“If you build it, they will come,” according to the Iowa trusim, but they might take their time getting here.
After a few fallow years, the Perry Industrial Park is again astir with new construction as the Perry Economic Development Inc. (PEDI) group erects a 30,000-square-foot spec building on a 5.2 acre parcel in the park.
“We’ve talked about it for some time,” said Jon Peters of Perry, the PEDI member leading the spec-building committee. “That’s how Percival was done and ITC was done. We put it up, and the goal is to sell it, get a business into Perry, create jobs and then move on to the next one. It’s just a vehicle to try to help Perry’s economic atmosphere.”
After applying for a zero-interest loan through the U.S. Department of Agrculture Rural Economic Development Loan and Grant Program and waiting through several cycles without landing the loan, PEDI turned to a local lender, the Raccoon Valley Bank in Perry.
“We had applied to the federal government for a USDA loan, and that was not being funded,” Peters said. “Of course, you read the papers and see what the federal govenrment is doing and the budgets. They might say, ‘We have a program that we’re funding,’ but the funds aren’t available when you need them, so Raccoon Valley Bank stepped up and said, ‘We’ll back you on his.’ So we went ahead.”
The Perry City Council approved the new plat for the property in February on the recommendation of the Perry Planning and Zoning Commission. PEDI purchsed the building from Menz Farms Agri Sales of Perry, and the contractor is Mike Perry of Perry Builders LLC.
“Thirty thousand square feet is just what Percival was and ITC was starting out,” Peters said. “Then when the building is sold, the buyer builds out to their wants, to their specs. We’re just putting up a shell.”
By keeping the design simple, the buildings are readily adapted to the needs of a particular business.
“We don’t put any concrete flooring in the spec buildings,” Peters said. “It’s just the dirt or the grass in there because we can’t guess — there might be a company that’s going to come in and set heavy machines or something like that on there, and they need 12 inches of concrete instead of the 6 that you might have there. So it would be counter-productive to try to guess on what a potential customer might want. At this stage, it’s almost a build-to-suit.”
Peters said he was optmistic about the spec building’s prospects.
“You’ve got to start somewhere,” he said. “I think Perry as a community is very blessed that we’re in a position that we’ve got a group that can do this, that we’ve got a local bank that we can partner with, so hopefully it’s a win-win.”
PEDI’s original industrial park covered about 65 acres, but the May 2013 voluntary annexation into the city of about 270 acres lying adjacent to the industrial park enlarged the park’s development potential and qualified it for certified-site status. The newly annexed land is owned by Dallas County ag magnate Harry Stine.
Site certification is a form of fast-track pre-approval of an industrial parcel, assuring potential buyers the site is properly annexed, zoned and equipped with utilities and transportation infrastructure.
The 330-acre Perry Industrial Park attained certified-site status in July 2013, the result of about three years of cooperative effort by the Iowa Economic Development Authority, the city of Perry, PEDI, the Greater Dallas County Development Alliance and private parties such as Stine.
Another 300 acres, owned by Struyck’s Slopes (157 acres) and William and Lynn Knoll (139 acres), were also annexed into the city of Perry in 2013 in order to accommodate placement of the three utility-scale wind turbines now seen sporadically spinning on Perry’s southeast side.
“The idea is to continue to make things grow,” Peters said, “to get some companies in here, get good-paying jobs, get people to move to the community, live here, spend money here.”
By bootstrapping development with its spec buildings, PEDI hopes to start in motion a virtuous circle.
“Now we’re just trying to get a new business into that industrial park that can join the circle,” he said.
