Making the effort

Jefferson won a remarkable award a couple of weeks ago. To win anything like it takes major contributions of at least three ingredients: time, treasure and talent. A whole lot of people chipped in a whole lot of each of those for the community, and the prize is well deserved.

The statewide Travel Iowa organization named Jefferson its “Outstanding Community” in the rural division of the Iowa Tourism Awards. There are a rural division and a metro division for award purposes.

The rural tourism division includes all Iowa towns under 10,000 population, which of course compose most of the state’s 944 communities. (Iowa has more towns and cities per thousand population than any other state in the United States.) Just one rural and one metro community (Cedar Rapids) received the coveted award.

Donations of time? The Jefferson Matters organization regularly asked volunteers to keep track of the number of hours they contributed to community service each month. The total is jaw-dropping. The Outstanding Community Award could not have been possible without those thousands of donated hours from so many residents.

Donations of treasure? As one example, there’s the significant six-figure pool of funds amassed by financial investments from several dozen women in the Why Not Us group, who decided to bring the restaurant on the northwest corner of the square back to life after broken water pipes destroyed it a few years earlier. Reborn as The Centennial, it made Jefferson a double winner at the Travel Iowa conclave by winning the rural “Outstanding Dining Business” Award.

But in a community of only a few thousand people, it generally takes public-private partnerships to get significant things done, and that’s been Jefferson’s experience. For instance, Jefferson’s city council for years has provided low-interest and/or forgivable loans for downtown buildings whose owners are willing to provide some of their own funds to improve their property. The Centennial building is a classic example. There are many others. The result is an impressive historic downtown business district.

Contributions of talent? Visitors to the community are greeted by downtown art in the alleys, on murals and on rooftops visible from the top of the Mahanay Carillon Tower. Then there’s the carillon itself, with regular bell concerts. Chad Elliott’s studio offers art, music and poetry at a high skill level, and Robbie Pedersen’s RVP~1875 period furniture workshop and museum, along with its authentic History Boy theater, fascinate and entertain visitors year-round. There’s plenty of other musical entertainment as well, some of it emanating from the Greene County Schools. And Sierra Community Theatre is maintained in part by local volunteers and donors.

A danger in listing important components for any success is omitting some that should be on the list. It’s impossible for me to do justice to all the reasons why Jefferson deserved the Outstanding Community designation for tourists, and I ask forgiveness for those I’ve overlooked.

But the purpose of this column is not to repeat the information provided about the award in The Jefferson Herald by Nicole Hasek’s excellent front page story and Matt Wetrich’s very fine column on the subject.

Instead, it’s to drive home a related point: for a community to impress visitors, it needs also to do right by its residents — present and future.

A few decades ago, Jefferson and Greene County didn’t have enough jobs for their residents. The county’s development group, predecessor to Greene County Development Organization, set about to attract industries to move here or open original facilities.

The group met with significant success, and the county became a center of light manufacturing, most of it based on metals. Job openings provided employment for a goodly number of area residents over the years, and continue to do so.

In fact, the pendulum has swung the other way. Back then the Jefferson area had people looking for jobs. Today it has jobs looking for people.

And in order to remedy that imbalance, the community must make itself attractive to newcomers, particularly young families. That’s why Greene County Development Corporation a few years ago shifted its emphasis from economic development to community development.

Jobseekers today enjoy a number of options for where to live and work. Competition among Iowa communities, particularly those not adjacent to metro areas, is keen. The existence of more than 900 Iowa municipalities makes that contest all the more demanding.

Attractiveness both to residents and to visitors is a two-sided coin. A community that’s a pleasure to visit must also be one that’s a pleasure to call home.

The attributes of attractive communities are generally universal, and they appeal in the same way to people of different backgrounds and ethnicities. In terms of selection options, it’s a buyer’s market for young families, who increasingly can choose where to land for their hometown. Communities that realize that fact, and that do the work to offer themselves to young people looking for attractive surroundings, have the best chance at success.

I’ve lived here a long time. Jefferson has never been a gated community. We opened ourselves to Tai Dam refugees in the 1970s and to Kosovar refugees in the late 1990s, and we need to continue to be available to young families today regardless of their ethnic background.

Jefferson enjoys several advantages in the competition for new residents and their energy. For the first time in many years, thanks in large part to the community’s recent “Thriving Community” designation by the state for housing purposes, several contractors are now in discussions with local officials about house and apartment construction here.

That’s because the state of Iowa provides enhanced state tax credits for communities with that designation. Those projects can improve available local housing stock for new and older residents alike.

Whether it’s tourism or community development, oriented toward visitors or potential new residents, Jefferson is doing what’s necessary tor future success as an Iowa community. As a local development leader has wisely said, “We don’t know if what we’re doing will succeed. But we know what will happen if we don’t make the effort.”

Rick Morain is a reporter and columnist with the Jefferson Herald.