Publication Date: February 2011

Citation: Roelofse, E., (2011). Tama County Magazine, Tama County Economic Development Commission, Archive reissued by Institute for Quantum Innovation and Impact, Qii Moment of Truth Series (Qii MOT No. 45-69, published in 2012).

License: Open access under
CC-BY-NC-SA 4.0

Available at: 
https://theqii.org/portfolio/tama-2011

Editor’s Note

As local stakeholders in our economy we have little control over natural disasters, corporate headquarters’ decisions to open and close plants, national economic forces, etc. What we do control is how we respond to these external circumstances and how we add value to the economy by investing and growing our own assets. That means recognizing what is good and building on that, and recognizing what is bad and minimizing the damage it does. And Tama County has a lot to be proud of looking back at the 2010 economy:

1. Record high entrepreneurship: 18 new businesses and 10 retained/new owner-ship businesses opened. These are record high numbers for Tama County. An estimated 23% of Tama County’s workforce are involved in some sort of entre-preneurial activity. Our goal is to increase that to 33% over the next few years as we recognize the economic landscape’s evolution. Turnover rate for new busi-nesses after 5 years is currently 50%. That is lower than the national average.
2. Record high visionary nonprofit and government projects: a record high 63 non-profit and government groups proposed ideas on how to better serve Tama County across various categories of serving the greater good. A little less than $100K was made available to help most of these groups raise $2.9M of projects.
3. New Housing Trust Fund: 48 residents of Tama County benefited from the new Housing Trust Fund helping home owners, renters, landlord and developers keep Tama County a valuable place to make a real estate investment.
4. First $125K tax credits to historic property: Our first nonprofit applied for and secured tax credits on a significant property. Commercial and residential proper-ties can also make use of this certified local government status to rehab proper-ties now that Tama County has a Historic Preservation Commission.
5. Strengthening employment numbers: Tama County’s employment numbers have been significantly better than the national average. Even compared to the state our recovery trend is strong. Also important are our wages. Through the recession this number has been growing 17% over the past 4 years decreasing the gap compared to surrounding areas.
6. Hiring industry for skilled workers: Tama County was the first to break the story on the national phenomena later covered in the Wall Street Journal that the re-cession unemployment was not as it appeared. Local stakeholders were made aware of specific skills that were in fact in demand to adapt resources and strate-gies.
7. Prospecting industry: Tama County was a part of the team of state leaders successfully helping facilitate Green energy investment for the past 3 years.
8. Rebounding taxable sales and services: have been growing for the past decade. Sales through the recession dip have already returned to $72-73 million where it has been 5 years ago.
9. County and most of our cities have no long term debt responsibility: During an economic downturn zero long term debt is a safe place to be, but during our growth periods, a little debt can allow us to leverage and trigger the next genera-tion of growth. Recognizing the right opportunity and timing is imperative.
10. Expanded the group of partners working together to better our local economy: Not only have we increased private partnership by 35% over the past 4 years, we also added public government partnerships when Meskwaki joined the 28E Partnership.

Lindi Roelofse
Executive Director, 2007-2012
Tama County Economic Development Commission