La Porte City ‘rumbles’ through the pandemic

LA PORTE CITY, Iowa — This Black Hawk County city emerged from the pandemic “ready to rumble” — literally.

La Porte City completed a $3 million “streetscape” renovation of Main Street downtown while many businesses were closed in 2020. It included a restoration of the raised-brick pavement in the street that autos and carriages rode over for generations.

“People wanted the bricks back because they like that rumble,” said Mayor Dave Neil, a former Iowa state labor commissioner and member of the Iowa Board of Regents.

But there also have been losses due to the coronavirus. Neil knows that firsthand.

“I volunteered out at the cemetery digging graves,” he said. “I would imagine we lost at least a dozen” people.

Residents of La Porte City — population 2,284, according to 2020 Census results — looked to each other for support, and kept their business and dollars closer to home.

It’s not the first time.

While the pandemic put a crimp on business, Neil and others in La Porte City felt worse economically during the 1980s farm crisis. Neil also had a front-row seat to that, as a union business representative with the United Auto Workers and a stint as president of UAW Local 838 in Waterloo when John Deere’ s Waterloo operations laid off nearly 10,000 workers, from a peak of more than 16,000 in the late 1970s.

Many La Porte and rural area residents commuted to Waterloo for work at Deere as well as to Rath Packing Co., which liquidated in 1985. IBP Inc. — now part of Tyson Fresh Meats — filled some of that void with a large pork plant that opened in 1989.

While the local newspaper, the Progress Review, also ceased operations during the pandemic, the city counts among its blessings:

So the city was in good shape headed into the pandemic, and improved conditions coming out of it, with the streetscape project the city hopes to promote with downtown gatherings and special events. The streetscape was enhanced by recent concurrent recreational trail projects and recreational improvements along Wolf Creek near downtown, including a riverwalk and kayak landing.

These are the kinds of amenities helping small towns thrive in Iowa while others are losing population, a four-month IowaWatch investigation found. There are several key factors that emerged as being important for a small town to succeed.

La Porte City has several of these, including a strong downtown.

Odd Pops Tea Room and Eatery, located downstairs from the old Odd Fellows meeting space on Main Street, opened for special events in fall 2018 and public dining in October 2019 — on the cusp of both the streetscape project and a few months before the pandemic came to Iowa.

“We were really starting to roll at that point. We knew we were going to have close for the street, and then the pandemic hit,” Odd Pops owner Deb Yordt said. “If anything good came out of it, at least it was all at the same time.”

Yordt chose to stay closed until July as street work continued. Business has started to pick up again.

“We’re known for scones,” she said. “We say, ‘Everybody must get sconed,’” playing off a line from a Bob Dylan song of the mid-1960s.

The business could grow more, with the idea of adding a coffee shop in the fall. It’s difficult to find workers, she said.

“That’s been more of a hindrance than anything,” she said.

Black Hawk County had an unemployment rate of 4.1 percent in July, down from 5.2 percent in June, Iowa Workforce Development data show.

“It seems to be hitting everywhere,” Neil said in June of the labor shortage. The town could not get enough lifeguards for the swimming pool, despite raising wages, and opened for limited hours, he said.

“The demand is there. And the labor force is not there. Iowa keeps struggling with that as a state, in my opinion,” Neil said.

“We don’t have people moving in here. “

The August 2020 derecho also posed a challenge for the street project because the supplier of new bricks, Culver’s Lawn and Landscape in Marion, sustained storm damage. Still, the work was done on time.

The project was aided by a $750,000 grant from the Black Hawk County Gaming Association.

“You’re not only replacing the street, you’re replacing the infrastructure underneath,” Neil said.

That included water lines and electrical work that included new lights and service to buildings.

“When you start digging into an area that has not been excavated for the last 100 years, you run into a lot of unknowns,” Neil said.

The project required a lot of meetings, which required masks and social distancing or by Zoom.

“It was cumbersome, but we got through it,” Neil said.

Facilities improvements at the Union schools, including its athletic facilities, drove and encouraged improvements downtown and elsewhere, Neil said. One housing addition has filled and a second one has been started.

“People saw that built, and it sent the right message to people that were not opposed to spending their dollars to fix up Main Street,” Neil said. “You put up a house for sale in this town and it’s gone tomorrow.”

Jan Pint and Wendy Walker, real estate agents, say sales did not slow with COVID-19.

Homes are going in around the $170,000 price range, where some sales might have been in the $120,000 range in past years.

One theory is that working from home had an effect with potential buyers wanting a big home office, Pint said.

That’s where having high-speed fiber and internet connections figures big, said Heidi Barz, who works in customer service at LPC Connect, a municipal communications utility founded in 1907 as a local telephone cooperative.

“I think there’s a lot more pride in La Porte with what the city did on Main Street, and along the creek. Even little things, like they have a little skating rink. The school system has always been great. I think La Porte, to me, has a whole new feeling,” Pint said.

The Iowa Center for Public Affairs Journalism is a nonpartisan, nonprofit news outlet that strives to be the state's leading collaborative investigative news organization. Read more or support its mission at iowawatch.org. This reporting was supported by the Solutions Journalism Network.