KYLE MUNSON

Munson: Politics aside, rural Iowa ready for turn in spotlight

Kyle Munson
kmunson@dmreg.com

JEFFERSON, Ia. — Two choices, America: Dump the Electoral College, or get ready for the vast rural core of the country to spend the next four years in the limelight.

A decorated wooden palette along a fence row on a farm on Sept. 8, 2016, outside Creston, Iowa.

That wasn’t quite the message of the inaugural Iowa Rural Development Summit on Friday in Jefferson, but the recent presidential election couldn’t help but cast a shadow. Donald Trump pulled off his upset win in part because he leveraged votes from rural counties. So regardless of their politics, the few hundred Iowans handpicked to attend the summit from 63 different communities seemed to sense a collective opportunity.

Politicians from across the ideological spectrum may be better primed to appease rural America as they keep a wary eye on the next election. So this is the time for small-town mayors, rural economic development directors and other officials to get on the same page and make a unified push to reverse the fortunes of their struggling main streets.

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Bill Menner, state director for rural development for the U.S. Department of Agriculture, was appointed to his post in 2009 and has since overseen about $5 billion in USDA assistance flowing into Iowa. He steps down in January after somewhat ironically being put out of a job by the same rural folk he has served. But first he convened this summit under the umbrella of the Iowa Rural Development Council, with help from the Iowa Farm Bureau and other key players.

Menner's boss, U.S. Agriculture Secretary and former Iowa Gov. Tom Vilsack, wasn't in the room Friday but has been imploring his fellow Democrats to pay more attention to rural voters.

Republican Iowa Agriculture Sec. Bill Northey did attend — a smart move since he's exploring his own gubernatorial run.

City officials drove from Le Mars, Fairfield, Manning, Fort Dodge, Maquoketa, Charles City, Forest City, Lamoni, etc.

They met at the new Wild Rose Casino & Resort in Jefferson. Again, this wasn’t the intended message, but I couldn't help but sense that the setting was a good symbolic fit: Legalized gambling in recent decades has been one of the most popular and reliable — yet also contentious — economic Band-Aids for Iowa cities. It might not replace farm families, school districts or a thriving manufacturing sector. But it's a quick shot in the arm.

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I called this an “inaugural” summit, but similar conversations have been percolating around Iowa and the Midwest for decades.

When a woman from Corning — the seat of Iowa’s least populous county, Adams — stood to explain her town’s dire need for attractive, new housing, that was a common refrain for everybody in the room.

There was the usual fretting over consolidation of school districts.

But hopeful stats also were trotted out, such as an $8.5 million project in Mount Pleasant that renovated 54 housing units above downtown retail and boosted the neighborhood's assessed value by 32 percent.

Co-working spaces in small towns such as Webster City and Riceville are examples of new experiments in luring entrepreneurs to unlikely corners of the state.

Chuck Fluharty, president and CEO of the Rural Policy Research Institute and a clinical professor at the University of Iowa College of Public Health, cited a speech he delivered exactly eight years ago. That was when the subprime mortgage scandal blew up and the Great Recession hit just as President Barack Obama took office.

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He re-read his own words that sounded more appropriate than ever: “Americans have now lost faith in most of their major institutions."

He also said that in the next generation, jobs are going to come to the people instead of vice versa. And rural America should be ready to capitalize on the shift.

The lunch keynote speaker was a familiar character: Zach Mannheimer, the theater entrepreneur from Pennsylvania and New York who moved to the capital city nearly a decade ago and launched the Des Moines Social Club. Now he’s trying to spread his nonprofit-and-arts formula into rural areas as vice president of creative place-making for Iowa Business Growth.

Mannheimer made the case that demographic trends show that a wave of young people in the next decade will flock inland from the coasts. And rural officials, if they choose, can be nimbler than their counterparts in big cities who tend to get bogged down in more complex problems. Small towns should scramble to remove hurdles to such innovations as — believe it or not — homes built in mere hours by 3-D printing.

Kyle Munson, Iowa columnist.

A 3-D-printed home on the range is a far cry from the quaint rural image of a barn-raising made possible by neighboring farmers.

But rural Iowa and rural America will need to take bold steps if they expect to make the most of whatever political clout they gained in the last election.

Kyle Munson can be reached at 515-284-8124 or kmunson@dmreg.com. See more of his columns and video at DesMoinesRegister.com/KyleMunson. Connect with him on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram (@KyleMunson) and on Snapchat (@kylemunsoniowa).