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.