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Union County Development Association (UCDA) has plans in the works to revitalize a more than 100-year-old uptown building and turn it into a multipurpose community resource for economic development.
The property, coined “Building 301” by UCDA, is located at 301 W. Montgomery St. (on the corner of Montgomery and Elm streets) in uptown Creston. iWireless was the building’s previous tenant until UCDA acquired it in January of this year.
Renovation plans for the building include two roughly 1,200 square feet loft-style executive apartments on the second floor, a public “co-working” facility on the first floor (to be called the “Roundhouse”) and leasable garage space on the west end of the property — about 4,000 square feet of it.
“It’s really an opportunity to re-invest in the uptown area,” said UCDA Executive Director Wayne Pantini of the project. “And I’ve been developing a business plan for a co-working facility, and researching models — so trying to bring different components all together [in this project].”
Pantini said the project’s budget is about $524,000 right now, a portion of which UCDA hopes to pay for with grant money. Much of the costs will be for new windows on the second floor of the building and for new facade-work on the exterior of the building.
“We decided we wanted to rebrand the building for a new purpose — to give it some new life,” Pantini said. “We’re hoping to make some pretty significant investment in the building so that it can last another 50 to 100 years.”
Pantini explained that funding for the project will be provided from a variety of sources. Already, more than half of the required funding has been raised by sponsorship from area businesses. Pantini said UCDA is still soliciting new sponsors.
To add, UCDA, in partnership with the city of Creston, has applied for a $100,000 “catalyst” grant offered by the Iowa Economic Development Authority — to be matched by the city over a 10-year period if the city is awarded the grant. UCDA also plans to apply for another $50,000 USDA Rural Enterprise grant in the near future.
“And then, whatever remaining that we’re not able to secure in grants and funding and so forth, we’ll be prepared to either scale back the scope of the project or we’ll borrow the money we need to make the project happen,” Pantini said.
Co-working facility
Pantini said the co-working facility planned for the first floor of Building 301 — which is about 3,000 square feet — will be rolled out in three phases. The ultimate goal of the facility is to provide resources and spur economic development in Creston.
The first phase is to simply provide a “shared workspace” for the use of the public. It is intended to be used by entrepreneurs or employees who have the need for an office, but are perhaps not far enough along in their business or don’t have the need to rent permanent office space on their own.
The facility will provide access to broadband internet, a copier/printer, some administrative services, several different kinds of workstations and other miscellaneous resources. Pantini said the space could also be used by individuals who simply need a remote workspace for a period of time.
As part of the facility, UCDA also plans to provide a more permanent, personalized office space option for those who would need it. Short-term leases would be available for this purpose.
The second phase of the co-working facility will be for UCDA to coordinate networking opportunities like workshops, seminars and training sessions for those in the business world.
And finally, the third phase of the project, which Pantini hopes to realize in three to five years’ time, would be to actually begin incubating new area business out of the facility.
“So they’ll (the start-up businesses) be there short term — we’d sign an agreement where they’d be there for a certain period of time — so that way they can eventually graduate out into the marketplace and whatever’s available to rent or lease,” Pantini said. “Basically it helps to reduce the costs of those start-ups, and keeps the overhead costs down. That’s the concept.”
Pantini added that as part of this incubation process, the UCDA would offer extensive one-on-one consultation services to new businesses and individuals.
“I do think it’s a really good thing,” said Creston City Council At-Large Representative Terry Freeman. “I hope that the business that are available for it do take advantage of it — to help beautify and kind of give a uniformity to the look of what we can do.”
Why the “Roundhouse?”
UCDA decided to call its co-working space housed within Building 301 the “Roundhouse,” in homage to Creston’s own historic railroad roundhouse that was dismantled in the 1930s.
A roundhouse is a maintenance shed for locomotives built around a turntable. They were primarily used because during this time trains could only move forward, so they were spun in the direction they were wanted using the turntable.
“The concept is, where they would pull in the trains and work on them and get them back out — we’ll do that same kind of thing with businesses,” Pantini explained. “That’s the idea behind it.”
Pantini expects Building 301 to be operational in 8 to 10 months’ time, by the end of this year’s third quarter (around October). UCDA plans to make every effort possible to utilize local contractors and material suppliers for the construction.
“I would just say that this is a small piece of a larger vision we have for the uptown,” Pantini concluded. “We have other committees that are working on some programs and things — but this is just a piece of that. This [project] will be an impactful part of what we do, and what our mission is, and it will compliment all the other renovations of buildings [in uptown Creston] that are going on.”