Jim Heavens

Dyersville Mayor

   DYERSVILLE, Iowa - This is not the easiest time for mayors - especially in small communities.
    Tight budgets. Aging infrastructure. Population leakage. Jobs loss. Local political friction.
    The problems seem as unlimited as the resources are limited.
    Dyersville is not immune to those issues. Yet, apparently better than many communities, it is weathering them.
    The Telegraph Herald recently discussed this and other topics with Jim Heavens, now in his third year as mayor. Here are highlights of that conversation.
    TH: Do you consider yourself a political person?
    JH: Well, I've always had kind of an interest in politics, but not to the point where I'd actually run for office.
    Two or three years ago, our city was mired in a lot of controversy. As things kind of went along, I thought to myself, well, maybe I'm somebody that can step in here and resolve this thing, such that I don't know anybody, I'm not related to anybody, I haven't got a side on this thing and would offer myself as somebody as kind of a student of corporate life, which is kind of akin to politics. So I put my name in the ring and won. Then the last election, I was unopposed.
    TH: What has surprised you about being mayor?
    JH: I would say that it's probably more responsibility than you think it is. Does it take a lot of your time? Yes and no. I think there are some weeks when it takes a lot of time. There are other weeks when I don't do much with it. You're kind of on-call a little bit more. I've been pleasantly surprised on how the people treated me. I think everybody's a little apprehensive when you go into a job like this. Are you going to get people who call you and cuss you out? That type of thing. I would tell you the people of Dyersville have been very nice to me. I get very few calls at home about things. Now, people sometimes get a little passionate about issues, but I think that's their prerogative. But as far as being ungentlemanly or unladylike about it, I have not seen that at all.
    TH: The fact that you weren't born here, you weren't raised here, might have been a good element in the political climate of Dyersville?
    JH: I think at that point, it was. Now, the downside of that, I would tell you, is that you don't know everybody here.
    One of the things that I have struggled with a little bit as mayor is that people come up to me like I'm their long-lost brother and I have no idea who they are. I'm a little bit scared to say, "Now, who are you?" I don't want to be aloof, and I don't want to be rude to them or appear rude, so I try to get to know them a little bit. I think that helps sometimes.
    TH: There was controversy going on in Dyersville. Were there steps that you took initially to try to sort that out or keep that on an even keel?
    JH: On the positive side of that, I inherited the city from Mayor Gibbs in good financial shape. It was poised to do two big projects, the Streetscape and remodeling this (municipal) building here. We had good people in all the places in the city and I think what we tried to do there is just try to work through some of these things. Some of them worked out through the elective process. Some of them, time heals all wounds. If you just kind of keep plugging away here and doing what you think is right, eventually those things will kind of go away. They're replaced by other things maybe, but they will kind of go away.
    TH: How did it happen that you ended up in Dyersville, Iowa?
    JH: Oh, that's an interesting story. I worked 10 years for Hubbard in Mankato, Minn. At that time, I was recruited by Super Sweet Feeds, which was - they're no longer in business as Super Sweet Feeds - but they were in New Ulm, Minn. I'm a cattle nutritionist by training. After a year and a half of training, they sent me to New Hampton as the district sales manager. I stayed there for five years. We actually lived in Charles City and worked in New Hampton, the next town over. My old boss recruited me to come to United Suppliers. Well, where they really wanted me to go was Eldora. I really didn't have any interest in moving to Eldora, but I knew Dyersville. I had come down here on a technical basis for many years. I said, "If you're interested in doing something in Dyersville, I'm interested in that." But I didn't really care to move to Eldora. So we drug my wife, kicking and screaming  well, I drug her kicking and screaming from Mankato to Charles City, and I drug her kicking and screaming from Charles City to Dyersville. I think it's been a good move for us. It really has.
    TH: So, if I asked her now, if she's OK
   JH: Yeah, she wouldn't want to go back. We have a lot of good friends.
    TH: Getting back to city government, you mentioned some of the projects that you have going. Streetscape is pretty well wrapped up.
    JH: Pretty well wrapped up, not entirely. But the city hall remodeling is wrapped up. That's been a good project for us. You almost have to see this building before and after it was done. As some of the people say, this building was maybe functional, but it was not something you would put forth as your best foot of Dyersville to somebody that came into the community. We believe the two things that people look at when they evaluate a community, either to live or do business with, is probably your Main Street and City Hall, and what messages those two things send them.

James A. Heavens Age: 54 Occupation: Manager of AgriBlenders for United Suppliers, Inc. Mayor of Dyersville, elected in 2003 and re-elected in 2005. Family: Husband of Cathy since 1983. Father of Alan, John and Patrick. Hometown: Coal City, Ill. Education: PhD in agriculture with specialization in ruminant nutrition (1978), master's degree in agricultural science (1976) and bachelor's degree in agricultural science (1973), all from the University of Illinois. Associates degree in pre-veterinary medicine (1971) from Joliet (Ill.) Junior College. Community leadership: Dyersville Area Chamber of Commerce Board. Beckman High School Booster Club Board.

    TH: Where do the schools fit into that picture?
    JH: As far as what?
    TH: Availability of public education. Dyersville is one of the larger Iowa communities without a full range of public schools
   JH: What I tell people is that if you want to move to this community, we have an excellent education system. If you look at anything you measure things by, drop-out rates and college graduations, attendance figures. I'm not an educational expert, but if you look at our community, I think we would rank very high in all those things.
    Now, do we have a public school in town? We have kindergarten and first grade. There has been an argument, and I mean that from a positive sense, whether to build more education, public education, in Dyersville. I think that that has kind of died down in the last couple of years. There's a lot of reasons for that. It would be very costly as this point for the school district to put a school here. I don't think a bond issue for that would pass in this community. The other thing is that you've got something that we all have to contend with here - declining enrollment. I think Beckman High School is the only, that I know of, Catholic high school in the diocese that shows an increase enrollment. But when you look at the pure numbers of students, not only Dyersville but from the surrounding towns, I don't think you've got maybe the burgeoning enrollment like you do in Dubuque to deal with out here. So, to me, the school issue has never been a big issue here. I think if you've got a good educational system, whether it's in Dyersville or Farley or Epworth, is not that big of an argument at this point.
    TH: But in terms of your contact with prospective industries or prospective residents, it does not seem to be a major obstacle?
    JH: No, it's not an obstacle at all that I've encountered with any prospective industry or resident.
    TH: Regarding the "Field of Dreams" phenomenon. That movie came out in '89. Did anybody in town really envision it carrying on this long?
    JH: I was not in town when that movie was made. I hear from people that they were all surprised that it has been this popular and has lasted this long.
    I guess I've never lived in a town where when my relatives came to visit that there was something they wanted to go see. I've always been impressed by how many people are out there and the stories that they have to tell about that. I don't foresee that thing dying any, really.
    TH: Over the years, on the employment front, we've seen a decline with Ertl - then Racing Champions. Where is that facility in terms of employment in Dyersville, and what do you see ahead?
    JH: Well, RC2 has undergone quite a building program in the last probably two years, I think. They've added on to their warehouse space and upgraded their equipment, their facility, such that they've become more of a distributor for toys than a manufacturer, certainly. And actually, their employment is up the last couple of years.
    TH: The other project was this building's remodeling. It does look great.
    JH: Yeah, I think it's tasteful. I mean, you've got a building here that was built in 1929, solid as a rock, but it had a furnace system in it that was from the '50s. It had asbestos issues in it. It has probably two-thirds of the space was not really habitable from an office standpoint. I think we got a good bid on it and it seemed to turn out quite well.
    TH: I see on your backgrounder that you go to some League of Cities-types of meetings. When the various mayors get together, what do you tell your peers from around the state or the Midwest about Dyersville?
    JH: Well, I would tell you that I'm more surprised about what they tell me. I am continually surprised when I run across mayors from other towns and they find out I'm from Dyersville. They say, "Wow, you're really smoking. Wow, that's a nice, clean town. You've really got stuff going there." They're very complimentary. I think some of them wish they had the tourist assets that we do. I think that a lot of the cities our size are really struggling financially, especially in the last four or five years, since we've had a lot of cutbacks at the state level. How does a town our size survive that? But we're lucky that we've got some industry to draw on. It's not all one industry. We've got tourism. We've got agriculture. Being on Route 20 is certainly an asset to us. I think we've got a very progressive population here that wants to move ahead and are willing to step up to the plate and do some things and are open to new things.
    TH: You shared with me a statement you made a few weeks ago at the council
   JH: We had a board and commissions banquet.
    TH: You spoke about Dyersville being in good shape fiscally. I understand you're looking at some adjustments in your sewer and water rates. That may cost you a few votes the next time around.
    JH: It might. Well, here's the thing on that, Brian. One of the things that happens in the city is that you have a general fund that you can use for police protection and fire protection and fix the potholes and that type of thing. And then you've got some enterprise funds, some business-like funds, which for our city are providing water, sewer and then solid waste disposal. Those are quasi-businesses that the city runs.
    Now what has happened in our town in the past is that we have subsidized the loss, especially in the water and sewer department, out of the general fund. When you had a lot of money in the general fund, you could kind of do that. Although I would say from my business experience that when you've got a department that's not making money and you're using another department to subsidize that, that's probably not on a long-term basis a healthy thing to do.
    So what we have done is raise the water and sewer rates a small amount the last few years and we have not raised our tax rate since the 2000-2001 fiscal year. Now this year, what the council elected to do is to raise the water and sewer rates hopefully enough, or almost enough, such that they fund themselves.
    The water was not as big a problem as the sewer. We built a new sewer plant in the last couple of years and we need a little bit more revenue to make that thing revenue-neutral.
    TH: So roughly, what type of increase is going in?
    JH: The average bill is going up $20 to $25 a month between water, sewer and solid waste. But your taxes are not going up. We have held the line on the taxes and hopefully, this will be enough to get us close to breaking those things even.
    TH: On average, $20-25 a month?
    JH: And that would still put us kind of in the middle of where we would be like with Maquoketa and Anamosa and Manchester - cities our size. We'd still be in the middle of the rate pack there.
    TH: And it's based on actual consumption. You pay for what you use.
    JH: Right. And everybody pays it. There's no discrimination there, of whether you own property or not. You pay it.
    The other thing we have attempted to do here is that we're going to need a new water tower here in Dyersville, probably in the next couple of years. We've been quietly trying to upgrade the water system so that we don't hook up some high-pressure tower to a system that's 100 years old and have us spring a million leaks. We have kind of a program where we replace five fire hydrants every year. We try to keep up with those programs. We're not raising those rates because we need to upgrade the thing because it's been let go. Our system is in good shape. But I think our thing here is kind of a pay-as-you-go and not leave that for the next generation.
    TH: Another decision the council made over the last few months involved residency restrictions for registered sex offenders.
    JH: I was wondering if you were going to bring that up.
    TH: You'd be disappointed?
    JH: I'd be disappointed if you didn't, you know.
    TH: What's your view on that issue?
    JH: I would say for good or bad, it was probably my idea. We had a citizen come to the council one time, whose child was involved with something like that with a minor, wasn't a person over 21. This person says we realize you can't do anything about this, but can you make sure to do whatever you can to make sure that this doesn't happen to somebody else?
    So we had a meeting of the public safety committee, police chief, city administrator, myself and two council members. Two things came up on the radar. One is that we didn't have any sex offenders living in Dyersville that were over 21. These laws do not apply to people that are under 21. The second thing was that if you took the city of Dyersville, as you see here on the map, and you applied the distance requirements that the state has ...  now some smaller towns if you applied that, it would cover the whole town. In our town, just the way it's laid out, that there was about 30 percent of it that wasn't covered. It was kind of weird things, you know, corners of it.
    The question came then if you had a home, if you had a $200,000 house that you wanted to sell and this is on the radar screen now for young families moving to Dyersville, and I asked you how does you house sit vis--vis the sex offender restriction laws and you said, well, it's 200 feet outside of the restriction. So that meant that a registered sex offender could move in next to you tomorrow and we couldn't say anything about it. Well, is that fair to you as a property owner that we have elected to discount your property because of a thing that we've done here? Potentially devalue your property by the way we've set up this thing.
    I do think that that thing is on the radar screen for people that move into a house, that they would at least ask where your property is vis--vis that. I said what I perceive here, because of the way our town is laid out and because of the fact that we do not have any registered sex offenders living in the city at this point, that if we ban them from the city limits, that we would preventing a problem that we really don't have right now, hopefully, or at least you prevent them from living here.
    I mean we never guarantee that nothing would happen. You can't guarantee that. Then the other thing is we were fair to all the property owners. We were not saying well, you're in, you're out and your property is more valuable or less valuable.
    I guess that group agreed with me. We drafted an ordinance. The other thing we did when we read the ordinance, we went out and tried to solicit public opinion on this thing. We didn't hide it. Surprisingly, we didn't get much response to that. Nobody really said yes, that's a great thing or no, that's a bad thing. We had a couple of people that were a little bit apprehensive about it from what it did to the offenders; is this a slippery slope deal? But the council people, other than one who's not on the council anymore, voted for it.
    TH: How likely is it that anybody is going to raise their hand and say, "Well, I really think this isyou ought to show concern for the sex offenders"?
    JH: Right.
    TH: They are the lowest of the low.
    JH: Well, that's right. The crimes, if you describe the crimes associated with that, I mean, they're so horrible that you can't say, well, I think this guy deserves a nice house in a nice town. One of the council members framed it as, you know, by doing that, they forfeited their right to live in the city of Dyersville, which I thought was kind of interesting. So we passed that.
    We were kind of surprised at the reaction. We didn't think it was that big a deal out here. Your newspaper kind of went apoplectic on it. The sheriff was not for it. The county attorney was not for it. We thought many times should we answer your concerns about it and I think we elected just to let it sit.
    I would tell you that we've had several towns our size ask for a copy of the ordinance. I don't that anybody has passed an outright ban on them like we have. But they've severely restricted it. But that's the story.
    TH: Do you have any evidence that these restrictions actually make children safer?
    JH: No. And I don't think we ever said that. I think that's maybe one thing that was maybe misunderstood or maybe just kind of read into that, that if we could do this, if we could restrict convicted sex offenders from living in the city, that we would guarantee the safety of people against those crimes. Now, I would say that if you play the percentages, I mean if you were 99 percent safe before, you're 991/2 percent safe now. I would say certainly on a percentage basis, you'd have to say that you might be safer. But completely safe, no. One thing that it did is it kind of put it on the radar screen that people need to be vigilant about that.
    TH: What challenges do you see ahead for the city?
    JH: Well, I think you're going to have a continuing funding problem. I just don't see the state of Iowa stepping back to the point where they were giving you as much money as they used to. In a town like ours, we're lucky from the standpoint that we haven't got like a water system that needs millions of dollars to get it back up to snuff. We just need to kind of keep doing our thing and be on this program to replace your city equipment, the pick-up trucks, the street sweeper and the fire trucks and that type of thing. If we can hold our head above water doing that, we'll be OK.
    I think that also down the road that you're going to see some survivors and not survivors in city government, small cities. I think our intention here is to make sure that Dyersville is a survivor and maybe a hub city type of thing. We're positioned to do that. Population growth. I think that Iowa is going to be continually challenged by that loss of young people. We have a lot of them that don't come back to Dyersville. I wish we had more. But we seem like we're holding our own there because of what we have to offer people.
    TH: You were re-elected last November. It's a two-year term. Is it too soon to talk about 2007?
    JH: I think I'd like to do it for a little bit longer. I think there's a point that you come to and I think you come to it internally, where you can kind of tell that maybe you need some new ideas and some fresh faces; that your time has kind of passed. I would say that I'm probably at least one election cycle away from that. I probably plan to run again. I like to campaign. Running unopposed was not much fun because (at the candidate forum) nobody asked me any questions. I just kind of had to sit there. The council seats we had were all contested, so that's where people thought the action was.
    TH: Just raise taxes a bunch.
    JH: That's right. That's one thing. You can term-limit yourself on this job real easy in this town. Real easy and real fast.