A reader named Hannah wrote that a lot of people in very small towns are against what the rest of us call economic development. Not in principle, she said. In practice.

Even one new family who starts building on a spot that used to be a field makes the locals mad. Tearing down condemned buildings to construct a new facility? Get ready for the rural furies to swoop in and start writing angry social posts.

My reply, in its entirety, was: “If the citizens of a town would rather see it die than to continue, that is a choice they can make.”

She came back with this:

Nobody would say that they want their towns to die. What they want (and what may not be realistic) is for their towns to be respected for what and who they are by outside investors.

Reading my reply back, I sound like someone who wanted the conversation to be over. She wasn’t asking whether towns have the right to choose. She was asking whether what we’re offering is worth choosing.

Collinsville is the Oklahoma version happening right now. Fastest-growing city in Tulsa County, 9,757 people as of July 2024, up 22.7 percent since 2020. When KJRH went up there in May of last year, the chamber’s board president told them 4,000 homes were projected over the next four years. One woman said her kids have always called the land behind them “the Prairie,” and now it’s getting built up. Another had moved there from Owasso three years earlier to get away from exactly this, and said she might be moving again.

The city manager gave them a quote that sums up the standard economic development perspective: “If you don’t embrace growth, then you’re condemning yourself to death.”

I recognized that one immediately, because it’s my LinkedIn reply with better delivery.

Here’s what I actually think, and it’s less satisfying than having a villain.

Everybody has the town’s best interest at heart. The people who don’t want it to change are trying to protect it. The city and the EDO trying to bring something in are also trying to protect it, because they’ve seen what happens to towns where nothing ever comes. Both sides want two things that are hard to have at the same time, and that’s a tough line to walk.

Some places have walked that line. Dubuque, Iowa was at 23 percent unemployment in the early 1980s with more than half its downtown sitting empty. Rather than just trying to recruit new businesses, it ran a planning process that pulled in more than 5,000 people in a city of 58,000, roughly one resident in ten. The projects came after the residents got to say what they wanted. Roanoke did something similar before it redeveloped 23 acres of old industrial ground.

Fine, but 58,000 people isn’t a small town. How does that scale down?

Haskell, OK, is trying to find out. The town of 1,761 is working up a land use master plan, and the first move was a survey asking residents what they like about the place, how they’d describe its character, and what ought to come first. City Manager Mike Keene put it about as plainly as it can be put: “We want to make upgrades and do things to the city that our citizens are interested in.” The plan is due in spring 2027.

I have no idea how it will go. Maybe 12 people fill out the survey and the whole thing sits on a shelf. Maybe it’s a smashing success. Either way, they asked first.

Hannah, you made a good point and I was glib about it. I’ve spent two weeks on the answer, went through more drafts of this than I want to admit, and skipped a newsletter because it wasn’t ready. The best I can do is that everybody is trying to protect the town. Residents, city hall, the EDO, all of them, and they don’t agree on what protecting it means.

There are places working on it, though. Dubuque got there, and Haskell is trying. If you’ve watched a town do this well, I’d love to hear about it.

These posts are brought to you by Econ Dev Ops, providing administrative support for Chambers of Commerce and economic development organizations. It’s hard to champion your community when the back office is on fire. Learn more at econdevops.com or reach us at hello@econdevops.com.

Sources

• Hannah Grieser’s comment, on the original thread: LinkedIn

• Collinsville’s growth figures and the resident interviews: KJRH, “’I may be moving again’: Collinsville locals react to rapid growth, development,” May 30, 2025

• Dubuque and Roanoke: U.S. EPA, “How Small Towns and Cities Can Use Local Assets to Rebuild Their Economies”

• Haskell’s master plan and survey: KJRH, “Haskell seeks public input to help shape city’s future growth,” August 26, 2026

• Haskell’s population: World Population Review

I was talking to a friend in the industry recently who specializes in finance tools, and she brought up micro TIFs. She was excited about the idea and wished we had it in Oklahoma. Having never heard of micro TIFs before, I immediately dove down the rabbit hole.

So that’s what this is — my effort to learn what a micro TIF is, how it works, and whether it’s worth looking at. I’m definitely not an expert on this, but I’ve done my best to gather accurate information that I can share with you.

A Few Things Became Clear Fast

• Micro TIF isn’t a general category of economic development tools. It’s a specific program in Nebraska statute that was created in 2020 and has been amended four times since then. Every legitimate example I found traces back to a Nebraska city.

• Most of what’s written about micro TIFs online is wrong. The top search results include a syndicated opinion column citing case studies in Michigan and Iowa, but neither state has a micro TIF program that I could verify. Even official pages in Nebraska have stale information because the laws change but nobody updates the websites.

• Nebraska has been expanding this program for six years and doesn’t track it. The state publishes a project-level TIF report every year, and micro TIFs only show up once in a footnote about capture periods. There’s no count of how many have been approved, no total dollars, no way to tell from public data whether any of this is working.

How a TIF Works

For those who have heard of TIFs but aren’t really sure how they work, here’s the short version.

A city draws a district. The county assessor freezes the assessed value of everything inside it at whatever it’s worth today. That frozen number is the base.

Development happens, values go up, and the difference between the frozen number and the new value is the increment. For a certain number of years, the taxes generated by that increment go to pay off the cost of the project instead of flowing to the school district, the county, and everybody else. Once the term ends, the whole value goes back on the rolls.

That’s it. The school district keeps collecting on the base the entire time. What it gives up is the growth, for a while.

The pitch for TIFs is that without the districts there wouldn’t have been any growth to give up. That is called a “but for” test, and most states require a city to make a finding that a project wouldn’t happen but for the TIF.

Why Nobody Does a TIF for One Building

The process for developing a TIF is expensive and laborious.

Under Oklahoma’s Local Development Act, a project plan needs legal descriptions, revenue projections, and cost estimates. It goes to the planning commission for review and recommendation. The review committee has to include a representative from every taxing jurisdiction whose ad valorem taxes might be affected, plus three at-large members. That committee makes findings on the financial impact for each of those jurisdictions.

Then public notice, then a hearing, then approval by ordinance with findings of feasibility and conformance with the master plan. If the council disagrees with the review committee, it takes a two-thirds vote. There’s also annual reporting to Commerce to top it off.

The names change and the process varies from state to state, but the overall shape is the same: Plan, eligibility study, taxing body review, notice, hearing, ordinance. Everywhere.

Add on top of that the cost for a lawyer and a consultant to make sure it’s done correctly, and you’ve got a real roadblock.

Here’s the part I had backwards. It isn’t a roadblock for small towns; it’s a roadblock for small projects. There are small towns all over Oklahoma that have TIF districts. They are for things like a big hotel, a river port, an industrial park, a resort community, entire downtowns. What they have in common is they are all multi-million-dollar projects.

A town of 1,100 will absolutely seat a review committee and hold a public hearing for a $2.5 million hotel. Nobody does it for a $180,000 rehab.

So How is a Micro TIF Different?

This is where I got tangled up, and I suspect most people do.

“Micro TIF” often gets defined in two different ways. One is just a small TIF district. Draw the boundary around a downtown block instead of an industrial park, run the usual process, and call it micro because it’s little. That’s what most of the online writing seems to mean. By that definition, a micro TIF isn’t a distinct tool at all. It’s just a small TIF.

The second definition, and the one I’m most interested in, isn’t about geography at all. It’s a single, small project that gets a fast-track approval instead of the full process. What’s micro is the project and the paperwork.

The distinction matters because the first definition doesn’t fix anything. Shrinking the district to one building doesn’t shrink the process.

That’s the problem Nebraska went after.

Nebraska’s Shortcut

Neb. Rev. Stat. § 18-2155 doesn’t create a new kind of district. It creates a shortcut through the approval process for a single project on a single property.

The five most important differences I saw:

1. The application is a form. The redeveloper fills out a one-page form from the state Department of Economic Development. The city can’t charge more than $50 for it.

2. There’s a clock and no hearing. The city has 30 days to approve or deny. No public hearing. No planning commission. The city can only say no for three reasons: it doesn’t meet the criteria, it exceeds the city’s own annual cap, or it conflicts with the comprehensive plan.

3. Eligibility is narrow. The county has to have fewer than 100,000 people. The building has to have been inside the city limits or the city’s extraterritorial zoning jurisdiction for at least 25 years or be a vacant platted lot or nonconforming lot of record platted at least 25 years ago. The property still has to sit in an area that has been officially declared blighted by the city. Completed value caps out at $350,000 for a single-family house, $1.5 million for a multi-family or commercial building, and $10 million for a National Register property. Look at that first number again: $350,000 for one house. No city was ever going to convene a review committee and hold a public hearing so somebody could rehab one house. That’s what this program is targeting.

4. The owner fronts the money. The redeveloper pays for the work and has two years to finish. When it’s done, the county assessor certifies the valuation increase, and the increment starts flowing back as repayment for up to 15 years. Payments stop when the agreed cost is repaid or 15 years runs out, whichever comes first.

5. The city owes nothing. The statute says plainly that this creates no general obligation. If the increment comes in short, the property owner eats it.

Cities opt in by resolution and can opt out by resolution at any time. The program was created by LB1021 in 2020 and has been amended four times. It seems they originally built it too tight, and they’ve been loosening it ever since.

What This Could Look Like Where You Are

The thing to take from Nebraska isn’t the statute. Your state probably can’t copy it anyway because what’s available to you depends on what your state constitution allows. The thing to take is the question underneath it:

Does the process scale down?

Nebraska’s does. A small project gets a small process: one form, $50, and 30 days. Oklahoma’s doesn’t. Same plan, same review committee, same hearing, whether it’s a battery plant or a storefront.

That’s the whole difference, and it has nothing to do with how generous the incentive is.

What a State Gets to Decide

Almost everything about Nebraska’s version is a choice. A state building its own micro TIF program could make different choices.

How small is small - An expedited process needs a cutoff, some number that separates the projects that get it from the projects that don’t. Nebraska used estimated completed value: $350,000 for a house, $1.5 million for commercial. Pick a number, write a short path underneath it, and leave everything above it alone. As far as I can tell, Nebraska is the only state that’s built one. Oklahoma has no expedited path at any project size, and neither does anywhere else I looked.

What makes a property eligible - Nebraska requires the property to sit in an area already declared substandard and blighted, and to get that declaration runs the full process with a hearing and notice to every taxing body. Oklahoma’s reinvestment area test only asks whether half the structures are 35 years or older. No blight finding at all. Most downtowns clear that bar without anyone studying anything. A state that wanted small-scale rehab to actually happen would use the age test.

Who keeps the increment - Nebraska sends 100 percent of it to the property owner. A state could let each city set the percentage instead, so the schools keep a share, which changes who shows up to oppose you.

How long it runs - Fifteen years is Nebraska’s numbers. You can make your numbers whatever works for your state.

What the assessor has to certify - This is one I would copy from Nebraska. The county assessor has to certify that the value increase came from the improvements and not ordinary market appreciation. That’s a true protection for the schools and the county.

What Doesn’t Change, However You Build It

It’s repayment, not financing. The owner still has to come up with the money first. If the bank won’t lend on the project, a micro TIF won’t help.

Less review means less screening. The hearing is where somebody asks whether the project needs the help. Take that out and people who don’t need it can take it anyway without any pushback.

The growth is withheld from the schools and the county. They keep collecting on the base the whole time, but they give up the growth. If a project wouldn’t have happened but for the micro TIF, they lose nothing. If it would have happened anyway, they lose all of it.

The Parts Worth Copying

• Cities opt in locally and can opt back out

• The state publishes one standard form

• A hard cap on the application fee

• A decision deadline with limited grounds for denial

• Value ceilings so it stays aimed at small projects

• A completion window

• The assessor certifies the value so nobody has to hire a consultant

• No general obligation on the city

• Require the state to report on these separately, which Nebraska didn’t do

That last one is mine, not Nebraska’s. Six years in, and there’s no project count, no dollar total, and no way to tell from public data whether any of this is working. Anyone pushing for this in another state should expect to be asked, and should have a better answer than I do.

If you’re in a state association and want to know whether this works before you champion it, Nebraska’s Department of Economic Development is where I’d start. I’d like to know the answers too.

So is a micro TIF worth looking at? I vote yes. A process sized to the project is what gives your Main Street building the same chance as a multi-million-dollar hotel.

These posts are brought to you by Econ Dev Ops, providing administrative support for Chambers of Commerce and economic development organizations. It’s hard to champion your community when the back office is on fire. Learn more at econdevops.com or reach us at hello@econdevops.com.

Sources

Neb. Rev. Stat. § 18-2155 https://nebraskalegislature.gov/laws/statutes.php?statute=18-2155

Nebraska Department of Economic Development, Micro TIF https://opportunity.nebraska.gov/micro-tif/

Nebraska Department of Revenue, Community Redevelopment Tax Increment Financing Projects, Tax Year 2025 https://revenue.nebraska.gov/sites/default/files/doc/pad/research/TIF_Reports/TIF_REPORT_2025.pdf

Nebraska Legislature, 2026 session summary (LB1114) https://update.legislature.ne.gov/?p=41019

City of Beatrice, Micro TIF Projects https://www.beatrice.ne.gov/finance/page/micro-tif-projects

Norfolk Economic Development, Tax Increment Financing https://www.norfolknebraskaed.com/tax-increment-financing

Eagle Observer, “Opinion: Micro TIF districts can help revitalize small communities” (syndicated; ran in several Arkansas papers) https://www.eagleobserver.com/news/2024/may/15/opinion-micro-tif-districts-can-help-revitalize/

Oklahoma Local Development Act, 62 O.S. § 855 https://law.justia.com/codes/oklahoma/title-62/section-62-855/

Oklahoma Department of Commerce, TIF FAQs https://www.okcommerce.gov/wp-content/uploads/TIF-FAQs.pdf

Illinois Municipal League, Final Report of the TIF Reform Task Force https://www.iml.org/file.cfm?key=14158

City of Two Rivers, Wisconsin, Tax Incremental Financing https://www.two-rivers.org/planning/page/tax-incremental-financing-tif

Oklahoma Department of Commerce, Oklahoma Tax Increment Financing & Incentive Districts, 2026 Update https://www.okcommerce.gov/wp-content/uploads/State-of-Oklahoma-Tax-Increment-Financing-Districts.pdf

It means an arts district with galleries in it. A restored theater downtown that books touring acts. A symphony with a season and a subscriber list. An ampitheater. There are venues, staff, payroll, and a building with a name on it, and some real number of people who drive in from someplace else and buy dinner while they’re there.

That model works at that size. It requires a population big enough to fill a hall on Tuesday night and a donor base big enough to cover the gap between ticket sales and the actual cost of anything.

A town of 1,100 cannot do that.

So what it does instead is buy the affordable piece: a mural. There’s a grant for it in most states, a consultant who’ll write the application, and a blank brick wall on Main Street that has needed something for 20 years. You can see it from the road. You can share it on Facebook.

And the town files it under quality of life.

This makes sense. I’ve never heard anyone in a town of 1,100 stand up and claim a mural would create jobs. People say the downtown looks rough and this will help, which is true, and is a legitimate reason to spend public money. Nobody asks the park to pay for itself.

But look at what just happened.

The city version of arts economic development didn’t scale down. A small town has neither the population nor the financial resources to support an arts district. Art became a quality of life item, and the conversation closed.

Meanwhile, in that same county, there’s a guy with a welder making decorative gates and yard art that ship three counties over. A quilter selling to buyers she has never met. A woodworker who makes bowls people wait six months for. A guy who carves standing sculpture out of cottonwood and hauls it to shows in three states. A painter who sells more work in Santa Fe than she’s ever sold at home. A photographer who covers weddings across half the state. A band that plays regionally forty weekends a year. Somebody’s mother painting portraits of people’s dead dogs.

Some of them do call it art. The sculptor probably does. The painter certainly does. Those are the ones you’d find first if you went looking, and they’re who the arts conversation is nominally about, though nobody’s counted them either. The welder and the quilter are the ones it never occurred to anybody to include at all.

Every one of these people is selling something to somebody who does not live here, which is the entire definition of economic development.

None of them is in the economic development conversation. Most aren’t in the arts conversation either. They’re sole proprietors, mostly working out of garages and back bedrooms, and most of them don’t call themselves artists, and neither does anybody else.

The city model was never going to fit your town. The thing that fits is already there, but nobody ever went looking, because everyone had agreed that art was the mural.

Money in, money kept, money moved

There are three things a business can do to a local economy, and only one of them is what people mean when they say economic development.

It can bring outside money in. Somebody somewhere else pays for something made here. That’s a manufacturer. That’s a wheat farm. That’s a truck driver hauling freight out of state. Call it money in. That’s economic development.

It can keep money from leaving. If people here were driving to the city to buy something and now they buy it here, no new money entered, but less of ours left. That’s a new grocery store in a town that had been driving forty miles for milk. Money kept.

Or it can shuffle money between local businesses. I spend forty dollars at the steakhouse instead of forty dollars at the pizza place. The steakhouse is better off. The county is exactly where it was. Money moved.

Now run the mural through it.

A mural is none of the three. It doesn’t sell anything outside the county, it doesn’t keep anyone from spending elsewhere, and it doesn’t even move money between local businesses. Economically it’s close to inert.

Which is exactly what your town already concluded when it filed the mural under quality of life.

Now run the woman making custom leather through it.

She sells a saddlebag to a buyer in Colorado. She buys some of her supplies locally, spends her income at the grocery store here, and that spending ripples the way any income does.

That’s money in. Same category as the manufacturer. Smaller, obviously, but the same category, which is the one everybody is chasing.

She also required no incentive package. No infrastructure, no site visit, no closing fund, no ten-year abatement, no press release. She started because she wanted to, and she’s still going because people keep buying.

She’s not the only shape this takes. A band that plays four states forty weekends a year is doing the same thing without shipping anything. They get paid somewhere else and bring it home.

So how many of her are there?

There’s one federal dataset that catches people like her. Nonemployer Statistics counts businesses with no payroll, which is to say one person and a tax return, and it sorts them by industry code. Code 7115 is independent artists, writers, and performers. You can pull it for any county in the country in about ten minutes.

I pulled four Oklahoma counties, picking places that get smaller as you go. Kay County, which has a real town in it, came back with 66 of these businesses. Woods County, 16. Dewey County, which has no town anybody has heard of, not even people in Oklahoma, 6.

Harmon County came back with none at all. Sometimes the answer really is that there’s nobody, and your mural is quality of life, which is a fine thing to buy. Or it means the artists are there but they’re not captured in the dataset. Anybody getting paid in cash, filing it as hobby income, or clearing under a thousand dollars a year won’t be in there.

But if your county comes back with 16, that’s 16 businesses selling something, mostly outside the county, and none of them are on anybody’s list.

Sixteen is more prospects than a lot of small-town economic developers have in their entire pipeline. If somebody announced sixteen businesses opening in your town there’d be a ribbon cutting, a newspaper photo, and a line in the annual report.

These have been there the whole time. The only visible sign that anything is happening is that the UPS truck comes down some of these roads more often than you’d expect.

Why you’ve never heard of them

Four separate systems have to fail before sixteen businesses can operate in a county for years without anyone noticing. All four did.

The business data can’t see them. When somebody pulls arts employment for your county, the source is almost always County Business Patterns, which only counts businesses with paid employees. Your bowl turner has no employees. Your wedding photographer has no employees. The query returns zero.

The tax form filters them. Nonemployer Statistics does catch sole proprietors, but it only sees people who filed a Schedule C and picked an arts business code. The quilter almost certainly coded herself under retail, because as far as she’s concerned she sells quilts. Six is the number of people in Dewey County who filed as a business and thought of themselves as an artist while doing it. The real number is likely higher, and no table will tell you how much.

The big arts study leaves them out on purpose. Arts and Economic Prosperity 6 is the study every arts council in America cites. It measures nonprofit arts and culture organizations and the money their audiences spend, and it excludes individual artists and the for-profit arts sector. That’s a defensible scope decision for what it set out to measure. It also means the most-cited evidence about arts and the economy contains no working artists.

And the federal arts agency can’t fund them. Coming out of the fights of the early nineties, Congress mostly eliminated National Endowment for the Arts grants to individuals in 1996. Thirty years later that’s still the structure. Which means every arts program your town has ever been offered was built to fund an organization, because organizations were the only thing left to fund.

Then there’s the fifth filter, which is us.

Say the word artist at a chamber meeting and watch what people picture. Galleries. A studio. Somebody in a city. They’re not thinking about the guy welding decorative gates or the lady making jewelry at her kitchen table.

So when a small town says it doesn’t have artists, what it usually means is that it doesn’t have a gallery.

Go find them

You already know what to do. You have a business retention and expansion program, or you should.

Go find them.

The feed store bulletin board has business cards on it. Whoever runs the county buy-sell-trade page can name twenty people in ten minutes. The woman who runs the farmers market knows every vendor’s story, including which ones sell more online than they do on Saturday.

And ask a different question. Not “are there any artists here.” Ask who around here makes something and sells it to people who don’t live here. Ask it at the coffee shop and watch what comes back.

Then treat them like the businesses they are.

When you visit a manufacturer you ask about workforce, about the building, about what’s constraining growth, about whether they’re thinking of expanding or getting out. Ask them the same questions and you get the same answers. The bowl turner can’t take more orders because he’s out of shop space. The lady making jewelry is turning down international orders because she can’t work out customs. The photographer has never worked out what her time is actually worth, so she prices by what feels reasonable. The band turns down out-of-state dates because they can’t afford a second vehicle.

You may not be able to solve their problems, but you know who to call. Your state Commerce department can offer export assistance to your jewelry maker. Your SBDC will sit down and do pricing with the photographer for free. You already know which buildings are empty that might work for your bowl turner. The vehicle you probably can’t fix, and it’s useful to know which problems you can’t solve.

None of that requires a grant, a consultant, or a plan document. It requires somebody’s time.

And keep the mural. Paint another one. A downtown that looks tended is worth money you can’t measure, and quality of life is a legitimate reason to spend public dollars without dressing it up as anything else.

Just stop letting the mural be the whole category.

Because while everybody was arguing about which wall to put it on, there was a woman three miles out of town making leather goods that ship to Colorado, and somebody’s mother painting portraits of people’s dead dogs for buyers in four states, and neither one of them has ever been to a meeting.

They’re doing the thing. Nobody counted them, because nobody thought to call it art.

These posts are brought to you by Econ Dev Ops, providing administrative support for Chambers of Commerce and economic development organizations. It’s hard to champion your community when the back office is on fire. Learn more at econdevops.com or reach us at hello@econdevops.com.

Sources

County-level business data, NAICS 7115, 2023 reference year, U.S. Census Bureau Nonemployer Statistics: https://www.census.gov/programs-surveys/nonemployer-statistics.html

Nonemployer Statistics coverage, including the $1,000 receipts threshold and the Schedule C basis: https://www.census.gov/econ/overview/mu0500.html

Schedule C and the business activity code on line B: https://www.irs.gov/forms-pubs/about-schedule-c-form-1040

County Business Patterns covers only establishments with paid employees, as stated in the NEA’s rural arts brief: https://www.arts.gov/sites/default/files/Brief-2-RuralCommunitiesPerformingArtsAccess.pdf

Arts & Economic Prosperity 6, Americans for the Arts, 2023. The exclusion of individual artists and the for-profit arts sector appears in the About This Study section: https://nmculture.org/assets/files/reports/AEP6_NationalReport.pdf

Congressional elimination of NEA grants to individuals beginning in fiscal year 1996, from the agency’s own annual report: https://www.arts.gov/sites/default/files/NEA-Annual-Report-1995.pdf

I understand why that is, but it got me wondering. We all know that most people live in the big cities, but what is the population of most cities?

The median incorporated place in the United States has 1,153 people

Not the average. The average is 11,069, and the average is larger than 84.6% of all American municipalities, which tells you most of what you need to know about using averages here.

Three quarters of the country’s 19,483 incorporated places have fewer than 5,000 residents. Nearly half have fewer than 1,000. Throw out every single place under 1,000, and the median of what remains is still only 4,608.

The 99th percentile is 145,100.

Note: I am not a numbers person, so I had Claude pull the Census Bureau’s place-level file and run the calculations, then check its own filter against the counts the Bureau publishes. They matched. The file is SUB-EST2025 and it’s free if you want to verify any of this.

Who the education is for

Think about the last economic development training you attended, or the last case study you read in a national publication. What size community was it about?

If it was a city of 50,000, it was about the top 4.2 percent: 817 places out of 19,000.

There is a defensible reason for that, and I want to be upfront about it. Those 817 cities hold 62% of the population living in incorporated places. If you are allocating attention toward people, allocating it toward the big places is not irrational. It is arithmetic.

But it means the profession has organized its entire body of knowledge around 5% of American municipalities. And the ones on the wrong side of that line are the overwhelming majority of the map.

What a town of 3,000 finds when it goes looking

Say the mayor of a town of 3,000 decides to get serious about economic development. She starts researching.

What she finds assumes somebody has parcel-level data and the software to map it. It assumes a marketing budget. It assumes a CRM full of site selector contacts. It assumes there is a person, or even a team, whose entire job this is.

She reads two or three of these and concludes, reasonably, that economic development is something bigger places do. Then she goes back to her actual job, which is making sure her town has safe drinking water…and the streets are paved…and the fire department has adequate equipment…and that dilapidated houses are taken care of…and that angry citizens have someone to yell at besides the city clerk. On top of her full-time day job that actually pays her bills because, let’s be real, being a small-town mayor often pays like $100 a month, literally. And then we wonder why nobody wants to do it. But, I digress.

Economic development is just as vital for small towns as it is for big cities, but we’re not providing training that fits the majority of American places.

Most people don’t know what economic development is, and they find the whole concept daunting. We make it sound complicated. The kind of thing that you need a degree to do.

The reality is you don’t need a degree or any special initials after your name to do economic development. You need two things: 1) the ability to gather information and 2) the ability to build relationships.

The things a town of any size can actually do

Know your sites. Have a list. Every parcel in town that could hold a building, who owns it, whether it’s for sale, and what shape it’s in. Most small towns either cannot answer this or don’t have it written down anywhere.

Know what you own. The city owns land. Almost every city does. Old ballfields, the lot behind the shop, right-of-way from a road that never got built, a building it took for back taxes. Nobody has walked the list in fifteen years. Walk it. Ideally, walk it with others who want to make things happen in your town. You might be amazed at the ideas that come out of a walking audit.

Know your utility capacity, at the site. For each site you would actually pitch: how much water can you deliver there and at what pressure, what is the sewer capacity, is there gas, and what is the electrical service to that specific parcel. For industrial sites, three-phase power matters more than anything else on this list, because most industrial equipment requires it and a lot of rural service is single-phase only. If your site doesn’t have three-phase, find out what it would cost to extend it, and find out before somebody asks. A prospect will ask all of this in the first ten minutes, and “I’ll have to find out” is an answer that ends conversations.

Talk to the businesses that already employ people.

That last one is where I want to spend a minute, because it is one of the least practiced and most valuable activities you can do.

Business retention at small-town scale

I am a fan of what SmartStart does for microbusinesses. Marci Goodwin and Katie Kelly built something that meets Main Street where it is, and investing in that kind of program is a good use of a small town’s money.

It is also most of what a small town has. In a community of 3,000, the overwhelming majority of businesses are microbusinesses, and a program built for them is a program built for nearly everybody.

But the businesses with ten to fifty employees are a different animal. They are past the startup stage and nobody is checking on them. A single business with 50 employees is probably the largest employer in a small town, and losing it is something the whole town feels.

Those businesses need their own program, and the profession already has a name for it. Business retention and expansion. Staying in regular contact with the employers you already have, finding out what they need, and fixing what you can fix.

The conversation isn’t complicated. How’s business? What’s your biggest headache right now? Are you finding people? Is anything about this town making your life harder than it needs to be?

Sometimes you will find something you can fix. A permitting problem, a road, a workforce connection, a utility issue.

Sometimes you will find something better than that. The shop is out of room. They’ve been out of room for two years. They’ve started looking at buildings in the county seat 40 miles away because they assumed there was nothing here, and nobody ever told them otherwise.

That is a save you only get if you’re actively having conversations. Nobody calls city hall to announce they’re thinking about leaving. They just leave, and afterward everyone says they had no idea.

Most economic development, in most small towns, is not a company arriving from somewhere else. It’s a company that’s already here adding eight people or building a second building. Those are the deals you are most likely to get and the ones you are most likely to miss.

Often, though, you will find nothing you can fix. The parent company is consolidating. The margins aren’t there. The owner is 71 and his kids don’t want it. There may be genuinely nothing your town can do about that.

Have the conversation anyway.

Because the town that has been having that conversation twice a year for a decade gets told eighteen months out. The town that hasn’t finds out when the notice goes up on the door. Eighteen months is enough time to work on a buyer, prepare the workforce, and line up the building for the next tenant. Two weeks is enough time to hold a press conference about it.

Get everybody in one room, four times a year

Here is another thing that costs nothing.

Pick a quarter. Get the city, the chamber, the school superintendent, the vo-tech, the hospital if you have one, a couple of nonprofits, local realtors or developers, a couple of engaged residents, and your two or three largest employers around one table. No agenda beyond four questions: How are things going? What are you seeing? What do you need? What do you have that somebody else might need?

I know how this sounds. Another meeting. But watch what happens when those people are actually in the same room.

The plant manager says he can’t find anybody who can run a CNC machine. The vo-tech director is sitting across the table and can build a program, but nobody had ever told him there was demand for one.

The same plant manager says the problem isn’t skills at all. It’s that the kids he hires don’t show up on time and won’t make eye contact with a customer. That’s a conversation the high school principal needs to be in, and it turns into something the chamber and the school can build together.

The chamber wants to bring in a program like SmartStart to support the microbusinesses downtown but can’t afford it. Your largest employer might write part of that check, because some of those microbusinesses are potential suppliers. Or because he lives here too and would like the downtown to not be empty. Or maybe he wants his kids to be able to start a business in town so they don’t have to move away to make a living.

None of those connections require an economic developer. They require a room and somebody willing to send the emails.

What they do require is consistency. Once is a nice meeting. Every quarter for three years is an institution, and after a while people start bringing problems to it instead of waiting to be asked.

When the town is too small even for that

There is a version of this where the town genuinely cannot do it alone. Not because nobody’s willing, but because there are four hundred people and a part-time clerk.

I’ve seen counties where the entire county has 17,000 people spread across six towns, none of which has an economic developer, and the county doesn’t have one either. Every one of those towns is separately too small to hire somebody. Together they are not.

The county is also the entity that already knows where things are. It knows the parcels, because it assesses them. It knows the roads, because it maintains them. It knows which building has been empty since 2011.

I'm not going to build out the case for countywide economic development organizations here, because I’ve already done that here. I'll just say that when I look at a dying county with no economic development capacity anywhere in it, the answer is almost never that one of those towns should try harder.

What I’m actually asking for

Most Americans live in big cities. I’ve said that twice now because it’s true and there’s no sense in pretending otherwise. The attention those cities get is deserved.

But the median American municipality has 1,153 people, and three quarters of them have fewer than 5,000. The majority of the education this profession produces is built for the top four percent.

That leaves fifteen thousand communities where nobody has ever been taught the basics. Not because the basics are hard. Because nobody wrote them down for a town this size.

A town of 1,153 people is probably never going to land a semiconductor plant. But it can know its sites. It can know what it owns. It can know whether there’s three-phase power at the parcel it keeps showing people. It can call the four employers it has twice a year and ask how things are going.

That’s the work. It doesn’t require a degree or specialized knowledge. It just requires someone to do it.

These posts are brought to you by Econ Dev Ops, providing administrative support for Chambers of Commerce and economic development organizations. It’s hard to champion your community when the back office is on fire. Learn more at econdevops.com or reach us at hello@econdevops.com.

Sources

U.S. Census Bureau, Vintage 2025 Subcounty Population Estimates (SUB-EST2025), July 1, 2025. https://www.census.gov/data/tables/time-series/demo/popest/2020s-total-cities-and-towns.html — Median, percentile, and threshold figures are author calculations from the place-level file, as the Bureau does not publish a median.

U.S. Census Bureau, “Population Growth Reported Across Cities and Towns in All U.S. Regions,” May 15, 2025. https://www.census.gov/newsroom/press-releases/2025/vintage-2024-popest.html

U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, Employment Situation, June 2026. https://www.bls.gov/news.release/empsit.nr0.htm

SmartStart Business Development. https://www.smartstartcommunity.com/about

This is a completely off-the-cuff “article” only to offer my amends for missing my weekly newsletter. But I have a good excuse reason.

My son and I are on vacation this week. I knew this was coming, and I totally planned on preparing a couple of articles in advance so I wouldn’t miss a beat. Clearly, that did not work out.

So I missed last Sunday’s article, and I can guarantee I’ll miss next Sunday’s article. But I should be back on schedule the week after that!

By the way, did you know that Arizona has a monsoon season? I did not know that. At least, northwestern Arizona does.

If you’ve never experienced it before, it’s super weird. It’s warm and clear in the morning. Then around noon, you start noticing how dark the sky is in the distance, and you can see the rain falling.

You just watch the storm roll in. Once it reaches you, it dumps all the water in the world on you for an hour or two, and then it rolls out. But it leaves clouds and cooler temperatures behind until you wake up the next morning to a warm, clear sky.

This is a new experience for me!

Also, if you’re like me, you’ve never seen a raven in real life. It turns out they are HUGE! Like kind of terrifyingly huge.

This might have something to do with the fact that they are clearly used to being fed, and they’re rather insistent that you participate. Which means they’re not afraid to get close, and they are so very loud!

They caw incessantly. And sometimes they fight each other. That’s a sight to behold!

So that’s my quick update and explanation for why articles are not forthcoming as normal.

I hope everyone is having a great week, and I’ll see you back here in 2 weeks!

I was at a workforce luncheon this week. The speaker covered familiar ground: training programs, upskilling initiatives, the K-12 pipeline into local employers. It was good material. Nobody in the room disagreed with any of it.

At some point, a manufacturer sitting near me said, to no one in particular, “What I need is automation.”

That was it. He didn’t elaborate. But I knew enough about his city to understand what was behind it. It’s a small city, a good one, but not the kind of place drawing new residents in from elsewhere fast enough to meet demand. Every manufacturer there is competing for workers out of the same limited local population, and that population isn’t growing much.

The programs the speaker was describing don’t change that number. Training an existing worker to upgrade their skills doesn’t add a new worker to the town. It just makes that worker more valuable, which mostly makes them a more attractive target for the manufacturer down the road to hire away.

Getting more local high schoolers into advanced manufacturing helps replace workers as older ones retire, but replacing isn’t the same as growing. Either way, the total number of available workers in that town stays roughly the same, and every employer is still drawing from it, and often from each other.

That’s the ceiling this manufacturer had hit. Once you’re there, training has done what it can do. What’s left is figuring out how to produce more without more people, and that’s automation.

Workforce development has decades of infrastructure behind it: programs, funding streams, a whole professional vocabulary built to support it. Automation doesn’t have the same kind of infrastructure behind it. The more I’ve thought about it since, the more I think that gap says something about where economic development is right now, and where it hasn’t caught up yet.

The Labor Shortage Won’t Correct Itself

To understand why this manufacturer’s comment matters beyond his own city, it helps to look at how economic development got built around job counts in the first place, and why that model has always assumed something about labor markets that doesn’t hold anymore.

For the last several decades, the job of economic development has been built around one goal: bring in jobs, and bring in enough of them. Job counts became the scoreboard because they tracked the thing that actually mattered. A community with more jobs than workers grows. Wages rise as employers compete for the limited pool of available workers. Tight labor markets themselves aren’t new. They cycle, and communities have lived through both directions of that cycle before.

This time, however, there are two other factors layered on top of that normal cycle that change the equation.

The first is automation. Manufacturers have been mechanizing processes for over a century, but the pace has picked up. It’s getting more affordable and, in a global economy, more necessary for smaller manufacturers, not just large ones.

The second is demographics. The US fertility rate has been declining for nearly two decades, down 23% since 2007, and the country had roughly 700,000 fewer births last year than it did at that 2007 peak, even with a larger overall population. As the baby boomer generation ages into retirement, population aging is doing more to slow the growth of the US labor force than most people realize, and that drag is projected to continue for decades. Research on labor force participation trends has found that even the most ambitious policy efforts to raise participation among today’s workforce would do little to change that trajectory.

Put those two together, and automation stops being a tool some manufacturers use and starts being one more communities will need whether or not their local labor market ever loosens again. That’s the case this piece is making: not jobs versus automation, but automation as a resilience and competitiveness tool.

In a labor-constrained market, automation isn’t competing with the goal of good jobs. It’s often what keeps the jobs that already exist from disappearing when a business can’t keep pace with competitors who solved the same labor shortage with capital.

The Businesses Already Here Feel It First

Automation used to be something a business chose, mostly to cut costs or improve quality. In a labor-constrained market, it starts to become something closer to a requirement, and the businesses already operating in a community feel that change before newly recruited employers ever do.

They aren’t just competing with the shop down the road for the next hire. They’re competing with employers elsewhere, including overseas, who don’t have the same labor constraint and are already automating around it. A manufacturer who can’t move as fast or produce as precisely as a competitor isn’t just losing a hiring fight. Eventually, they’re losing customers, contracts, and market share to a business that solved the same labor shortage with capital instead of waiting on workers who aren’t there. That’s not a hypothetical for economic developers. It’s the plant closure a few years down the road that everyone treats as a surprise.

One distinction matters enough to spell out clearly here, because it is constantly mixed up in how this gets talked about: automation and AI are not the same thing.

Automation, in the sense this piece means it, is machinery, robotics, and equipment that does precise, repetitive, physical work faster and more consistently than a person can. That’s been happening for over a century.

AI is a different tool. It can make individual workers faster at parts of their job, but it isn’t, at least not yet, a tool that lets a business meaningfully shrink its headcount the way a robotic welding cell or an automated packaging line can. Conflating the two makes for a punchier headline and a much less honest argument. It also means the word “automation” now carries a fear that has more to do with AI headlines than with what a manufacturer proposing a new equipment purchase is actually talking about.

Competitiveness, then, isn’t just about whether a community can hand a new employer an incentive package. It’s about whether the businesses already here can actually produce at the pace the market demands with the workers realistically available to them. That’s a different job than the one economic development has traditionally been built to do.

The Tools Exist. Most Manufacturers Can’t Reach Them.

If helping existing businesses stay competitive with the workers they already have is the real job now, the obvious next question is whether economic developers actually have anything to offer a business in that position. The answer is yes, but with a catch.

At the federal level, automation investment is already incentivized. Section 179 expensing and bonus depreciation let manufacturers write off the cost of new equipment far faster than standard depreciation schedules would allow. R&D tax credits apply to a lot of process automation work, not just lab research. The Manufacturing Extension Partnership, run through NIST, offers manufacturers direct technical help evaluating and implementing automation projects.

The catch is that nearly all of that support is structured as a tax benefit, which means it shows up after the fact, at filing, sometimes a year or more after the equipment is already purchased and running. That’s a real problem for a smaller manufacturer. If a piece of automated equipment costs $500,000, a tax credit that reduces next year’s liability doesn’t help a business come up with the $500,000 today. For a lot of the manufacturers who’d benefit most from automating, the incentive exists on paper but isn’t actually reachable, because the gap it needs to close is a cash flow gap, not a tax bill.

Some states have tackled that problem directly, and a real model is starting to take shape across the country. Iowa’s Manufacturing 4.0 Technology Investment Program offers grants up to $75,000 with a 1:1 match for smart-technology adoption. Maryland’s Manufacturing 4.0 program covers 50 to 75 percent of project costs, up to $500,000, for small and mid-sized manufacturers adopting new technology and robotics. Michigan and Massachusetts run similar Industry 4.0 grant programs. These are structured as upfront grants or cost-share, not tax credits, so the benefit is upfront. Rather than a grant paid upfront, the Oklahoma Innovation Expansion Program takes a different approach. It rebates state income tax withholdings back to qualifying companies in cash, in monthly installments, once they’ve documented spending 10% of a project’s cost. It’s a slightly different tool, but it resides in the same toolbox. A community or state without something like this in its toolkit has real, specific models to look to if they want to consider implementing automation assistance.

The Sentence Economic Developers Won’t Say

Building an automation assistance program like this is a solvable problem. A harder one sits underneath it. It’s a sentence you'll rarely hear an economic developer or an elected official say out loud, even when it's true — we helped a business need fewer workers.

“Company X creates 40 new jobs” is an easy headline for a mayor or county commissioner to stand behind. “Company X automated and increased revenue by 5%” isn’t nearly so compelling. It’s genuinely hard to make the second one sound like a win worth claiming, even when it is one. But that’s not actually the choice on the table.

The real choice a labor-constrained business usually faces isn’t “keep the same headcount” versus “automate and shed workers.” It’s “automate and stay competitive” versus “don’t, and slowly lose the business to a competitor who did.” The counterfactual to automating isn’t the status quo. It’s decline.

That’s the more honest story economic developers need to help elected officials tell. Automation lets a business produce faster, win work it couldn’t take on before, and grow. That growth is what eventually funds a new shift, new hires, expansion. The jobs that come out of it aren’t a consolation prize. They’re jobs that exist because the business got competitive enough to grow again.

Two Tools, One Problem

None of this works, though, if it gets heard as an argument against workforce development, so it’s worth closing where this started.

Automation doesn’t remove the need for workforce development. Someone has to run the new equipment, program it, maintain it, troubleshoot it when it breaks. Automation projects often create their own upskilling need, even as they reduce how many total workers a process requires.

The two aren’t opposites. In places with room to grow, and plenty of communities still are, training programs, upskilling, and the K-12 pipeline are exactly the right tools, and they’ll keep doing exactly what they’ve always done, automation or not. This is an argument that workforce development stops being sufficient on its own once a community hits its labor ceiling, and a lot of smaller communities are closer to that ceiling than the field’s usual toolkit assumes.

What that means practically is treating business resilience as a competitiveness fundamental, not a side conversation. It means building local incentive structures that can actually credit a capital investment even when it doesn’t come with a new headcount number attached. It means getting comfortable measuring, and talking about, a different kind of win: a business still standing in ten years, still employing the people it employs today, because it got competitive enough to stay in the fight instead of losing it to a competitor who automated first.

I think about that luncheon room a lot. The workforce speaker and the manufacturer sitting near me weren’t actually disagreeing. They were describing two different tools for the same underlying problem: how do we help our businesses have what they need to compete. One of those tools has decades of infrastructure behind it. The other one is still mostly something a business owner has to go find on his own, and mention out loud to no one in particular, hoping someone in the room is listening.

Economic development doesn’t need to choose between them. It needs to start building for both.

These posts are brought to you by Econ Dev Ops, providing administrative support for Chambers of Commerce and economic development organizations. It’s hard to champion your community when the back office is on fire. Learn more at econdevops.com or reach us at hello@econdevops.com.

Sources:

• CDC/NCHS fertility data via NPR: https://www.npr.org/2026/04/09/nx-s1-5779627/birthrate-united-states-babies-immigration

• Economic Policy Institute, labor force projections: https://www.epi.org/publication/the-u-s-born-labor-force-will-shrink-over-the-next-decade-achieving-historically-normal-gdp-growth-rates-will-be-impossible-unless-immigration-flows-are-sustained/

• Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis, AI adoption data: https://www.minneapolisfed.org/article/2026/ai-adoption-in-business-grows-steadily-but-unevenly

• NCCI, sector-level AI adoption vs. job growth correlation: https://riskandinsurance.com/ai-adoption-shows-early-negative-correlation-with-job-growth-raising-workers-comp-questions/

• S&P Global, AI employment impact 2026: https://www.spglobal.com/en/research-insights/special-reports/ai-impact-on-employment-2026

• GBQ, on state/local incentive programs excluding automation projects due to job-creation thresholds: https://gbq.com/incentives-economic-challenges-key-insights-for-manufacturers/

• EisnerAmper, on federal tax credits for manufacturing capital expenditures: https://www.eisneramper.com/insights/manufacturing-distribution/incentivizing-capital-expenditures-0225/

• Wisconsin Automation, on Section 179 as applied to robotics/automation purchases: https://www.wisconsinautomation.com/blogs/2025/9/18/section-179-tax-incentive-what-does-that-even-mean

• Iowa Manufacturing 4.0 Technology Investment Program: https://opportunityiowa.gov/business/financial-assistance/manufacturing-40-technology-investment

• Maryland Manufacturing 4.0 grant: https://commerce.maryland.gov/fund/maryland-manufacturing-4-0

• Oklahoma Department of Commerce, OIEP program details: https://www.okcommerce.gov/oiep/

Weirdly enough, it made me think about municipalities.

Many small towns run almost entirely on grants. To be fair, every government organization takes advantage of grants, from state level to large cities to the tiniest of towns. The problem arises when grants are the only way anything gets done rather than being leveraged to build any capacity of its own between one grant cycle and the next. It creates a level of dependency that a town can get stuck in the same way a person can, doing fine as long as the help keeps arriving, and in a serious jam the moment it doesn’t.

So what can a town actually do to build some capacity so it isn’t waiting on the next grant cycle? That question got me thinking about all the empty, dilapidated buildings that sit on small town Main Streets.

The Building Every Town Already Owns

Every town has them. Many towns own at least one of them. A tax-delinquent property the city ends up with almost by accident, because nobody paid the back taxes and the county eventually handed it over. And almost every town does the same thing with it, selling it fast to whomever will take it off the books, usually for close to nothing. The building goes back on the tax rolls, the city gets a small check, and everyone moves on.

That’s a one-time payout, and it feels like a win because a problem property became someone else’s problem. But that actually creates two problems: 1) when you sell it for almost nothing, it’s often bought by somebody who doesn’t actually have the money to renovate it, so it simply remains an empty, dilapidated building, and 2) it doesn’t build anything the town can use again.

What very few small towns do is treat the building the way a private developer would by fixing it up and either finding a tenant to lease it to for income or selling it for a real return once it’s worth something. Private developers do this constantly in towns of every size. There’s no reason a town can’t do the same thing for itself and build exactly the kind of capacity that keeps it from being tied to the grant-funding hamster wheel.

Why does this matter?

Economic development is just as important to a tiny town as it is to a big city. Unfortunately, a tiny town typically doesn’t have the resources to invest in itself in any meaningful way. Some larger towns solve this with a dedicated sales tax. A penny or two carved out specifically for economic development instead of the general fund. It works, and it’s worth knowing about. It just doesn’t have nearly the same impact in a town with one gas station and a Dollar General, because there’s no real sales tax base to carve a penny out of in the first place. That’s what makes real estate the option worth walking through here. It doesn’t require an existing tax base to get started, just an asset and a tenant.

I want to focus this specifically on towns under a thousand people, because that’s where I see this idea matter most, and where it’s hardest to picture. A lot of towns that size have quietly lost hope that anything is going to change, not from a lack of caring, but from watching enough cycles go by where nothing did.

I want to spend the rest of this on two questions. Can a town this small actually pull this off? And if the answer is yes, how does it actually start?

Yes, and here’s the proof

Before getting into how, it’s worth settling whether a town this small can actually pull off something like this at all. Dieterich, Illinois is the clearest answer I’ve found. It had roughly 617 residents in the early 2000s and was watching its school district edge toward closure. Village leadership created a residential TIF district and effectively became its own real estate developer. They bought land, developed it into building lots, and sold those lots at a real loss, as little as $5,000 each when the actual development cost ran closer to $30,000, betting that the property tax increment from all the new houses eventually built there would outweigh what the village lost upfront.

It worked.

Only six of the original 130 lots are still unsold. The village’s population grew to 890 by the 2020 census, nearly doubling. The school stayed open, and Dieterich has since built a new community center funded partly through the same TIF district. In 2020 they even built a house and raffled it off, sold at $100 a ticket, to draw attention to a new subdivision, more than covering the cost of the house in the process.

Dieterich did this with land instead of a building, and by selling instead of leasing, so it doesn’t hand us a ready-made playbook for the version this piece is actually about. What it hands us is proof that a town under a thousand people can run a multi-year real estate operation, take on real financial risk, and come out ahead. That’s the piece that carries forward. The rest, land versus building, selling versus leasing, is a matter of matching the tool to whatever opportunity is actually sitting in front of a given town. TIF specifically has its own intricacies that vary by state, and this piece isn’t the place to untangle them.

What Dieterich doesn’t prove

I went looking for a town this size that did the same thing with a commercial building instead of housing lots—bought it, fixed it up, and leased or sold it for a return, and I couldn’t find one. That might mean it’s a genuinely underused idea. It might also mean there’s a reason it hasn’t caught on that I haven’t run into yet. Either way, I’d rather say that upfront than dress up Dieterich as proof of something it didn’t actually do. What it proves is the capability. The commercial building is another iteration of this concept.

So from here on I’m going to focus on the version most small towns are already staring at every day: the dilapidated buildings downtown. Not because it’s the better option and not because anyone’s proven it out at this scale yet, but because it’s the one almost every town already has sitting right in front of it, whether or not it happens to own one already.

How to get started

1. Find the tenant before finding the building, if possible.

The safest version of this isn’t renovating first and hoping. It’s identifying a business that wants to open but can’t afford the buildout, then acquiring and fixing a building around that specific need. If no single tenant exists, a shared space works too. Find one empty building, offer reduced rent, and fill it with two or three small entrepreneurs instead of waiting on one big one. Many building owners have run this exact play successfully, and there’s no reason a town can’t do it too.

2. Start with whatever’s already sitting there.

Many towns already own an empty building. Often a tax-delinquent building nobody’s dealt with. That’s the free starting point. If nothing like that exists, the first acquisition is where a grant genuinely earns its place. CDBG’s economic development set-aside is explicitly built for acquiring and rehabbing commercial buildings, and USDA’s Rural Business Development Grants and some state Main Street programs cover similar ground. A bank loan works too. The particular program isn’t as important as the end result. Whichever one gets the first asset into the town’s hands is the right one.

3. Decide where the revenue goes before revenue starts coming in.

If you don’t settle this in advance, real estate income could easily disappear into the general fund and get spent on whatever need rears its head that year. The simplest fix is a restricted account, walled off by policy so it can only be used for this purpose. That’s a simple enough way to start, since a lot of towns this size don’t have the staff to justify anything heavier yet.

Once there’s more than one asset in the portfolio, it’s worth creating an actual public development authority or redevelopment authority instead. This is a separate legal entity chartered under state law with its own small board, so the revenue is protected by its own charter rather than by whoever happens to be on council that year.

4. Underwrite for a reserve before anything else gets paid.

If the town is leasing out a building, the first dollars from rent go into a maintenance reserve specific to that building, before anything else. Skip this and the town has just recreated a smaller, private version of the same deferred-maintenance problem it’s trying to get out from under.

After the reserve is funded, the rent covers any loan payment on the building, then a small cushion for the months it might sit vacant between tenants. Whatever’s left after that is real surplus, and that’s the money that goes to work on the next building.

If the town is selling lots or buildings outright the way Dieterich did, there’s nothing left to maintain once the sale closes, so the money works differently. It covers whatever debt or upfront cost funded the development first, then goes straight back to work on the next acquisition.

These two paths carry very different levels of risk. Leasing a building the town already owns is low risk. Worst case, the town still owns a building. Dieterich’s build-and-sell approach is real, uncapped risk taken on all at once. A town doesn’t have to start at Dieterich’s end of that range. Starting with the lower-risk lease model and only taking on land-development-scale risk once there’s a track record and a real reserve behind it keeps a bad outcome from hitting the town’s core budget.

5. Let that surplus buy the next thing.

This is the part that turns one lucky project into an actual strategy. A few years of stabilized income, whether from a lease or from lot sales, gives the town a track record and a revenue stream a bank will lend against or straightforward cash to reinvest directly. That’s how the second building or the second phase of lots gets funded without needing an outside program to make it happen at all.

If getting a tenant into the building is a struggle, some small towns run their own revolving loan fund through USDA. The town borrows from USDA at around 1%, relends to local businesses at a somewhat higher rate, and the margin covers the cost of running the fund while repayments cycle back out as new loans. That fund can specifically help the next tenant afford their buildout, which is often the actual barrier once space is ready.

When City Hall Can’t Carry It Alone

If city hall doesn’t have the bandwidth to lead this, that doesn’t mean it can’t happen.

In towns under a thousand people, there’s usually only a few full-time people running all the departments, and a multi-year real estate project is a hard thing to prioritize on top of everything else that’s actually on fire that week. What many towns do have is a few residents who want to see something happen and have some money of their own to put toward it. That’s a real asset the town can work with.

The town and a group of residents can work together to make this happen. The town buys and holds the building. A group of residents, organized as a member-managed investment club LLC, the same structure a group in Ord, Nebraska used to fund a spec building and a housing project, separately invests in whatever business wants to move in, covering the buildout or startup costs the building itself doesn’t solve. It’s a real public-private partnership. Public capital holds the real estate, and private local capital gets the business open.

None of this has to be built from scratch inside city hall, either. Regional councils of governments and multi-county economic development districts often provide exactly this kind of capacity to small member towns as a shared service, and state Main Street programs typically come with technical assistance staff who’ve walked other towns through this before. A development authority board doesn’t need to be pulled only from elected officials either. A retired banker, a former realtor, or a local contractor sitting on that board is often how a town this size actually gets expertise it doesn’t have on payroll.

In a town this size, the people running city government and the people forming an investment club might be the same handful of people, and pretending otherwise would be dishonest. The ethical way forward is disclosure and recusal. Anyone with a stake in the investment club discloses it and sits out the vote on that specific deal.

Some of the payoff in this model isn’t rent or lot sales at all. The moment a business occupies a building or a family moves into a new house, sales tax and whatever else that activity generates starts flowing to the town immediately, independent of what the development entity itself earns. Dieterich didn’t just sell lots, it saved a school district, which is the kind of return that never shows up on a balance sheet but is exactly why the town took the risk in the first place.

The honest caveats

To be clear, this article simplifies a lot. Municipal finance law, TIF eligibility, procurement rules, and public authority statutes vary by state and sometimes by the size of the town, and none of that fits into a newsletter. I’m not a lawyer, an accountant, or a bond attorney, and nothing here should be read as instructions. It’s a way of thinking about an asset a lot of towns already have and mostly throw away, not a step-by-step plan. Anyone actually doing this needs their own city attorney and their own numbers.

It’s worth addressing one objection directly. This isn’t government competing with private investors. There’s rarely a private developer looking at a town of 500 people in the first place. The choice usually isn’t between the town doing this and someone else doing it; it’s between the town doing it and it not happening at all.

Lastly, none of this works without real demand behind it—a tenant who’ll actually sign a lease or a housing market that’s actually being held back by a lack of available lots rather than a lack of interest in the town at all. Dieterich’s story is a real risk that paid off, not a formula guaranteed to work everywhere. The village took a genuine loss on each of those first lots and had to wait years to find out if the bet was right.

This process is slow, often measured in years for a single building and more like a decade or two for something like Dieterich’s turnaround. It doesn’t replace the grants that fund water and sewer work, and it isn’t trying to. The point is that a town that owns and runs even one income-producing asset has a small, compounding source of money it controls itself, one it can put toward the next building, the next lot, or eventually the next need, without waiting on someone else to fund it.

Like a charity that teaches someone a skill rather than just handing over free stuff, a grant is an amazing tool when it’s used to build something a town can own and grow, not just to patch the same problems over and over again. That’s how a small town stops waiting around for an outside organization to save it and begins saving itself.

These posts are brought to you by Econ Dev Ops, providing administrative support for Chambers of Commerce and economic development organizations. It’s hard to champion your community when the back office is on fire. Learn more at econdevops.com or reach us at hello@econdevops.com.

Sources

• Governing, “Rural Illinois Towns Defend Their Quiet Communities” (Dieterich, IL): https://www.governing.com/community/rural-illinois-towns-defend-their-quiet-communities

• Ford County Chronicle, “Dieterich’s growth setting the example”: https://www.fordcountychronicle.com/articles/opinions/dieterichs-growth-setting-the-example/

• Resource Bank, “Dieterich, Illinois: A Small-Town Success Story”: https://www.inspirerenewenjoy.com/solve-challenges/attract-tourists/p/item/2511/dieterich-illinois-a-smalltown-success-story

• Dieterich, Illinois — Wikipedia (population data): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dieterich,_Illinois

• eCFR, CDBG eligible activities (Title 24, Part 570): https://www.ecfr.gov/current/title-24/subtitle-B/chapter-V/subchapter-C/part-570

• USDA Rural Development, Intermediary Relending Program (IRP): https://www.rd.usda.gov/programs-services/business-programs/intermediary-relending-program

• Ord Nebraska Economic Development, Loup Valley Investment Club: https://ordnebraska.com/economic-development/business-incentive/

• MRSC, “Public Development Authorities (PDAs)”: https://mrsc.org/explore-topics/economic-development/financing/public-development-authorities

Where the “Parasite” Label Comes From

I understand where the framing comes from. In 2023, the Institute for Local Self-Reliance — a nonprofit that explicitly advocates against corporate chains and in favor of local alternatives — published a report called “The Dollar Store Invasion.” It was picked up by NPR, the New York Times, NBC Nightly News, and USA Today. A Wendover Productions documentary on YouTube drew heavily from it and racked up millions of views. The word “parasite” started showing up at conferences.

Here’s the thing about this ILSR report: some of what’s in it is real. The USDA later confirmed independently that dollar stores do measurable harm to rural grocery stores. Those findings hold up.

But the report’s most inflammatory claim — that Dollar General deliberately locates next to existing grocery stores to destroy them — cites as its source ILSR’s own previous report from 2018. Not an independent study. Not peer-reviewed research. Themselves.

And the figure you’ll see repeated everywhere, that grocery stores lose 15 to 30 percent of their sales when a Dollar General moves in? Same source. The actual independent USDA study found 9.2 percent — real and significant, but less than a third of what ILSR claimed, with no evidence of deliberate targeting.

What makes this more striking is something buried in ILSR’s own companion document to the report. In it, they write that dollar store chains “simply choose locations with cheap space and significant concentrations of low- and moderate-income residents.” Not grocery stores. Not vulnerable neighborhoods to exploit. Cheap space near their customer base. That’s a very different thing than predatory targeting, and ILSR said it themselves.

The report also leans heavily on peer-reviewed research from the University of Georgia showing that dollar stores concentrate in low-income minority neighborhoods and frames that concentration as predatory. But concentration isn’t predation when you’re the only retailer showing up. The residents in those neighborhoods tend to see it differently. As one woman in York, Alabama — a town of 2,400 with no grocery store — told NPR: dollar stores are “the bread and butter of small towns.”

Meanwhile, independent researchers have been considerably more careful. Dr. Lauren Chenarides, an assistant professor at Arizona State University’s Morrison School of Agribusiness, noted in 2023 that academic studies on the economic consequences of dollar store expansion “are just starting” and that major papers are still years away.

Her own research found that dollar stores often open in areas that have just become food deserts — after the grocer already left — and that they are less likely to close stores inside food deserts than outside of one, suggesting they can survive where grocers can’t. That’s not the profile of a predator. That’s the profile of a last resort.

This matters because the ILSR report is now the invisible foundation under almost every “dollar stores are parasites” argument you’ll hear. When that argument reaches a conference keynote, nobody mentions that its most dramatic claims are self-cited advocacy research. They just repeat the conclusion.

And here’s what the full picture actually looks like: the harm is real in some situations and absent in others. When dollar stores enter a town that still has a functioning grocery store, there’s documented harm. When they enter a town where no grocery store exists, which describes a lot of the towns I work in, the picture is completely different. That distinction matters enormously. And it’s the one the “parasite” argument almost never makes.

What Dollar General Actually Is

If you’re sitting on a two-lane state highway with 300 people and no grocery store, Dollar General is the modern version of the general store that used to exist in every small town in America. It’s a five-and-dime. It sells canned goods, cleaning supplies, paper products, over-the-counter medicine, and basic household items at prices competitive with Walmart because, like Walmart, Dollar General has the purchasing power to keep prices low. A small regional grocery store doesn’t have that purchasing power.

Here’s the economic reality: Dollar General can be profitable in a market that would bankrupt a grocery store. Their model is built for it. Small footprint, minimal staff, no expensive meat and produce infrastructure, focused almost entirely on shelf-stable goods. A grocery store needs fresh food departments to be a grocery store, and those departments cost money to run and carry spoilage risk. Dollar General sidesteps all of that, which is exactly why they can make money in a town where a grocery store can’t.

And crucially: in most of these towns, Dollar General didn’t replace a grocery store. The grocery store was already gone. Dollar General didn’t kill it. It just showed up after the funeral.

For residents without cars or the elderly who can’t drive, this isn’t an abstraction. It’s whether they can get canned goods, soap, and cold medicine without asking someone for a ride to the nearest town thirty minutes away. Calling that a parasite is a statement that could only be made by someone who has never needed one.

Increasingly, individual locations are adding fresh produce. Dollar General now has more produce distribution points than any other mass retailer in the country, including Walmart. It’s not the same as a grocery store. But it’s something. And in a lot of towns, something is everything.

And for many of these towns, Dollar General isn’t just the only place to buy groceries. It’s the largest single source of municipal revenue. Oklahoma municipalities run almost entirely on sales tax; they collect no property tax. In a small town on a state highway, Dollar General is often generating more sales tax than every other business in town combined. The calculus is different in other states, but in towns with low property values and a thin commercial base, Dollar General’s sales tax contribution is significant regardless of which state it’s in.

Where Dollar General Goes Wrong

None of this means Dollar General is above criticism. It isn’t.

When Dollar General moves into a town that still has a functioning independent grocery store, there’s documented harm. A 2024 USDA study found that rural independent grocers see about a 9% decline in sales when a dollar store enters their market, nearly double the impact seen in urban areas. Rural grocery stores are three times more likely to close following a Dollar General opening than their urban counterparts. And unlike urban markets, where the effects tend to fade after a few years, in rural areas they don’t. That’s real, and it matters.

The pricing scandal is real too. Multiple state attorneys general have investigated and sued Dollar General for charging customers more at the register than the price shown on the shelf. A Missouri investigation found that 92 out of 147 stores failed pricing inspections, with an average overcharge of $2.71 per item. A national class action lawsuit settled for $15 million, with preliminary approval granted in December 2025.

Dollar General has since committed to third-party pricing audits and dedicated pricing employees. But the pattern was widespread and went on for years, and the people with the least ability to do anything about a small overcharge are exactly the low-income rural residents who can least afford it. If your only option is Dollar General, disputing a $2.71 discrepancy doesn’t get you very far.

But here's the thing: none of that changes the fundamental reality in the towns I'm talking about. The pricing scandal is real and wrong. The harm to existing grocers is real. But documented problems with a company don't conjure a grocery store into existence in a town that doesn't have one. In a town where Dollar General is the only place to buy food, too often the alternative to Dollar General isn't a better option — it's nothing.

So What Do We Do About It?

First, let’s stop treating Dollar General as the villain in a story where the real problem is that small towns can’t support full-service grocery stores. That’s a harder problem, and it doesn’t have a corporate punching bag attached to it. But it’s the actual problem.

Second, there are communities already working on solutions worth paying attention to. Medford, Oklahoma — a town of about 900 people — faced losing its only grocery store, and the city stepped in to buy it and keep it running. It’s not a perfect model, and I don’t know how easily it replicates. But it’s a community that decided food access was worth a public investment and found a way to make it work.

In Cody, Nebraska — population 156 — teachers and students at Cody-Kilgore High School built their own grocery store from straw bales after the town’s previous store closed. Students run it as part of their curriculum. It opened in 2013 and is still operating today. If you’re looking for a way to get young people invested in their community, it’s hard to beat handing them an actual business to run.

The more interesting idea to me — and one I’m actually working on — is the tandem model. Dollar General handles what it handles well: shelf-stable goods, household products, basic consumables, at prices small towns can’t otherwise access. A separate, smaller operation fills the gap Dollar General leaves — fresh produce, meat, dairy, and locally made products. Not competing with Dollar General. Complementing it.

I’m personally involved in an exploratory project doing exactly this in a small Oklahoma town, in partnership with Zero Empty Spaces, a national company that typically creates affordable artist studios by activating vacant commercial spaces. The rural grocery market concept is new territory for them too. It’s early in the ideation phase and there’s no launch date yet, but the fact that it’s being seriously explored tells me the idea has legs.

Nobody has cracked this nut completely. There’s no playbook. But the towns that figure this out will be the ones that take their food destiny into their own hands instead of waiting for a regional grocery store to save them.

These posts are brought to you by Econ Dev Ops, providing administrative support for Chambers of Commerce and economic development organizations. It’s hard to champion your community when the back office is on fire. Learn more at econdevops.com or reach us at hello@econdevops.com.

Sources

1. USDA Economic Research Service, “Dollar Store Entry Affects Rural Grocery Stores More Than Urban,” May 2024. https://www.ers.usda.gov/amber-waves/2024/may/dollar-store-entry-affects-rural-grocery-stores-more-than-urban

2. Dollar General class action settlement, preliminary approval December 15, 2025. https://www.classaction.org/news/15m-dollar-general-settlement-ends-class-action-lawsuit-over-alleged-price-discrepancies

3. Dollar General press release via BusinessWire, “Dollar General Surpasses Milestone of 5,000 Stores Nationwide Offering Fresh Produce,” January 30, 2024. https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20240130572693/en/Dollar-General-Surpasses-Milestone-of-5000-Stores-Nationwide-Offering-Fresh-Produce

4. Pew Charitable Trusts, “How Local Governments Raise Their Tax Dollars,” 2021. https://www.pew.org/en/research-and-analysis/data-visualizations/2021/how-local-governments-raise-their-tax-dollars

5. Nebraska Public Media, “The Circle C in Tiny Cody Calls Itself ‘More Than a Store,’ and Here’s Why,” December 2016. https://nebraskapublicmedia.org/en/news/news-articles/the-circle-c-in-tiny-cody-calls-itself-more-than-a-store-and-heres-why/

6. Government Capital Corporation, “City of Medford Announces Equipment Upgrade for City Owned Grocery Store,” March 2022. https://www.govcap.com/city-of-medford-announces-equipment-upgrade-for-city-owned-grocery-store

7. Institute for Local Self-Reliance, “The Dollar Store Invasion,” March 2023. https://ilsr.org/articles/report-dollar-store-invasion/

8. Institute for Local Self-Reliance, “17 Problems: How Dollar Store Chains Hurt Communities.” https://ilsr.org/article/independent-business/17-problems/

9. Gulf States Newsroom / WBHM, “Advocates warn of a ‘dollar store invasion.’ Researchers are still figuring out the consequences,” April 2023. https://wbhm.org/2023/advocates-warn-of-a-dollar-store-invasion-researchers-are-still-figuring-out-the-consequences/ (source for Dr. Lauren Chenarides quotes and April Russell quote)

10. NPR, “As more dollar stores open, advocates warn of the harm they can do to communities,” May 2023. https://www.npr.org/2023/05/02/1173477651/as-more-dollar-stores-open-advocates-warn-of-the-harm-they-can-do-to-communities

That’s not entirely true—I’ve bumped into the concept in passing, caught the occasional Strong Towns reference, nodded along at conferences. But I’d never actually sat down and worked through what it means, how it works, and whether it holds up when you poke it.

So let’s do that together.

First: What’s Actually Wrong with the Property Tax?

Property taxes work like this: a county assessor estimates what your property is worth—land plus whatever you’ve built on it—and then the local government taxes you a percentage of that value. Simple enough.

Here’s the problem economists have been complaining about for 150 years: that system penalizes improvement.

If you own a vacant lot downtown and a developer builds a four-story mixed-use building next door, your land just got more valuable. Good for you. But if you’re the one who builds the mixed-use building, your tax bill goes up immediately because your assessed value jumped. You got taxed for doing something productive.

Meanwhile, the guy holding the vacant lot? He’s sitting on appreciating land that your neighbor’s investment helped create. When the assessor eventually catches up, his bill goes up too — but only on the land. He’s not being penalized for building anything, because he didn’t. He’s just waiting for someone to offer him enough money to sell.

This is not a flaw in the system. This is the system.

The traditional property tax essentially puts improvement on the same footing as speculation. Build something useful and pay more. Sit on dirt and pay less. Sprawl happens. Infill doesn’t.

Enter Henry George

In 1879, an American political economist named Henry George published Progress and Poverty, which became one of the bestselling books of the 19th century. His central argument: the value of land isn’t created by the landowner. It’s created by the community around it.

Roads, sewers, schools, proximity to jobs, walkable neighborhoods—all of that gets baked into land value. The landowner didn’t build any of it. They’re just the one collecting the windfall when it arrives.

George’s proposed fix: tax land value, not improvements. Tax the location, not what someone built there. Since you can’t move land, you can’t avoid the tax by disinvesting or relocating. And since land value is created by the community, capturing some of that value back makes a certain kind of ethical sense.

Economists from Adam Smith to Milton Friedman have, at various points, expressed sympathy for taxing land. It’s one of the few policy ideas that finds some support across ideological lines, which tells you either that it’s genuinely sensible or that it’s vague enough for everyone to project their own preferences onto it. Possibly both.

The Vocabulary, Sorted Out

There are a few terms floating around this conversation that mean slightly different things.

Land value tax (LVT) is the pure version: you only tax the value of the land itself, not anything built on it. The land underneath a vacant lot and the land underneath the ten-story building next door are taxed equally if they’re in the same location — because location is what determines land value, not what someone chose to build there. The building owner isn’t penalized for improving their property. The vacant lot owner can’t hold cheap by leaving it empty while the neighborhood around them rises in value.

Split-rate taxation is the more common compromise: you tax land at a higher rate than improvements. You still tax both, but the incentive structure shifts. You’re penalized less for building and more for sitting on empty land. Pennsylvania has the longest history with this approach in the U.S., with more than 20 jurisdictions trying it in some form.

Land value return is a slightly broader concept. Rather than just talking about tax policy, it asks: how do communities recapture the value that public investment creates in the land around it?

Here’s the mechanism. Take two identical vacant lots on opposite sides of a city — same size, same zoning, same distance to downtown. The only difference is that Lot A has water and sewer lines at the property line. Lot B doesn’t have any within half a mile. Lot A is worth more — not because the owner did anything, but because the water authority ran pipes there. The owner of Lot A is sitting on publicly-created value. Land value return is the idea that some of that value should come back to fund the infrastructure that created it.

That might happen through a land tax, but it could also happen through other mechanisms. An access fee charges landowners for the benefit of being connected to public infrastructure — think of it as a connection charge that reflects what proximity to that water main is actually worth. A special assessment is similar: when a government project demonstrably increases the value of nearby properties, those property owners pay a one-time or recurring charge tied to that benefit. The point isn’t the specific tool — it’s the underlying principle that when government investment increases land value, the windfall shouldn’t flow entirely to whoever holds title. Communities that fail to capture any of it end up in a familiar trap: they pay to build infrastructure, then pay again in higher land prices if they want to locate near it.

A note for my Oklahoma readers: municipalities here don’t collect property tax at all — that revenue flows to counties and schools. But the fee mechanisms described above aren’t entirely out of reach. Special assessments tied to specific infrastructure projects exist under Oklahoma law and can capture some of the value public investment creates in nearby land. It’s a narrower tool than a split-rate tax, but the underlying logic is the same.

The Asheville Walmart and Why Your Math Is Wrong

Here’s where Urban3 and Joe Minicozzi enter the picture, and honestly, this is the part that’ll change how you look at your community.

Minicozzi is an urban designer who started asking an obvious question: we talk about property values in total dollars, but shouldn’t we compare them per acre? A Walmart might be worth $20 million on paper. But if it sits on 34 acres, it’s generating about $6,500 per acre in property taxes. A renovated downtown building with a beauty salon, offices, and 19 condos, sitting on a fraction of that land, might generate $634,000 per acre—nearly one hundred times more fiscal productivity.

His analogy: we don’t measure fuel efficiency in miles per tank. We measure it in miles per gallon, because the tank sizes are different. Total property value without land area is miles per tank. Useless.

When you map a city this way—value per acre instead of total value—the picture often flips. The big-box retail corridor looks like a fiscal drain. The messy, dense, walkable downtown blocks look like the engine funding everything else.

This is relevant to the land value conversation because it explains why the tax structure matters. Your municipality’s infrastructure costs are largely linear—roads, pipes, wires run through land. Sprawl costs more to serve, mile for mile, than density. If you’re taxing improvements more heavily than land, you’re actively discouraging the dense development that makes your infrastructure financially sustainable.

What Actually Happened in Harrisburg

By 1980, Harrisburg, Pennsylvania was, by some federal measures, the second most distressed city in the United States. Vacant lots everywhere. Crime rising. Tax base collapsing.

The city had already adopted a split-rate land tax back in 1975, taxing land at four times the rate of buildings. Over the following decades, it kept ratcheting up that ratio—eventually reaching six to one. The results are genuinely striking:

• The number of vacant buildings dropped from over 4,000 to around 500 between the early 1980s and early 2000s.

• Businesses increased more than fourfold.

• From 1982 to 2009, over $4.8 billion in new investment came into the city.

• Over 90% of property owners paid less under the two-rate system than they would have under a single conventional rate.

The mayor at the time credited the split-rate system as “one of the key local policies” in Harrisburg’s recovery. To be fair, it wasn’t the only thing going on—no single policy ever is—but the pattern held across multiple Pennsylvania cities. McKeesport switched to split-rate in 1980 and saw a 36% gain in the annual value of building permits over the next three years. Neighboring Clairton, which didn’t switch, saw a 30% decline.

Pittsburgh is the complicated counterexample. The city used split-rate taxation from 1913 to 2001. Studies found it was associated with significantly higher construction activity compared to similar midwestern cities. But a countywide reassessment in 2001 drove up assessed land values sharply, wealthy residents filed thousands of appeals, and the city scrapped it. Tax rates on buildings went up to compensate, meaning most residents ended up paying more than they would have under the land tax—exactly the opposite of what opponents had hoped for.

The Legitimate Criticisms

This is where the piece could become a boosterism session for a tax policy that sounds elegant in theory, and I don’t want that. There are real problems.

Assessment is hard. Land value in isolation—separate from the improvements on it—is genuinely difficult to assess. How do you figure out what a lot is worth without the building on it? Appraisers do this, but it requires expertise and consistency that not every county assessor’s office has. Mess up the assessment and the whole system produces weird results.

Rate-setting is messy. The Pennsylvania experience showed enormous variation—land-to-improvements tax ratios ranging from 1.67 in one town to 26.11 in another. That kind of range suggests communities are guessing more than calculating. And the incentive effects depend heavily on getting the ratio right.

Rural areas are different. A land value tax makes intuitive sense in a dense urban environment where the gap between idle land and productive development is visible and significant. In rural communities, the tool is weaker even before you get to the farmland problem.

The core mechanism of LVT depends on demand. In a city, a vacant lot in a desirable location has obvious productive potential — the tax creates urgency to develop it. In a town of 800 people, taxing that vacant lot at a higher rate might pressure the owner to sell or develop, but who’s buying? You can’t incentivize development the local economy can’t support. The tax creates pressure without a market to respond to it.

Rural land values are also lower partly because the dense public infrastructure that creates urban land value — transit, utilities, walkable amenities — isn’t there. Which means there’s less publicly-created value to recapture in the first place. And large rural parcels make the assessment challenge harder: small errors in valuation have outsized consequences at scale.

Then there’s farmland, which complicates everything further. Farmland can carry high market value — especially in areas with development pressure nearby — without generating income anywhere close to what that value implies. A farmer taxed on what their land could theoretically sell for to a developer isn’t being taxed on their actual economic reality. That’s a real hardship, and it’s different in kind from taxing a downtown lot-holder who’s just waiting for values to rise.

Some states address this through use-value assessment — taxing agricultural land on what it produces as farmland, not what it might fetch on the open market. That’s a different policy lever, but it’s the relevant one for rural contexts where a straight land value tax would land unevenly.

It’s politically difficult. Pittsburgh’s collapse illustrates the problem. Wealthier landowners bear more of the burden under a land tax (they tend to hold more valuable land), and they have political influence. The policy is genuinely better for most property owners on paper, but “most property owners” don’t always win political fights.

It’s a tool, not a miracle. Some advocates talk about LVT the way economic developers talk about certain big projects: as if the thing itself produces the outcome, regardless of context. Harrisburg’s recovery wasn’t just the tax. It was the tax plus deliberate policy choices plus whatever broader forces were working. When the Pittsburgh Business Improvement District used a land value surcharge on top of the regular property tax from 1997 to 2016, researchers found it was hard to isolate from other economic conditions that also happened to be favorable.

What This Has to Do with Economic Development

If you’re working in economic development, here’s the practical translation:

Your community is almost certainly leaving money on the table. Not because you’re not recruiting businesses or writing incentive packages, but because the tax structure is actively rewarding land speculation and penalizing productive use. Every vacant lot in your downtown that sits idle while the owner waits for values to rise is a symptom. Every time a developer builds a bigger parking lot than necessary to lower assessed value is a symptom.

Urban3’s work—mapping value per acre rather than total assessed value—is a way to see the pattern. It tends to show that the dense, walkable, mixed-use parts of a community are producing dramatically more fiscal value per unit of infrastructure than the sprawling commercial corridors. And yet zoning, incentive structures, and yes, the property tax system often push investment toward the sprawl.

Land value return, in its various forms, is an attempt to realign those incentives. If landowners benefit from public investment in their area, capturing some of that value back funds the infrastructure that created it, rather than handing it as a windfall to whoever happened to hold title at the right moment.

The concept doesn’t require full adoption of a pure land value tax—a system that barely exists in the U.S. anyway. Split-rate property taxes are the realistic version. Incremental, legal in a number of states, and tested in enough communities to have an actual track record rather than just a theoretical one.

What You’d Actually Have to Do

If you’re a local elected official or ED practitioner wanting to explore this, the honest answer is: a lot.

You’d need state enabling legislation that permits split-rate or LVT structures. Pennsylvania has it. Connecticut recently authorized pilots for up to three municipalities. Virginia has it in limited form. Most states don’t.

You’d need your assessor to be able to separately value land and improvements. In some jurisdictions, this is already done. In others, assessors have always valued them together and have no infrastructure to separate them.

You’d need political coalition-building, because the landowners most affected by the shift—those holding valuable land without much on it—often have significant political weight.

And you’d need to be honest with yourself about what the realistic outcome is. This isn’t a switch you flip. It’s a structural adjustment to how land is valued over time. Harrisburg didn’t see dramatic results overnight. The shift in incentives accumulated for years before the vacancy numbers started moving.

So Is It Worth Exploring?

I went into this piece not knowing what I thought and I’ll tell you where I landed: yes, with caveats.

The underlying logic is sound. Land value is genuinely created by communities, not landowners. The traditional property tax does genuinely penalize improvement and reward speculation. The Urban3 analysis of value per acre is a useful lens that most communities have never applied to themselves. The Pennsylvania evidence, messy as it is, points toward some real effects.

But “sound logic with mixed evidence in specific contexts” is a long way from “this solves your fiscal problems.” Rural communities, small towns with thin land markets, and places without assessment infrastructure face higher barriers and lower likely returns than dense urban cores.

The most honest version of the recommendation is this: if your state has enabling legislation and your assessor can do the work, it’s worth modeling what a split-rate structure would actually mean for your specific community before making any decisions. Urban3 offers exactly that kind of analysis—taking your own municipal data and showing you what you’re actually looking at.

That’s not a plug. That’s just what due diligence looks like before you touch the tax code.

These posts are brought to you by Econ Dev Ops, providing administrative support for Chambers of Commerce and economic development organizations. It’s hard to champion your community when the back office is on fire. Learn more at econdevops.com or reach us at hello@econdevops.com.

Sources

• Rick Rybeck, “Land Value Return and Building a More Equitable Economy,” Shareable, January 27, 2022: https://www.shareable.net/land-value-return-and-building-a-more-equitable-economy/

• Elizabeth Kepner and Rick Mattoon, “Land Value Taxes—What They Are and Where They Come From,” Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago, Chicago Fed Letter No. 489, November 2023: https://www.chicagofed.org/publications/chicago-fed-letter/2023/489

• Smart Growth America, “What’s the Value of a Great Downtown? Joe Minicozzi Can Tell You Exactly, in Dollars and Cents”: https://smartgrowthamerica.org/whats-the-value-of-a-great-downtown-joe-minicozzi-can-tell-you-exactly-in-dollars-and-cents/

• “Land Value Taxes,” Sustainable Development Code: https://sustainablecitycode.org/brief/land-value-taxes/

• “Leaning on the Land,” Governing: https://www.governing.com/archive/gov-land-tax.html

• “Non-Glamorous Gains: The Pennsylvania Land Tax Experiment,” Strong Towns, 2019: https://archive.strongtowns.org/journal/2019/3/6/non-glamorous-gains-the-pennsylvania-land-tax-experiment

• MinnPost, “Per-Acre Analysis: A Unique Way of Looking at Urban Economics,” February 2021: https://www.minnpost.com/cityscape/2021/02/per-acre-analysis-a-unique-way-of-looking-an-urban-economics/

• Urban3: https://www.urbanthree.com

• Henry George, Progress and Poverty (1879): https://www.loc.gov/item/05022674/

• Land Value Tax Guide: https://landvaluetaxguide.com

• Local Housing Solutions, “Land Value Taxation”: https://www.localhousingsolutions.org/housing-policy-library/land-value-taxation/

• Oklahoma Policy Institute, “Local Government Revenues”: https://okpolicy.org/resources/online-budget-guide/revenues/local-government-revenues/

You’ve seen the pattern. A downtown building sits empty for a year. Then three years. The owner pays the taxes, technically complies with nothing, and nothing happens. Meanwhile the building deteriorates, neighboring property values soften, and anyone considering opening a business on that block does the math and passes.

Most communities treat this as a fact of life. It isn’t.

There are three tools worth knowing — a property maintenance code, a vacant building registry, and a blight fee ordinance — and real towns have used them. Here’s what each one looks like in practice.

Tool 1: The Property Maintenance Code

Callender, Iowa — population around 400 — passed Ordinance 167 in 2010. It’s a property maintenance code that sets minimum exterior standards for every structure in town, residential and commercial.

The code covers sanitation, structural and foundational components, roofs, exterior surfaces including windows and doors, and even rules on parking vehicles outside a garage. Enforcement sits with the city council, which can bring in outside inspectors. Each day a violation continues after notice is served counts as a separate offense.

What makes this useful for small towns is its scope. It’s not aimed at a single problem property — it applies to everything in the city limits. That gives officials a consistent legal basis to act rather than navigating a political fight over one building. And it’s replicable: Callender wrote it, passed it in two readings, and published the summary as required. Any town with a city attorney and a willing council can do the same.

Tool 2: The Vacant Building Ordinance

This is where the most compelling proof of concept lives.

A decade ago, Centerville, South Dakota had 14 vacant storefronts in a downtown that encompasses only a few square blocks. Some properties were used as storage for junk, others were withering toward condemnation. The look was one of decline — not enticing to potential visitors, residents, or business owners.

In 2017, the Centerville City Council passed a vacant buildings ordinance that uses a registration system, building inspections, warning letters, threats of fines, and eventual fines to prompt property owners to either fix up their buildings or sell them to make way for new opportunities.

The result: downtown Centerville now has a women’s clothing boutique, a salon, a tattoo parlor, a discount retail store, two restaurant locations, and a historic building converted into a combination museum, art gallery, and visitors center.

Centerville is a town of around 900 people. The economic development coordinator, Jared Hybertson, has become a resource for other South Dakota communities trying to replicate the model. Officials from Hurley — a town of 385 — contacted Hybertson and enacted their own vacant building ordinance in October 2024.

(I want to point out here that a town of 900 people recognized the importance of having a role dedicated to economic development.)

Hybertson is also candid about the limits. He acknowledged it takes patience, resilience, and sometimes luck and good timing. Even after improvements are made, maintaining a profitable business is a challenge in small towns. “Sometimes it feels like one step forward and two steps back,” he said. And the ordinance can get tricky and controversial when it comes to property rights.

That’s an honest assessment. The ordinance doesn’t conjure tenants. It removes the friction that keeps willing buyers and sellers from connecting. The owner sitting on a vacant building faces no pressure to sell or improve. The ordinance changes that equation.

Tool 3: The Vacant Building Fee

The third tool is blunter: charge owners for the cost their vacancy imposes on the community.

Hazleton, Pennsylvania passed an ordinance requiring owners of any vacant building — residential, commercial, nonprofit, governmental — to register annually with code enforcement and pay a $200 non-refundable fee per property. The registration kicks in after a building has sat vacant for 45 days.

The fee isn’t punitive enough on its own to force anyone’s hand, but that’s not entirely the point. As Council President Jack Mundie put it: “The purpose is to fight blight. It will raise some revenue and if people don’t abide by it, they are going to be fined.” The fines escalate — up to $5,000 for owners who repeatedly refuse to register.

The ordinance also gives code enforcement real teeth: the ability to inspect properties, require owners to post a bond to cover potential abatement costs, temporarily secure a structure that poses a public safety threat, and file a lien against owners who don’t reimburse the city for that work.

One of the smartest provisions is the waiver option. Owners who submit a legitimate rehab, demolition, or sale plan can get a one-year fee waiver. That gives cooperative owners a reason to engage rather than ignore the notice. It also separates the genuinely stuck owner from the one who just doesn’t want to deal with it.

Mundie identified the real target plainly: out-of-town landlords and banks who own property but have no one local accountable for it. The registration requirement — with a notarized statement listing all owners and their addresses — makes ignoring the city harder to sustain.

Yes, but what about property rights?

This is where someone at the council meeting always speaks up, and they’re not wrong. Property rights matter. Americans have a deep and legitimate tradition of not wanting government telling them what to do with what they own.

But property rights have never been absolute, and they shouldn’t be. When your vacant building starts dragging down the value of your neighbor’s building, you’re affecting their property rights. When your neglected structure deteriorates to the point where it’s a safety hazard — literally collapsing onto the building next door (here, here, and here ) — you’ve stopped exercising your rights and started imposing your problems on someone else.

We have a great spirit of independence in this country, and that’s worth protecting. But part of living in a community is accepting that your obligations don’t stop at your property line. Keeping your building from becoming a blight on your neighbors isn’t government overreach. It’s the basic social contract of shared space.

That said, there’s a real tension worth noting. These ordinances are about keeping buildings structurally sound, occupied, and not actively harming the surrounding area. They’re not an invitation to micromanage paint colors, dictate landscaping choices, or zone the personality out of a downtown. A town that fights blight while still allowing its residents to be creative and individual is doing it right. A town that uses code enforcement as an aesthetic taste committee has gone too far.

The goal is a living town, not a tidy one.

What these three tools have in common

Vacant and deteriorating buildings have owners, and those owners currently face almost no cost for doing nothing. Each of these ordinances imposes some cost — reputational, financial, or legal — on inaction.

None of them require a big city budget, a full-time code enforcement department, or state legislation. They require a willing council, some legal drafting, and the organizational will to follow through when someone pushes back.

Paula Jensen of Dakota Resources, who works to spread replicable ideas to communities across South Dakota, put it plainly: “This isn’t just putting flowers on Main Street to beautify it. It’s making a decision to incrementally improve their Main Street and show that they’re in it for the long haul, so people will want to establish a business there.”

If your town has vacant buildings and no ordinance addressing them, you don’t have a building problem. You have a policy gap.

The Honest Economic Developer is a publication of Econ Dev Ops. We connect chambers of commerce and economic development organizations with pre-vetted remote operations specialists. Learn more at econdevops.com.

I posted it as an interesting data point. The comments took that fact and expanded on it.

Someone pointed out that livestock agriculture is actually far worse than almonds. Someone else brought up golf courses. John Shepard, a planner and economic developer, pushed back with the most quotable line in the thread: “Can’t eat a data center. The statistic may be valid, but I doubt the numbers will win hearts of the electorate.”

Fair point. The numbers may never win the argument on their own. But I’m not sure we can even have the argument honestly until we know what the numbers are. And sitting there reading the thread, I realized I didn’t.

So let’s do that. Not to crown a winner or declare a villain, but because economic developers get asked about water all the time — especially when a data center wants to site in a community — and we should know what we’re actually talking about.

A Rough Comparison

So I went looking. Comparing water consumption across industries turns out to be harder than it sounds. Methodologies differ, definitions of "consumption" vary, and some sectors track their usage far more carefully than others. But even with those caveats, the rough picture is striking enough to be worth laying out.

This graph uses a log scale to make all five sectors visible in the same chart. On a true proportional scale, the livestock bar would dwarf everything else entirely. But even compressed, the picture is clear: U.S. livestock sector water consumption is in a category of its own, consuming thousands of times more water than any other sector shown here.

California almond farms alone — a single crop in a single state — consume roughly eighty times more water than U.S. data centers use directly. Golf courses, which most people never think about in this context, consume more than thirty times as much. And data centers, the subject of so much public concern, barely register at the bottom of the chart.

What Data Centers Actually Use

Here’s where the data center conversation gets complicated fast: there are at least two different numbers in play, and people mix them up constantly.

Direct water use — the water a data center physically consumes on-site, mostly for cooling, is the number you see in headlines. A 2024 Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory report estimated that U.S. data centers consumed approximately 17.4 billion gallons of water directly in 2023. A large hyperscale facility can consume hundreds of millions of gallons a year. Google’s biggest data center, in Council Bluffs, Iowa, consumed roughly 1 billion gallons in 2024.

Indirect water use — the water used by power plants to generate the electricity that runs the data center is much larger and much murkier. The same Lawrence Berkeley report estimated an additional 211 billion gallons consumed indirectly through electricity in 2023. That number depends heavily on what kind of power grid is powering the facility. Coal and gas plants are far more water-intensive than wind and solar.

So the honest answer to “how much water does a data center use?” is: it depends on how you count, and most companies aren’t counting the same way.

What’s also true: the industry knows this is a problem, and the technology is changing — fast. In August 2024, Microsoft began designing all new data centers around zero-water evaporative cooling, which are closed-loop chip-level liquid cooling systems that circulate coolant without consuming fresh water. Those facilities are expected to come online starting in late 2027.

Meta is building a facility in Beaver Dam, Wisconsin, where the anticipated annual water use will reportedly be less than that of two full-service restaurants. These aren’t future promises; they’re design decisions being made right now.

That doesn’t mean legacy facilities become magically efficient overnight. But the trajectory is meaningfully different than what you’d hear from the panic headlines.

Beef and Dairy: A Whole Other Scale

One commenter on the original post cited University of Nebraska research putting total U.S. livestock sector water consumption at 72,650 billion gallons per year — a number so large it barely feels real. For context, that’s over 4,000 times data centers’ direct water use in 2023.

That figure includes rainfall on pastureland, feed crops, drinking water, and facility operations. Of course, methodology for measuring water usage matters, but even the more conservative figures are staggering. A single pound of beef requires an average of 1,800 gallons of water to produce, with nearly all of it going to the feed consumed over the animal’s lifetime. Beef, pork, and other meats combined used an estimated 2.5 trillion gallons of irrigated water in 2012 alone. Admittedly, that’s data from well over a decade ago, and improvements have been made. We’ll get to that shortly.

Dairy isn’t far behind. A single eight-ounce glass of milk has an average water footprint of around 50 gallons. A four-ounce serving of cheese takes about 119 gallons. At the farm level, a high-producing dairy cow can consume 50 gallons of drinking water per day — and that’s before counting the water embedded in the feed she eats.

Does this mean we should shut down cattle ranching? Of course not — and nobody’s seriously suggesting it. Ranching is culturally embedded, economically significant, and feeds people. Also, it has improved. Peer-reviewed research found that water intensity per kilogram of beef dropped by nearly 38% between 1991 and 2019, and total blue water use by the U.S. cattle herd fell by 29% over the same period. That’s meaningful progress achieved over decades.

Which raises an uncomfortable question. The hyperscale AI data centers generating so much public concern today have existed in their current form for maybe three or four years. We’re applying scrutiny and expectations to a brand-new industry that we’ve never applied to industries that have been using vastly more water for over a century. A cattle operation doesn’t trigger community water hearings. A data center does — even when it uses a fraction of the water.

Now Let’s Talk About Almonds

California almond orchards consume between 4.7 and 5.5 million acre-feet of water per year — roughly 1.5 to 1.8 trillion gallons. That’s approximately the same amount of water used annually by all California households combined.

It takes between 1.6 and 1.7 gallons of water to produce a single almond. A pound of almonds requires between 520 and 560 gallons of water.

To put that in perspective against data centers: the U.S. data center sector’s 17.4 billion gallons of direct water use in 2023 represents roughly 1% of California’s almond water consumption in the same period.

There’s a fair counter-argument from the almond industry: almonds produce four products from one water input (kernel, shell, hull, and the tree itself, which sequesters carbon), and almond hulls are used as dairy feed, offsetting water that would otherwise go to growing alfalfa. That’s not nothing. But the raw numbers are still jarring when you see them next to each other.

And Then There’s Golf

The Golf Course Superintendents Association of America released a national survey in December 2025 showing that U.S. golf facilities applied 1.63 million acre-feet of water in 2024 — about 531 billion gallons. The headline on that report was actually celebratory: golf courses have reduced water use by 31% since 2005. Credit where it’s due.

But 531 billion gallons is still 531 billion gallons. That’s more than thirty times U.S. data centers’ direct water consumption in 2023. A single 150-acre course can use 200 million gallons per year. There are roughly 16,000 courses in the country.

Golf generates real economic activity — tourism, real estate values, employment. I’m not arguing against golf courses. But I am noting that nobody shows up to the planning commission to ask a golf course developer about their Water Usage Effectiveness metrics — and the industry spent two decades getting to a 31% reduction while data center companies are announcing zero-water cooling designs from scratch.

The Comparison That Doesn’t Quite Fit

Here’s where I want to pump the brakes on my own analysis: comparing these industries purely on gallons consumed is a little like comparing the electricity use of a factory to a single household. The industries are different in nature, different in scale, different in what they produce, and different in where they’re located relative to water stress.

Water scarcity is local, not national. A data center in eastern Oklahoma drawing from rural groundwater is a completely different situation than one siting in Phoenix drawing from the Colorado River Basin, which is already under enormous strain. Same goes for almonds (almost entirely in drought-stressed California) versus cattle operations scattered across the country.

What makes the data center conversation different — and what I think is worth tracking as an economic developer — is that the industry is actively redesigning around water. Farming practices are improving too, and precision irrigation has meaningfully reduced agricultural water use. But you don’t often see a cattle rancher announce that by 2027, all new calves will be raised using zero-water evaporative processes.

“Can’t Eat a Data Center”

John Shepard’s comment deserves more than a passing mention because he’s right.

Food production has a moral weight that data infrastructure doesn’t. People feel differently about water going to raise crops and cattle than water going to cool servers — even if the servers use a fraction as much. That’s not irrational. It reflects something real about what we value and what feels essential.

But economic developers don’t get to work only with emotionally uncomplicated industries. We work with what shows up. And when a data center proposal comes to a community that’s never thought carefully about its water supply, the electorate deserves better than a vague sense of alarm — they deserve actual numbers, actual comparisons, and actual context. Including the uncomfortable parts.

So What Does This Mean for Economic Development?

There are a few points here to consider, and none of them point cleanly in one direction:

Water is increasingly a site selection variable. Data centers, semiconductor fabs, food processing — they’re all water-intensive industries, and they’re all looking hard at water availability, water rights, and regulatory risk. Communities that have good water data and a clear story about long-term supply are at an advantage. Communities that don’t may find themselves making commitments they don’t fully understand.

The “data center = water hog” narrative is partial — but so is the counter-argument. Data centers currently use far less water than agriculture or golf courses. That’s true. It’s also true that AI infrastructure is expanding rapidly, that legacy facilities aren’t going anywhere, and that the efficiency technologies being announced today won’t be fully deployed for years. The current snapshot looks favorable for data centers. The trajectory is less certain.

The transparency problem is real and ongoing. As of 2026, all major hyperscalers — Google, Meta, Microsoft, Amazon — publish some form of water disclosure. But the reports are voluntary, inconsistently structured, and often incomplete. Meta reports only owned sites. Google omits third-party operations. Microsoft provides aggregate figures without site-level breakdowns. Amazon reports water relative to power rather than total consumption. Institutional investors are actively pressuring all three for better data. A community negotiating a data center agreement today is still working with incomplete information — and that’s a legitimate concern regardless of how the industry compares to almond farms.

The outrage tends to follow the unfamiliar. Golf courses have been part of the American landscape for a century. Beef is culturally embedded. A data center — that faceless industrial building going up outside town — is easy to question even if it uses less water than the golf course three miles away. That asymmetry of scrutiny isn’t entirely fair. But it also isn’t entirely irrational — data centers are new, they’re growing fast, and the communities hosting them deserve to ask hard questions.

Per-job water comparisons matter — but they aren’t the whole story. A data center that employs 50 people at $80,000 average wages and consumes 100 million gallons per year looks favorable compared to a crop that exports most of its yield overseas and uses 10 times the water for a fraction of the local employment. That framing is useful. It’s also worth asking what else that water might have supported, what the long-term water availability looks like, and whether the community has negotiated adequate protections.

The point of this article isn’t to tell you data centers are good or bad. It’s to give you the actual numbers so you can have a real conversation — with your community, with developers, with the public. That conversation is going to happen whether economic developers are prepared for it or not.

Sources

• Mytton, D. (2021). Data centre water consumption. npj Clean Water, 4(1). Data center water transparency and tracking figures. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41545-021-00101-w

• Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (2024). United States Data Center Energy Usage Report. Direct and indirect water consumption figures for U.S. data centers, 2023. https://escholarship.org/uc/item/32d6m0d1

• University of Nebraska Extension (2020). Water Productivity in Meat and Milk Production in the U.S. (Part II). Livestock sector total water consumption figures. https://water.unl.edu/article/animal-manure-management/water-productivity-meat-and-milk-production-us-part-ii/

• Rotz, C.A. et al. (2022). How advances in animal efficiency and management have affected beef cattle’s water intensity in the United States: 1991 compared to 2019. Journal of Animal Science, 100(11). https://academic.oup.com/jas/article/100/11/skac297/6692300

• California Water Impact Network (September 2024). California almond acreage and acre-feet consumption figures. https://www.c-win.org/cwin-water-blog/2024/9/23/california-almond-water-usage-updated

• Pacific Institute (2015). The California Drought: Almonds and the Bigger Picture. Per-almond and per-pound water figures. https://pacinst.org/national-geographic-scienceblogs-the-california-drought-almonds-and-the-bigger-picture/

• Golf Course Superintendents Association of America (GCSAA) (December 30, 2025). Golf Courses Reduce Water Usage by 31 Percent According to National Survey. https://www.gcsaa.org/who-we-are/media/news-release/2025-news-releases/2025/12/30/golf-courses-reduce-water-usage-by-31-percent-according-to-national-survey

• Mekonnen, M.M. & Hoekstra, A.Y. (2012). A Global Assessment of the Water Footprint of Farm Animal Products. Ecosystems, 15(3), 401–415. Per-pound beef and dairy water footprint figures. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10021-011-9517-8

• FoodPrint (2022). Dairy’s Large Water Footprint. Per-serving milk and cheese water footprint figures for U.S.-produced dairy. https://foodprint.org/blog/dairy-water-footprint/

• Microsoft (December 9, 2024). Sustainable by Design: Next-Generation Datacenters Consume Zero Water for Cooling. https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-cloud/blog/2024/12/09/sustainable-by-design-next-generation-datacenters-consume-zero-water-for-cooling/

• Meta (December 2025). Advancing Water Stewardship in Meta’s Data Center Communities. https://about.fb.com/news/2025/12/advancing-water-stewardship-in-metas-data-center-communities/

• USDA Economic Research Service (August 2021). U.S. Food-Related Water Use Varies by Food Category, Supply Chain Stage, and Dietary Pattern. https://primary.ers.usda.gov/amber-waves/2021/august/u-s-food-related-water-use-varies-by-food-category-supply-chain-stage-and-dietary-pattern/

The Honest Economic Developer is a publication of EconDevOps. We connect chambers of commerce and economic development organizations with pre-vetted remote operations specialists. Learn more at econdevops.com.

The conversation goes nowhere useful. The business moves on to the next location on their list.

Nobody in that county ever knew the opportunity existed.

The Gap Is Bigger Than You Think

This is not a rare scenario. Across rural America, entire counties and regions have no economic development organization — no staff, no board, no point of contact. A business looking to locate or expand has nobody to call. A developer looking for available land has nobody to call. A railroad trying to connect a client with local opportunity has nobody to call.

Some counties have an EDO in name. But in practice, the organization is headquartered in the county seat, staffed by people who know the county seat, and focused on projects that benefit the county seat. The smaller towns in the county that may actually have the available land, the right infrastructure, or the workforce are effectively invisible.

Either way, the result is the same. When opportunity comes looking, there is nobody home.

The County Is the Right Unit

A town of 500 people cannot sustain a full-time economic development presence on its own. The budget isn’t there. The tax base isn’t there. Even a town of 5,000 may struggle to justify a dedicated ED staff position when there are streets to maintain, water lines to repair, and a city budget that’s already stretched thin.

But a county of eight small towns pooling resources is a different equation. Suddenly there’s enough to fund a part-time position, or contract for ED services, or at minimum maintain a real presence — a name, a phone number, a person who knows the county and can answer when someone calls.

There’s another reason the county is the right unit: it’s often how outside businesses and developers think. They’re not looking at your town specifically. They’re looking at a region, a corridor, a county. They want to know what’s available in the area. If your town is part of a county-wide ED effort, you’re in that conversation. If you’re not, you may never know the conversation happened.

Where It Usually Goes Wrong

Here is where county-wide economic development usually goes wrong.

A county decides it needs an EDO. The county seat, being the largest town and the center of county government, takes the lead. The office is located there. The staff are hired from there. The board is dominated by business owners and civic leaders from there. The projects that get attention are the ones that benefit — you can probably guess.

The smaller towns in the county are invited to participate. They may even have a seat on the board. But one seat out of twelve is not representation. It is decoration.

This is not always intentional. The county seat isn’t necessarily trying to shut smaller towns out. It’s just that proximity matters. Staff drive past the same vacant building every day. Board members run into the same mayor at the same coffee shop. Attention flows toward what is visible and familiar.

The solution isn’t to distrust the county seat. It’s to build the structure right from the beginning. Smaller towns need genuine representation on the board — not token seats, but proportional voice. Bylaws need to spell out how resources and staff time are allocated across the county. And the smaller towns need to show up — to meetings, to conversations, to the work — or the gravitational pull of the county seat will fill the vacuum.

A county-wide EDO that only serves the county seat isn’t a solution. It’s a rebrand.

So How Do You Actually Build One?

It starts before anyone files paperwork or writes a check. It starts with a conversation ideally among leaders from every town in the county, however informal. Not “how do we set up an EDO” but “do we agree that we need one, and are we willing to build it together?” That question has to be answered honestly before anything else moves forward. A county-wide EDO built on reluctant participation from half the towns isn’t going to work.

Once there’s genuine buy-in, bring in the county commissioners. They may or may not see economic development as part of their mandate. Many don’t, and that’s a conversation worth having rather than a fight worth picking. But county government can be a meaningful partner: funding, facilities, political legitimacy. If commissioners are willing, involve them early. If they’re not ready yet, don’t wait for them. The towns can move forward on their own.

From there, the basics of organization apply. You need a board with real representation from across the county — not just the county seat, not just the mayors, not just the chamber directors. An engaged resident from a small town who knows their community and shows up consistently is worth more than a reluctant official who treats board meetings as an obligation. Aim for every community to have a voice, even if the board can’t be infinitely large.

You need bylaws. This is where the protection for smaller towns gets built in structurally rather than left to goodwill. Bylaws should address board composition, how funding is allocated, how staff time is directed, and how decisions get made. Goodwill is nice. Structure is better.

You need funding. The most common model is some combination of municipal dues, county appropriation, and grants. Each town contributing something — even a small amount — creates ownership and accountability. A town that pays dues has standing to ask what they’re getting for it. That’s healthy.

Some cities go further and dedicate a portion of local sales tax revenue specifically to economic development, subject to voter approval. The mechanics vary by state, but the principle is worth knowing. Dedicated funding creates stable organizations, and stable organizations get things done. Whatever the funding model, make sure every participating community has skin in the game.

And you need staff. A volunteer board without staff capacity is a good intention without a follow-through mechanism. It doesn’t have to be a full-time hire immediately. A part-time position, a contracted service, even a shared staff arrangement with a neighboring organization can get things started. The goal is to have someone whose job it is to know the county and do the work — not someone doing it in the margins of another full-time role.

None of this happens overnight. But it starts with the towns deciding it’s worth doing and committing to do it together.

The Goal Is Simple

What you’re building toward isn’t a bureaucracy. It isn’t a ribbon-cutting machine or a logo on a website. It’s something much more basic: someone whose job it is to know the county.

Know the available land. Know the utility infrastructure. Know the property owners. Know which buildings are vacant and who holds the titles. Know the local contacts well enough to make a useful introduction. Be findable when someone comes looking.

That’s it. That’s the core function. Everything else — the incentive programs, the marketing materials, the strategic plans — those come later, if they come at all. The first job is to exist, to be present, and to be reachable.

A regional ED office can’t do that for you. A state agency can’t do that for you. They don’t know your county the way someone embedded in it does. They’re covering too much ground to know any of it well.

The railroad in our opening hypothetical didn’t need a sophisticated economic development apparatus. They needed a phone number and a person on the other end who could answer basic questions about a piece of land. That’s a low bar. It’s also a bar that a lot of rural counties can’t clear right now.

A county-wide EDO clears that bar. That’s reason enough to build one.

Build It Yourself

This doesn’t happen because a state agency decides it should. It doesn’t happen because a foundation offers a grant or a consultant recommends it in a report. It doesn’t happen because the county seat starts thinking about the smaller towns in its orbit.

It happens because the towns in a county decide to build it together.

That’s not an obstacle. That’s the point. A county-wide EDO built from the bottom up by communities that chose to invest in each other is more durable, more representative, and more functional than one imposed from outside or assembled by default around whoever showed up first.

You don’t need permission to start the conversation. You need a few people from a few towns willing to sit in the same room and agree that flying without a net isn’t working anymore.

The railroad isn’t going to wait. The business looking for a site isn’t going to wait. Opportunity doesn’t hold while a county gets organized. But once you’re organized — once there’s someone whose job it is to know your county and answer the phone — you might be surprised how many conversations were waiting to happen.

These posts are brought to you by Econ Dev Ops, providing administrative support for Chambers of Commerce and economic development organizations. It’s hard to champion your community when the back office is on fire. Learn more at econdevops.com or reach us at hello@econdevops.com.

He’s not wrong. It happens, and it’s frustrating to watch.

But the more I sat with it, the more I thought the interesting question wasn’t about the officials.

When One Project Poisons the Well

Here’s what the pattern usually looks like. A significant development gets proposed — a data center, a large warehouse, an industrial facility. A vocal group of residents shows up opposed. The coverage turns negative. And elected officials, who are nothing if not sensitive to who’s in the room, start to distance themselves.

That’s understandable, if not always helpful. What’s harder to watch is what happens next. The skepticism that started with one project doesn’t stay there. It leaks. The official who was a reliable partner last year is suddenly asking harder questions about everything. The board that approved your last three projects wants another study. The council member who used to return your calls now wants to discuss concerns first.

The development community tends to read this as betrayal. And sometimes it is. But more often it’s an indication that the relationship was always more transactional than it appeared. It held up fine when nothing was controversial. It just wasn’t built for pressure.

The Fracture Was Already There

This is the part where I’m supposed to tell you that elected officials need to show more backbone, or that communities need better civic education, or that the opposition is mostly misinformation. Maybe some of that is true in your situation. But none of it is particularly useful, and none of it is something you can control.

What you can control is the foundation you build before the controversial project arrives.

The hard truth is that a contentious development doesn’t create the fracture between economic developers and elected officials. It reveals one that was already there. If a single project can turn a reliable partner into a skeptic, the partnership was always conditional. It was built on easy wins and shared credit, not on the kind of trust that holds up when the room turns hostile.

That’s not a criticism of anyone in particular. Building that deeper relationship takes time that most economic developers don’t feel like they have, and it requires investing in people who may not be in office two years from now. It’s easy to let it slide when things are going well. Most of us do.

But the communities where ED professionals and elected officials actually weather controversy together — where a contentious project stays contained instead of contaminating everything else — those relationships were built long before the controversy showed up.

What the Relationship Actually Looks Like

So what does that relationship actually look like, built in advance?

It’s probably not what you’re picturing. It’s not a formal briefing schedule or a quarterly update meeting, though those aren’t bad ideas. It’s more basic than that and more consistent.

It’s making sure elected officials hear things from you before they hear them from someone else. Not a formal presentation. A phone call. A heads up. “This is probably coming, here’s what I know, here’s what I don’t know yet.” Officials who feel informed don’t need to perform skepticism for their constituents. Officials who feel blindsided often do.

It’s being honest when something is complicated. If a proposed project has real downsides, say so. If the community benefit is genuine but the concerns are also legitimate, say that. Elected officials are going to figure out that the picture is complicated eventually. The question is whether they figure it out from you or from the opposition. If it’s from you, you’re a trusted advisor. If it’s from the opposition, you’re someone who wasn’t straight with them.

It’s also knowing when to say “I can’t make you support this, and I understand if you don’t.” That sounds like a concession, but it’s actually what trust sounds like. An elected official who knows you’ll respect their position is more likely to pick up the phone when the next thing comes along.

None of this guarantees that officials won’t go populist when the pressure is high enough. Some will, no matter what. But there’s a meaningful difference between an official who opposes a project and an official who uses a project to redefine their relationship with economic development entirely. The first one you can work with. The second one usually means the foundation was never there.

The Quiet Work

The reader who suggested this topic wanted to talk about officials who become obstacles. I get it. It’s demoralizing to watch a project you’ve worked on — one that would have meant something real for your community — get caught in a political current that had nothing to do with its merits.

But if you spend your energy trying to manage officials in the moment, you’re always going to be behind. The opposition has already framed the story. The room is already hostile. You’re playing defense on someone else’s terms.

The economic developers I’ve seen handle controversy well aren’t necessarily better at crisis communication. They’re better at the quiet work that happened before the crisis. They made the calls that didn’t seem urgent. They had the honest conversations that were a little uncomfortable. They built something that could hold weight before they needed it to.

That’s not a guarantee of anything. Some projects shouldn’t happen, and some officials are going to read the room no matter how solid your relationship is. But when the contentious project arrives — and it will — the question you want to be able to answer is whether you’ve built something sturdy enough to survive it.

If you have, the controversy stays about the project. If you haven’t, it becomes about everything else.

These posts are brought to you by Econ Dev Ops, providing administrative support for Chambers of Commerce and economic development organizations. It’s hard to champion your community when the back office is on fire. Learn more at econdevops.com or reach us at hello@econdevops.com.

This is not a new problem. But it is getting worse.

What It Looks Like From the Inside

A mayor of a small town recently stopped going on her morning runs. Not because of health. Not because of time. Because she no longer feels safe.

People have come to her home to yell at her. They have approached her at her children’s ball games and screamed at her in front of her kids. Over municipal decisions. Over a budget. Over a water rate.

This is what the disconnect looks like from the inside of local government right now.

Elected officials in small towns are not insulated executives with security details and communications staff. They are your neighbors. They coach your kids. They go to your church.

They took the job — often a part-time job with modest or no pay — because they wanted to serve their community. And increasingly, they are being treated as though they are personally responsible for every frustration their residents have ever had with government at any level.

The loss of basic civility in public life has consequences that land particularly hard at the local level, because local officials are the most accessible targets. You can’t yell at the state legislature at a soccer game. You can yell at your mayor.

What makes this especially painful is that most small-town elected officials arrive in office knowing almost nothing about municipal finance. Not because they’re incapable but because nobody taught them.

There is no prerequisite. There is no licensing exam. Someone gets elected because they’re a good person who cares about their town, and a week later their neighbors are treating them like they’ve been corrupt for years.

This is not hypothetical. It happens constantly, in towns across the country. A person runs for mayor, gets elected, and before they’ve had time to read a single budget document, the community Facebook group has already decided they’re a disaster. The leap from “good neighbor” to “incompetent official” takes about ten days and zero evidence.

What It Looks Like From the Outside

Now flip it.

Most residents have genuinely no idea how municipal finance works. I certainly didn’t before I got into economic development. It’s not taught in school. It’s not in the local paper, because most small towns don’t have a local paper anymore. It lives in budget documents on city websites that nobody reads and council meetings that nobody attends until something goes wrong.

Here’s a simple test. Ask the next ten people you see whether their city receives property tax revenue. Most of them will say yes. In Oklahoma, the answer is effectively no. Property tax flows to counties and school districts, not city general funds. Even state legislators and governors often don’t know this until someone tells them.

Ask residents what a general obligation bond is. Ask them what a mill levy funds. Ask them why the road in front of their house hasn’t been repaved in fifteen years. They don’t know, and why would they? Nobody told them.

The result is a community full of people who believe that their local government is wasting money or hiding money or simply not trying hard enough.

They see a pothole and they assume someone is incompetent.

They see a tax increase and they assume someone is corrupt.

They don’t have the framework to evaluate what they’re seeing, so they fill the gap with the most available narrative, which is usually the angriest one in the Facebook comments.

Wyoming’s Warning

Wyoming recently enacted a sweeping 25% property tax cut with no plan to replace the revenue. According to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, their local governments are now being forced to cut budgets by up to 23%, and Wyoming’s own legislative fiscal projections show a $686 million school funding deficit by 2030.

The tax cut was popular. The consequences are arriving on schedule.

This is what happens at scale when the civic knowledge gap goes unaddressed. Voters who don’t understand what taxes fund will cut them — not out of malice but because nobody enjoys paying taxes.

The elected officials who tried to explain why the cut was a bad idea were dismissed as self-interested bureaucrats protecting their budgets.

The voters won. The schools lost.

The lesson for small-town officials isn’t that voters are bad. It’s that uninformed voters are vulnerable to the simplest available message, and “cut taxes” is always a simpler message than “here’s how infrastructure funding actually works.”

Preaching to the Choir

The instinct, when confronted with a civic knowledge gap, is to create a program.

Citizen academies have become popular in local governments across the country — multi-week courses where residents can come in and learn about the police department, the water system, the planning process, how laws are made.

They’re genuinely good. Cities that run them report that participants come away with a much better understanding of how local government works and far more patience for the complexity of municipal decision-making.

But the people who sign up for citizen academies are already the reasonable ones. They’re the residents who want to understand, who are willing to invest six Tuesday evenings in becoming better informed.

They are not the people screaming in the Facebook comments. They are not the people showing up at the mayor’s house.

Civic education programs that require residents to opt in will always reach the already-engaged. That’s valuable, but it doesn’t solve the disconnect. It deepens the divide between the informed minority and the angry majority who never showed up.

Where the Fight Actually Is

If you want to reach the people who are driving the disconnect, you have to go where they are. And right now, for most small towns, that is Facebook.

Community Facebook groups are where small-town civic life happens, both good and bad. They’re where people find out the water is getting shut off for maintenance. They’re where someone posts a photo of a pothole and it gets 200 reactions. They’re where rumors about city council decisions spread faster than any official communication ever could.

They are, for better and worse, the public square of the modern small town.

Most municipal governments treat Facebook as an announcement channel. They post meeting agendas, utility outage notices, and event flyers. They do not post budget explainers. They do not post plain-language breakdowns of where the money comes from and where it goes. They do not show up in the comments when misinformation spreads, because showing up in the comments feels undignified or risky.

That is a mistake.

A consistent series of plain-language posts — “here’s what your water bill actually pays for,” “here’s what a one-cent sales tax generates in a town our size,” “here’s why we haven’t fixed that road yet and what it would actually cost” — posted regularly, not defensively but transparently — could do more to close the civic knowledge gap than any citizen academy. It meets people where they are. It puts real information into the space where misinformation currently fills the vacuum.

Yes, Facebook posts also get yelled at. That is manageable. A hostile comment on a transparent budget post is public discourse. Someone showing up at the mayor’s house is a safety crisis.

The goal isn’t to eliminate conflict; it’s to move the conflict from personal to policy. You can respond to a comment. You cannot respond to someone standing in your driveway.

The Messenger Problem

There’s a real question about who should be doing this communication.

A mayor posting municipal budget explainers looks defensive. A city clerk posting them looks bureaucratic. The people who most need to be reached are often the ones most primed to dismiss anything that looks like it’s coming from city hall, because they’ve already decided city hall is the enemy.

This is where chambers of commerce, economic development organizations, and regional development professionals could play a genuinely useful role — as translators.

Not advocates for the city government, but neutral interpreters of how municipal finance works. A chamber posting “did you know your city doesn’t receive property tax revenue? Here’s what that means for your roads” is a different message than the city posting the same thing.

Same information. Different credibility.

State agencies, regional councils of government, and economic development districts are also positioned to provide this kind of support. A small town with a part-time clerk and a mayor who coaches Little League does not have the capacity to run a sustained public financial literacy campaign. But a regional entity that serves fifteen towns could develop the content once and help all fifteen of them deploy it.

Take It To The People Who Will Listen First

For communities that want to go further than social media posts, the instinct is usually to call a town hall. Resist that instinct.

A general community meeting is an invitation for the angriest voices in the room to set the tone. The people who show up to an open meeting about the budget are not always the people you want driving the conversation.

Sometimes they are. Often they’re not.

A more honest first step is to take the numbers to the groups that are already organized around caring about their community. The Rotary Club. The chamber of commerce. The Main Street board. If there’s a Strong Towns local conversation in your area — a network of residents who gather specifically to talk about fiscal sustainability and community investment — that’s an especially natural fit.

Yes, these are still the already-engaged. But there’s a difference between asking them to come to you for six Tuesday evenings to learn how the city works and going to where they already are to show the numbers.

Bring the one-page summary. Walk them through it. Ask for their input on priorities and tradeoffs. And then ask them to do something specific: carry the message back out.

Not as advocates for the city, but as neighbors who understand the numbers and can explain them to other neighbors in ways that city hall can’t. The chamber member who tells her peer at the coffee shop why the road hasn’t been fixed is a more credible messenger than anything the city posts on Facebook.

That’s not a workaround. That’s just how civic information actually travels in small towns. You’re not preaching to the choir — you’re asking them to sing to someone else.

This won’t reach everyone. The people screaming in the Facebook comments at 11pm are probably not in the Rotary Club. But Rotary isn’t the audience — it’s the starting point.

It Doesn’t Have to Work Perfectly

The mayor who stopped running her morning route just wanted to serve her town.

None of this is guaranteed to make it easier. Some budget explainer posts will get forty angry comments and zero changed minds. The civic knowledge gap took decades to open. It won’t close in a budget cycle. But the current alternative — saying nothing, posting the agenda, hoping the Facebook comments burn themselves out — isn’t working either.

So try. Post the budget explainer. Show up at the Rotary meeting. Ask the chamber to carry the message. Do it imperfectly, because perfect isn’t on the table.

The goal isn’t to make everyone reasonable. It’s to move the conversation away from the mayor’s driveway — away from the personal, away from the 11pm Facebook comment, toward something that resembles an actual exchange about an actual constraint.

In a small town, that’s not a small thing.

These posts are brought to you by Econ Dev Ops, providing administrative support for Chambers of Commerce and economic development organizations. It’s hard to champion your community when the back office is on fire. Learn more at econdevops.com or reach us at hello@econdevops.com.

The consultants, the bond attorneys, the TIF experts, the economic development literature — most of it has been built around the other 25%. The towns big enough to have a full-time finance director, a bond counsel on retainer, and a staff member whose actual job is grant writing.

The other three-quarters are largely solving their own problems with very little tailored guidance, whatever revenue tools their state gives them access to, and whatever institutional knowledge hasn’t retired or moved away yet.

In Oklahoma, they’re doing it with one hand tied behind their back.

Oklahoma: A Case Study in Sales Tax Dependency

Most states give municipalities two primary tax tools: property tax and sales tax. Oklahoma municipalities rely almost entirely on sales tax. While the state does have a property tax system, it flows primarily to counties and school districts — city general funds see very little of it.

The result is a structural dependency that is, by the numbers, the most extreme in the country. Oklahoma is first in the nation in local sales tax reliance, with sales taxes accounting for 66% of total local tax revenue. For context, the national average is 13.5%.

This matters because sales taxes are volatile. They track retail activity, which tracks the economy, which tracks things no small town controls. When retail is up, revenues are up. When a major employer closes or a Dollar General becomes the anchor of your commercial district, revenues reflect that too.

Property taxes, by contrast, are among the most stable revenue sources available to local government — values grow at relatively constant rates even during economic downturns.

And the state just made it worse. The Oklahoma legislature recently capped property assessment increases at 1.5% per year, down from 3%. The intent — protecting senior citizens on fixed incomes from being taxed out of their paid-off homes — is sympathetic. The mechanism is a blunt instrument.

During periods of high inflation, that cap becomes a vise, squeezing county and school revenues even as costs rise. New York State has a similar cap, and local officials there have described it as sometimes so restrictive that overriding it is the only way to keep collecting garbage and keep the streetlights on.

Meanwhile, Oklahoma’s Freedom Caucus has floated eliminating property taxes entirely. Oklahoma currently ranks 50th in the country in overall education quality. The schools that serve our rural communities run primarily on property tax revenue. It is not clear what problem is being solved by removing the floor from beneath them.

But this piece isn’t primarily about Oklahoma, and it’s not primarily about politics. It’s about what municipalities — especially small ones — can actually do to fund the services their residents expect, in a national environment where anti-tax sentiment is high, state legislatures are restricting local revenue authority, and the federal government is pulling back from the support programs small communities have historically depended on.

Most small towns are leaving tools on the table. Here’s a look at what’s available, who it works for, and where the limits are.

The Practical Toolkit: What Works, for Whom, and What Doesn’t

What follows is not an exhaustive list of every revenue mechanism available to municipalities. It is a practitioner-honest assessment of the tools that are actually accessible to small towns, with real examples of communities that have used them.

The MAPS Model: Oklahoma’s Most Exportable Innovation

In December 1993, Oklahoma City voters approved a temporary one-cent sales tax dedicated to a defined list of capital projects. The money didn’t go to the general fund. It went into a separate trust. A citizen oversight committee — not the city council — supervised the spending.

The projects were designed to appeal across demographic groups: something for everyone, geographically distributed to create synergy. The tax had a start date and an end date.

Thirty-two years later, that original vote has driven more than $5 billion in public and private investment in Oklahoma City. Voters have approved the model three more times. MAPS for Kids renovated 70 public school buildings. MAPS 3 built Scissortail Park. MAPS 4 is projected to raise $1.07 billion through 2028.

The MAPS model didn’t invent anything. A dedicated temporary sales tax is a tool every municipality already has. What MAPS added was structure and accountability: citizen oversight, locked funds, defined projects, a sunset. Those features are what got it through a ballot box in a city that, in 1993, was genuinely struggling.

Elk City, a western Oklahoma community of about 12,000, replicated the model at small-town scale. Their Community Action Plan Projects program — C.A.P.P.S. — put a one-cent sales tax before voters in 2019 for a defined list of quality-of-life projects, including synthetic turf on 17 baseball and softball fields, making Elk City the only city in Oklahoma with that many high-quality fields. The measure passed 2-to-1. Over twenty years, it will generate $70 million in debt-free capital investment.

The structural features that made it work are the same ones that made MAPS work: citizen committee, dedicated trust, specific projects, no new bureaucracy.

Here is the honest limitation: this model scales to your retail base. Elk City draws from a trade area of nearly 80,000 shoppers. A one-cent sales tax on that volume generates real money. A one-cent sales tax on a gas station and a Dollar General is still a one-cent sales tax — it’s just doing a lot less work.

For truly small towns, this tool can fund a park shelter or a sidewalk project. It will not fund a community center. The mechanism is sound; the math is constrained by reality.

The takeaway is not that small towns shouldn’t try this. It’s that they should right-size their project list to their actual revenue capacity, set honest expectations with residents, and use the political infrastructure of the model — the citizen committee, the dedicated fund, the defined projects — to build the institutional trust that makes the next ask easier.

Tax Increment Financing: Not Just for Cities

The conventional wisdom is that Tax Increment Financing is a tool for cities with active real estate markets, a functioning property tax base, legal staff, and bond counsel. The conventional wisdom is wrong, or at least incomplete.

Dieterich, Illinois has a population of roughly 900. In the late 1990s, community leaders were considering closing the town’s school and merging it into another district. Instead, they created a residential TIF district — a tool most people associate with Chicago downtown development — to reduce financial barriers for housing.

Here’s how it works: when a TIF district is established, the existing assessed value of the land is frozen. As new homes are built and assessed, all property tax revenue generated above that frozen base flows into the TIF fund rather than to other taxing bodies.

Dieterich used that accumulating increment to subsidize lot prices dramatically — selling half-acre lots to contractors for $3,500 and to residents for $5,000, far below what it cost to develop them. That subsidy made it financially viable for builders to come in.

Importantly, TIF funds under Illinois law can also cover the cost of roads, water lines, sewer connections, and other infrastructure needed to make lots buildable in the first place, which is often the biggest barrier to residential development in small towns.

Ten homes were built in the first year. Thirty within four years. Ninety-three within the first fifteen years. The TIF increment generated by each new home helped fund the next round of subsidized lots, creating a self-reinforcing cycle of growth.

In the decade following their last census, Dieterich’s population grew by over 44% — from 617 residents to 890 — adding 142 children to the school district that had once been on the verge of closure.

A town of 617 people used a Chicago-scale financing tool to save its school. The tool didn’t care about the population.

The genuine barriers to TIF for small towns are capacity, not eligibility. Setting up a district requires legal counsel, a project plan, public hearings, and ongoing administration. For a town with a part-time clerk and no economic development staff, that’s a real obstacle.

The answer is regional cooperation. Take advantage of economic development districts, councils of government, or state agencies to access the expertise without hiring it full-time.

General Obligation Bonds: The Tool Most Small Towns Never Try

Oklahoma has 566 municipalities. As of recent data, only 37 have active GO bonds.

Before we talk about why that number is low, it’s worth being clear about what a GO bond actually is: a debt instrument. When a municipality issues a general obligation bond, it is borrowing money that must be paid back, with interest, backed by the full faith and credit of the issuing government, meaning its taxing authority. If revenues fall short, the municipality is still on the hook.

Defaults are rare but not impossible, and for a small town already operating on thin margins, taking on long-term debt is a decision that deserves serious scrutiny. Some communities have made a deliberate philosophical choice to avoid debt financing entirely. They build only what they can pay for, when they can pay for it, without obligating future residents to service debt on decisions made today. That approach has real constraints, but it also has real integrity.

GO bonds are nonetheless a legitimate tool for municipalities with the financial health to use them responsibly. The gap between 37 active bonds and 566 municipalities is not entirely explained by towns that tried and failed. A significant portion of it is towns that never tried — that assumed they couldn’t pass a bond election, couldn’t afford the process, or didn’t know where to start.

The research on what makes bond elections succeed looks a lot like the research on what makes dedicated sales tax elections succeed: specificity, visibility, and a direct connection between the ask and something residents can see and touch.

Revenue bonds are a related but distinct option worth understanding separately. Where a GO bond is backed by a government’s general taxing authority, a revenue bond is backed only by income generated by the specific project being financed — water bills paying off a water system bond, for example, or utility fees paying off infrastructure improvements.

Because the repayment comes from the project itself rather than the general tax base, revenue bonds typically don’t require voter approval. They carry slightly more risk than GO bonds from a lender’s perspective. If the project doesn’t generate the projected revenue, the municipality has a problem, but for specific infrastructure purposes with predictable revenue streams, they’re a lower-barrier entry point to capital financing that many small towns overlook entirely.

Municipal Real Estate as a Revenue Stream

When a municipality owns property and leases it to a business, it’s not just doing economic development — it’s generating recurring revenue. That distinction matters, and it applies to both of the models most towns consider: industrial parks and existing buildings.

Industrial parks with municipal ownership are a legitimate revenue model. When a town develops a park, retains ownership of the land, and leases it to manufacturers or distributors, that lease income can fund operations, service debt, or build reserves over time.

The problem isn’t the ownership structure; it’s getting the industrial park built. With site surveys, utility extensions, infrastructure installation, rail access, environmental review, the upfront development cost is enormous, and the payoff horizon requires a business to actually come.

For a small town dependent on sales tax and running lean, that’s a significant gamble on a long timeline — and the political cost can be brutal. Residents and even city councilors who see an empty industrial park for years after the investment was made often don’t connect the infrastructure to the eventual payoff. It gets tagged as a waste, a boondoggle, the road to nowhere.

That doesn’t mean it never develops into a functioning, revenue-generating park — sometimes it just takes fifteen or twenty years. But in the meantime, you’ve got an angry constituency and elected officials who inherited someone else’s unpopular decision, and that political reality shapes what the next council is willing to try.

The building-first approach gets to the same destination — municipally owned, lease-generating real estate — at a fraction of the upfront cost. A vacant building in the middle of town already has water, sewer, gas, and electricity. It already has address infrastructure and parking. It often has historic character that new construction can’t replicate.

The renovation cost is usually a fraction of greenfield development, and the risk profile is fundamentally different: you’re improving something that exists, not betting on something that might come. A town that acquires a vacant building, whether through purchase, donation, or cheaply at a tax resale, and renovates it for a tenant is on the same path as the industrial park model, just with a much lower barrier to entry and a faster path to lease revenue.

In Bellefontaine, Ohio, a local entrepreneur named Jason Duff launched a company called Small Nation to invest in the city's vacant historic building stock. Over fifteen years, the effort renovated 56 buildings in downtown Bellefontaine, helped launch about 60 new businesses, and generated more than $30 million in private investment in a city where more than 70% of the business district had once sat vacant.

The municipality wasn’t the developer in that case, but nothing prevents a town from playing that role directly, especially when the building is already on the tax rolls as a liability and can be acquired for little or nothing.

Nebraska’s Local Option Municipal Development Act allows incorporated cities to collect and appropriate local tax dollars for economic development, including infrastructure improvement grants for business owners who invest in building upgrades. The principle is transferable even where the specific statute isn’t: municipalities that think of their existing building stock as a revenue-generating asset are working with more than they realize.

Cell Tower Leases: The Asset on Every Water Tower

This one requires almost no political lift and is genuinely underused. Municipalities that own water towers, rooftops on public buildings, or open public land sit on assets that wireless carriers actively want as 5G networks expand and antenna density requirements increase.

A municipality leasing land or structure space to a wireless carrier typically receives between $12,000 and $24,000 per year, depending on location and negotiation. For a town of 600 people running on a shoestring general fund, that is a meaningful line item — and it requires no new tax, no voter approval, and no ongoing operational burden.

The barrier is awareness. Most small-town officials don’t know this market exists or that their water tower qualifies. Regional development specialists, state municipal leagues, and councils of government are natural channels for getting this information to the towns that need it.

Franchise Fees and Utility Revenue: The Money Already Coming In

Franchise fees — charges assessed on utilities, cable companies, trash collectors, and pipeline operators for use of public right-of-way — are legal in most states and often already exist in some form. The problem is that many small towns negotiated these agreements years or decades ago and haven’t revisited them.

Regular review and renegotiation of franchise fee structures is basic revenue hygiene that many municipalities skip.

Utility revenues are already the largest single source of income for many small municipalities across the country — water, sewer, and electric fees collectively dwarf sales tax in communities that lack a strong retail base. The structural challenge is universal: aging infrastructure requires more revenue to maintain at the same time that flat or declining populations reduce the customer base.

Regionalization of utility systems — shared infrastructure across multiple small towns — is one solution that reduces per-customer costs while maintaining service levels. It’s an approach that’s been used effectively in the rural Midwest and Southeast but remains underused in many states where small towns are still trying to go it alone on systems they can no longer afford to maintain independently.

The Honest Conclusion

The tools exist. Not all of them work at every scale, and the article that tells a town of 400 people that they can replicate MAPS is not doing them any favors. But the gap between what small municipalities are using and what’s available to them is real, and it’s largely a gap of awareness and political will rather than eligibility.

The anti-tax environment isn’t going away. Federal support is tightening. State legislatures are restricting local revenue authority in ways that will take years to fully manifest in service cuts and deferred maintenance.

The towns that figure out how to layer these tools — a dedicated sales tax for capital, a TIF district for development corridors, franchise fee revenue for operations, a cell tower lease for a small unrestricted fund — will be in a different position than the towns waiting for a grant to solve a structural problem.

None of this is easy. Most of it requires more capacity than many small towns have on staff. That’s an argument for regional cooperation, for state technical assistance programs doing more outreach, and for economic development professionals treating municipal finance as part of the job description rather than someone else’s department.

The tools are there. Most of them don’t require new legislation, a large staff, or a perfect political environment. They require someone in the room who knows they exist and has the will to try.

The Honest Economic Developer is a publication of EconDevOps. We connect chambers of commerce and economic development organizations with pre-vetted remote operations specialists. Learn more at econdevops.com.

These are terms of art in this profession. Everyone in the room has used them. Everyone in the room has meant them.

We use them because the frustration is real. We use them in front of each other because we all know exactly what we are talking about.

But here is what I have been thinking about lately: the label is doing damage, and not just to the people we are labeling.

When we call someone a CAVE person, we have stopped listening. We have decided that their position is irrational, and we have moved on. And sometimes, honestly, their position is irrational. But sometimes it is not. And when we dismiss the whole category, we lose the information that is actually useful to us.

Citizens Against Virtually Everything

CAVE: Citizens Against Virtually Everything. The acronym is clever and mean in equal measure. It implies that the opposition is reflexive, undiscriminating, and essentially a character flaw. If you are against virtually everything, you are not a person with a perspective. You are a problem to be managed.

I spent a weekend recently in a small town of about 3,000 people. It sits in the path of growth radiating out from a nearby city. We were not there for a public meeting. We went into the crowd at a community event and just asked people what they wanted to see for their town. No agenda, no microphone, no sign-in sheet. Just conversations.

About half the people we talked to said some version of the same thing: I don’t want anything to change.

That finding matters more because of how we got it. These were not people who showed up angry to fight something. They were people going about their day who we happened to ask. There was no selection effect pushing the sample toward opposition. It was just a genuine cross-section of residents telling us something real about how they feel about this place.

These were not all old-timers shaking their fists.

There were young people in those conversations. There were people with kids. They looked at what this town was — a couple of restaurants, a convenience store passing as a grocery store, one shop, and not much else — and they said: this is what I want. I like it the way it is.

Now, the other half wanted an actual grocery store. They wanted more things for their kids to do. They were tired of driving forty-five minutes for basic errands. Their position is easy to understand and easy to get behind.

But I keep coming back to the first half. Because I have been in enough rooms to know that we write those people off too fast.

Two kinds of no

When someone says they don’t want anything to change, the easiest interpretation is that they are being selfish, or scared, or short-sighted. That interpretation is occasionally correct. But there are at least two other things going on, and they are worth separating out.

The first is the long-timer.

This is someone who has spent decades in a place, watched it be what it is, and built their identity around that. The hardware store on the corner, the diner where everyone knows your order, the fact that you can walk to the post office and run into four people you know.

This is not nostalgia in the pejorative sense. This is a genuine, functioning community that works for the people in it. When a long-timer says they don’t want it to change, they are not being irrational. They are saying: I have something good here, and I am afraid of losing it.

The second is the escapee.

This is someone who came to this town precisely because it was not somewhere else. They watched growth hollow out a place they loved, or they got priced out, or they just wanted something smaller and quieter and slower. They found this town and thought: this is it. And now the thing they were running from has caught up with them.

That is not obstruction. That is grief.

Neither of these people is against progress in some abstract philosophical sense. They are against losing something specific that they value. That is a coherent position. It deserves a coherent response.

Valid and unreasonable at the same time

Here is the thing I am not going to pretend otherwise about: the people who don’t want anything to change are going to be disappointed.

The growth is coming. The city down the road is expanding. The highway interchange is going in. The people who found this small town because it was quiet and cheap and slow are watching the calculus shift in real time.

Wanting no change is a valid feeling. It is not a viable plan.

The question practitioners are actually answering is not whether change happens. That is already settled. The question is what kind of change, at what pace, shaped by whom. And here is where the people who don’t want anything to change actually become important allies, if you let them.

Because the person who knows exactly what they do not want to lose is giving you the most important information you have.

They are telling you what this place actually is. What makes it worth showing up to a community meeting at 7 p.m. on a Tuesday. What is at risk if you get this wrong.

The CAVE label turns that information into noise. It says: this person is an obstacle. And once someone is an obstacle, you stop trying to understand what they know.

What we lose when we dismiss them

The most dangerous kind of community engagement is the kind that only hears from one side.

If your public meeting fills up with people who are angry about a plan, you walk away thinking the whole town is against it. If you only seek out people who support what you are trying to do, you miss the valid concerns and the contradictory but useful perspectives that would actually make the plan better. Either way, you are making decisions based on a distorted picture of what the community thinks and that is how plans fail.

The person who shows up to fight the plan knows things. They know which neighbors did not come to the meeting and why. They know the history of the last three times someone tried to change something here. They know what was promised and what was not delivered. They have been paying attention, often longer than you have been in the room.

When you label that person a CAVE person and move on, you have made your plan more fragile, not less. You have created an opponent with detailed institutional knowledge and nothing to lose.

There is also a fairness issue that we do not talk about enough.

Some of the people who say they don’t want change moved to this town precisely because it was not somewhere else. They made a choice based on what a place was. It is not unreasonable for them to feel that something was changed on them without their consent. That does not give them a veto. But it does mean they are owed a real conversation, not a label.

A more useful posture

None of this is an argument for letting resistant residents hold a community hostage. A small, loud minority should not be able to block things that serve the broader community. That is a real problem and it deserves real pushback.

Sometimes you will do everything right — you will listen, you will acknowledge the loss, you will ask the right questions — and it will not matter. Some residents are not looking for a conversation. They are looking for a veto, and no amount of good-faith engagement will change that.

When that happens, you work around them. You document that you tried, you make the case to the broader community, and you move forward. That is also part of the job. But it is the last resort, not the first response — and most practitioners get there too quickly because the earlier steps are harder and slower.

But there is a lot of space between “this person gets a veto” and “this person is a CAVE person.” Most of the productive work happens in that space. Here is what that work can look like in practice.

• Ask what they are protecting, not just what they are against.

“I don’t want anything to change” is the headline. The story underneath it is specific: the traffic on Main Street, the feel of the downtown on a Saturday morning, the fact that their grandkids can still ride their bikes to the park. That specificity is useful. It is the beginning of a conversation about what growth that preserves those things might actually look like.

• Try the grandchildren question.

One of the most genuinely disarming questions you can ask someone who wants nothing to change is this: do you want your children or grandchildren to be able to live here?

For a lot of resistant residents, the honest answer is yes and that answer quietly undermines the “no change” position. Because if the town stays exactly as it is, with no grocery store, no jobs worth staying for, no housing a young family can afford, the children or grandchildren leave.

The thing they are trying to protect cannot survive in amber. This is not a rhetorical trick. It is a genuine reframe, and it works because it is true.

• Acknowledge the loss honestly.

If the growth coming to this town means it will not be what it was, say so. People who feel like they are being managed or deceived become adversaries. People who feel like someone has looked them in the eye and said “yes, things are going to change, and that is a real loss” sometimes become complicated allies.

• Stop depending on public meetings to get community input.

Public meetings self-select for opposition. The people who show up are the ones angry enough to come out on a Tuesday night and say so.

The people who support the plan stay home because they don’t feel the urgency. They’re fine with what’s happening.

The people who have no strong opinion either way also stay home, because nobody designed a meeting for them.

So the room ends up looking like the whole town is against it, when really you’re just seeing the fraction motivated by opposition.

If you want to know what a community actually thinks, you have to go where people already are and ask them — at the farmers market, at the school pickup line, at the community event where half the crowd will tell you they don’t want anything to change. That is a different kind of effort, and it produces a much more accurate picture.

• Give people something to protect, not just something to approve.

The resident who only ever gets asked to vote yes or no on a plan that someone else wrote is going to vote no. The resident who helped define what matters most in this place has something at stake in the outcome. That is a different conversation, and it tends to produce different people.

The obligation runs both ways

Change is coming to that small town. That is not a question. The question is whether the people who love it — who know it in the way that only comes from years of living somewhere — get any meaningful say in what it becomes.

When we label someone a CAVE person and move on, we are not just being rude. We are making a decision about whose knowledge counts. We are saying that the person who has watched this town for thirty years has less to contribute than the plan on the table. That is almost never true.

The practitioner’s job is not to overcome resistance. It is to understand what the resistance is protecting, take that seriously, and then help a community figure out how to hold onto what matters while accepting what cannot be stopped.

That is harder than calling someone a CAVE person. It is also the actual job.

These posts are brought to you by Econ Dev Ops, providing administrative support for Chambers of Commerce and economic development organizations. It’s hard to champion your community when the back office is on fire.

The room is loud. Name tags, handshakes, the ambient hum of people who seem genuinely energized by being here. Someone hands me a drink ticket and gestures toward a cluster of people I should probably meet. I smile, I move toward them, I do the thing.

And somewhere underneath all of it, a quiet part of me is already calculating how long until I can leave.

I am an economic developer. I have been for a few years: as a chamber director, as an ED district director, now covering eleven counties across north-central Oklahoma. I believe in this work. I am good at this work. And events like the one I just described are, in theory, the lifeblood of it.

They are also, if I’m being honest, quietly exhausting.

This isn’t a complaint about the work. It’s not even a complaint about the events, exactly. It’s an admission that I am an introvert in a profession that wasn’t built with me in mind, but fits someone else like a glove.

What “Extrovert’s Game” Actually Means

Let’s be precise about what introversion actually is, because the word gets misused constantly. Introversion isn’t shyness. It isn’t social anxiety. It isn’t a dislike of people.

It’s about energy. Extroverts are energized by social interaction, and introverts are drained by it. That’s it. An introvert can be warm, funny, engaging, and genuinely good with people, and still need two hours alone afterward to feel like a human being again.

With that out of the way: economic development is, structurally, an extrovert’s game.

The job asks you to be in rooms constantly. Ribbon cuttings, chamber luncheons, city council meetings, site visits, regional summits, national conferences. It asks you to network not as an occasional task but as a core professional function. It asks you to be visibly enthusiastic about your community, your projects, and your partners in public, repeatedly, on demand.

Relationships are not a side effect of the work. They are the work.

The culture of the profession reflects this. ED attracts and rewards people who light up in a room, who remember everyone’s name, who can work a conference reception like it’s effortless, because for them, it is. The informal criteria for success in this field — presence, likability, visibility — maps almost perfectly onto extroversion.

None of that is a criticism. Economic development is fundamentally about trust, and trust is built through contact. The extrovert’s natural mode is contact. The fit is logical.

It just doesn’t describe everyone doing this work.

The Introvert’s Quiet Advantages

Here’s what often gets overlooked: introversion comes with a set of capabilities that economic development actually needs.

• Deep listening. Not the kind where you’re waiting for your turn to talk, or mentally drafting your follow-up while someone is still mid-sentence, but the kind where you catch what someone isn’t quite saying, where you notice the hesitation before the answer. In a field where a business owner is trying to tell you why they’re struggling, or a community leader is dancing around a politically sensitive problem, that skill matters.

• Comfort with complexity. Introverts tend to stay in the weeds of a difficult problem longer before reaching for a simple answer. In a field full of projects that don’t fit neatly into incentive programs, communities whose needs don’t match available funding, and stakeholders who want incompatible things, that patience is an asset.

• Deep relationship building. While an extrovert’s wide network is genuinely valuable, there’s something distinct about the relationships introverts tend to build. The mayor who actually calls you when something goes sideways. The business owner who tells you what’s really going on because they trust you. That kind of trust takes time and real conversation to develop, and introverts tend to be good at both.

• Observation. In a room full of people talking, the introvert is often the one watching, noticing who’s uncomfortable, who’s aligned, and where the actual tension is sitting beneath the surface. In the politically layered environments that ED professionals navigate constantly, that peripheral awareness is more useful than it looks.

• Written communication. Grant applications, strategic plans, reports, newsletters, proposals: a significant portion of ED work lives on the page, and introverts often bring more care and precision to that work than they get credit for.

• Follow-through. The introvert who had a real conversation with someone at a conference is more likely to follow up meaningfully than someone who met forty people that day. Fewer connections, tended more carefully, which over time builds a different kind of professional reputation than visibility alone can produce.

These aren’t traits exclusive to introverts, and they’re not the only things that matter in this work. But they are the quiet strengths that tend to get overlooked in a profession that rewards the loudest person in the room.

Where the Work Gets Hard

Here’s the honest tension: breadth matters in this profession, and maybe more than introverts like to admit.

A significant part of economic development is connecting people to resources, and the more people you know, the more connections you can make. The extrovert who knows five hundred people, even superficially, can still make an introduction that changes someone’s trajectory.

The introvert’s deeper relationships are genuinely valuable, but they exist alongside a real challenge. Building that breadth of network doesn’t come naturally, and the primary tool the profession offers for doing it is the conference, which is about as introvert-unfriendly as it gets.

Large crowds, unstructured social time, the implicit expectation that you’ll be on for hours at a stretch. There’s no quiet corner built into the agenda. Recovery isn’t part of the program.

Then there’s the visibility pressure that comes with the job itself. Economic development is inherently political in the lowercase sense. You are always, to some degree, managing relationships with elected officials, board members, investors, and community stakeholders who need to feel connected to you and confident in you.

That requires a kind of consistent public presence that doesn’t come naturally when you’d rather be doing the work than being seen doing the work.

There’s also a subtler problem: introversion can be misread. In a field that prizes warmth, enthusiasm, and visible engagement, someone who is quieter, more measured, or who doesn’t naturally fill silences can come across as aloof, disinterested, or lacking passion for the community they serve.

That misreading has professional consequences. Relationships get built on perception as much as reality, and the introvert’s natural register doesn’t always project what they actually feel.

None of this is insurmountable. But it’s real, and pretending otherwise doesn’t help anyone who is quietly navigating it.

How the Introvert Plays It

So how do you play a game that wasn’t designed for you?

You don’t try to out-extrovert the extroverts. Trying to work a room the way someone who is genuinely energized by it does is not a strategy. It’s a performance that costs more than it returns. The goal isn’t to become someone else. It’s to get the same outcomes through different means.

For network breadth, that means being intentional in ways that extroverts don’t have to be. An extrovert can walk into a reception and come out with ten new relationships without a plan. An introvert needs the plan. Who is going to be there? Who specifically do I want to talk to? What’s a natural entry point for that conversation?

Two or three real conversations at a conference are worth more than twenty-five card exchanges, but you have to engineer them deliberately rather than hoping they happen.

Written communication becomes a networking tool. The follow-up email after a meeting, the thoughtful response to someone’s LinkedIn post, the newsletter that keeps you visible to people you don’t see in person regularly: these are ways of maintaining and expanding a network that don’t require being in a room. For an introvert, they’re not a supplement to relationship-building. They’re a primary channel.

Energy management isn’t optional. It’s operational. Knowing how much a full conference day costs you, and building recovery into the schedule rather than hoping you’ll be fine, is the difference between showing up well and showing up depleted.

That might mean a solo lunch instead of a group one. It might mean slipping away to your hotel room for fifteen minutes between sessions just to decompress in silence, or sitting in your car if you don’t have a room nearby. It might mean leaving the evening reception early without apologizing for it, or blocking the morning after a big event so you’re not walking into another draining situation on empty.

And sometimes it means performing extroversion strategically, being deliberately on for a specific room or moment, and not feeling like a fraud for doing it. Knowing you’re going to be tired afterward isn’t inauthenticity. It’s just self-awareness.

A Question for the Profession

Here’s the question I keep coming back to: what kind of person does economic development select for, and is that the only kind that works?

The profession’s informal criteria: presence, likability, visibility, the ability to light up a room. They map almost perfectly onto extroversion. That’s not a conspiracy. It makes intuitive sense in a field built on relationships and trust. But intuitive sense and actual evidence are different things, and I’m not sure the profession has ever seriously asked whether its preference for a certain kind of personality is producing better outcomes, or just more comfortable ones.

Conferences are a small but telling example. The standard ED conference format has barely changed in decades: general sessions, breakout panels, and long unstructured networking blocks that are, without exception, built for extroverts. There is nothing in that architecture that accounts for the fact that some of the most thoughtful people in the room are quietly running out of gas by noon.

A few structured small-group conversations, some intentional pairing of attendees around shared challenges, a little white space built into the agenda: none of that is radical. It would just require acknowledging that not everyone in the room experiences it the same way.

The point isn’t that economic development is broken, or that the profession is actively choosing one personality type over another. It’s that the job looks, from the outside, like an extrovert’s job, and so a lot of introverts who might be genuinely good at it never consider it, or talk themselves out of it before they start.

And those who do find themselves in it sometimes spend years feeling like they’re doing it wrong, because they’re not doing it the way the loudest person in the room does it.

You’re not doing it wrong. The skill set is real. The path looks different — fewer rooms worked, more relationships tended, more energy managed deliberately. But the destination is the same.

If you love helping people and you care about the places where you work, that’s the job. The rest is just figuring out your version of how to do it.

The Honest Economic Developer is a publication of EconDevOps. We connect chambers of commerce and economic development organizations with pre-vetted remote operations specialists. Learn more at econdevops.com.

It shows up in conference presentations, strategic plans, and consultant reports. It is, technically, correct. And it has become almost completely meaningless.

Not because storytelling doesn’t matter. It does, more than most communities realize. But somewhere along the way, telling your story got reduced to a deliverable. Usually a video. Sometimes a pretty one. And then the conversation moves on.

That’s not storytelling. That’s a brochure with a soundtrack.

What Communities Usually Do

Here’s the typical sequence. A community decides it needs better marketing. Someone in the room says they need to tell their story better. Everyone nods. A production company gets hired. Drone footage is captured. Locals say nice things on camera about why they love living there. The video gets posted to YouTube and the economic development website. Somebody shares it on Facebook.

And that’s the end of it.

The video might even be genuinely good. That’s almost beside the point.

A single piece of content, however well-made, is a snapshot. Your town isn’t a snapshot. It’s a place where things are happening every single day — businesses opening and closing, kids growing up, old-timers passing away, new families figuring out where they belong, hard decisions getting made at city council meetings, somebody’s barn burning down and half the county showing up to help.

One video cannot hold all of that. It was never supposed to. The problem is when communities treat it like it can, check the storytelling box, and move on.

What Storytelling Actually Is

Community storytelling isn’t a campaign. It isn’t a tagline. It isn’t a video, a logo refresh, or a new slogan on the welcome sign.

It’s the ongoing, cumulative, honest account of who your community is. Your people. Your buildings. Your parks, your trails, your main street, your back roads, the diner that’s been there since 1962. The things you’re proud of and the things that are hard. The funny stories that get told at every reunion and the losses that changed things.

A story that only shows the good days isn’t a story. It’s marketing material.

Your residents know the difference. So do outsiders. They can feel the inauthenticity even when they can’t name it. The communities that tell honest stories, including the complicated ones, tend to have more credibility than the ones that only run the highlight reel.

And here’s the part that matters most: your town is happening every day. The storytelling should be too.

Why It Matters

Yes, ongoing community storytelling supports tourism. It helps with talent attraction and business recruitment. It gives economic developers something to share that isn’t a fact sheet. Those are all real benefits.

But the more important audience isn’t outside your community. It’s inside it.

Storytelling is how a community understands itself. The stories a town tells about where it came from, what it survived, what it values, and who its people are shape what residents believe is possible.

A community that sees itself as resilient makes different decisions than one that sees itself as forgotten. A town that tells stories about neighbors showing up for each other builds a different culture than one that doesn’t tell stories at all.

Stories are also part of how change happens in communities. Data tells you what’s going on. A story makes someone care enough to act on it.

A specific person, a specific moment, a specific place can motivate action in ways that a spreadsheet or a strategic plan rarely does. Economic developers know this intuitively. Most don’t treat it as the core skill it actually is.

And storytelling is continuity. It’s how a community passes down what it learned, what it built, what it lost, and what it’s still trying to figure out. That’s not a marketing function. That’s closer to culture.

How Do You Find Your Story?

The good news is your story is right there in front of you.

It lives in your people — the ones who have been here for three generations and the ones who moved in last year and can already tell you which gas station has the best breakfast burritos.

It lives in your buildings, both the ones still standing and the ones that aren’t.

It lives in your parks, your courthouse square, the road that floods every spring, the grain elevator you can see from ten miles out.

It lives in what people do for each other without being asked. The informal networks. The workarounds. The things that happen because somebody just does them, not because there’s a committee or a budget line.

It also lives in what’s already gone.

When I lived in Pittsfield, Illinois, there was a paint and wallpaper store downtown. A husband and wife had owned it for 70 years. She kept records on every house in town — what color they’d painted it, what wallpaper pattern was in the front bedroom, what they’d used on the trim.

They sponsored ball teams. They showed up for the Chamber. They were the kind of business that everybody in town just knew, the kind you stop thinking of as a business at all and start thinking of as part of the place.

The husband died. The wife eventually moved into a nursing home. The family sold the building. And that was that.

When the store closed, people felt it. Not the kind of grief that breaks you, but the kind that settles in when a part of your community just stops being there. This couple wasn’t the heart of Pittsfield. But they were any number of its heartbeats, steady and present for so long that people took their presence for granted the way you take your own pulse for granted. Until it changes.

That’s a story. Not a cautionary tale, not a case study — just a true thing that happened in a small town, the kind of thing that happens in every small town, that makes up the texture of what a place actually is. The 70 years of that store being open is part of Pittsfield’s story whether anyone wrote it down or not.

That’s what community storytelling is for. Not engineering a narrative. Paying attention to what’s real.

Real stories aren’t found by pointing a camera at a resident and asking why they love living there. “I love the people here” is true of virtually every town in America and tells you nothing about any of them.

Better questions: What would you miss if it disappeared? What’s something your town does that you’ve never seen anywhere else? Who’s somebody here that more people should know about? What's something your town is still trying to figure out?

Those four questions will get you further in an afternoon than a production crew will get you in a week.

How Do You Tell It?

Consistently. Varied. Ongoing.

Yes, video matters. A well-made long-form video can anchor a storytelling effort and give people something to share. But short-form snapshots — a two-minute piece on the family farm that’s been in operation since statehood, a photo essay on the county fair, a written profile of the coach who’s been at the same school for thirty years — often do more cumulative work than any single production.

The format should fit the story. Some things want to be video. Some want to be photographs. Some want to be written. You don’t have to pick one.

Who tells the stories matters as much as how.

It should be someone with proximity to and genuine affection for the place, not just access to the marketing budget.

The best community storytellers are usually already paying attention: a local journalist, a passionate staff person, a resident with a good eye and a phone. Professional production help is valuable for certain things. It can’t substitute for someone who actually knows the place.

You don't have to be the one holding the camera.

Create space for it instead — a Pinterest board, a Facebook group, a standing invitation for residents to share photos, short videos, or written pieces that you can draw from and amplify. The stories are already out there. They just need somewhere to land.

Cadence matters more than polish. Consistent and imperfect beats occasional and beautiful every time. A community that shares a genuine, slightly rough story every two weeks has a richer public record of itself after a year than one that released a gorgeous video once and went quiet.

Return to subjects over time.

The family that opens a restaurant in a vacant downtown storefront is a story worth telling on day one. It’s a different story at year three when they’re still there and have hired a dozen people.

The kid who wins the science fair this year is worth a mention. Following up five years later when she’s studying engineering somewhere — that’s a story.

Let the story accumulate. That accumulation is the point.

Your Town Is Already Happening

The goal isn’t to tell your story better. It’s to tell it regularly, honestly, and in ways that reflect who you really are rather than who you want people to think you are.

People can feel the difference between a community telling its story and a community selling itself.

The one big video isn’t the story. It’s one frame, at best.

Your town has been writing new chapters every day, whether anyone is paying attention or not. The paint store in Pittsfield kept showing up for 70 years. The story was always there.

The question is whether anyone is telling it.

These posts are brought to you by Econ Dev Ops, providing administrative support for Chambers of Commerce and economic development organizations. It's hard to champion your community when the back office is on fire.

The Towns That Are Quietly Making Progress

If you search for strategic planning advice for a small town, you’ll find two things: a 74-page PDF from a state municipal league that assumes you have a planning department, and articles written by consultants who charge $15,000 to facilitate the exact process they’re describing.

Neither one was written for a town of 600 people.

But here’s the thing. There are small towns making real progress — fixing things, launching things, attracting people, holding onto the ones they have.

They’re not doing it because they hired a consultant or wrote a comprehensive plan. They’re doing it because somebody got a few people together, figured out what mattered most, and just kept showing up.

What those towns have in common isn’t a document. It’s a group.

A regular gathering of people who care about the place — business owners, school folks, city leaders, farmers, young people who haven’t left yet — meeting monthly over coffee or good food, keeping a short list of priorities, and doing the work between meetings.

Loose enough that people actually want to come. Structured enough that things actually get done.

That’s what this article is about. Not strategic planning. Not a formal process with phases and deliverables. A group of people with enough structure to finish things.

If your town already has a Friends of [your town] group, a Main Street committee, or a civic organization that actually functions, this might help you sharpen it. If you don’t have anything like it, this will help you build one from scratch.

Two organizations have thought harder than most about how small towns build momentum from the ground up: Strong Towns and SaveYour.Town. Both are worth your time. Becky McCray and Deb Brown at SaveYour.Town in particular have done serious thinking about how communities start moving with what they already have. Links to both are at the end of this article.

What follows is one practical path for towns under 1,000 people, written in plain English, with no assumption that you have staff, budget, or free time.

The Friends of Community Group — What It Is and Isn’t

Let’s get one thing out of the way. This is not a committee.

Committees have bylaws and officers and Roberts Rules of Order and someone who sends passive aggressive emails when the minutes aren’t distributed within 48 hours. Committees are where good intentions go to die slowly over a refreshment budget dispute.

This is also not a task force, not a nonprofit, not an official city advisory board, and not a new layer of local government.

It doesn’t need to be incorporated. It doesn’t need a chairman. It doesn’t need a mission statement written on a poster with a sunrise on it.

It is a regular gathering of people who give a damn about their town, meeting monthly, working from a short list of priorities, and getting things done together. The city is at the table as an invited partner — not running the show, but not left out either.

That distinction matters.

The reason the city belongs in the room isn’t procedural. It’s practical.

In a town of 600, some of the most important things a community needs to tackle, such as a failing water system, a street that needs repair, or a grant application with a deadline, can only be moved by the city. Not because the city is in charge of everything, but because the city has the legal authority, the liability, and sometimes the only employee with the relevant knowledge.

Leaving city leadership out of the group doesn’t make the group more community-driven. It just creates two separate conversations that never quite line up.

At the same time, the city doesn’t own this group’s agenda. Some priorities will be city projects where community members are supporting players. Some will be community projects where the city is a supporting player. Some will be genuinely joint efforts where both are pulling equal weight.

The downtown park is a good example of how that can work: the public works director owns getting the bathrooms functional, a community volunteer owns organizing a cleanup day and replacing the equipment. Same priority, two owners, neither one waiting on the other.

What makes this different from a city council meeting is the energy and the membership.

A council meeting is a legal proceeding with an agenda posted in advance, public comment periods, and motions that go into the minutes. This is a monthly get-together where people who care about the same town sit around a table and figure out what to do next. Those are very different things and they should stay different.

The format should reflect that.

Meet somewhere comfortable. A back room at a local restaurant, the library meeting room, somebody’s farm shop if that’s what fits. Bring food or meet somewhere that has it. Keep it to an hour or ninety minutes. Have a short agenda so it doesn’t wander, but leave room for actual conversation.

If people dread coming, they’ll stop coming. That’s not a soft concern — it’s the whole ballgame. A group that keeps showing up month after month will accomplish more than any plan ever written by people who met once and never saw each other again.

Who Belongs in the Group

The short answer is: people who will say true things and actually show up.

The longer answer is below. This is not a checklist you have to complete before you can start. It’s a picture of what a well-rounded group looks like so you know what you’re aiming for and who you might be missing.

Town government core. Your mayor or council president, two or three council members, your city clerk, or your public works person. These are the people who carry legal authority and institutional knowledge about what the town can and can’t do.

They belong in the room not to run it but to be part of it. You don’t need all of them every month. You just need city government represented consistently enough that nothing falls through the cracks between the group and the council.

Economic anchors. A main street business owner who feels the foot traffic directly. A representative from your largest local employer if one exists — a grain elevator, a manufacturer, a major farm operation.

Your local banker. A good community banker has watched businesses open and close, knows who’s struggling and who’s growing, and has a ground-level read on the local economy that doesn’t show up in any report.

Infrastructure partners. Your rural electric co-op representative knows what’s coming on the energy side and is plugged into regional conversations that don’t always make it to town hall.

Your county extension agent or your regional council of governments representative, or both, are among the most underused resources in rural America. Most people aren’t entirely sure what either one does, which is exactly why they’re underused.

Extension agents know the grant landscape, understand agriculture and community development, and are usually genuinely glad to help. Council of governments representatives work across multiple communities in your region and often know about programs, funding, and partnerships that individual towns never hear about. Call one of them first and ask what they can do for a town your size. The answer will probably surprise you.

Schools. Get your superintendent or a principal in the room. Enrollment trends tell you more about where a town is heading than almost any other single data point. Schools are often the first thing families weigh when deciding whether to stay or leave, and the school sees demographic shifts coming before most people do.

Healthcare. If your town has a hospital, clinic, or rural health center, invite their director or administrator. Healthcare access is a recruitment issue, a retention issue, and increasingly an economic development issue. If you don’t have local healthcare, that absence is worth naming in your priorities conversation.

Community connectors. Your library director if you have one. They see who’s coming through the door and what people actually need.

A faith community leader, because in small towns churches often run the social infrastructure whether anyone says so out loud or not.

And whoever coordinates services for older residents, whether that’s a senior center director or a volunteer coordinator. In many towns under 1,000, older residents make up a significant portion of the population and their needs and knowledge both deserve a seat at the table.

County level. A county commissioner keeps the collaboration door open and signals that your town isn’t trying to go it alone. The county is an underused partner for most small towns and having a commissioner in the room from the beginning makes a lot of things easier later.

Tribal nations. If there are tribal nations in your area, extend a specific personal invitation to a tribal representative. This relationship is underused in most communities where it exists.

Tribal nations often have resources, programs, and deep knowledge of the region that don’t show up anywhere else, and their perspective on the community’s past and future is worth having in the room.

Young residents. Invite one or two people between 18 and 25. Not necessarily the student council president type. Look for someone who shows up to things, asks questions, and has real opinions about whether they want to stay in this town long term.

A young person in that room is doing a live calculation about their future that nobody else is doing. That perspective is genuinely useful, and including them sends a signal to the broader community that this wasn’t just the usual suspects deciding things.

If you’re building this group from scratch, you probably won’t fill every seat on this list right away. Some towns don’t have a hospital. Some libraries are a single room staffed by volunteers on Tuesday afternoons. That’s fine. Fill what you can and don’t let the gaps stop you from starting.

If you already have a group, read back through this list and ask honestly who’s missing. A group that has been meeting for two years with the same eight people has probably stopped seeing things clearly. Fresh eyes and different perspectives are worth the awkwardness of expanding the circle.

Aim for 12 to 18 people who actually show up rather than a roster of 40 who don’t.

How to Get This Started

Don’t post on Facebook.

A general broadcast of “Hey everyone, I’m thinking about starting a community group, who’s interested?” will get a handful of likes, two heart reactions, and nobody in a chair when you show up with coffee. People who see a general post think “that’s a good idea” and then go back to scrolling.

That’s not a knock on your community. That’s just how general broadcasts work.

Start smaller. Think of one or two people you already know who care about the town and would probably say yes to a conversation. A neighbor. Someone you see at church or the feed store. The person who always shows up to city council meetings.

Invite them for coffee and float the idea informally. Not a pitch, just a conversation. “I’ve been thinking about getting a group together to work on a few things in town. Nothing formal. Would you be interested in something like that?”

This is the core of the Idea Friendly Method from SaveYour.Town. Start with who you have. Build from there. Becky McCray and Deb Brown have written extensively about why this works and it’s worth reading their take. There’s a link at the end of this article.

Here’s the practical reason it works: when you show up to invite the banker or the school superintendent or the county commissioner, it is a lot easier to say “a few of us have been talking about this and we’d love to have you involved” than it is to say “I have this idea and you’re the first person I’ve told.”

Two or three yes’s gives you social proof. Social proof makes the next conversation easier. And so on until you have a room.

Once you have your small founding group, work through the list of who to invite from the previous section together. Decide who knows whom and who should make each ask.

A personal invitation — a phone call, an email, a conversation after church — is almost always more effective than a group text or a social media post. When someone receives a specific personal ask that explains why their perspective matters, it is genuinely harder to say no than when they’ve been added to a group chat with fifteen other people.

The invite doesn’t need to be complicated. Something like this works:

Subject: Getting together to talk about [Town Name] - can you join us?

Hi [Name],

A few of us have been talking about getting a small group together to work on some priorities for [Town Name]. Nothing formal. Just a monthly meetup where people who care about this place figure out what we can actually get done together.

We’d love to have you involved because [one specific sentence about what they bring — their knowledge of the school, the business community, the county, healthcare, whatever applies].

We’re planning a first gathering on [date] at [time] at [location]. Can you make it?

One honest note: we’re asking for one evening to get started. If something comes out of the conversation that you want to take on, that’s great, but there’s no pressure to do anything beyond showing up.

[Your name]

The personalized line in the middle is worth the extra two minutes it takes to write. People show up differently when they know why they were specifically asked.

If your town already has a Friends group or a civic organization that’s lost momentum, this same approach applies. Don’t send a mass email announcing a relaunch.

Have a few personal conversations first. Find out who still cares, who has capacity, and what would make them want to show up again. Then build from there.

The First Gathering

The first meeting has one job: figure out what matters most and who is going to do something about it.

Everything else is secondary. You’re getting the right people in the same room, asking three honest questions, and leaving with a short list of priorities and names next to each one.

Make it welcoming. A back room at a local restaurant works well if you have one. The library meeting room. The farm bureau office. Somewhere comfortable that isn’t a government building if you can help it. City hall has its place but it sets a certain tone that doesn’t always help.

Have food! It doesn’t have to be fancy. Pizza and a salad is fine. People are more generous with their time and their honesty when someone feeds them first.

Plan for ninety minutes to two hours. Send a simple agenda in advance so nobody shows up cold.

The facilitator question

Before the meeting, settle one thing: who is going to run it?

It should not be the mayor. The mayor has opinions, a history with everyone in the room, and a stake in the outcome. That’s not a character flaw. It’s just a bad combination for someone trying to stay neutral.

You need someone who can keep the conversation moving, draw out the quieter voices, and redirect when things go sideways without pushing their own agenda.

A county extension agent sometimes plays this role well. So does a council of governments representative or a retired administrator from a neighboring town.

If nobody obvious comes to mind, try your state municipal league, your regional planning commission, or a regional development specialist through your state’s Department of Commerce or equivalent agency. Most states have someone whose specific job is to support communities in exactly this kind of situation, and they are often genuinely glad to help.

The three questions

Write these on a whiteboard or a large piece of paper where everyone can see them for the entire meeting:

What’s working in our community that we should protect?

What’s broken that affects the most people?

What could we realistically accomplish in the next 12 to 18 months?

Start with what’s working. People in small towns are often quicker to list problems than strengths, and starting here sets a more honest tone.

It also surfaces assets the group might be taking for granted, whether that’s a strong volunteer fire department, a well-run park, or a community event that draws people every year. These are worth knowing before you start talking about what to change.

Move to what’s broken. The facilitator’s job here is to keep the conversation focused on things that affect a significant portion of the community, not just the person talking.

Individual grievances are real, but this isn’t the meeting to resolve them. If something keeps coming up from multiple people in the room, that’s a signal. Write it down.

Finish with what’s realistically accomplishable. This is the hardest question and the most important one.

The word “realistically” is doing a lot of work. It rules out things that depend entirely on outside funding you don’t have yet, things that require state or federal approval with no clear timeline, and things that sound exciting but have no obvious owner. Focus the room on what’s actually within reach in the next 12 to 18 months with the people and resources you have right now.

The parking lot

You will have someone who wants to add fifteen things to the list. This is normal and the facilitator needs to be ready for it. The move is not to dismiss their idea but to park it.

Keep a running list on a separate piece of paper or a corner of the whiteboard for things that came up but didn’t make the cut. People are much more willing to let go of an idea if they can see it written down somewhere rather than watching it disappear.

The parking lot isn’t a trash can. It’s where next year’s priorities come from.

Before anyone leaves

For each of the three priorities the group lands on, do three things before anyone puts on their coat.

1. Name it clearly in plain language.

2. Assign one specific person as the owner, not “the city” or “the group.”

3. Then build the action list as far as you honestly can.

For some priorities you can map every step to the finish line right there in the room. “Apply for the community development block grant” has a knowable sequence: confirm eligibility, gather documentation, write the application, submit by the deadline. If you can see the whole path, write it down with a name and a target date next to each step.

For other priorities the path isn’t fully visible yet. “Figure out what to do with the abandoned building on Main Street” might have an obvious first step — find out who actually owns it — but you genuinely can’t know what step two looks like until step one is done.

That’s fine. Agree on the first step, assign an owner, set a target date, and establish a clear trigger: when this step is done, the owner reports back to the group, and they decide what comes next at the following monthly gathering.

If a priority involves exploring financing options, the banker might be the right owner.

If it involves a grant search, the extension agent might take that on.

If it involves organizing a community cleanup, a volunteer is a better fit than the public works director.

When community members own pieces of the work, it stays a community effort rather than something the mayor and clerk are carrying alone.

Close by confirming the date of the next monthly gathering. Then adjourn.

Thank people genuinely. They gave up an evening. That matters.

The Priorities List

Everything that came out of that first gathering now gets compressed onto a single page. Not a summary of a longer document. Not page one of ten. One page, total. If it doesn’t fit, you haven’t cut enough.

This matters for a practical reason. A document that lives in a binder on a shelf gets looked at once.

A single page that gets posted at the community center, handed out at the monthly gathering, and shared with everyone who was at the first meeting gets looked at regularly.

Visibility is accountability. If the priorities are easy to ignore, they will be ignored.

Here’s what goes on the page for each of the three priorities:

The priority itself, written in plain language. One sentence. Not “enhance community vitality through strategic placemaking initiatives.”

Something like “identify who owns the three vacant storefronts on Main Street and make contact with each owner before the end of the quarter.” That’s plain, specific, and you can put a name next to it.

If you have to explain what the priority means, or if you can’t immediately see who in the room should own it, rewrite it until both of those problems are solved.

The owner. One person’s name. Not “the city” or “the group.” A name. If a priority has both a city component and a community component, list both owners and note which piece each one is carrying.

The action list. Either every step to the finish line with a name and a date next to each one, or the first concrete step with a name, a date, and a note that says “owner reports back to the group when complete.”

What success looks like. One sentence describing what done actually means. Concrete and specific enough that nobody has to debate whether you got there.

“The grant application is submitted by March 1st.” “The park has functioning bathrooms and maintained grounds by Memorial Day.” If you can’t write that sentence, the priority isn’t defined clearly enough yet.

One thing worth understanding before you look at the example below: the community group doesn’t have authority over the city and shouldn’t pretend otherwise. For priorities that involve city infrastructure, city property, or city funds, the group’s role is to identify the need and make the ask.

A city representative carries that ask back to the council. The council votes. If the answer is yes, the city handles the work through whatever process it’s required to follow — bids, contracts, procurement, all of it. The community group’s job at that point is to stay informed and stay supportive, not to manage the process.

That’s not a limitation. That’s just an honest description of how government works and why having a city representative at the table every month matters.

Here’s what a finished page might look like for a town of 700:

[Town Name] Community Priorities 2026

Priority 1: Submit the CDBG application for the water line replacement on the east side of town. Owner: Mayor Jane Smith — Step 1: Karen Lopez (extension agent) confirms eligibility and identifies application window by February 1st — Step 2: Mayor gathers required documentation by February 15th — Step 3: Application submitted by March 1st — Success: Application submitted on time and complete.

Priority 2: Restore the downtown park to usable condition. City owner: Public Works Director Tom Hall (bathroom repair -- city will handle assessment, bidding, and contracting per standard process. A city representative will update the group monthly on progress.) Community owner: Lisa Reed (volunteer cleanup day and equipment fundraising) — Step 1: Lisa organizes a cleanup day and reaches out to the Lions Club about equipment donations by February 15th — Success: Bathrooms functional, grounds maintained, families using the park by Memorial Day.

Priority 3: Launch an annual community festival for the fall. Owner: Sarah Briggs (community volunteer) — Step 1: Sarah connects with neighboring towns and county extension about co-sponsorship possibilities by February 15th — Success of first step determines next steps. Sarah reports back to the group at the March gathering.

A few things worth noting about that example.

Priority 2 has two owners because it’s genuinely a joint effort, but the two owners are operating in completely different lanes.

The public works director is handling a city responsibility. There will be an assessment, an open bid process, a city council decision on the contract, and all the steps that come with that.

The community group doesn’t have a vote in any of that and shouldn’t expect one. What the group does have is a city representative at every monthly gathering who can speak to where things stand, whether that’s the public works director, the mayor, the city clerk, or a council member.

That’s the right relationship between a community group and a city-owned priority. The group identifies the need and makes the ask. The city representative carries it back to the council. The council votes. The city handles the process from there and keeps the group informed as it moves forward.

The community owner on Priority 2 is operating independently of all that. Lisa Reed isn’t waiting on the bid process to organize a cleanup day or talk to the Lions Club about equipment donations. Those things can move on their own timeline.

Priority 3 doesn’t have a full action list because Sarah can’t know what step two looks like until she makes those calls. The blank space after the first step isn’t a failure. It’s an acknowledgment that some things have to unfold before you can map the whole path. The group will fill in the next steps together at the March gathering based on what Sarah finds out.

Keep the formatting simple. A plain table works fine. A word document with three sections works fine. The goal is something anyone can read in two minutes and understand completely.

Once the page is drafted — ideally by whoever volunteered to do it before the first gathering ended — share it with everyone who attended. Post it at town hall and anywhere else the community gathers. Put it on the town website if you have one. The more people who know what the group is working on, the more likely someone shows up to a gathering with an offer to help.

This page belongs to the group, not the city. It lives and changes as the group does.

A note on economic development priorities specifically

In a town under 1,000, there is usually no economic development director, and the city is focused on keeping the infrastructure running. That means the community group is often the only entity with the bandwidth to work on economic development at all.

That’s not a problem; it’s an opportunity. But economic development for a group like this doesn’t mean recruiting a manufacturer or landing a big employer.

It means making the phone call nobody has made yet.

Finding out who owns the empty building.

Connecting the person who wants to open a bakery with the landlord who hasn’t listed the space.

Starting that small is not a failure of ambition. It’s an honest assessment of what a volunteer group can actually move, and moving something small is what builds the credibility to move something bigger later.

The Monthly Gathering

This is where the work actually happens.

The first gathering sets the priorities. The monthly gathering is what keeps them alive. A community group that meets once and never reconvenes isn’t a community group. It’s a meeting that happened one time. The towns that make progress are the ones where people keep showing up.

Monthly is the right frequency. Often enough that priorities stay visible and momentum doesn’t die between meetings. Not so often that it becomes a burden. If you skip to quarterly, things quietly stall in the gaps and nobody notices until three months have passed and nothing has moved.

Meet somewhere comfortable. Rotate locations if that keeps it interesting. Have food. A group that gathers over a meal feels different from a group that sits in folding chairs under fluorescent lights staring at an agenda. Both technically meet, but only one of them builds the kind of relationships that make hard conversations possible when they come up.

Keep it to an hour or ninety minutes. Longer than that and attendance starts to slip.

The agenda

Short and consistent. Every month, the same basic structure:

Quick welcome and any new faces. Five minutes on each priority — where things stand, what’s happened since last month, anything that’s blocking progress. A look at the parking lot list to see if anything there has become more urgent. Open conversation about anything new worth the group’s attention. Confirm the date of the next gathering and adjourn.

That’s it. On a good month where everything is moving, the priorities check-in takes ten minutes total and you’re done in forty-five.

On a harder month where something is stuck or a priority needs to change, you’ll use the full ninety. Either way, people know what to expect when they walk in the door.

Reporting

City representatives report on city-owned priorities. They’re not managing the process for the group, just keeping everyone informed on where things stand.

Community owners report on their items. If an owner can’t make a gathering, they send a quick update to whoever is running the meeting beforehand so the information still gets to the table.

When something gets finished

Stop and celebrate!

Not a perfunctory “good job everyone” before moving to the next agenda item but an actual celebration. These are volunteers who gave their time and energy to make something real happen in their town. That deserves more than a checkbox.

Consider making the next gathering a party. Skip the agenda for one month. Bring better food than usual. Invite people who weren’t part of the work but benefited from it. Let people talk about what it took and what it means.

If the park bathrooms are finally working, have the next gathering at the park. If the festival happened, spend a meeting talking about what went well and what was fun before you ever talk about what to do differently next time.

In a town that hasn’t finished much lately, a real celebration sends a signal to the whole community that this group is different from the ones that met a few times and faded out. People notice when things actually get done. Let them notice!

Then, when the group is ready, when the energy is right, pull the next priority off the parking lot list and start again.

When something stops making sense

Sometimes circumstances change. A grant program disappears. A key person moves away. Something more urgent surfaces. A priority that seemed critical six months ago turns out to be less pressing than something new.

The priorities list is allowed to change. What’s not allowed is letting it change by accident through neglect.

If a priority needs to be swapped out, make that decision explicitly as a group, note it in whatever passes for minutes, and move on. That keeps the process honest and gives everyone a clear record of why things shifted.

Keeping it worth showing up for

This might be the most important thing in this entire article and it’s the one most likely to get skipped over because it sounds soft.

If people dread coming, they’ll stop coming. And if they stop coming, none of the rest of this matters.

Fun isn’t a nice-to-have. It’s load-bearing.

The monthly gathering should be something people look forward to, or at minimum something they don’t have to talk themselves into attending.

That means good food, good conversation, and a sense that the time was worth it.

It means celebrating finished things.

It means keeping the agenda tight enough that it doesn’t drag.

And it means building the kind of relationships where people are genuinely glad to be in the same room together.

A community group that people enjoy being part of will outlast any plan ever written.

When You Need Your Neighbors

There are things a town of 600 simply cannot do alone.

Not because the town isn’t capable or the people aren’t willing. Because some things require a scale that a single small town can’t reach — enough volunteers to run a festival, enough applicants to justify a grant program, enough purchasing volume to negotiate a better price, enough voices to get a state agency to pay attention.

This is where neighboring towns, your county, and regional partners become less of a courtesy and more of a practical necessity.

Other towns

The town twenty minutes down the road is probably dealing with the same things you are. Same aging infrastructure. Same struggle to attract young families. Same question of what to do with a vacant building on Main Street.

They’re not your competition. They’re your most natural collaborator.

Joint projects between neighboring towns can take a lot of forms.

A shared community event that draws from a wider audience than either town could reach alone. A combined grant application that meets a minimum threshold neither town hits individually. Shared services or equipment that neither town could justify purchasing separately. A regional farmers market that rotates locations.

The conversation doesn’t need to be formal to start.

Find out if a neighboring town has a similar community group or a mayor who’d be open to coffee. Come with something specific: “We’re thinking about applying for X. Would you want to go in together?” Specific is easier to say yes to than general.

The county

Your county is an underused partner for most small towns, and the relationship is worth cultivating deliberately. County commissioners, county health departments, and county economic development offices often have programs, resources, and connections that individual towns never hear about simply because nobody asked.

If you have a council of governments representative in your area, they work across multiple communities by definition and often know about regional funding opportunities and partnerships before individual towns do.

Get to know them. Tell them what your group is working on. Ask what they know that you don’t.

Tribal nations

Where tribal nations are present in your region, they are frequently the most underutilized potential partner in the area.

Tribal nations often have resources, programs, economic development capacity, and deep regional knowledge that most small towns never think to tap. If your community group doesn’t already have a relationship with a neighboring tribal nation, building one is worth the effort.

Start with a personal conversation, the same way you’d start anything else in this article.

Your state

Most states have regional development specialists whose specific job is to support communities like yours. They know the grant landscape, they’ve seen what works in towns your size, and they’re usually glad to hear from a community that has its act together enough to know what it’s working on.

Your state municipal league is another resource worth knowing. They exist specifically to support small municipalities and can often connect you with peer communities facing similar challenges.

The through line in all of this is the same principle that started this whole article: don’t wait until you have everything figured out to reach out. Start with a specific ask, start with who you know, and build from there.

The Bar Is Finishing One Thing

Here’s the most honest thing this article can tell you. The communities that make progress aren’t the ones with the best plans. They’re the ones that keep showing up.

A priorities list with three items on it is only as good as the group behind it. If the group meets once and dissolves, the list is worthless.

If the group keeps meeting even when progress is slow, even when something falls through, even when attendance drops for a couple of months, things get done. Maybe not on the original timeline. Maybe not exactly as planned. But things get done.

The bar for your first year is finishing one thing. Not three. One.

That sounds low. It isn’t.

Finishing one real priority as a volunteer community group, navigating the relationship between community action and city process, keeping people engaged and showing up month after month is genuinely hard.

Most groups that try something like this don’t finish anything in the first year because they aimed at too many things at once or lost momentum after the first gathering and never quite got it back.

One finished thing changes the conversation in your town. It’s proof that this group is different. It’s a reason for people who sat out the first year to get involved in the second. It’s the foundation that every subsequent priority gets built on.

The group is allowed to evolve.

People cycle in and out. Priorities change. The format shifts to fit what works. None of that is failure. That’s just what a living community effort looks like over time.

What you’re trying to protect isn’t the plan. It’s the habit. A group of people who care about their town, meeting monthly, keeping a short list of what matters most, celebrating what gets finished, and pulling the next thing off the parking lot.

That’s it. That’s the whole thing.

Your town doesn’t need a strategic plan. It needs people who show up.

Resources Worth Knowing

Strong Towns - A nonprofit organization focused on building financially strong and resilient communities. Their Local Conversation model is worth exploring if you want to go deeper on community-driven action.

SaveYour.Town - Becky McCray and Deb Brown have thought harder than most about how small towns build momentum from the ground up. Start with the Idea Friendly Method.

Your state municipal league - Every state has one. They exist specifically to support small municipalities and are worth a phone call early in the process.

Your regional council of governments - Regional planning and coordination organizations that work across multiple communities. They often know about funding and partnership opportunities before individual towns do.

Your state’s regional development specialists - Most state Departments of Commerce or equivalent agencies have regional specialists whose job is to support communities like yours. Find yours and introduce yourself.

Your county extension service - One of the most underused resources in rural America. They know the grant landscape, understand community development, and are usually glad to hear from a town that’s trying to get organized.

You know the kind. The drive-through at every corner. The self-checkout replacing the cashier who used to ask about your kids. The online portal that handles what used to require a conversation at a counter. Everything is faster. Everything is smoother. And somehow, everyone feels more alone.

We have spent decades worshiping at the altar of efficiency. Get in, get out, get home. Reduce friction. Minimize wait times. Streamline the experience. And those are legitimate goals in plenty of contexts. Nobody wants to wait 45 minutes at the DMV if there is a better way. But somewhere along the line, we started applying those same principles to the parts of community life where friction is actually the point.

Here is the honest truth: community is not efficient. It never has been. It is built in the margins, in the lingering conversations, in the accidental encounters, in the time you did not plan to spend but ended up spending anyway. And if we are serious about building communities that actually hold together, we might want to stop treating those moments as problems to solve.

The Slower Pace People Actually Want

When people move to small towns and talk about loving the pace, they are almost never talking about speed. They are talking about a place where the person at the hardware store knows your name and asks what you are working on. Where the coffee shop line moves slowly because the owner is catching up with three regulars. Where you cannot get through the farmers market in under an hour because you keep running into people you know.

None of that is efficient. All of it is valuable.

There is a well-documented concept in community building called the “third place” -- a term coined by sociologist Ray Oldenburg to describe the informal gathering spaces that exist outside home and work. The barbershop. The diner. The corner bar. These places work not because they are convenient, but because they invite people to slow down and be present. They are, by design, slightly inefficient. You could get a faster cup of coffee somewhere else. You come back here because of what happens while you wait.

The question for economic and community developers is whether we can build that quality into our places intentionally, rather than leaving it to chance.

What Designing for Inefficiency Actually Looks Like

Urban designers have a term for it: “positive friction.” The idea is that well-placed difficulty can interrupt autopilot behavior and create moments of awareness, interaction, and connection. Applied to community spaces, it means designing environments that slow people down on purpose.

Consider some concrete examples:

The road diet. Across the U.S., cities and towns have been converting four-lane one-way arterials back into two-lane two-way streets, a practice sometimes called a “road diet.” Memphis did it on several downtown corridors. Oklahoma City did it as part of its broader downtown revitalization. The results tend to follow a consistent pattern: traffic slows, pedestrian activity increases, and the street starts to feel like a place rather than a corridor. Businesses along those corridors typically see increased foot traffic. What looks like an inconvenience for drivers turns out to be an investment in the street as a community asset. The inefficiency of slowing a car down by 10 miles per hour ends up being worth considerably more than the 90 seconds it costs.

Traffic calming that is actually calming. Roundabouts, chicanes, and raised intersections are not just safety measures. They interrupt the default mental state of a driver in a hurry and create natural pause points. Towns that have converted high-speed arterials into slow, walkable main streets consistently report more foot traffic, more spontaneous interaction, and more business for the shops along the way. The friction is the feature.

Shared gathering infrastructure. Pixar’s original headquarters was famously designed by Steve Jobs with a single central atrium where all the bathrooms, the cafeteria, and the mailboxes were located. The entire building was built around one idea: force people from different departments to run into each other. The resulting cross-pollination of ideas is credited with contributing to some of the studio’s most creative output. The lesson is not unique to film studios. It applies to downtowns, parks, community centers -- anywhere you want people to encounter each other by accident.

The farmers market model. A farmers market is a profoundly inefficient way to buy vegetables. You can get everything you need at the grocery store in a fraction of the time. And yet farmers markets are thriving in communities across the country because they offer something the grocery store cannot: the experience of being in a place, among people, at a pace that allows for actual human exchange. The inefficiency is not a bug. It is the whole product.

Front porches over backyard decks. This one sounds small, but it is not. The shift from front porch culture to backyard deck culture has been well documented as a contributor to neighborhood disconnection. Front porches face the street, invite passerby interaction, and signal that the people inside are open to the world around them. Backyard decks face inward. They are private. They are efficient in the sense that you do not have to talk to anyone you did not already invite. Communities that are actively encouraging front porch design -- or building public benches and gathering spots at street level -- are making a bet that accidental interaction is worth designing for.

The single-register store. Some small businesses make a deliberate choice not to add a second register or self-checkout, not because they cannot afford it, but because the line is where the community happens. This is not nostalgia. It is strategy. The business owner who knows every customer’s name is building loyalty that an efficient transaction cannot replicate.

The Economic Development Argument

Here is where this gets relevant to those of us in the community and economic development world. When we design our downtowns, our event spaces, our public gathering areas -- are we designing for throughput, or are we designing for connection?

A downtown that moves people quickly from parking to store to parking is not building community. A downtown that has benches, farmers markets, festivals, slow streets, and coffee shops with tables out front is building something harder to measure and considerably more valuable: a sense of place. And sense of place, as any site selector will tell you, is one of the most powerful economic development tools available. People choose where to live and where to locate businesses based on whether a place feels alive.

The communities that are struggling to attract and retain residents are often the ones that have optimized the human experience right out of their downtowns. Wide streets moving fast traffic through. No shade, no seating, no reason to linger. A town built for throughput is not a town anyone wants to stay in.

A Modest Proposal

The next time someone presents a plan to make something more efficient -- a new drive-through, a parking structure that gets people in and out faster, a digital system that eliminates the need for a conversation -- it is worth asking what we are actually optimizing for.

Sometimes efficiency is the right answer. But sometimes the wait, the detour, the person you were not expecting to see, is exactly what the community needed.

Design for inefficiency. Slow people down on purpose. Give them a reason to linger. Build the road diet. Put the benches out. Make the coffee line a little too long and a little too social.

The communities that figure this out will not look like the most optimized places on the map. They will just be the ones people actually want to live in.