Pomeranz working to support local businesses

CEDAR RAPIDS - City Manager Jeff Pomeranz on Monday remembers when he arrived in Cedar Rapids three years ago and the stories from developers and business owners about how bureaucratic roadblocks were prompting them to move and invest elsewhere.

At the time, Pomeranz was leaving a growing West Des Moines, after being city manager for 12 years, and he said he had had a similar experience in reverse: Developers and business owners were fleeing Des Moines for suburbs such as West Des Moines.

“They found communities that were very welcoming,” he said in a speech on economic development at the Downtown Rotary's noontime meeting.

Pomeranz said Cedar Rapids today is as welcoming a community to business as West Des Moines was when he worked there.

“I personally never want to hear the words, ‘You were so hard to work with Cedar Rapids, I went somewhere else,'” he said. “That to me is absolutely unacceptable.”

Pomeranz spelled out changes the city has made in the last year to better equip itself to promote economic development.

Joe O'Hern is the city's executive administrator for development services and is heading up a “one-stop” Cedar Rapids development team with a development liaison that contacts businesses and asks what the city can do for them.

Pomeranz said the Cedar Rapids Metro Economic Alliance has an important role in the area's economic development, but he said the Alliance's role centers on the entire metro area.

Economic development, he said, is too important to Cedar Rapids for the city government to sit back and not take a lead role. The city's effort is not redundant to the Alliance's, but necessary and complementary, he said.

He said he viewed the city as the “spark plug” to provide the encouragement and energy needed to create economic development opportunities.

He listed development projects by Intermec, Raining Rose, Geonetric, Ruffalo Cody and developer Joe Ahmann as examples where city support has helped spark private investment.

Pomeranz said he wants to accomplish things.

“We want to move things forward,” he said. “We want to create jobs. We want to create economic vitality.”