as a community that's a great place to live. Um quality schools, uh great place to live, affordable housing. That's all good and true, but I think that the time has come for Western to start marketing itself as a community that is a strong business environment. And I know that you've got a Microsoft data center. Uh, and the first thing Ryan told me was that Microsoft chose chose West Moy. And the reality is Microsoft didn't choose you once, they chose you six times, right? And when I, as a site selector, when I come in here, I see win after win after win. Somebody choosing you six times. That should be front and center in all of your economic development marketing messaging. So, think about how you can shift that messaging. Quality of life is still extremely important, but you have so many wins under your belt that need to be celebrated and need to be brought up in your marketing materials. And I've got a whole laundry list of quotes of happy businesses that I can give you that didn't make it into the executive summary, but kudos to to the city um for for building that uh business development environment. Second one, um, as you think about RFI and RFP responses, only limit it to what you're actually capable of delivering and doing. I know it's enticing to want to to respond to every single RFI and every single RFP, but if you don't have the site, if you don't have the infrastructure, if you don't have the utilities, um, don't respond. Start focusing on the things that you do well. And there are so many things that this community does well that you don't need, you can afford to be choosy with what you're going after and chasing.

I'd also like to elaborate on that one a little bit. So, when we send an RFI, as Alan mentioned, we are site eliminators. We are not here to keep you on the list. If you continue to submit RFIs that do not qualify, in other words, you don't have the right site size, you don't have the right infrastructure, it actually damages your reputation with site selectors. It actually makes them think that you're not a sophisticated market and that you don't really understand development. So, it can actually cause people who don't know you, who have not looked at you for a project to be feel like, uh, they are just a small community and they haven't figured this out yet because they don't know how to properly respond to an RFI. So, what you don't want to do is do that in a game of, well, you know, oh, if we just show them something, maybe we can get them here and then we can show them. Unfortunately, that is not how economic development works anymore. used to be that way a long time ago, but it hasn't been that way in a very long time. Uh, so that would be one thing that we would just caution you against. Plus, you have a small staff of economic development. So having them respond to every RFI that comes in the door that doesn't necessarily fit with what your community wants or even really can serve um from a standpoint of what you have available limits their availability to do the things that they really could be getting some powerful gain from uh because of the fact that they're just responding to all of these RFIs. So we would really caution you on being you know very specific and proactive about how you do that type of work. Uh next one, use online resources uh to look at expiring leases. Utilize those relationship with brokers. So um you know as we talk about how the ways business uh the ways office space is being used, it's changing significantly. And what does that mean? That means when businesses have expired leases, uh they're looking to either downsize or change the type of space that they're in. Um you want to make sure first and foremost that you don't lose what you have. uh there are tools and ways that you can go out there work with again with those brokers to make sure that if

a company has an expiring lease coming up you've met with them that Western Economic Development has met with them and that business understands the value proposition that the community is bringing

and unfortunately if they open the door to look for new space they will open the door to look everywhere. So having them look outside of here, it it once they open that door to look anywhere else than where they are right now, they're not just going to focus here. So you want to catch those as early as possible and redirect them locally. Uh city planning, conduct a comprehensive corridor study for the area near the reclex. Again, uh we talked about this a little bit already. What is the future of that area? There's a lot of infrastructure down there. You've got a university that's very happy with the city. You've got the reclex that you could start to build out around and use it as an economic development engine. I also see rail. I also see power. I also see industrial opportunities. Again, um that area needs to be thought about with some intention. Uh and make sure that you're balancing the needs of what's down there already uh with thinking about the future and where those opp development opportunities lie. Um same thing with uh Valley Junction. You know, we we talk a lot about suburbs, especially in the De Mo metropolitan area. Maybe they don't have the strongest sense of place. You guys have got a really strong sense of place in Valley Junction. Um, every single storefront that that we drove by, it appeared to be it was occupied 95% occupancy. Um, where are the opportunities to expand on that, right? How can we make Valley Junction the crown jewel? And it doesn't have to be putting up more buildings. Is it wayfinding? Is it signage? Is it ingress and egress? where are those opportunities? Because when I see Valley Junction, I say, "Gee, I would love to have that in my community." And I think you guys would like to have more of that. And I know that there are challenges there um when it comes to development, but let's think about ways that we can turn it up and support additional small business development in Valley Junction.

And I'd also bring up a little bit about we were talking about the entrepreneurship and creating a little bit more robustness in that ecosystem. Yeah, that's going to be really important. Um that any type of financial services company, life science, agricultural, technology companies, um headquarters specifically, they are looking for a very robust and strong uh entrepreneurship ecosystem. It gives them this just feeling that there this is a place that's innovative and it does things and it's really important to your recruitment message. So again, that's just building on that to actually give them what they need to feel like this is the right environment for them to grow. Do you want to take incentives?

Oh, sure. I'll take the incentives one. Um, so again, this is one coming back to that uh creating that discretionary incentives fund. We think that that's a primary focus that where it would give you the opportunity to really allow you to be creative. You don't have to use it. You can always make the parameters of how you're going to give it out and the clawbacks that would might be necessary for those companies that are receiving it. You know, I would also caution just be careful on how much you want to lay into that. we have a lot of people who lay too many things into it and then it becomes a disaster for your team to actually handle the compliance part of it and we can talk more about that offline um if you would like but basically to create a fund that you can use as a deal closing fund for a project that you really really want or one that fits best in your community and it's just great to have that as a way to be like okay this is just that last little piece that might jump them over the side to determine that west de mo is where they want to Um, we've already talked a lot about um, branding and marketing. You know, I I think the marketing message right now is go west. Um, I think that West De Mo is a community that doesn't need to sell itself using word play. Um, you guys have so many business success stories. We look at your website, uh, none of them are on there. Uh, they need to be up there. And the the pro business, progrowth success stories, testimonials, all of that, you guys have it. I have a whole laundry list of of positive quotes and positive things that have been said about your community that should be front and center on your economic development website.

I came in today through the airport and I was reading the signs that I was like as I was exiting and I was like ah that's really great. Ooh, that could be really great. Oo and I was like I really should have taken pictures of them because I was like honestly thinking like the these are kind of where the business message needs to be. And I was also loving the fact that it was growing on words and creating a labor force that only you can do. They were there was one there for uh the university and it said we grow agriconomists and I'm like whoa look who's getting fancy you know like it's not an economist it's not an agriculture degree it's an agriconomist degree and I was like okay this is really getting that and that's where I think you can also make some steps in your workforce development initiatives and how you're putting forward those types of things especially around AI and is how it's going to impact insurance you're going to be because you have so many of them it is going to impact you guys in a very different and how you turn that on its head to be a positive instead of a negative by maybe creating a workforce that's not exactly existing here now, but you could be one of the forefronts of creating an AI type of skill set in your community could actually make you be an outside market that these companies start to look at for growth.

Um, we've talked about this a little bit as well. Um, defined roles for economic development. I think that the way West Mo economic development has functioned in the past uh has obviously led to a lot of wins, but you're a growing community. Um and population growth is going to continue more population, more people, more businesses, more work for your economic development team. I think it's time to start thinking about a hierarchical structure uh and assessing whether or not you have the appropriate amount of staff required in order to do all the economic development recommendations that we've talked about here and ensure that you're engaging with businesses on a regular basis. Uh that kind of feeds into our our second discussion point here. You know, we talked about a fragmented small business ecosystem. Um it's a challenge. Your small businesses are bootstrapping it. Uh they're calling the city and they might not be getting a response or they're not sure where to go uh to find certain services or to even find a space to do their business. So, uh let's make sure that the city has someone in place. I'm not saying you need to add staff, but let's make sure that there's some way that a small business that's here in West Mo can engage and grow and stay here um when growth time comes.

Yeah. And for site readiness, this plays on what we were talking about earlier. Whatever you can do on the front end to further develop that site, even if getting those studies in place, that's a big big step that you can take. It really makes such a big difference in that process. Um we have a number of recommendations around the site readiness part and a lot of those are about those proactive measures you would take uh consideration even of those high priority sites that we have that would be your best opportunities for those competitive national projects. Uh proactively zoning them for specific uses. I I know that you have a flexible comprehensive plan right now that allows you to uh be somewhat nimble and you can choose the right thing when it does come. But the risk at that is that often when you try to be everything to everyone, you're suddenly nothing to anyone. And so identifying what industries you do really want to go after and identifying which those high priority sites are, that could be something for you to consider again on that proactive measure that's going to put you in a better position because they're going to be other sites out there have all due diligence studies that are fully zoned and they've got a mountain of public support saying yes, we want this type of industry, this manufacturer, we want it at this site. And if you're not able to say that, you're going to be behind them the whole time.

Uh last couple of recommendations. Um you know, let's talk about a small business ecosystem map. Also missing uh from the West De Mo economic development web page, but we want to make sure that West De Mo economic development knows the right people and the right resources to put those small businesses into touch with when they need help. Uh so the first step is reaching out to them to make sure they know that West De Mo is willing to help. but it's also uh Weston Wayne Economic Development's opportunity to develop those relationships with small business service providers. Um finally uh this is just also a really great case study that actually exists in in your community. Uh the Greater Dwayne Partnership has done this when it comes to workforce development. I think they've mapped maybe 50 or 60 different workforce development service providers. Um, and so when you're working with businesses that need to change their workforce, whether it's uh finance and insurance or some other type of industry, make sure that you have those relationships with the workforce service providers that can help with reskilling, with upskilling, with wraparound services. And again, this isn't just I know a guy at DMAC, I know a guy at ISU. This is I know every single service provider on that map of 50 service providers so that when someone comes to me with workforce challenge, I have the knowledge and I can redirect them to the right resources that they need so they can continue to grow in the community.

I think that's it. So, um that is it. Um I can't believe we were quiet for this long. I've never seen this before. I missed you. Yes. No doubt. It was It was a struggle for me. It was a struggle. All right, let's let's start here down at the end with Doug. Doug, do you have any any questions, comments? Don't feel like you need to. Um, one quick thing. Where do other cities like ours get this money to do these things?

Oh, there's a lot of places. Um, okay. There's a lot of funding through EDA grants and others. Um, when we talk about the sites, a lot of states are putting those funds together. We actually keep track of those. I know your time,

but but that that is a lot of the states have come through. And I mean, don't don't count them out just yet. There's been some other states that weren't necessarily big providers in the space that have learned the importance of site readiness. And so, they've already started to put some fun money behind that going forward. There's plenty of examples that your state can take a look at, but that is where some of it, but if not them, it's EDA grants, Department of Energy grants, um, a lot of federal funding that is out there that you can go after to help support that. And then the other is self-fund. Unfortunately, I I think about like the due diligence studies for the sites like do property owners pay for that or do we pay for that or

it all depends. We did a cut a number of different ways. I think the biggest and most obvious role you can play is just in that of education. Um, if you want to uh participate financially, that's that's amazing. That's great. But I also understand that if they get the the the the deal, then they're going to stand to benefit a lot, right? So, you have to balance that. But, if you can at least educate them on the competitive process that is being undertaken every single time they're getting site looked at, that can at least be a big role for you. You know, basically showing them the list of reports that most sites provide when we are looking for sites. Anything else? No.

No. I'm sure I'll have questions through the report. All right. Well, I have tons of notes, but I won't ask a lot of questions. Um, it's just two things that in intrigue me about all the data and everything that you have gone over. You've mentioned marketing. Marketing is so critical. It's almost like if you build them, they will come, but they won't come if they don't know.

That's right. So I see a lot of marketing opportunities in the information that you provided. Um areas of growth just real quick. Would you envision in the area of the where the Rex Rex Plex is and the expansions that we're doing, what's the feasibility of a housing development, town homes, housing All of this is everything you have discussed is in terms of businesses but I haven't heard anything you know in terms of homes town homes.

So in part of the redevelopment part the GIS part that we didn't speak a lot to there's a little more conversation around housing opportunities and maybe some redevelopment there. I don't think we're going straight to the reclex for housing opportunities. The goal with that is is one, there's just a ton of infrastructure down there that would be a big waste of your investment up to this point if you went strictly residential in that area. So, what as Brian recommended, you know, in that phase, which is do a feasibility study in that area, focus on that area specifically, look at the feasibility of it being a sports complex or something that draws sports from all over. Um, and doing that there. So, that would mean leaning more towards hospitality potential opportunities. So nice hotels, restaurants, those kinds of things that feed to the people who are kids are playing there. Maybe some shops here or there

park maybe water park what specialty you know sporting equipment type scenarios um you know can come into these kinds of mixes as well. Um but that would be the first thing is take a look at that area and actually do a study of that area to see what would actually be possible capable and feasible down there. But, you know, obviously I don't think that it's it's zero housing, but it probably wouldn't be a priority necessarily considering the infrastructure you've already put in. Well, the only thing I'll add is this is only my second city council meeting. Congratulations. Welcome.

She's hit the ground running though and she's picking up the pace, trust me. So, no. And we do have, you know, associated with the Waterpark Hotel Convention Center, we do have like 150 units of affordable housing that are planned, provided that it can work for the developer at that point in time. So, and that's going to be for people that are going to be working in and around that area. So, I hope that comes to fruition, but I don't know. Anything else, Fette? No. Okay, Matt. Okay. Uh, this is the opportunity to ask you guys questions, right? I mean, are you guys are contracts over? I mean, you can still ask us questions, but we just won't be here in person to answer that. Very good. Send them through Ryan and we will answer.

All right. Perfect. Two items I'd like to just get a understanding on. You talked about a utility incentives.

Here uh in West De Mo, we have what we call franchise tax, which is a tax that go on your electrical bill that you may have. Okay. So when under utility incentives, one of the challenges you identified and I think we're all very concerned about is the ability to um I've heard it be called uh load uh load ramp. Uh basically how soon can someone build something um and get the power they need to to do it? What I and when you had in there you had reduced rates, credits, something else. What are communities doing to address that challenge? because what I saw was reduced rates and in my mind it's like don't raise our franchise tax but what is what is going on to try to meet that need I know that's maybe a regional thing through an RTO or the state you know but is there anything a city is doing

starting yeah we can share all right um I think one thing that you can do is like rate writers or rate reductions for high users um so that's one thing that you see a lot of cities do so if you've got somebody who needs a lot of water usually there's a break point and then at if you're using water above this amount they get a price break for for that water and it's kind of counterintuitive when you're thinking like I have to put all this infrastructure in people are pressuring us to go the other way

of course of course but that that is probably the biggest is what we call rate writers and you see that also with some utilities not all utilities can participate um you're also seeing utilities go the opposite direction so for years and years and years specific utilities especially the best performing utilities in the us were funding infrastructure. So they were building substations, they were providing all of the the expansions to get the power to your site because of what has happened in the basic just demand for power and the lack of transformers and switches and all of those wonderful fun infrastructure things that they need to actually get power to a site. We're seeing more and more that of that fall onto the end user to actually pay for that. We one of the things I'm actually giving a speech later this week in a different state um in regards to things that incentives really need to be thinking about when they're going through the incentive process. And one of those is nobody is capturing the capital investment that an enduser is having to put into infrastructure now on their own. It's not captured in the valuation of their building. It's not captured in the valuation on their tax roles. It's not cap it's captured by the utility company because they didn't have to pay for it. and it is opening up utilities into other parts of the city that aren't necessarily getting those utilities at this point in time. But the business is receiving no benefit from that other than just getting the power that they really need to their site. Uh so from that perspective, there needs to be some creativity in how that valuation is captured and how that can be credited towards the business for the investment that they're in. Um but that's going to have to be just a full-on incentive shift of mentality um just across the US at this point in time and probably even in Europe as well. Yeah, we talk about like inside the fence development, outside the fence development. I think some things that Kim is mentioning there is when you talk about outside the fence and you know additional uh transmission lines need you that may be running to that end user site but it's going to benefit potentially other users within

the area and end user now to Kim's point being asked more and more to shoulder the cost of the outside defense infrastructure costs more than they ever were before. What starts to happen though then is that they're starting to add those capital cost up. And so they're obviously looking for those locations that can provide them the lowest cost solution for that. And so that's either a we need to be as close as possible to existing infrastructure. So that extension that we do need to make is as minimal as possible or b someone whether that's the state, the county, the city, the utility is providing some of those proactive measurements up front to get them to that point there need to be.

Okay. I think there's also a second piece of that which is that you have to have a plan. So you have to work with your utility to make sure that they have a true service plan to get that power to that site. That goes into some of the due diligence that he's talking about for the three primary sites that you're going to pick to be the ones that you're going to put out there. You should be sitting with your power company and you should have a defined number of months that it's going to take them to get power up to this point. you know, this many gigawatts or this many megawws at that site and how long it's going to take and what that timeline looks like because we were just talking about this in the car about a project that I was working and you know we were at a sitting at a site and I could see the power line like a block and a half away that needed to come to the site but it was 10 times as expensive for them to bring that a block and a half as it was for another community to bring a 345 KV line 8 miles. So there's reasons behind that and it comes more of understanding is your problem bringing the the infrastructure to the site or is it a generation problem and you know the difference was we were having to pay for a new power plant on one site for generation and not necessarily the infrastructure. So if you're going to market those sites you need to understand what it is you actually need to get them to the site. What is the true timeline to get that there? because that's going to give you some potential competitive advantage if you can get it below 48 months.

Okay. To to be clear, power is a challenge everywhere right now. It's not a unique to us more. That's something you're going up against. And so to Kim's point, the more you can have the plan in place and be able to proactively say this is what we're going to do. This is how much it's going to cost and we know who's going to show the cost you're there. That's a that's a big thing you can do. Do we seem average when it comes to challenges with power compared to the nation? Yeah. Okay. Some are way more challenged, but some maybe a little better off.

I mean, there are some that have just interesting legacy assets in place where if I went there to them tomorrow, they could get me a gig like today. But that's a very very unique situation and not at all indicative of what's actually happening. Most are going to be much more in your your situation where they're coming for something about 10 20 30 megawatts. Uh most communities are going to be challenged to deliver that in 36 months or less. We are very painfully aware of this problem as he and I said we were going to go recruit every single data center possible. We're going to go talk to Google, Apple, anybody that has a data center and the our power company told us literally looked at said please don't. Yeah. It was pretty discouraging. Yeah.

Well, I was going to say and the other thing about that is is you know as we mentioned you know you have a data center that has expanded six times. Yeah. By going and recruiting every hypers scale data center that you've gone you're damaging the capabilities of that one to grow and they're already here. And that that's you know again going back to that retention do no harm help work with those that are already here uh to do those expansions versus trying to bring in somebody all new because they are going to cannibalize the power that that data center needs and you're going to run into bigger challenges down the line. So

that's a fair point. Okay, last item. Um it caught my attention and I'm sorry I have to ask it. Parking utilization in Valley Junction. What what what is that about? Uh, is it in your full report or how can I learn what you were thinking of relative to parking utilization? Uh, maybe that was just an a comment that I made. Okay. Yeah, it was it was on on the slide.

Everybody everybody's downtown doesn't have enough parking if you're going to continue to I mean that is a that is an every downtown problem. Um, it doesn't matter um where where it is or how big it is or how little it is. Um, but that would be something around, you know, how you manage that. If you, especially if you're commencing to expand and bring in maybe some more housing opportunities, some other things that are going to be down there, parking is going to become even more challenging. So, making sure that you're designing that appropriately when you go into We've had some people come and talk to us about purposely making it difficult to park down there. So, we encourage people to ride bikes.

Yeah. Uh hey, and for anybody that's watching online and my colleagues here on the council, there was a concept I had shared uh about trying to just help people have more awareness of where to park. Uh because I think that is one of our biggest problems that we have so many lots that are not right visible on Fifth uh and helping wayfinding somebody, you know, hey, just go around the corner and there's 300 spots. So there's all kinds of unique things. Um one of my favorites is the city of Fort Worth, which they just finished doing it. They're not doing it anymore, but it was brilliant to get people to come use our downtown when they were trying to educate people to do so. Um, is that they gave parking free after six and on the weekends free,

right? But I'm just saying, well, no, I know, but I'm just saying like for a big city, that's what they did to encourage people to come downtown. I think that's usually the the problem with parking is that people don't know where to park more than anything. Uh, so teach them that, you know, through social media, through other other ways, and then hopefully you won't have a parking problem.

Thank you. Appreciate your work. Thank you, Mr. Mayor. I have to say thank you for coming and sharing. Uh I was typing furiously a lot of stuff, but don't worry, I don't have 25 questions. I do have a few. And uh I have a few because I mean you are are clearly experts. And what I really like about what you're sharing tonight is not just of course your expertise, but I'm interested in comps. I'm so interested in comps because if if it truly is hyper competitive, then we've got to know what everybody else is doing. So thank you for sharing those comps. So the first question is actually about data centers. Feels like we got on the ground floor of data centers. Uh where are we on this on the curve of data centers nationwide? Are we at the top? Have we reached peak data center? We're on our way or we keep going like I I don't know where we are. Where are we?

The the the the data need is only continue to exponentially grow. Um, you know, there's stats out there about uh how how much more media has been created and consumed every single second relative to the previous history and just how much more that's going to continue on that pace. And that's really where we see right now. I think the biggest impediment is going to be the actual infrastructure, right? If if electricity, water, if if that could be solved and be in perpetuity forever, you would see a neverending explosion of data centers. So right now it's a question of what infrastructure is in place to support that continued buildout and that that's where the real challenge is right now and that's of course why you're starting to see some community opposition in a lot of parts of the country.

So bouncing along to the next follow-up question which is since we've already have such an exceptional relationship with Microsoft what you were saying Kim earlier when we're just no no focus on what has already worked really well and our relationship there is that what you're saying and we should also spread that message far and wide. Yes. Because if Microsoft, which I think some people have heard of, uh, if they have chosen West De Moines six times, that is a message that needs to be shouted, which brings me to my next question, which is how good are other cities that shout it out? And and and what cities are really good at shouting it out and how are they doing it that we're not? That's the question.

All right, this is where I have to take it because I live in the loudest darn state there is. Um, I am out of Dallas, Texas, and Texas shouts louder than anybody in this space. And they they will turn their marketing message. They will do whatever they need to get that out. They are not ashamed. They are not humble about it. They are like, "Come here. This is where you need to do business." That is where something in the Midwest really struggles. I call it Midwest nice. I always tell people, you got to quit doing that. You got to be bold because there are definitely people that are shouting from the rooftops and are getting attention. I would land on Louisiana as the next one in the mix because they are landing data centers left and right because they changed their message. If you would have asked me that a year ago, it would have been very different. Um, their messages has changed, their business friendliness message has changed and that is definitely showing up in the number of projects that they're winning. So from that standpoint, be bra, be loud, be proud. Don't get caught up in the, "Oh, we're humble. We don't like to brag." No, brag. You have to brag.

Yeah. Everybody else is. Seems like it. And you just mentioned like Louisiana data centers. However, you are not really encouraging us to go outside of the Microsoft data center situation. You're encouraging us to go to some different industries. They have other developments. They have one two from their change in their messaging other than data centers. Had some very large in infrastructure or let's say EV, clean energy, other projects that they're coming out in Louisiana with. So it's not just data centers. They're just they've changed their message and they have gotten very very robust wins over the last six to nine months. So

yeah, and that it leads to kind of a more of a comment that local businesses, local developers, local real estate companies are not using Co-Star to to share the sites loud and proud everywhere. We've got to change that. So that was just more of a comment. Absolutely. That is a number one data source for almost most brokerage firms. So if you're not even looking at site selectors and you're just looking at brokers looking to take to know what's in your community, Co-Star is the space to go. And how are we not on it? I well I mean in a lot of different ways there's reasons but

co-star is a phenomenal resource for some of these more complicated big mega projects you probably are going to start with co-star but you need to know what is out there and if you don't have your midsize sites on there you know we talked about that potential leakage of existing companies within the area if they don't know that that's there and just because it's not listed and they go online they're looking they're asking for somebody they're just go to the next town because that's that's where it was

all right what what you said earlier, I think Kim, you had said it, we have really done a great job going all in on on certainly economic prowess of West De Mo and but we haven't shouted as well as we should, but so much has been focused on this is a great place to live. This is a great place to live. This is a great place to live. And please don't get angry at me, anyone in the room, but in this city, which I think has done so much for quality of life, have we maxed out quality of life? And therefore, it's time for a shift of energy and resources to economics if our schools are great, if our trail systems great, if our outdoors are great, if our uh entertainment is great, if our five waters project is great. Not to stop, but maybe just a slight shift. Is that can you max out quality of life?

I don't know that you can max out quality of life because it's kind of a consistent moving target. Um, you need people as much as you need infrastructure in order to supply a company. Labor is still the number one boardroom problem. No matter what type of company, no matter what industry, it's getting quality, skilled, available labor. So, you have to places for them to live. In order to them to choose you for a place to live, they have to have good schools. They have to have good parks. They have to have good roads. they have to have good safety, all those types of things. So, you can't turn your head away from that. What we're saying is change your message. That message still stays that you have quality of life, but you also have to say it is a great place to operate a business. The wage the wage rates that we experience here are much lower than any other plant that we have could be a wonderful quote that could come from somebody possibly. You know, the fact that we have skilled labor force and big workforce development programs that continually graduate thousands of people every year, that's a state statement marketing point that you need to make. So, it's more around business friendliness. And actually, we had a little bit of a chat earlier today and we were talking about like your planning and zoning process and the fact that it is easy and that you can get reszoned theoretically in 60 days. That's huge. that should be like the lead in, you know, like we can get you up and running in a very short period of time and have that detailed out of what that process looks like. In the end, any business is looking to move to a location that is lower in risk. If you can demonstrate that you are the least risky choice for them, there's no no risky choice, but if you are the least risky choice for them, you're going to have much better opportunities to win those projects. Testimonials make such a massive difference. Again, talk about Microsoft choosing West De Mo six times. D-risisking that process. The quality of life plays a big role in a company's decision to choose, but it's not the only reason. So, what you have to show is how they're able to execute on utilizing that quality of life.

Remember, most places we go to talk about their quality of life and how great it is. And like, if you live there, you probably love your community. You can talk all day about that. We hear that all the time. And it's question though of how you actually leverage that to execute on the business side of that. That's that's the message that has to be shifted to

and I think those third party testimonials are also incredibly important. Not that we don't love economic developers. We love you to pieces and think you're wonderful. However, you're paid to market to us. A com a seuite to a seuite conversation about why I chose a specific location has a lot of power. Um, and so having those testimonials and being able to connect businesses that are looking to potentially come here with people who are happy and successful here is going to again be a critical marriage to make that successful. Yeah.

Because that makes a huge difference. And to be clear, what when I asked the question, I asked the harshest question possible. Not in terms of eliminating quality of life, but maintaining that consistency and not necessarily spreading financial resources, but spreading certainly message resources, maintaining the quality of life because I think we're biased, but I think we are very low risk. I think we are, but maybe we're not.

Well, and I think there's there's another opportunity, and this is actually something I've shared with all of you before. Um, when I the first time I ever came to De Moine, I didn't know anything about De Moines. I came for a wedding. Um, I had two Uber rides. One was a gentleman from Spain. Um, he'd moved to De Moine. He'd been here for four years. He said he would never live anywhere else. It was the most amazing place that he had ever chosen. He didn't say which suburb he lived in. He just was driving me and said that I will never leave here. It's amazing. See, see.

Um, so the second Uber driver was from Africa. He had lived all over the world. He told me everywhere that he worked. And he again said, I will never leave De Moine. it is my most favorite place to be. I this will be where I raise my family. This is all those types of things. And so, not only having businesses, but having those types of people who have come here, they've felt welcomed. They've integrated into the community. And having those types of marketing messages on top of everything else is really important. But I will also send one word of caution because we have had this happen more times than I can count, which is do not turn a blind eye to your school district. That is one thing that can change in the blink of an eye. And you want to make sure that they stay strong, that they are developing and pushing out wonderfully skilled talent that's going either into, you know, other programs within the community or good colleges and they're coming back here. But if your school system starts to fail, you become a very difficult place to do business. Um, no. Like again, you know, I could I you could have Microsoft offer a job to some gentleman or woman in a different part of the country and while he comes here or she comes here to interview, the other spouse is googling your schools. Oh yeah.

And if for some reason something bad comes back before he even makes or she makes it home, you've been eliminated as a potential place that they would want to do. So that would be my one big thing is don't turn a blind eye to your school system. I agree wholeheartedly being a teacher at this local school district and Finette was just on the school board till she came across the pond to join us on city council. Absolutely. The last question I had is um is is incentives. Are you suggesting I'm just going to hypo hypothetical here. Are you suggesting that that top of the pyramid a cash incentive of say 200,000 is actually more valuable than say a tiff that's eventually worth 400,000? And I'm just giving an example. I I'm wondering if there's it is if I don't have any infrastructure. Okay.

If I don't need roads and I don't need water and I don't need sewer because they're already there. That cash incentive has way more value than that tiff does. Are they doing that kind of stuff in Texas? That top of the They lead by cash.

If we rebate it back, not if we rebate it back to you. I mean, if we do a tiff rebate, even though you have the infrastructure, we do a tiff rebate. We wouldn't do tiff for infrastructure. We would rebate back to you uh 400,000 based on incremental increase that you created from going there. No, that is true. And like I said, that's a you know, there that's a big tax financing districts are a big tool that can over complicate things that you can do very simply with a discretionary incentive or a tax rebate that doesn't involve having to create an tax increment financing district. It makes a lot of sense for large developments, so large mixeduse developments, large industrial developments. Um, a lot of places would do industrial parks, not industrial sight by sight tax increment financing districts because they would take the increment of the entire park and use that to actually fund other projects that come into the park. But bottom line on incentives, flexibility is your key goal because what you don't want is you don't want to put too many structures and rigors in place that when you get the one company or the one business that you want so bad and you could have just a little flexibility in how you put together a very creative financing package for them and that wins the project for you. You would want that flexibility. If you keep it rigid and structured and you have no capabilities to be creative in your financing structures, you may lose that project to somebody else who can be incredibly creative. And you asked if we do cash in Texas. Yes. The number one state fund is a cash deal closing fund that's funded at over hund00 million every time they go back to the board and do that. So, they have tons of cash available to do that. The the process is slow. I mean, it has its own flaws um in in that situation, but they also give a lot of power to the local governments. The local governments have incentives.

I'm sorry. I know. So, a city like West De Mo here like you know how much money we have to get like a big boy with an enormous cash incentive so to speak. That's really really difficult. But are you saying down in Texas there's a ton of state support and that's what maybe makes a city of 75,000 more able to get that because they are leading with cash all the time and they have support from the state. Yes, but they also have the capabilities to do that on their own. Again, the state of Texas is very unique. They created an incentive about 30 years ago that let you take anywhere from a quarter to a half cent of your sales tax and put that towards economic development. Oh,

so anytime you have a large retail development, um I don't know if any of you have heard of the city of Frisco, Texas. Oh yeah. All right. They have loads of cash. Why? Because they built in that incentive to be able to capture that quarter to a half cent sales tax from a huge mall and which is a luxury mall and all of the retail that comes and into the city and it goes straight into a cash fund and they're pulling in $50 million a year that they can use for their slush fund. So they don't need the state. They could do it all by themselves if they really wanted to. So I'm telling you, start slow. You don't need $50 million, but start with a couple hundred,000 or half a million bucks. continue to build that because you're not going to have a project that requires that cash fund every year. I would love to tell you that that's how it happens, but whale hunting doesn't usually happen every year. So, build that fund up over time where it's actually fits, you know, what you can do as a budget that doesn't damage any of the other quality of life or place or other things that are going on. start to build that slush fund and that way when you have that big headquarters project that wants to come in here, you can say here's a million dollars in cash, you just choose us.

To some extent we have this with Valley Junction programs where we put cash into a fund and have a one to one match or a you know no interest loan or or whatever. Yeah, you can do forgivable loans to take take more money out of our general fund reserve. Again, you're going to be jeopardizing potentially that AAA bond rating. Yep. What's more important, aaa bond rating or economic development? Yep. I just want to say too, you know, you're you're not competing with Texas, right? True. Um, we are competing with them. They just don't understand it. We're nipping at their ankles. Understood. Yes. You you need to play with the deck of cards. Absolutely. I was using an example,

but I will say thank you very much. I think what you've shared is incredibly light. So, thank you so much. I want to hear I gota run to my son's Well, you know, I just think if you're competing with Texas on incentives, that's really just not the that's not the sandbox you're playing in, right? You're you're looking at Midwestern relocations or local expansions that happen here,

right? And you're on a level playing field with the other municipalities in the De Mo metropolitan area. you know, the state is competing with other states with Minnesota, South Dakota, Nebraska, right? And we know what the states are offering and we know how you can supplement it. And I know that Kim Kim presented three slides, that section's like 70 slides, right? So, if you want to get if you want to get in into the details, um, but I I I just don't think that Texas is a fair comparison because I'm not sure that there's, you know, a business that's considering De Moines versus Houston or or what have you. So absolutely that wasn't the plan that I would just you just mentioned Texas. So So but Sou Falls

is able to maybe and they're quite a bit bigger. So they're able to maybe create a cash incentive that's much larger than the city of West Point. So I I was more suggesting it seems kind of difficult but you start small, right? I mean that that's how you eat an opening, right? One bite at a time. So it doesn't have to be big. It could be some of these are going more towards some of those a tech companies that are 20 people right now. That could be a hundred people in no time flat. And you're giving them a couple hundred thousand dollars to get them through to that next phase of growth and then they become your unicorn. Incredibly helpful, incredibly informational informative and uh being here. Our pleasure. Thanks for coming back. You guys fly out tonight or tomorrow?

Tomorrow. Tomorrow. Oh, just in case anyone. Thank you everyone for your attention to this. I will say that in the next two weeks we hope to finalize our review of the 437 pages of report that we've got. We'll distribute out to everyone for I can also tell you we're going to work closely. I'm really excited about this and talking to Jamie during the this that we're going to work in team with the CED office and bring resources ourselves because this is very important and I think this is we get an implementation plan and move forward. Thank you Tom. did a great job. Thank you. Hey, thanks. Appreciate it.

Appreciate it. Have a good Thank you so much for Thank you for making the trip. I enjoyed our practice and sight selection.