Ondrea Elmquist, Boone City Administrator, October 28, 2026

On our program today, we are going to take time to visit with Andrea Elm, Quest Boone City Administrator. Thanks for taking time to come and visit. Thank you for having me. What's happening in Boone? Lots of things. Lots of fun things happening. And I know we're going to also have snoring and stuff coming up too. I didn't visit with Waylon about that. We'll do that another time. Yeah. Maybe, well, we're pretty sure we're going to have it coming up here fairly soon. Maybe we'll even have, leave it up to Chief Weevil to do that. He's already kind of hit on the thing. Yes. Make sure you get signed up for it. Andrea, we had a lot of different things go on. First of all, obviously the City Council and most people turned out for your last meeting. And the big thing was the site plan for a co-location facility for Boone Edge or Light Edge Solutions. The big thing was at the council meeting, and you'd already heard comments from Pro and Con before, two previous meetings when it wasn't on the agenda. Now, they were going to start talking. People wanted to talk about the pros and cons of data centers. Bottom line is what they wanted. But the big thing is it was a site plan. And that's where comments would have been directed if it was going to be about the site plan itself. And really, it met all the standards, all the guidelines that you have in place that's already in your ordinances. Correct. So it went to PNZ. PNZ reviewed the site plan based off of our zoning ordinance and found nothing that was against the zoning ordinance. They were not asking for a variance of any sort. So they approved it. It went to City Council. They did the same thing. They reviewed the site plan and determined that they fit within the ordinance. And that is what they approved. And then the second thing that they approved was the memorandum of understanding. There were things that the council had voiced concerns with that they would like to make sure that we were protected on. And so we put that all in a memorandum of understanding so that if at the time LightEd chooses Boone, we would be able to easily put a development agreement together. And we have that as part. We had all the things laid out that were of concern. And in addition to that, we do have within the very first paragraph, it states that a development agreement must be executed prior to any building permits being issued. So if they do make that decision, then they come back to you and say we need a development agreement. Then you know you were picked. Correct. Correct. Then you go ahead with that. Again, the water restrictions, not too bad. Again, questions that were raised, handling water discharge, wastewater, outside of their typical wastewater, but should they have to do any work within their closed loop system or things like that? And they did say, we'll test it. We'll have somebody come in and deal with it, take it away so we don't run it into our sewer system. Yeah, it's no different than any other industry where when they have wastewater discharge, it has to be tested to determine if it is something that the city wastewater plant can process. If it is not, then it has to be trucked out. So that I think probably noise is the one where more people are what's going to happen with the noise, what kind of noise, what happens when they start their generators and things like that. That topic's come up and been discussed a little bit, but they are all willing to do this monitoring and keeping tabs on it and everything else and cover the cost of it. Yeah, I actually went to the open house last week and I talked to the company doing their noise modeling and they actually have already done some pre-testing out there and I'm going to get a copy of that report so that we can see where that noise is before construction were to begin and before operation so that we have kind of a baseline. Okay, on the upside for the city, they obviously there'll be some sort of a minimum valuation. I know they want that. On the property tax side of things, I'm guessing you like to see this is kind of like Alliance. They also like to see a customer coming on that I mean they like a lot of the residential growth we've got, but industrial growth like this a little bit more enhancing. Yeah, absolutely. The big difference between a residential growth versus a commercial or industrial growth is the percentage of property taxes that you pay. A commercial or industrial is paying 90% of their assessed value where a residential is only paying about 50% and that does fluctuate from year to year but yeah and light edge isn't asking for any incentives so we will start as soon as it's built and on the tax rolls we will start collecting taxes. Well, they keep coming back and looking at it so I'm feeling a little confident but again they still have not made that final call. Now, there are two other cities that they are in the works of either negotiating or looking at. Well, we'll see what happens. In the meantime, we do have other things that are still going on like how high can Daisy go out there pretty much. I think they're probably as high as tall as that building is going to be, it looks like. Yeah, I think so. I think so. I think they started taking a couple of the cranes down but still massive amount of space out there and now if we could ever get that road done out there and I know the council is disappointed they say even the mayor on our tuned in program he said, you know, it was great weather in the month of July. The problem is you can't dictate to your contractor when you say you've got this many working days. Correct. You can't really tell them you missed the boat. You should have been doing it back here. They might have had other things going on somewhere else. Yeah. I mean, yes, it would have been nice to see them out there getting it done. But when you have just number of working days, there's so I mean, you can't force them to go out there and lay concrete. Nope. And then when we got all that rain, then we had soil issues and and so then we had to wait for it to dry out. So they have working days through the end of the calendar year. We are just hoping that they can still get that done. And you're only paying 20% of this. Correct. So Rice Grant pays majority of it. I'm pretty sure the DOT is following. I'm pretty close to yes. I would think they would be anyway. So we can have that keep going forward with that. But that's another way. Now, speaking of the DOT and roads and things like that, we will have bidding probably over the winter time for First Street. That should be coming up. I think February. Yeah, we're expected to go out for bid on that. Excited. Yes. It would be nice to have that done and off my capital projects plan. Yes. By the way, yes, the capital projects plan is one of those things where it's on there and you like to get that off and move on to the next, which by the way, it looks like right now the interest seems to be north on Lynn. Lynn. No, we'll get it in there sooner or later. Yeah. Lynn Street. Yeah. North Lynn Street because I think that's the one that we had Wayland saying that's his next target. It's on the CIP already. We put it on last year. So people understand when you do city projects like that, they go, well, where's all my property taxes going? It's not really to roads. Yeah. So what we have been focusing the last several years on is roads that we can get federal funding. And so that's not all roads. Those are roads that your main thoroughfare type roads. Yeah. That's a good way of putting it. Yes. So what that allows us to do is use property tax dollars or road use tax dollars. And actually, we don't use property tax. Typically, it's usually local option sales tax and road use dollars to pay for the engineering and then the federal dollars pays for the construction. So it was our dollars to go a little bit further. And you get so many of those dollars are allocated come through every every year. Yep. And because of the cost of doing road projects, usually take two years worth of money, try to do one one year, skip a year, and then do another one. So yeah, you borrow less that way. Right. And we haven't been borrowing for the roads. We've been trying to use our cash. And so by the time we wait two or three years, we have about a million dollars between the federal dollars and local option sales tax and road use. We've been doing is is about 120,000 out of local option else local local option sales tax each year. And then the 10 cent road use tax that they passed about 10 years ago, equals to about 225,000. So we put those dollars in and after about two or three years, that's usually enough to cover the engineering for a million dollar project. One thing we've touched that you and I have talked about this in the past two and people keep saying we need to have more roads done. We could but we would have to do property taxes to do I mean the volume that they're talking about. Right. And right now it cost about a million dollars a mile. Yeah. That's that would be a size. Yeah, 1.2 is what it cost and that's for an overlay. So we would not want to do too much of that. No. Well, at least I mean they would not want their property taxes going up that much just for road work. Now for the amount of roads that we have in our community now. So we have to keep it's a matter of weighing it out and with picking which ones and if you add more money you do more I'm guessing. Absolutely. Absolutely. And one of the things that I just talked to Wayland the Public Works Director about is coming up with a list of 10 roads that we can put together and kind of figure out where that funding would be. Where would we need to get that money because not all roads are federally available. Money isn't federally available for those. So if we could come up with just kind of the top 10 roads that he felt needed to be looked at over the next several years maybe we could put a plan together. This would mean maybe doing some more capital probably maybe taking some more of your local option sales tax money directing it towards specifically some road work. This would be the council's decision. You'd have to offer them some ideas on how to fund some of this. Right. Yep. Absolutely. We would need to look at you know property tax general obligation bond which is paid back with property tax dollars maybe instead of doing some of the putting that hundred and twenty thousand and the two hundred twenty five thousand maybe we go out and do a bond and then the unfortunately we'll delay some of the every other year projects but maybe we can do more over a certain period versus and then we pay it over a 10 year period which we've done in the past also. No but we tend to try to avoid doing. We do. We do. It's good. It's good for our bond salesman. We do need to go out there. Speaking of we do have a lot of different things that came up during the last meeting. The one thing everybody was kind of focusing at the beginning obviously request for proposal was one that drew all of a sudden drew a lot of attention but this has just been relatively a recent opportunity that came up. We became a thriving community which offers incentives to developers. That's the best way to describe it. I think it makes you eligible. If you're a developer and you're picked in it by a thriving community to do a project you have a really good opportunity to get tax credits through the state which you get bonus points. Yeah. You get bonus points on that. So that's one of the things that kind of generated this request for proposal. You had developers making contact I'm guessing saying are you doing any projects and low to moderate income is an area and we touched on this a few different times basically because we lost a lot of our low to moderate income TIF money that was used by the city of Boone. It was used in some cities didn't use it as well as we did. Yes I liked my low to moderate income revenue. But the housing that we've been doing a lot of marketplace housing a lot of single family residential those kinds of things that's one area in the recent housing survey you had was some low to moderate income housing you haven't hadn't really added to that pool. Yeah the last one we did was the one that's on 22nd and Lynn that one is half family unit units and half is senior. Prior to that was an Alice place that's over by Fairway. So we do have ambition to use those bonus points which we're excited to do. This is actually our second location the first one did not work out but we do have some land there that we can can develop and incentivize even more for a developer to come. This would be on South Lynn street the area by the Golden Lake RV Family Resource Center. Part of the issue or part of the thing on the proposal was for a developer are you interested in acquiring this building and even though even if you do we want you to know there are tenants there and we need to have them stay. Yeah so I we definitely the council wanted to protect the tenants so there is a clause in that RFP that says that the new developer owner would honor the leases for a 10-year period at minimum with a maximum of a seven percent increase per year not saying that they would have to do a seven percent increase but that would allow for those years as repairs are needed. Cost of living goes up utility increases those things so that those funds are available to cover those costs without that building getting dilapidated. Because it would be that developer right now the city does it yes and basically you charge what the utilities and everything are that's that's their rent. Correct yes the city makes no money off of that building basically whatever their operational costs are to maintain the building is divided by the number of square feet and then multiplied by the entity that is leasing the building's square footage that they're using and that is their rent. Okay we do have a pretty fast track on this though you'd like to get something put together relatively soon and basically get ideas from developers because some of them come in with some pretty good ideas. Yeah so again it is a request for proposals so that does not necessarily mean that we will sell the building this is just our opportunity to take ideas from developers and determine if this is the path that we want to go. The second thing is is the reason for the quick turnaround is is because if a developer is selected they have to submit an application for a low-income tax credit to the state of Iowa and then get that awarded to them. So there's so many different steps in this that that it's not a guarantee that this is where we're going to go. And this is also I think you indicated during the council meeting it may not be the site somebody else might have an idea of a different site and might be well trying to go in that direction. Absolutely there is a clause in the RFP that they can choose a different location and provide that as a proposal instead. So we'll see what happens. Yeah at the end of the meeting not too many people paid attention I do because I see these things on here and mostly because I've seen the other city councils matter and Ogden doing the same thing looking ahead towards potential development and doing urban renewal districts and kind of revamping and amending those you had what five I think I think there's several on here that you said public hearings these are going to be coming up folks but you have some developers that are interested in doing some projects. Yeah definitely I'm having an amazing team out there because this was a very quick turnaround also where I called our attorneys down in Des Moines and said hey I've got all these that need to be done before the end of the year but I've had developers reach out to me that want this done too. So one of them is two of them are an amendment to the current urban renewal area one being the southeast urban renewal area which is our biggest urban it's the biggest one and so what we do is when we have a development we have been taking those parcels out of that southeast urban renewal area and creating new ones and so that was one of them we are taking two parcels out of that area to create new ones and then we had to amend the east central urban renewal because Hunsaker who's doing Irby Park is moving forward with the development agreements for phase two and phase three. Already. Yeah so we he wanted to get those done before the end of the year so we'll get those done and then we had three new urban renewal areas one being for the property at Highway 30 in Snidden Drive that is a business park that is planning on going in there okay then we had one that is on South Lynn in Kate Shelley that is a residential development that Hunsaker will be doing a third project there and then the industrial park that's the 210 acres that Boone County Economic Growth has option on and that'd be right east of the airport I think in that vicinity yep and the urban renewal areas all that is doing is setting the stage for allowing us to provide incentives to go into a development agreement which will be the next step so this is really just allowing for us to move forward it's a tool it's a tool yeah it's a tool that should we have an opportunity we might be able to draw some resources on it's not going to cover so that's what we do plenty of things happening we do it's a lot of fun it is if you get somebody to help you the finance side of things here it's been really crowded just so people understand you've been handling most of the financial stuff yourself you had do you have a part-timer on or coming up I have an assistant finance officer she's fresh out of college she's helping me with some of the tracking of the projects okay so mostly she's just learning yes yes yep she's doing a great job but yes it is a bit of a learning curve for so again full-time financial officer and still doing all the other things for being city administrator yeah you've been spending a lot of time over there and even I mean it's a challenge it's it's hard to keep everything going it is and right now especially as busy as the city is we are and we are entering into an even busier season with financial reporting that has to be submitted to the state started the cip projects this past a couple of weeks we'll be meeting in the first part of november to go over those cip being capital improvement projects and then right after that we'll be heading into the budget season doesn't slow down very much at all does it well again it's part of what's been going on and very busy again we do have at least some of the things seem to be coming together a little better hopefully we got good bids for the for the water tower we've got two bids opening today okay and then we do have uh let's see I know that uh headworks project that was getting pretty well close to being done I think I know but we're just built we're just getting the equipment in and we got the electricians out there now starting it I have not gotten quite the start time from the actual contractor yet so the headworks folks that was even before daisy yes that's an that is a improvement not an expansion project so that's just uh taking care of business out there at the wastewater plant that after 20 some years it needed to be done yes yes a lot of that going well we keep going we do we got plenty of things that keep us busy of course uh halloween coming up on saturday so and I know you're treating 530 to 730 on the 31st you asked the mayor he's no one ever asked him all of a sudden andre at the meeting goes uh are we doing a trick or treating yeah keep it the same yep october 31st from 530 to 730 yeah all right thanks so much for coming in thank you