WEST BURLINGTON – Southeast Iowa Regional Planning Commission Executive Director Mike Norris has been around for about 40% of the 50 years the economic development group has been functional in the area.
But it’s not hard to see how that 40% has impacted the group’s four-county functionality in terms of planning, transportation, housing, and anything else that area leaders reach out for.
Norris said the SEIRPC has been helping local agencies for five decades and the commission had morphed based on what the area needs.
“We’re kinda built more to react because we’re a service provider. The restaurant can plan and have the food, but they don’t know what you want until you ask for it.”
The group held a 50th anniversary celebration a week ago at its offices in West Burlington on Gear Avenue on the former Raider Precast Concrete site.
SEIRPC’s origins can be traced back to the late 1960s’ Iowa Office for Planning and Programming. That group, created by the state legislature, was aimed at serving groups like community colleges, workforce agencies, and transportation groups.
The original plan created 16 planning regions with the southeast Iowa group getting tapped as Region 16.
SEIRPC was formed in 1973 with Des Moines, Lee, Henry, and Louisa counties creating a mutual agreement.
The first regional development plan from the group was created five years later in 1978 to help drive economics, demographics, housing, and transportation within that region.
Norris said the other intent of the commission was to serve as an extension of local governmental staffs within the four-county region.
Norris said Mike Dunn, a current board member on Southeast Iowa Regional and Economic Port Authority (SIREPA), started bringing people together in the early 70s to take advantage of legislation and grants that were being rolled out for infrastructure and housing.
“Each city didn’t have the staff to manage all that stuff because of lot of the grants required you have a plan in place,” Norris said. “So you needed something you could scale and that became all these regional planning commissions.
“We were needed to help solve issues across boundaries and to serve as staff for all these communities where it didn’t make sense to do it themselves.”
The group started with offices in Burlington and Keokuk, but then consolidated the offices to Burlington in 1980. The group became involved in helping mitigate the flooding crisis of 1993, and then established the first Revolving Loan Fund in 1994. In 1995, they established an affiliation with the Iowa DOT to plan and program federal transportation funds and then grew regionally for about 10 years before starting SEIBUS, a regional public transportation system.
In 2010, SEIRPC closed on its own office space in West Burlington, where it currently stands.
Another hallmark moment for the group came in 2012 when they established the Great River Housing Trust, which has been focused on improving housing stock and assisting low-income families with home ownership and maintenance.
In 2014, the SIREPA was formed under the umbrella of SEIRPC and, then in 2019, Norris and SEIRPC ushered in the Homes For Iowa program, an offender-based home construction program in conjunction with the state’s Department of Corrections. The last big addition for SEIRPC was the permanent SEIBUS garage also on Gear Avenue in West Burlington.
Currently, 28 cities and the four counties pay dues to the commission in exchange for grant writing services, grant administration, planning, technical assistance, management of public funds and programs…and just about anything else to which the region would look first to SEIRPC.
Earlier this summer, Fort Madison asked Norris and SEIRPC to help set up a structure to find a replacement for its vacant city manager position, which surprised even Norris. But since that time, another community has reached out for the same services.
“Didn’t see that coming,” Norris said Thursday.
“This is a wave. You’re not sure which direction the wind’s going to blow or how big the wave is going to be. It’s always an evolution.”
Norris said the group, consisting of 20 employees in five different departments, tries to be very proactive with things, but a lot of the work the group does is reactive to the requests of the agencies in the region. He said that’s the service they provide and he doesn’t see it changing.
“It’s like looking at yourself in the mirror 20 years ago. You’re still you, but that was 20 years ago. You’ve changed, every day changes you somehow. Each conversation, what’s happening in the world. It’s a similar thing here,” he said.
“You have to be ready to change. What you can’t change is how you develop and keep relationships. And you can’t change the quality of the work and the interactions.”
Asked how SEIRPC sustains the changing governmental landscape, Norris said “We just keep picking up the phone.”
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