This week, the Clinton Chamber of Commerce held its annual strategic planning meeting and the guest speakers were Dubuque City Manager, Mike Van Milligen and Rick Dickinson, President of the Greater Dubuque Development Corporation. Van Milligen and Dickinson have been working in Dubuque since the mid-1990’s. And they really did start from scratch. Thinking back to the 1980’s Dubuque had some of the worst unemployment in the nation. Dickinson described his start as inauspicious.

“In the course of a few weeks of my starting in 1995, the Riverboat Casino in East Dubuque left, a foundry in East Dubuque burned to the ground and the Dubuque Packing Plant closed its doors. People were calling me, ‘The Angel of Death.’ ”

“But, the hard times put fire in the belly of the people of Dubuque,” said Van Milligen.

When talking about the keys to their success Van Milligen and Dickinson came back again and again to two themes: cooperation and preparation. For years, the GDDC leadership has had a standing meeting with City Hall staff every Wednesday at 11 a.m. where they go over everything that is going on in the city and share responsibilities for preparing for initiatives. Further, the GDDC board, which might seem unwieldy with 37 members is also a vehicle for public and private cooperation, Dickinson explained.

The board requires the City the County and the School District to have a member of the Greater Dubuque Development Corporation board. All members of the board must be executives of their organization. This means CEO’s of member businesses, City Council Members, and the School Board Superintendent. Dickinson explained why this is critical. “We need people there who are decision makers, who can give the unqualified opinion of their organization and who can move the ball when opportunities arise.”

The two used as an example, the recent selection of Dubuque by IBM to locate a facility and 1,300 jobs in Downtown Dubuque. When the IBM committee visited Dubuque to consider the city and evaluate sites, they fell in love with the old Roshek Department Store building downtown. The problem was, neither the City nor the GDDC owned the building. They had thirty days to put together a deal to purchase the building and secure the $42 million in funds to restore and build out the facility.

Within 24 hours Dickinson had convened a meeting of the CEO’s of every financial institution in town. He told them< "We need a $25 million line of credit." Dead silence. City Manager Van Milligen then rose and said, "This line of credit will be backed by the full faith and credit of the City of Dubuque." And so the deal was made.

Preparation is also key. The GDDC talks to over 200 local businesses per year and keeps a powerful database of all the existing businesses, their current conditions, needs and plans. The GDDC sponsors a concierge service and subsidises a Distictively Dubuque (PDF file link) program that hosts classes and tours for newcomers.

During the process during which IBM was weighing Dubuque against other cities, each visit by the IBM staff was highly orchestrated and nothing left to chance. By way of example, Dickinson talked about the final stage of the process. The race was down to Dubuque and a city in South Carolina. The decision was up to three IBM divisions: Operations, Facilities and Human Resources. Operations liked Dubuque. Facilities liked South Carolina because they were offering a new building, ready to move in. Human Resources would have to break the tie.

IBM’s Vice President of Human Resources came to visit and was having lunch with representatives of the three colleges in Dubuque. She had already fallen in love with the city’s historic architecture, river expanses and quirky layout, but she expressed some skepticism about Dubuque’s ability to provide the highly-educated, specialized talent IBM would need. A GDDC staffer walked over with a stack of 600 resumes that she had pulled off the Access Dubuque website — all were qualified technology applicants — and dropped them on the table next to her. Game, set, match to Dubuque.

That incredible level of preparation and organization is a critical element of successful economic development activity. How does a city get there? Dickinson summed it up in four words, “Elect talent. Hire talent.”

Clinton has done a lot in the last couple of years to lay the foundation for a major increase in economic growth through strategic investments. But in order to make those investments pay off the community needs to begin to pull together and work smart as well as hard.

During the period of explosive growth in the Dot-Com era right through to today the one thing that makes the Internet special is its blind simplicity. At the end of the day, all it is is a network of very fast little virtual mail-room clerks shifting packets to and from their destinations. The network does not care at all what is inside that packet. It can be part of a credit card transaction, a video, a love letter, a chat text, a blog post, literally anything that can be reduced to digital bits can be moved over the Internet.

The Internet’s strength and its value as a tremendous generator of innovation, progress and freedom in the world is directly linked to its OPENNESS. The fact that it is a dumb network that just moves packets means that anyone who can think of an interesting thing to do by moving little chunks of information, can go right ahead and do it, EVEN IF ITS NEVER BEEN DONE BEFORE. THEY DON’T NEED PERMISSION. IF IT FOLLOWS THE PROTOCOLS IT GETS ACCEPTED.

We’ve got a web site up and running, google4clinton.org. There’s nothing there yet, but we’ll have some content up later today.

Yesterday afternoon we met with officials from the Clinton Regional Development Corporation, the Chamber of Commerce and City Aldermen and agreed that this is worth pursuing and divided up responsibilities for collecting the information required by the Government application.

We’re moving forward. Most of my efforts will be consumed by work and this initiative for a couple of weeks so do check back but don’t expect much posting here.

If you don’t know what I’m talking about, start here.

Posting will be light while I add this to the to-do list.

Creepy, no?

India-based Reliance is continuing to try to purchase the bankrupt chemical giant. The offer, initally tendered in November, stands at $13.5b.

The Dutch-based Lyondell is continuing to work through its Chapter 11 reorganization, and recently filed a motion for settling claims of creditors and setting up a litigation trust fund.

Bridgepoint Education-Ashford University

Of course the big news for Bridgepoint and Ashford recently was the purchase of the property of the Clinton Country Club for an undisclosed price $2.5 million.

Ashford University is adding to its educational offerings, most recently adding specializations to its MBA program. Ashford graduated a record number of students at it winter ceremony and attracted a prominent commencement speaker in National Public Radio’s senior correspondent, Susan Stamberg.

RockTenn

RockTenn posted very good earnings growth in its Q1 2010 filing.

The Norcross, Ga.-based packaging and folding cartons maker (NYSE: RKT) had net income of $56.3 million and earnings of $1.43 a share, compared with net income of $30.6 million and earnings of 79 cents a share in the first quarter of 2009.

The company has also recently announced price increases in its corrugated box and sheet as well as its uncoated recycled paper products.

ADM

ADM is beginning initial startup of the bioplastics plant in Clinton.
The cogeneration facility is up and running.

The company also donated 700 tons of rice to Haiti relief.

It is expected that she will endorse Clinton attorney, Mary Wolfe to replace her. Ms. Wolfe is expected to make an announcement soon.

Hah! Scoopage! Power to the Internets!

Mediacom officially blames an influx of spam on the outage. And some customers report that in the mail they are receiving there is lots of spam. However, this does not fully explain why inbound mail — which is where one would see traffic related to spam the most –seems to work okay and outbound is so bad. Unless Mediacom’s customers’ computers are just congested with malware that relays spam. Which isn’t outside the realm of possibility.

The other problem is that although Mediacom says that they announced the changes some time ago via e-mail to their customers, I have yet to talk to one who acknowledges ever having seen such a thing.

Here is Mediacom’s official FAQ on the mail situation and the officially supported settings.

Outgoing SMTP Server: mail.mediacombb.net. Port 465 Require SSL ON
Incoming POP3 Server: mail.mediacombb.net. Port 995 SSL ON

Check the FAQ linked to above if you don’t know what these settings mean. It has pictures and arrows and stuff. Or just call Riverfront Technology and we’ll walk you through it.

A Mediacom technician who I spoke with on the phone this afternoon said that the problems are ongoing and those settings may not work. The mail servers will be the same but he said some people are having success with

POP3 on the standard port, 110 with no encryption;
SMTP on the standard port, 25 with no encryption.

For the time being, he said, just play with the settings and see what works. The server-side settings are changing hour-by-hour as they work through their problems.

Regardless, this is the biggest major ISP fail in as long as I can remember. My experience and thoughts regarding Mediacom Internet services over the years range between outright contempt and very grudging acceptance. They treat their business customers like cattle despite charging more for the same level of service as they provide to everyone else. Their overall quality and reliability has always been substandard at best. Outages are frequent and configuration changes that wreck service settings happen in the middle of the night with very little or no advanced notice.

I have had very good luck and good experiences overall with their technicians on the business side of things. Although they are often a beleaguered lot, they are pretty helpful and give the right advice. There appears to be a call center in Des Moines, so many of the techs are Iowans or at least midwestern-based.

Aerial Concept View

How long has this been in development?

The former director of the Clinton Regional Development Corporation, the late, Hugh Lamont, began looking into the project and talking about it with interested parties as far back as 1989, according to Ed O’Neill, former Director of the Quality Jobs program at the CRDC. When the current Executive Director, Steve Ames, came on board he began to move the project forward and planning in earnest began in 2005.

What is the rationale for this project?

Since the first settlements in Clinton and Lyons, the area’s economic development has been driven by geography and the area’s ties to transportation links. The same is true today and that is Clinton’s main advantage for a project like this.

Clinton is on the banks of the Mississippi River and has three barge terminals.

• The City of Clinton terminal behind ADM.
• The former Determann Industries terminal, now owned by Artco in Camanche.
• The private deep-channel terminal in Fulton, IL.

Clinton is served by three Class I (national service) Railroad Lines:

• The Union Pacific running East to West through town.
• The Canadian Pacific, which recently bought the Iowa Central and Eastern (ICE) running North to South along the river.
• The Burlington Northern & Santa Fe, which also crosses the river at Clinton and runs North-South on both the Iowa and Illinois side where it also crosses at Burlington.

Clinton has excellent access to major highways with four lane US Highway 30 leading west and via US Highway 61, linking up with Interstate 80 twenty-five miles away. In addition, plans are in place to construct a four lane extension from Highway 30 from the Interstate 88 exit outside Morrison, Illinois to Clinton, which would bring four full lanes accessing town from East and West.

Clinton has a municipal airport with a 5400 foot runway that can accommodate corporate and light cargo aircraft.

This combination gives Clinton a huge advantage in serving industries that require bulk transport in or out of the area of raw materials or finished goods. According to O’Neill there are only about five or six similar locations in the entire United States that even come close. And Clinton’s project is the only one close to being ready. Therefore we have a unique position.

What is the Railport project?

The overall vision is to build railroad access to a parcel of land between Hwy 30 and 44th Avenue South just south of the Airport and then to attract industrial tenants to the facility and build out on the 500 fully improved acres already owned with potential for 1,000 more to be added later. According to multiple sources at the CRDC and at the City, this is not a pipe dream. No less than a dozen very large firms have visited Clinton and expressed very strong interest in locating to this site. Although there are no guarantees, the attitude of many of the firms has been one of, “Let us know when you have it ready and we’ll move in.”

Map view.

Phase I of the project is to build accommodation for pulling trains off the Union Pacific main line. This will be a 9700 foot long extension that will allow a full, 100 car train to pull off the Union Pacific main line. This was a requirement of the Union Pacific. If we were going to put (another) spur on the main line, the railroad wanted to be able to pull off an entire train for loading, unloading and switching so as not to delay traffic. Phase I will also include a 3000′ runaround line near the Railport site to allow through trains to continue on their East-West journeys while trains are entering and exiting the railport.

Phase II of the project will be to build the railroad access lines into the industrial park area. This will be done specific to the needs of facilities that move into the industrial park. Much of the cost of this phase will be absorbed through state and federal economic development grants and zero-interest loans.

How much will it cost?
Phase I has a construction cost of $10.8 million. This comprises: $2 million for bridges, culverts and railroad switches, $2.35 million for grading and earthwork, $6.4 million for ballast and railway. The time frame on this is approximately 18 months. In addition, $5 million worth of land and engineering will be contributed by the City of Clinton, $3.0 million of sewerage will be donated by the City of Clinton and $2 million of land will be contributed by the CRDC to bring the total cost to $20.8 million.

The funding for this project will hopefully come from the following sources:

• City of Clinton $8m
• CRDC $2m
• Clinton County $6m
• Federal DOT $2m
• Gaming Grant $1m
• IDED, Other $1.8m

The federal loans are stimulus fund money via the Iowa DOT. They must be used by January 1, 2013. So there is some urgency to get things moving.

What will the result be?

While there are no written guarantees, no less than a dozen large firms have visited the site and met with CRDC officials and expressed very strong interest in the site. 9 of these firms were wind power related. This project is a targeted development not just of the Clinton area but of the Iowa Department of Economic Development, so Des Moines is strongly behind it as well.

According to IDED studies, the project will attract up to 1,000 high-wage (> $17/hour) jobs within 5 years of completion of Phase I. This does not include construction related jobs for completion of the project and building of the very large facilities on the property. The net positive wage inflows to the area will increase by $25 million.

Also, whenever there is a large concentration of a particular industry in the area, other businesses tend to locate there in order to serve those customers. So, one can logically expect other business development to follow-on to the railport project once the tenant industries are established there.

There will be a public hearing on the project at the Clinton County Board of Supervisors on December 14 at 10:00 at the County Administraton Building.

India’s Reliance Industries has tendered a non-binding offer for LyondellBasell. Details were not disclosed but sources cited by CBS News Marketwatch say it is in the neighborhood of $12 billion. Rumors has been circulating that US-based private equity firm TPG and Chinese chemical giant Sinopec had been mulling a joint offer but they were denied by officials from both companies last week.

There is a good profile of the for-profit education market in Fast Company this week.