Bottom-Up Shorts: How Decorah, Iowa, Is Becoming a Strong Town
Travis Goedken is the city manager of Decorah, Iowa. In this Bottom-Up Short, he joins Norm to talk about a few of the practices and reforms that are making Decorah strong, including making its budgeting easier to understand for residents, embracing a highly collaborative planning process, and opening up new housing options by finding creative loopholes in restrictive state laws.
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Norm Van Eeden Petersman 0:00
Hey folks, I'm Norm with strong towns and I want to welcome you to bottom up shorts. After meeting 1000s of strong towns, members and other advocates within our communities, often think I've got to tell you about this person, and that's what bottom up shorts is all about quick introductions to regular people doing exciting things. They're not superheroes. They once felt like you might unsure if they could make a difference. Today, my guest is Travis Godkin of the city of Decorah, Iowa, and they are one of the cities that has been nominated to be in our strongest town contest this year. And so I'm really excited to be able to dive in to the particular aspects of Decorah submission and what it is that they, together with their city manager, Travis, are doing in order to help their community become stronger, more financially resilient, and truly over time, become just a place that people are thrilled to be able to dwell and call home. And so. Travis, thank you so much for joining us. And wanted to ask you up front, what is it that your community is doing that really stands out in respect to the way in which you've opened up many of the budget discussions and made people realize that they have a role to play in understanding and also contributing to the city's financial well being.
Travis Goedken 1:20
Well, thank you, norm. I appreciate you having me on on the podcast here. I'd like to think that some of our successes well can be shown through just being nominated for this contest. Our nomination actually came from a resident of the community that attended our budget work sessions and put us forward. So I like to think that our successes are primarily on the delivery of our budget. When we have these conversations about, you know, $20 million in expenses and revenues, most people will struggle with that concept, $20 million sounds like a ton of money. How Aren't you getting all this stuff done? What are you spending all of this money on? And when we really break it down into, you know, the pots of money when it comes to fund accounting, where the different revenues, how they're dedicated revenue sources for specific expenses. It's all in the delivery. You cannot talk too technical when it comes to budget preparation, or whether it's Joe Q citizen or even council members, their eyes start to glaze over, and they lose interest quickly. So we use lots of lots of very colorful graphs, and we show historical trends over years, making sure Joe Q citizen can understand as well.
Norm Van Eeden Petersman 2:52
And that sounds like a commitment that sort of, I perhaps even predates sort of your work, but is is woven into that fabric of engaging the citizens within the community and making them feel like they have a place at the table in those types of discussions. I think there's something really valuable there. And maybe touch on the fact that, I mean, one of the elements of a strong town is having a great relationship with local newspapers and things like that. And one of the notes was that the paper newspapers worked hard to break down questions about complex or unique things in the community. Can you touch on how that has a role to play in helping your community to be stronger as well?
Travis Goedken 3:30
Absolutely. Local media has been a tremendous, tremendous partner here, whether it's the paper or monthly radio shows or we have an online newspaper presence as well. All have been fantastic partners the written newspaper here. We've partnered together to do a series of stories that are they sometimes can get a little technical, but we call it for the record, and it's a series of different city programs and projects that we have going on where we try and break down what is going on specifically and really try and carry through a story from start to finish on projects for
Norm Van Eeden Petersman 4:19
those, I suppose we didn't Do any of the intros. That's part of the strategy with this podcast. Is always a dive right into the action, and I already picked up on several of the pieces. But if someone walked in and said, Tell me a little bit more about Decorah, how would you do that, and particularly from your position as someone with responsibility to sort of work together with all of the many different parts within the community?
Travis Goedken 4:40
Well, I'd like to tee it up by saying, well, it's Decorah Iowa, and have people start envisioning Iowa. Okay, that's potato fields, right? No, that's Idaho. We're in Iowa. That's corn and soybeans. That's what everyone else jumps to right away, right? Pigs. Decorah, Iowa, though, doesn't fit, really that that stereotype. We are in an area called the Driftless region, where the glaciers, as they crossed over the Midwest and shaped the landscape, they missed this area, the Driftless region. And so we've got amazing river bluffs and a very unique topography to northeast Iowa. We've got trout streams here in Iowa as well. It's very picturesque, and so that's where many people learn about Decorah and fall in love with it and try and become a resident, much like myself. You know that's this was a destination for me on my short list of where I wanted to work in city administration. It It's come become reality, and we have a very close community where I can be out on the streets and be approached by, quite frankly, anyone that knows what my role is here in the community and in a very polite manner, ask about how things are going. And in today's day and age, civility is extremely lacking, and so being here in the Midwest, we still have a little bit of that here, and in smaller communities of 7500 even more so.
Norm Van Eeden Petersman 6:29
And one of the men things that was mentioned in the nomination form is that our city manager will come right out and tell people what he is thinking. And I actually think that there's something remarkably underrated in that. Do you want to maybe explain why is that part of your personal ethos as you take this up?
Travis Goedken 6:43
Yeah, well, I'm very well known for saying I'm just thinking out loud here. And really, if you don't have those conversations and throw out ideas, not all of them are going to be great ideas. But it's also not my job to present just the good ideas. Here's the options. What are some options that? And again, they don't have to be just all my ideas. Whether it's Staff Council, our our meetings are much more a dialog among people trying to figure out, figure out solutions to our problems, then it is a board meeting of me presenting. Here's the path board. We've already got it pre baked. This is what we need to do. So we'll have whether it's multiple work sessions leading up to a specific action item on a topic, we just have conversations. And some of them don't always pan out the greatest, but more times than not, we've seen a lot of success from that. And I think an
Norm Van Eeden Petersman 7:51
element of it is finding ways to allow residents to unleash their creative capacities, to make, you know, do things and adapt their spaces, and adapt, sort of, even sometimes the public realm, in order to just work better for everyone. And not always with the end goal in mind, but sometimes just to say, like, hey, if we made just a small change here and you've taken some steps on housing, can you talk about the container projects, or, pardon me, the ability to use containers as a suitable housing construction component, and maybe some of the other components that you're doing to say these are the steps we need to take to make housing that is affordable for a broader range of people. Because one of the fascinating things across the United States and Canada is that housing has become largely unaffordable, even in areas where there's still available land or there are vacant lots, and yet, at the same time, the price to acquire a home is really daunting for a lot of people that are in limited economic circumstances, not even that limited at that point. And so what does that look like in your community? How are you responding to local housing needs?
Travis Goedken 8:56
This is a Oh, as you pointed out, across all of North America, this is every community. I don't care your size. Every community is struggling with this issue right now, and as I said in a local forum here not too long ago, once we figure this out, if we ever find the solution, I'm taking the show on the road and retiring, because I'm going to make millions once we truly figure this out, but we have taken numerous steps here in decor to try and figure to try and ease the issue. But largely our big struggle here is also, as I pointed out before, many people love our beautiful topography and the river bluffs, or excuse me, river valleys and the bluffs, but it's also a tremendous expense. When it comes to infrastructure costs, we're looking at, you know, $80,000 per lot, per residential, single family lot. And I know I am a strong talents follower, and one of the things that. That I do say very candidly in the public single family homes don't pay the bills. You just heard me say it's $80,000 in infrastructure costs to construct a new lot. Well, then you have, of course, have ongoing maintenance costs associated with that infrastructure. And in Iowa, our property tax which cities are are by state code heavily reliant on single family homes. We have unique property tax structure here where they don't pay the bills and so but it's a double edged sword, right? We need residents. We need workforce. We we need to grow. And I use that term, knowing that as a strong towns follower, that cities sometimes can get caught up in a Ponzi scheme, right? You've talked about a couple of different things we've done for the housing so, like the shipping containers, this is, you know, a bit of a novelty for our area, but we have, we saw a few requests to start using them as garden sheds, storage sheds, things like that. Did a little bit of more exploration of where communities that have done successful uses for residential and thought, You know what? There's a building code completely surrounding the use of shipping containers for structures. Why not? Right? And so we've opened that door. We haven't seen anyone necessarily come through that door, though, and adopt that here in the corner, but we have no prohibitions about where it can be utilized across the city, and just gotta follow building code to make it happen. Accessory dwelling units, of of course, that's a easy first step, in my opinion, for most communities. So we have seen an uptick in those being taken advantage of decreasing setback requirements, all that stuff that strong talents preaches. You know, that's that's the low hanging fruit. And I'd encourage anyone that hasn't taken steps in that direction do that. And
Norm Van Eeden Petersman 12:06
what stands out to me is that you're taking those steps within your capacity as city manager, addressing those things in your code, and really addressing as rapidly as possible. I mean, things move slowly, I'm sure, at times. But as Edward from our team has said, you know, actually, just go through your code book and say, All right, in this section, why is that there? Does it still belong there? Should we actually consider removing it? But at the same time, there's a vitality expressed in, you know, that type of activity that is behind the scenes. But then there's also more visible activity that's mentioned in Deborah's submission here, of the buckthorn Blitz, which just stood out to me, which was, hey, we've got mountain biking trails. Let's set aside specific times where everybody shows up with tree pruners. We're going to remove invasive shrubs, we're going to clear the trails. We're going to just do the work. And there's something so invigorating about that. And then I also learned a new term, which is the benzebo. Can you tell me just as we close, what is a benzebo and and then we'll, we'll wrap up, oh,
Travis Goedken 13:03
it's in typical Iowa fashion where it's not good enough to just have a gazebo. You got to take a grain bin and turn it into a gazebo. So that's what a bin Z Bo is, yeah. And
Norm Van Eeden Petersman 13:15
as it was described, it was donated to put one into the park for the city. And I mean, how very Iowa. I grew up on a dairy farm, and so we would have to do a silo version of it, which would be a little bit more challenging to put together, but it would be pretty awesome. Yeah,
Travis Goedken 13:30
yeah, that it would Hey, as we
Norm Van Eeden Petersman 13:33
close, I always like to ask, like, what is it that gives you hope?
Travis Goedken 13:37
Ooh, hope. Well, in decor here, we actually just had a special election, a referendum held that just a few years ago. It's a repeat of just a few years ago where the measure failed by three votes. It was extremely contentious then, and was fairly contentious this week, up until our election on Tuesday, but when all the votes were casted and all the votes were counted, even on social media, I did not see people calling out the opposition of I told You, or this was a terrible idea, or anything along those lines. You know, I saw plenty of people happy that that the measure failed, if that's that was the path they wanted to choose, some expressing disappointment that it didn't pass, because that was the path that they wanted. But it I did actually see a little bit more civility than, quite honestly, I expected. And so that gives me hope, yeah,
Norm Van Eeden Petersman 14:47
and I think that is a consequence of that work at the local level, when it is across the table with people that you're going to then go and, you know, cut invasive shrubs down with and build a benzebo and do other types of things and and that is. Key part of it with that. Thank you so much to Travis for being on bottom up shorts, and to everybody that's listening. I'd go out and find something in your community, whether that's in a stack of codes that you to working with city staff can begin to bring in the process of bringing about changes, or taking note of things that could go into a public park, or things that are going to improve your trails, doing those small things to really make a difference. And so with that, take care and take care of your places.
ADDITIONAL SHOW NOTES
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Travis Goedken (LinkedIn)
Norm Van Eeden Petersman (LinkedIn)
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