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 Storm Lake’s big statement: $40 million project lets town “reinvent” itself as a destination By CHUCK OFFENBURGER March 9, 2009 STORM LAKE, IOWA The following story is published here with permission from the Iowa Farm Bureau’s “Family Living” monthly magazine, in which the author is a regular columnist. The story was first published in the March edition of that magazine, in a nicely condensed version. It is published here in its full version with additional photographs.
The adjacent municipal golf course has been rebuilt, the State of Iowa is opening a new marina on the southwest shore of the lake this spring, and in the next couple of years a very popular municipal campground at the east end of the lake will be totally renovated and camping cabins will be added. A nature interpretive center is planned at Little Storm Lake, which is really a large wetlands just to the west of the big lake. The government investment – which included $9 million from the state’s Vision Iowa Program and several million in other state and federal grants to help with lake dredging – has inspired millions more in private investment all around the community. The downtown and north-end business districts have recently become regional shopping hubs. Within a 25-mile radius, more than 600 huge wind turbines generate electricity and quietly signal a new age. The northwest Iowa town has truly reinvented itself. Storm Lake is now a genuine getaway destination that is regularly drawing families, conventions and business groups not only from around the immediate area, but also from as far as Sioux Falls, Des Moines and Omaha. The city government is now investing $70,000 this year in a new marketing campaign that will use billboards and media ads that feature local people in photographs, enjoying the local amenities. Its slogan: “This is how LIFE should feel!”  I’m a former Storm Laker myself. Carla and I lived there five years while we taught at Buena Vista University, which has its beautiful campus a mile west along the lakeshore from the resort. We saw the transformation of the community taking root before we moved away in 2004, and we look upon the new Storm Lake with pride and a bit of wistfulness that we left. “If you grew up in Storm Lake like I did, you feel like you’re in a different place now,” said Art Cullen, 51, editor of the Storm Lake Times, which inspired the municipal effort with its news coverage and editorial campaigning. “Out on the east end of the lake, where King’s Pointe is now, my memory from boyhood was the wind would be blowing, dirt would be blowing, it was kind of a desolate spot. Now you go out there and you’re sitting around a resort you’d expect to see in Arizona or some place like that. It’s really classy.” The main economic anchors for the community through most of its history were the university and meat packing. In the 1990s, both did very well. BVU saw enrollment hit 1,200 on its home campus, with several thousand more in its extensive distance education programs. President Fred Moore led a huge wave of new construction and renovation of existing buildings on the campus, and the university gained national prominence for its early lead in computer technology. The IBP, Inc., pork processing plant, which is now owned by Tyson Fresh Meats, underwent a big renovation and started growing rapidly, to the point that now it employs 2,000 and is slaughtering 15,000 hogs per day. A quarter-mile away, Sara Lee Foods grew its turkey processing plant, and now has 700 employees slaughtering 30,000 turkeys per day. Those plants grew beyond the Storm Lake labor pool, and that prompted waves of people from other countries and cultures moving in to fill the jobs. The remarkable growth had upsides and downsides. On the positive, Storm Lake itself had a population of 10,076 in the 2000 Census. It was the first time the town had hit five figures, and it also meant that Storm Lake was the only county seat town in the immediate area that grew during the ’90s. It had also become one of the most racially and ethnically diverse communities in the Midwest. Editor Cullen estimates today’s population, if you include the adjacent towns of Lakeside and Alta and the residences of the non-incorporated South Shore neighborhood, “at 14,000 to 15,000.” That includes “about 5,000” Latinos who hail from a dozen different nations, and “1,500 to 2,000” Southeast Asians from about six different nations. Enrollment in the Storm Lake Community Schools grew substantially, and really diversified. Today, more than 60 percent of the students are from what had once been called the “minority” population. There were a few problems, with all the different kinds of people getting used to each other. But for the most part, the diversity was embraced locally. It certainly was by the city government, which posted its office hours on the City Hall door in English, Spanish and Lao.  However, national anti-immigrant groups and some headline-seeking outside media reporters began bombarding Storm Lake with smear campaigns and hostile stories, about how a nice little town had gone bad. The community also won considerable praise for the way its schools, social services and police department handled the challenges of rapid growth and the change to multi-cultural living. But the whispering campaigns across the Midwest were giving Storm Lake a bad reputation, local leaders realized, even if the whispering was inaccurate and unfair. “I think among not only the city officials but also the people of Storm Lake, we all got tired of being kicked in the face,” said Gary Lalone, who is now executive director of the Storm Lake Area Development Corporation and a key player in the transformation. “There was a pride issue. We all felt like we had a great thing going here – a quality of life that was really good – but outside people perceived our immigration as a negative and trashed it. Local people got sick of that. We knew what a great place we could be here. We needed to take on this big project to make a statement.” The turn-around started with the lake dredging in 2002. Just before then, two State of Iowa officials – Jeff Vonk, then the director of the Department of Natural Resources, and Michael Blouin, then director of the Department of Economic Development – came to Storm Lake on separate speaking engagements. Lalone, Cullen and a few other co-conspirators nearly kidnapped them, taking Vonk and later Blouin on tours of the lake and community, asking for ideas and help. Vonk suggested starting with lake dredging, clean-up and watershed stabilization. Storm Lake’s response was forming a coalition between the city government, Buena Vista County government and the non-profit Lake Protective Association. A multi-year plan was put together to dredge the lake, which was only about three feet deep, to a new depth of 13 feet in most places. The LPA went out and raised $1.5 million in private money – most of it from around the area – to go with the federal, state, county and city contributions. Vonk also suggested that the community already had the makings of a “destination state park,” with its lake, trailside parks, campground, recreational trail and more. All it needed, he said, was “a good resort hotel.” Blouin volunteered an IDED grant to help pay for a feasibility study. And thus began the biggest public works project in the community’s history.
But taking on a project that eventually grew to $40 million? What kind of leap was that for a city government the size of Storm Lake’s? “It was a huge leap,” administrator Moore said. “This city government had been managed pretty conservatively through the years, and the thought of us building and owning a resort hotel was something that would have never been considered at one time. But the fact is, because of the city council’s management through the years, we had almost no debt and we had strong cash reserves.” They received reassurance about the city’s fiscal capacity for such a project from Tim Oswald, their municipal finance consultant from Piper Jaffray in Des Moines. How bold a project did he think it was for the city government? “Significantly bold, to be sure,” said Oswald. “They were willing to take a risk that few other communities their size would be willing to take. Part of the reason they could was that the city government had very little debt. But another part of it was that they had this great physical asset in the lake that had been so underutilized. They thought the time was right both to improve that asset and to improve the public’s image of Storm Lake as a community.” He praises Moore, project manager Mike Wilson and city clerk Justin Yarosevich “for being so willing to work hard, to learn about risk and how to manage it – at a level most of their counterparts would not be willing to do.” But the bottom line, said Moore, is that “the project happened because the people of Storm Lake got behind it and wanted it to happen.” She tells about making “149 telephone calls” to line-up chairpersons and workers for 23 different committees organized to plan the project, “and I only got one turn-down.” Eventually 240 volunteers filled those committees and, said Wilson, “that spread the ownership of this project all across the community. They all became salespeople for the project.” When the time and need came that $2.5 million in local matching money was needed, more than 500 individuals and companies – almost all of them in the area – became donors. When the city government held an election on whether $3.5 million in general obligation bonds should be sold to help with the project, the issue was approved with a 73 percent favorable vote. Talk about a public mandate! Wilson was somewhat reluctant to become the project’s manager, working on a contract with the city government, because it meant giving up a 30-year career in banking and investments. He has stayed on now as the city’s full-time development director. He said he’s glad he made the career change now because it’s clear he’s been a big part of a project that is dramatically changing the community. “It’s amazing the community would do this, could do this,” he said. “We went from concept to reality on a $40 million project in five years’ time.” The city government contracted management of the resort to Leisure Hotels, headquartered in the Kansas City area, the same firm which now operates the Hotel Pattee in Perry. One of the things I like about the resort is the management team, which is headed by 34-year-old Jason Havey, a Wisconsin native who was hired away from being general manager at the sprawling Chula Vista Resort in the Wisconsin Dells. The sales manager is 33-year-old Katie Schwint, who was previously conference director for the public meeting facilities at Buena Vista U., her alma mater.  “When I was driving out here to look over King’s Pointe before I took the job, I kept driving and driving and thinking, wow, did they put a resort out here in the middle of nowhere?” said Havey, who took over as general manager in December, 2007, about three months after the hotel opened. “Since then, I’ve had a couple of my best friends who are in the hotel business come out here to visit. One of them had a great comeback about our location. He said, ‘Middle of nowhere? This is in the center of everywhere!’ He was right. That helps make it a getaway destination.” Young as he is, Havey has been involved in two hotel/resort start-ups before, and he sees the one here “as just about typical of what happens everywhere. They never go quite according to plan, or on the precise timetable. You are always hanging up the last of the drapes when the first guests are checking in, and you have a lot of kinks to work out in the whole operation. But after some time, things smooth out.” He said that has happened rather quickly in Storm Lake, “especially when you consider that only a handful of the 100 employees when I got here knew anything about the hotel business. Most of them, even our managers, are local people who have never worked in hotels before. But I was amazed at their enthusiasm and loyalty, especially after they went through the grand opening. That usually burns out a lot of new staff members, but not here.” The staff reflects Storm Lake’s diversity. Havey said “our employees represent seven different nations. I love living with this kind of diversity in a community. One thing, it means we’ve got great food around town in a lot of really different restaurants. And there are new cultural experiences all the time.” Schwint, who joined the staff in the summer of 2007, remembers the resort’s grand opening as “a definite adventure,” and there’s still a lot of excitement about the place. She recalled how “when the idea for the resort first came up, a lot of people thought it was crazy. Many doubted that people would come from all over for the experience here. But now on nice days, we’ll take what we call ‘slushy breaks.’ We go down to the concession stand on the beach, buy a slush, walk around and see all these visitors having so much fun. It makes you proud to be part of it.” The three-story hotel, designed in contemporary style with some “Prairie School” accents, is very comfortable. Rooms start at about $90. After several meals at the hotel’s Regatta Grille, I can attest that it is excellent. Entrees average $20, and salads and sandwiches are very reasonable. The public playgrounds outdoors have the most unusual swings and rides I’ve ever seen anywhere. The waterparks are open to the public, as well as hotel guests. The waterslides are awesome looking. Two of the five have high-tech “virtual experiences,” with special music and pictures as you swoop toward the bottom. One slide is 420 loopy feet long. Three others are 250 feet or longer. They have names like “Electric Eel,” “Tyson Twister Tornado” and “Runaway Rebel.” While they look fun, I’ve been too chicken to try them. That makes my 83-year-old friend Bob Ohrlund, a retired pharmacist in Storm Lake, chortle at me, because he was among the earliest waterslide customers. He’s been sold on the resort project from the beginning, and was one of the leading fundraisers for it during the public campaign. “My buddy Les Vohs and I were going on bicycle rides out past the resort almost every morning when they were building it,” Ohrlund said. “I’m a swimmer, too, and I was especially interested in the pools and those waterslides. So when the outdoor waterpark opened, I went out there to try it. Why not? That’s what it’s for!” He did all five slides on his first visit, “starting with the Tornado, which is the wildest one,” he said. “It’s like you’re caught in swirling water in a giant toilet bowl. After I survived that one, I decided I could surely survive the other ones, so I tried them all.” His review of them? He immediately sticks both thumbs up in the air. “But actually, the most fun I had that day was climbing up the stairs to the slides,” he said. “I had all these little kids trying to get around me, pushing inner tubes up the stairs. They’re laughing and shouting and saying, ‘Get out of the way, old fella!’ I’ll tell you, I felt like a kid again myself.”  You can write the columnist at chuck@Offenburger.com.
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