(Spirit Lake)– Four major issues continue to confront local employers in the region. Corridor President and CEO Curt Strouth says they continue to evolve around affordable housing; the cost of living in the Iowa Great Lakes; the high cost of daycare and the number of available workers. He says those were relayed to representatives of Iowa Workforce Development during a recent listening session that also involved business and industry officials from the corridor’s four county region.
Strouth says affordability and availability of child care probably drew the most discussion at that session, adding more action is needed from the state level…
“There has to be a needle moved on the legislative side when it comes to daycare. Right now all of the assistance for daycare is being utilized to help communities and counties conduct studies. Well we can do studies but we can tell you right now there’s a big demand for daycare. We need daycare. We understand that. But now that we’ve shown that demand how do we help facilitate, assist, our daycare providers to be able to operate a facility, whether that’s operating at home, or if they need to purchase and build a new daycare facility, how are we going to assist that in the construction phase and also in the ongoing operations phase which are the two critical pieces for the ongoing part of that.”
Trevor Smith, Senior Vice President of Economic Development for the Corridor, says it’s also affecting workforce availability…
“That’s the challenge that we’re seeing and then parents have to make the decision to stay home or go in the workforce and now we’re losing qualified workforce members, productive people in the workforce and then that hurts it, too.”
Strouth told supervisors the Iowa Lakes Corridor Development Corporation is continuing to actively address the concerns.
The information was presented during an update at today’s (Tues.) Dickinson County Board of Supervisors meeting.
