Lets start by talking about some of the pitfalls related to the wrong businesses. What are the economic benefits we are looking for? Well for starters, as residents of the city, we want our taxes to go down. What will affect that for the better and what will affect that for the worse?

Taxes will continue to rise so long as the city spends more money that our economic growth can offset. This is like you home budget in many ways. If you spend more than you make, you can put it on the credit card for a while but eventually the bill comes due. When that happens, you have less money for those things you still have to pay for. Most responsible people who recognize that their obligations exceed their means will at least look for a second job or some other way to supplement their income. The city just raises our taxes to cover that overspending.

Businesses that by extension cause our city’s budget to grow more than that business pays in taxes is a bad one to promote. We already pay significantly more for public safety than many of our neighbors and now we are expected to pay for a new law enforcement building on top of the renovated fire station. We always have at least two patrol cars on duty, and our posture is often seen by the public as over inflated. What if we bring to town industry that suddenly makes that police force seem necessary? We might actually need to expand our patrolling and increase that budget.

Currently the median income for a household in Belle Plaine is just a little under $100 thousand. Your probably asking yourself how that can be in such a small town. Well, approximately 80% of our residents work out of town, and many are working in industries that pay fairly well, despite the commute. We pride ourselves for having skillsets and work ethic. This doesn’t make us a wealthy city by any means. If you were to infuse this community with another 5000 people over the next 25 years, as is the projection by the metro council(1), we would want to keep that median household income level steady or rising.

To bring in a Walmart, Target or other ‘big box store’ will bring jobs that pay about $15-$17 per hour. Assuming that as an employee you could even manage to get 40 hours a week, you would make at best about $35 thousand a year. Fast food and clothing stores generally make significantly less. This does nothing for our native-born residents and while the properties would enhance our tax base on the input end, the cost in terms of social programs, crime and deterioration of our community would far exceed whatever these businesses contribute. On top of this, our local establishments would then have to compete with stores that will only send those dollars outside the city to whomever runs their franchise services.

So, what kind of industry do we need? First, we would attract manufacturing jobs that pay between at least $25-$30 per hour ($55,000-$62,500 per year). Second, the ideal manufacturing environment would deal in consumables that are extremely high valuable and profitable to the company. A manufacturing center’s ability to generate revenue is a contributing factor in the tax assessment process. That makes the property more valuable in terms of tax generation and more valuable to the community. Third, we need for the industry to either buy its resources from community or bring them in from the outside, but never (or seldom) sell to the local population. Ideally, they are selling their product around the world and that money is flowing back into the company located here in Belle Plaine. The infusion of that money supports increased growth of the company and increases in the local job market. When the community is a buyer of a business’s finished products, those dollars are then sent out of the community and that is not good for local growth.

So how can we do this and keep our small-town atmosphere? Its not going to be easy. Out community will probably grow to more than $12,000 people by 2050 just as the metro council predicts. That may be unavoidable, but what we can affect is the demographic dispersion that defines the face of our future. We can choose to place industry centers on the edge of town, while constructing alternative entry and exit points to the highway. We can zone our streets to require trucks to enter through these alternate routes.

We can establish our own timelines to achieve the metro council’s goals and do it our own way. Nothing will force this community to accept the wishes of outside authority faster than financial insolvency. When we hit critical mass through sustained debt and we need to start looking for a bailout from someone outside the community, we will be bought and paid for by whomever is willing to give us money. Change is not a question; it is an inevitability. If you want this community to control its own destiny in defining the pace and the direction of that change, we need to build in a way that keeps the decision making local.

(1) https://stats.metc.state.mn.us/profile/detail.aspx?c=02394113