Two years later: Grade the Mayor

MAYOR’S STATE OF THE CITY REPORT, JANUARY 5th, 2010

Mayor Bookmeyer provided his State of the City Report which was as follows:

“First I’d like to welcome everyone to the first meeting of our 2010 Mason City City Council. Congratulations to newly elected Council Members, Janet Solberg and Travis Hickey and re-elected Council Member, Scott Tornquist, who I’ll be recommending for appointment as Mayor pro tem. I also want to thank former Council Members John Jaszewski and Steve Tynan for their years of service. In particular, I want to thank Roger Bang, who served Mason City for over twenty years as a Council Member and most recently as Mayor. He’s been nothing short of wonderful to my family since we’ve made our home in Mason City. All of your services are valued and commendable. Lastly, I want to thank the candidates who ran in November’s election. Your commitment to your City was on full display and I applaud the effort you put forth and encourage you to continue those efforts.

Citizens of Mason City, Council Members, the state of our City is strong, however, we are in a state of challenge and opportunity. We are prepared for what lies ahead but need to act to seize the opportunity. We are at the tail end of a recession that hit North Iowa hard, and we are still recovering from the floods in 2008. To face the challenges effectively, we must capitalize on and develop our own opportunities. We must lead North Iowa back to economic viability and by a partner with our communities to grow North Iowa with the focus on regionalization, a concept Mayor Bang rightly championed. We must strike while the iron is hot. Our challenges are clear and have developed slowly over time. In order to realize where we are going, we must get a bearing on our current heading so we can determine our current status and trending patterns relative to our peers.

In 1980, we were the twelfth largest City in Iowa. By 1990, we were fourteenth. By 2000, we picked up a spot to thirteenth, and now we’ve dropped to the sixteenth position. Of the top twenty-five cities in the State of Iowa, Mason City has the highest rate of population decline since 2000 at around six percent, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. In fact, since 1980, Mason City has lost nine percent of its population. Only one community in the top twenty-five has lost more population – Waterloo at twelve percent – until they stabilized in the 1990’s. Bottom line, we’re not developing, retaining and recruiting our next generation. Our population decline is reflected in our numbers. In the last fifteen years, Mason City’s median age increased from 34.7 to 41.7 years, and enrollment in our schools has dropped over seven hundred students, approximately a fifteen percent decline. Although Mason City’s overall asset valuation has improved ninety percent over the last fifteen years, it is significantly out-paced by Iowa’s average of a hundred and sixteen percent. Unfortunately, due to the flood and the much needed buyouts, Mason City’s valuation will be down this year for the first time in over fifteen years. We will lose approximately $14 million in asset valuation. Fortunately, we will recoup half of that in the Village Cooperative project and another quarter with Taco Bell and Kentucky Ridge’s expansion. Candidly, we’re bleeding good paying jobs and not replacing them. The jobs that fuel the next generation for Mason City. They are the jobs that would keep children from moving away and leaving their parents and grandparents behind.

From 2002 to 2007 in Cerro Gordo County, we lost sixteen percent of our non-commercial employers, thirteen percent of our non-resident employers, and two percent of our resident employers. That totals a loss of eight point seven percent of our jobs here in Cerro Gordo County before 2008. This does not include the current recession. It does not include Holcim or any other recent losses due to slow-downs since 2007.

We’ve also absorbed a severe impact in construction starts and remodels. Over the last five years, Mason City’s housing starts are down seventy-seven percent and housing remodels are down fifty-seven percent. Most notable over the last five years, new commercial building permits are down eighty-four percent, commercial remodels are down thirty-six percent and we have only had a total of four industrial starts. These types of declines have resulted in our City running deficits nine out of the last eleven years and draining our reserves from around $7.5 million ten years ago to approximately $5 million this year. Candidly, our risk averse position is not translated into competitive valuation or population increases enjoyed by our peers. Capital is nothing if not a means to create more capital. It is meant to be invested, leveraged and utilized. Mason City’s forefather’s toil should be honored with diverse investments and not depleted with continual operational deficits. No matter how we parse it, we have not been on a sustainable course. One could assume that external factors have been the largest contributor to our decline, but that doesn’t explain why our peer cities in Iowa have been able to thrive and Mason City’s growth rate mires in last place among the top twentyfive since 2000, and twenty-fourth since 1980. Fortunately for us, our opportunities are just as evident. Within the last year we approved a $32 million dollar Vision Iowa project. We were fortunate our schools received over $9 million dollars to renovate our high school and Mercy just announced a $17 million dollar addition to their ER. That is $58 million dollars worth of projects that will be completed within the next few years in our town. The City Council has rounded that out by completing approximately $45 million dollars worth of much needed City infrastructure projects over the last five years. In addition, we live in the nation’s second most livable state, based on forty-three factors ranging from median household income to crime rate and from sunny days to infant mortality rate, in a state with a third lowest cost of doing business in the country, according to CQ Press in 2009.

Mason City is also continually ranked as one of the lowest cost-of living states in the US. In Iowa we’re ranked 544th from the highest in combined
City and County taxes for 2009, and are projected currently to move down to 568th this year. The only town in Iowa that is cheaper to live in from the City and county tax perspective is Ames, which has unique revenue streams. The next largest City cheaper to live in is Spencer, Iowa, with a population of 11,317.

Put simply, we are one of the best values for families to settle and establish their homes. From a business perspective, we’re strategically located at the intersections of major highways and equally distant from numerous major markets. We are well positioned for distribution and manufacturing. In addition, we have first class public and private schools, excellent health care and the ability to train our underutilized regional workforce at a leading community college, with one of the country’s best entrepreneurial centers. Let’s address our core strengths. Mason City is the sixteenth largest City in the State, but possesses the fifth largest retail pull in the State. That is reflected in our fourteen percent increase in retail over the last five years and twenty percent increase over the last ten. In addition, we also have an incredibly large tourism draw. We are up forty percent over the last five years and Cerro Gordo County won the 2008 Tourism County of the year Award, awarded by the Iowa Tourism Office out of IDED. It is to our advantage that our CVB has a productive working partnership with the Clear Lake Chamber of Commerce, but clearly this is our CVB’s award and we should be proud of them as a strong economic driver in this town. We have an incredible amount of assets to market if we can build critical mass and continue our upward trajectory,
but we need jobs.

It is Mason City’s responsibility to lead our region out of the recession. We have an opportunity to capitalize on a pattern followed by titans like Warren Buffet and Bill Gates. By low and sell high. Develop, innovate, be flexible, add value and success follows. Regionalization working hand in hand with our partners at the North Iowa Corridor, the Chamber of Commerce, the CVB and the Pappajohn Center are the key. We must cooperate and pool our resources
to maintain a sustained upper trajectory while costs to develop are still low. To do this, we need leadership and a hundred percent commitment from our
Council to not just vote up or down but consider our how our actions will be viewed internally and externally, today and in the future. There is no question
what our number one priority is – its jobs, jobs, jobs. It is noted that it is not the City Council’s charge to recruit business but it does not just mean approving development agreements either. It is the City Council’s responsibility to create a tone and an atmosphere in which honest business people can come before this body and leave with their reputation in tact. Business must sense that we are moving forward with pro-growth policies that allow business to thrive.

We have been successful with a number of the Council goals by doing a solid job of maintaining our infrastructure, a sound financial position and have been persistent towards maintaining an attractive community through our enforcements of nuisance and blight codes. However, we continue to struggle with the Council’s goal of planned and controlled growth which includes jobs, income, population and school enrollment. Part of turning this tide is running and being a party to an effective public meeting. A small component of that is what you will see in a few minutes. It is a visual timing system purchased Dsan. Dsan, spelled D-s-a-n, provides timing systems to the United States Senate and House of Representatives, numerous state governmental bodies, non-governmental organizations and City governments. The elegance of the system is that it provides one hundred percent transparency to the public. It will effectively take the ambiguity out of our speaking time and transparently display it to the public at the podium, guest speakers, Council and the public viewing at home. There will be an overlay on the broad4 cast that allows the public to view exactly where we are at during public input and during the floor debate that will essentially leave the Mayor in the position to maintain order, run the debate on the floor, take motions and call questions. I’m more than comfortable with that and thrilled that our Council is in support of a new level of transparency for the public of Mason City. The Council has made
progress on most of its primary priorities, but the new Council as agreed has added three new priorities and I applaud the Council in its forethought. The first priority of this Council is to develop a plan for a multi-purpose arena south of Southbridge Mall. This is a forward-looking priority and couples with the Council’s priority of reviewing and updating the downtown Comprehensive Plan. Before this happens, I will advocate that we continue to shore up the downtown by incentivising businesses using Tax Increment Financing and increasing our valuation to increase our bonding capacity. TIF is a valuable tool utilized by the top twenty-five cities in the state to be competitive. We can’t afford to not use it to the fullest. There is $200,000 dollars of TIF money allocated annually for the downtown that has not been optimized. We must build what I term the coefficient of critical mass. The coefficient is a measure of where people want to be because there are other people present. It benefits all businesses and spurs competition.

It is time to stop worrying about handouts for business in the form of a low interest loan or a grant that will be made up by future business when utilizing our TIF opportunities.

We must lean forward and strike fields in our downtown. What some perceive as handouts are actually savvy investments that our peers in the state don’t shy away from, large and small, and the results are evident. For those that say, I can see them lining up already for the handouts, I say line them up. Its
about time we had a rush on employers in our community and if it is a near wash to the taxpayers, let’s do the deal, every deal possible. The next priority is the City’s organizational effectiveness and efficiency. The question this Council will ask is whether we are providing the biggest possible bang for the taxpayers’ money possible in all aspects of government. This is a healthy course of action, one which most of our citizens do naturally in their places of employment on an annual basis. This means we – this means we need to empower our valued City employees to innovate and determine the most effective and efficient way to provide the core services and use of their time. We must remain flexible and continue efficiency efforts to honor and leverage our taxpayers’ dollars. This does not necessarily mean layoffs. It means continuous improvement. Exploration of more efficient manage to operate and cross training in order to maximize our efforts.

Lastly, our Council’s priorities include developing a business park. We’ve invested heavily south of town to make this happen and we must continue the
course. I’m aware there is concern about the affluence that manufacturing could generate down south. That is why I encourage this Council to commit the south business park to distribution, technology and low affluent manufacturers. Noting the later priority, it should be the goal of this Council to land and close a project with a major business referred by the Iowa Department of Economic Development within the next year. The City should work closely with the North Iowa Corridor to accomplish this goal for Mason City and the surrounding communities. Overall though, the policies we need to consider are included in the Comprehensive Plan approved in 2006. We should consult it heavily and learn from it. The policies and directions in it are compiled from towns that have been successful. We should learn from our peers, success, and adjust our bearings accordingly. Lastly, let me make two quick notes. One of the bright spots in Mason City is tourism.

We have excelled year after year in increasing our tourism dollars and jobs. We should continue to invest heavily in this effort as our Vision Iowa projects come alive. However, we must also encourage our partners at the County to do the same. One of the foremost items is the fairgrounds operation. As Mayor, I’m acutely aware that the City does not control the operations at the fairgrounds. However, I will strongly encourage the Mason City City Council not to give another dollar to the fairgrounds until their house is in order. I will advocate that the fairgrounds execute a well-laid plan to sell their front lot and use the funds to build a state-of-the-art equestrian facility with the balance to be used as an endowment to supplement their operations. They should not have to come year after year to the taxpayers to excessively fund their operations. Hockey and equestrian events are crucial to this community. We value them and we value the North Iowa Fairgrounds, but Mason City should not continually and unnecessarily be on the hook for them when we are one of their biggest marketers. Second, now more than ever, our focus must be to do our best to retain and expand our existing businesses and recruit others. Businesses want to see an upward trajectory, an investment in a town. A town that is proud. A town that sells itself. If you are in business, talk to your vendors and clients.

Search for strategic opportunities, encourage them consider Mason City to bolster their business. As a citizen, become an ambassador for Mason City. Talk to your elected representatives in State and National government and make sure they understand that Mason City is prime to lead North Iowa back to economic viability. Impress on them that we need all assistance possible from our State and National governments to contribute to put us on a path to growth. Bring those hard earned tax dollars home. I am confident that our Council can put aside some long-held predispositions. Just because we have
always done it this way doesn’t mean we need to continue. Mason City must reverse our current perception in the business community and build a new reputation that defines Mason City as a premier place to do business. Business is what provides jobs and those jobs make Mason City the great place it is to grow up, live and retire in. We have an extremely proud citizenry and the assets to grow, if we have the persons of good will to promote and utilize them. I will strongly advocate our City to the State and region. I will also advocate our town every chance I get within Mason City and speak in as many venues as possible. I believe in this town. I am proud of this town. It is our home. Our wonderful citizens and strengths should not be denied and Mason City should have grown tired of looking in from the outside. We need all hands on deck. We must meet the challenges and seize our opportunity. Remember, a rising tide lifts all ships.

Let’s signal that Mason City is open for business and get to work.

Thank you.”