(Spencer)– The Iowa Lakes Corridor Development Corporation is out with its annual report for 2023. President and CEO Curt Strouth tells KUOO news one of the highlights is the findings of retention and expansion visits the Corridor conducted among various businesses and industries in the four counties they serve…
“One of the biggest things we came out with in 2023 based on 74 in person visits that there’s looking to be about $524 million in new capital investment over the next three to five years and with that the creation of about 350 new jobs. And while this is exciting, there’s also those issues that kind of are pinch points that may be preventing some of the capital investment happening locally and those are some of the things we’re working on pretty hard on a local level from workforce recruitment to try to bring these people in to fill these jobs that we are looking to create locally. Housing is another issue that we’re trying to figure out how to get new rooftops available for those that we’re trying to recruit that workforce in. We need places for those individuals to live and their families to move to. And then, you know, another issue that we’ve identified in some of these visits is just the availability of child care. This is one that doesn’t get talked about enough. It’s something that we’re focused on here at the Corridor level to be able to break down that barrier to get our children into high quality childcare so the parents can get in our workforce and fill the many needs and jobs that are available on the local level.”
In addition to those issues, Strouth says the Corridor is working on a number of other priorities as well in 2024. Among those is the construction of a new 30,000 square foot speculative building in collaboration with the city of Spencer…
“We’re excited to break ground on that coming up here in hopefully late March. This weather has been outstanding so I know moving dirt is getting closer and closer, so that will be coming up here with a substantial completion on that project, we’re hoping early fall, to be able to market that at a high level. We’ll continue to provide exposure for manufacturing and working with our schools primarily to provide that exposure and build that culture to bring our kids back who are graduating either from our local high schools or from colleges in the area to come back and live in our communities and work and raise a family, so we’re going to be having high priorities for some of that stuff as well. We’re also going to look at providing scholarships to help with that recruitment effort for some of our kids to come back and join the workforce.”
