Jim Heavens

Dyersville Mayor

ADDITIONAL CONVERSATION

TH: Do you consider yourself a political type of person?

JH: Well, I've always had kind of an interest in politics, but not to the point where you'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. I mean, you have politics in corporations. And somebody who has had 28 years of experience well, then it was 26 - in corporate life, that maybe I could add something to this mix. So I put my name in the ring and won. Then the last election, I was unopposed

TH: In terms of holding the mayor's position, what do you know now that you didn't know then, once you got elected?

JH: (laugh) You mean, what kind of comes with the job that you don't expect? 

TH: Yeah. What 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 guess 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. Now I'm from a little town in Illinois that's about the same size as Dyersville. When I grew up there, I knew everybody. 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. I think that certainly when you come to a situation that's a troubled situation, if you can come there with a lot of experience and an open mind is the best way to approach some of those things.

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: Well, the thing is that on the positive side of that, I inherited the city from Mayor Gibbs in good shape, 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. As kind of a management trainee, I was trained as a technical person. 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 screamingwell, 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. No. We have a lot of good friends. We had five good years in Charles City. We met a lot of friends there that we still keep in contact with and watch our families grow.

TH: Getting back to city government, you mentioned some of the projects that you have going. The Streetscape is pretty well wrapped up.

JH: Pretty well wrapped up, not entirely. We've still got some issues left with that. 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. I guess 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.

TH: Where do the schools fit into that picture?

JH: As far as what?

TH: Availability, public education. I mean, Dyersville is one of the larger Iowa communities

JH: What I tell people is that if you want to move to this community, we have an excellent education system. I mean, if you look at anything you measure things by, drop-out rates and college graduations, attendance figures. I don't know, 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, I guess, and I mean that from a positive sense, whether to build more education, public education in Dyersville. I would say that as an observer, I think that that has kind of died down in the last couple of years. I think there's a lot of reasons for that. I think that it is very costly. 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. And I think the other thing is that you've got something that we all have to contend with here is declining enrollmen t. 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, I guess that 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 anybody prospective, industry or resident.

TH: This Field of Dreams phenomena. Did anybody in town really envision this Field of Dreams thing carrying on, how many years? JH Fifteen, 16 years, 17?

TH: In '89, that movie came out. To what degree is that still fueling some of the image and the visibility for Dyersville? Do you see that just continuing?

JH: Well, I think, again, 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. When I take people out to the Field of Dreams, sometimes you'll have people from the city or relatives and friends that will come through and they want to run out to the Field of Dreams. 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. When ESPN decided to pick a spot to come to Iowa for a sports site, they picked Dyersville, Iowa, and the Field of Dreams. I don't think it's going to die. I think it's been a pleasant surprise. It's certainly done well for the town. It's brought a lot of money into town.

TH: Over the years, on the employment front, we've seen a decline with Ertl and then Racing Champions. Where is that particular 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 bit on it and it seemed to turn out, I think, quite well.

TH: It looks great. I see on your backgrounder that you go to some League of Cities-types of meetings and so on. 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, the people that have been through here. I think somebody that's in city government kind of recognizes that. When you do farm work like I do, you can kind of tell what's going on at the farm in five minutes when you walk on there. I think if you're in city government, you can go to another city and drive around a little bit and find out in five minutes what's happening there. Nobody has to tell you. So, 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: From your perspective, where you have to balance budgets and justify the taxes and make all that work, to what degree is the state helping or hurting small and mid-sized Iowa communities?

JH: Let's see how I want to say this and not offend anybody.

TH: Oh, come on.

JH: I would say the state has not helped our situation. Maybe that's the way to say it. In the last three years, if you look at what the city got from what we call consolidated payments from the state - which would be anything from bank franchise fees to just a myriad of things that they would kind of rebate or give back to the cities - we're down $320,000 a year on that program.

TH: Where would that be, roughly as a percent?

JH: Maybe 20 percent would be my guess. As I look back on the books and how this city used to operate, I think the way we used to operate here in Dyersville is that they took in the money that they took in from local taxes and used that to operate on. They took the money that they got from the consolidated payments and kind of saved that up so when it came time to do the Streetscape, and that took $1.5 million, they could pay cash for that because they had that money that was a surplus. Just a surplus almost in the general fund. When it came time to remodel City Hall, they had some money that they had saved up and they could pay cash for this project. Now I think those days are kind of over with. I think it takes all we can muster here locally just to keep the bills paid. We are not in a lot of debt here, but we do have some debt service we have to contend with. My vision of the thing right now is that it takes all we can muster here just to keep the bills paid. Now, I would say what happened at the stat e is that they lost a lot of revenue from a lot of different sources, were reluctant to raise taxes - I mean, they really haven't raised taxes - and they have kind of pushed that down on the cities and pushed it down on the school districts and pushed it down on the counties and said, "Hey, we haven't got the money, you solve it." I think that every community is probably approaching that a little bit different. We probably wouldn't approach that the same way or couldn't the same way Dubuque could. But Dubuque has done an excellent job. And they're faced with the same thing. I think it's harder on a town our size than it is on a town Dubuque's size, I think, to contend with that type of thing.

TH: Well in a Dubuque, you can spread it out farther.

JH: Right. You've got more option that you can use to kind of make that shortfall up. Where here, what we've had to do is just tighten our belt down such that we try to do a break-in budget out here and just wait events. Now the one thing we have going for us, that we're kind of counting on, is that we put on a lot of new assessable property in the last two years. You know, we're well over $16 million here in what we've added. I think we've got about 45 or 46 new houses that we've put up here in town. Now the problem with that is that it does take 18 months for that to go from when you've actually got a hole in the ground to when the city gets taxes in the checkbook from it. So hopefully our revenues next year will show enough increase from our taxable valuation that maybe we can start to wiggle a little bit.

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 were speaking of basically of the fiscal health, I mean Dyersville fiscally was in good shape. 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. Mick (Michel, city administrator) and I were just discussing that a little bit before you came. One of the things that happens in the city is that you have like 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 wat er 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 on sewer?

JH: Well, when you look at it as a percent basis, and this was brought up at the council meeting the other night, I believe it's about 50 percent on the water and about 70 percent on the sewer. But when you look at it on a dollar basis, it goes from $2.10 a month on the water to $3.

TH: So, $12 a year.

JH: On the water. It'll be more than that when you add them up. 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: So, the rates were probably artificially low previously.

JH: Right. Well, see, that's what we elected to do. Remember, I was telling you that they kind of took their money and they kind of saved that up. Well, one of the things I think that they did was is that the kind of subsidized those enterprises because it was nice to have cheap water and cheap sewer. As long as you have money in the general fund, you had kind of a surplus anyway. You could kind of artificially keep those low. Well, I think the council has decided, and I think wisely so, that we don't have that money anymore and we really can't subsidize those business-like activities out of general fund revenue. The good part is no tax increase. The bad part is that the water and sewer rates are going to go up. The good news there, I guess, is that they're not really way out of line, they're kind of in the middle of where our neighbors are at.

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. I mean, we have kind of a program where we replace five fire hydrants every year. Some of them were back at the turn of the century they don't make parts for. We try to do that. We try to keep up with those programs. If you can do five fire hydrants a year, you should be able to replace them in town about every 100 years. The same way, when you've got a town that's this old, you've got some parts of the water system that are pretty old. We're trying to upgrade those and loop those such that when you hook a new water tower up to it, it doesn't just all come out through the grou nd. So that's kind of one of the reasons, too. 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 particular view on that issue?

JH: I would say for good or bad, it was probably my idea. I'll tell you how that came about. 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 and we discussed what we should do. 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 that came up 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 3 0 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. What came out of that meeting was, and I guess I told the city administrator and the police chief and the council members, I said what I perce ive 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, 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. We said, hey, here it is, this is what it means, that nobody can live in the city limits of Dyersville if you're a convicted sex offender over 21 years old, which means you can't move here. We said, hey, public, what do you think? Is this what you want? Are we out of line here? Is this a good thing? 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: That's the low 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. One of the things that is kind of curious about it from the standpoint of the ACLU challenging it, since there's nobody in here that is a sex offender, they have to have somebody that's affected negatively by that to bring a case. I don't know, I think that would be hard to do. I think they've elected to put their efforts not on the city ordinances, but on the state level to try and do something there if they want to. I would tell you that we've had several towns our size ask for a copy of the ordinance. Guttenberg, the closest one to us. Oelwein has done some more restrictive things. 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. Again, we were surprised that it generated that much interest. That it went national. For us, it was just kind of a natural thing for us to do.

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. I don't think anybody has ever said that. 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. I think that one thing that it did is it kind of put it on the radar screen that people need to be vigilant about that. Now, even though you live in a town like Dyersville, Iowa, with a sex offender restriction, does that mean you can go to sleep on that thing and assume that things will be well? No. I think our people are very vigilant here aboutpeople here are very strong family people and they watch each other's kids. They do kind of intervene a little bit more.

TH: Changing the subject, what challenges do you see ahead then for the city? What's on the list?

JH: Well, I think you're going to have a continuing funding problem. I think from the state level, 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. I think that 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 repair it and 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, why 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 hav e 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: What do you like to do in your spare time or have your mayoral duties sort of become your spare time?

JH: Well, you know, that's true. I had to take a day's vacation off to do this. I can get some of my yard work done. But we have enjoyed the kids' athletic events. We like to do that. I'd like to travel a little bit more, read all the books I didn't get a chance to read when I was too busy to do it. But you know, I have a full-time job and my employer makes sure that I'm well occupied there, too. It's a job I like. I mean, I enjoy working for U.S. Feeds. The time has gone really quickly and I enjoy working with farmers. I just don't have a lot of spare time right now. I'm a very poor golfer. I learned too late and I have no natural athletic ability. I like to go out on the river once in awhile. I don't have a boat but I kind of mooch a ride from people time to time. I don't have a lot of time for hobbies at this point. Which is fine. I think when you're our age, this is probably the more productive years of your life and hopefully, if I live long enough, I'll have some time for hobbies and stuff.

TH: You were re-elected last November. It's a two-year term. So, is it too soon to talk about 2007?

JH: Well, I don't know. I think I'd like to do it for a little bit longer. Maybe I can answer that this way. I think there's a point that you come to and I think you come to it internally, at least I think I will, 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. At this point, I don't think I'm planning not to. It's kind of fun. I like to campaign. Running unopposed was not much fun because (at the candidates forums) 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 whole 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. ?? ??