Downtown Cedar Rapids. PHOTO CR METRO ECONOMIC ALLIANCE
By Dave DeWitte
[email protected]
The latest survey of Cedar Rapids businesses found flood protection to be the largest single area of concern in an overall favorable business climate.
Twenty-eight percent of the 80 companies surveyed onsite said they will be more likely to invest in Cedar Rapids after the completion of a long-awaited flood protection system, according to David Connolly, the city’s economic development specialist who led the survey this spring.
The survey found 97 percent of respondents considered the city’s overall business climate “good” or “excellent,” Mr. Connolly said, an improvement of about 10 percent from the inaugural survey in 2016.
Workforce retention emerged as the primary challenge facing businesses, Mr. Connolly said, whereas last year it had been attraction.
“Overall, the workforce issues are still of paramount importance to business – talent attraction, finding workers with the precise set of in-demand skills,” Mr. Connolly explained. “Our labor market conditions have tightened over the last five years.”
Some of the survey’s other key findings:
- Eight out of 10 companies surveyed thought the city’s business climate has improved in the past five years.
- Nine out of 10 companies report stable or improving profit margins over the last three years.
- 44 percent of companies are interested in expanding in Cedar Rapids in the next three years.
- 59 percent are expecting to hold employment the same.
- 61 percent give the city’s quality of life a positive rating (good or excellent).
Mr. Connolly said the data will help inform a business advisory council that will be convened later this year to advise City Manager Jeff Pomeranz as Cedar Rapids updates its strategic plan for economic development. The current plan runs from 2016-2018.
City leaders have begun deploying a permanent flood protection system to protect the city from the threat of flooding that resurfaced in September 2016, when a rising Cedar River forced the evacuation of much of downtown. However, the city still lacks the federal funding needed to complete the $630 million project in the forseeable future.
The city’s business survey contacted businesses of various sizes and from a range of industries; it also included about 40 different respondents from last year. Survey visits at 10 companies were coordinated with an ongoing survey of existing industries by the Cedar Rapids Metro Economic Alliance, with findings from both reported in June.
The alliance’s Existing Industry Report showed that while workforce availability remained problematic, there were hints of improvement from the previous survey. On a scale of one to seven, business leaders interviewed by the Economic Alliance ranked the city’s workforce available as 4.01, up 0.34 points from 2015.
The survey of 85 executives found access to exceptional education was one of the community’s highest assets, and airline passenger service is viewed favorably, receiving 4.97 points on the same one-to-seven scale.
Digging into data
Mike Lukan, who led the existing industries survey, said the alliance is hopeful that its efforts in regional branding, programming and “overall quality of place efforts” are making a difference in addressing the workforce challenge.
While the city’s survey found workforce was even more of a concern than in 2016, Mr. Connolly said the availability of qualified workers is an issue being felt across the nation. He said one challenge Cedar Rapids faces is in retention of the workers in the 19-24 cohort.
“When you look at the percentage of young adults we retain, it’s very low compared to the other five-year age cohorts,” he said, adding that when all age cohorts are combined, the city’s workforce retention performance balances out with the state.
One of Cedar Rapids’ strongest points was in workforce productivity, which Mr. Connolly said stood out as 29 percent above the national average, and higher than Wisconsin, Illinois, Nebraska or Minnesota as a whole.
Ralph Russell was among the city council members pleased by the findings.
“I see this survey as the only thing that tells us real-time what’s happening in the community,” Mr. Russell said.
In response to a question from Mr. Russell about what other insights the council could receive, Mr. Connolly said city staff are looking at using the kind of real-time data analytics it is using to attract retailers in other areas of its economic development program. The city also launched a website this year, www.economicdevelopmentcr.com, to help attract new businesses and expanding existing businesses. One feature of the site is a data dashboard that provides indicators of economic performance for the metro area.
