Marshall County
The Roger Umbaugh Impact Investing Fund
A little history…
I’ve talked about my friend, Roger Umbaugh, a couple of times here. Roger was a past board member of on the Marshall County Community Foundation (MCCF). While on that board, he was also on the MCCF Investment Committee. When I joined the MCCF board, I also joined the MCCF Investment Committee.
One of Roger’s goals was to get MCCF into a better home. While the generosity of Key Bank was always appreciated, it was not always the best solution. On top of that, the Community Foundation had grown and needed more space than was available at Key Bank. When financing for the community pool project was under discussion, Roger found a way to finance it using New Market Tax Credits and to put MCCF in a position to facilitate this while also getting a new home as part of the deal.
Another of Roger’s goals was to see some of MCCF’s investment funds invested back into the community. He always thought it would serve two purposes… providing some income and doing good in the community. At the start, he didn’t know that there was a name for this: Impact Investing.
When the New Market Tax Credit project needed additional funding, Roger broached the subject of MCCF providing the funding gap as a loan. This resulted in $500k of Community Foundation funds be loaned to the project. This was a win-win for MCCF and project.
After Roger’s passing, I wanted to carry this forward for him. In his name, I championed designating the $500k as the start of an Impact Investing Fund. I also suggested that the fund be named the Roger Umbaugh Impact Investing Fund. The board voted to approve both measures. I have the feeling that this will be a draw to a different kind of donor for the Community Foundation. Another win-win.
This is still new. I have sat in on a seminar on Impact Investing. I have done a little research. There appears to be a lot of different ways we could approach this. At the last MCCF board meeting, I suggested that we should start this process by setting some goals which we’ll be doing in a future meeting. This seems to range from self-run scenarios to hands-off options where 95% of the heavy lifting is done using outside financial institutions.
So… I’m throwing this out here to see if there is any input from followers. This is your chance to add suggestions on how this new venture should be structured. Any ideas? Contact me by email (mail@easterdayconstruction.com) or feel free to use the comments.
More Stellar Signs
As I said in my previous post, I have been disappointed in the lost potential of the Stellar signs. At the time of that post, I hadn’t had the chance to see the signs in Bremen and Bourbon. I had the opportunity to see those signs the other day. While both of these seemed to be making better use of the opportunities and goals set for these signs, they are still under used.
Bremen is doing the best with use of it for town events. It had quite a few different local events listed, but there was still the ubiquitous Time & Date filler and “Welcome to Bremen”. Nothing was shown regarding the events outside of Bremen when I was there.
Bourbon wasn’t being used as much with the Time & Date filler prominent. Bourbon did make the move of including other local connections. They included screens with their town website address which I thought was an improvement and something the others should consider. (The sign was legible up close, but obviously not enough so for a picture.)
As I stated in the previous post, I realize there are limitations to the time municipal employees have to keep up with these things. Just this past week, I was please to see that Culver’s sign had shown some improvement, including advertising the “Paint Out” that was scheduled here this weekend. But events like the Paint Out should be showing up on all of these signs. The opportunity for cross-county tourism is a real one, plus the event would have been seen by travelers passing through those communities too. I’ll keep an eye on all of them for improvements. Time will tell. The opportunity is still there.
Stellar Signs – Wasted Potential
I drive by the “new” electronic sign at the corner of School Street and Hwy 10 in Culver every morning. I’m disappointed in the wasted potential. It is one of the Regional Message Boards that was proposed and funded through the Marshall County Stellar Region award. From the Marshall County Crossroads Stellar Strategic Action Plan (SIP) pg138: “This project recognizes the importance of marketing and communicating our regional work to the communities we live in, and recognizes the value in shaping our communities as destination places. By incorporating a consistent look and feel in the message boards, our rural communities will have one more method of marketing and communicating our regional plans by grouping them with local news and community events.” Yet, most of the time when I drive by the Culver sign, it is flashing the time & temperature or contains filler in the form of affirmations or admonishments to watch for school buses.
Culver has a plethora of events that could be promoted. If the sign were just used for the events on the Visitors Guide Magnet (See left), there would always be something of interest there. Travelers on the highway most likely know what day it is. If they’re not from Culver, they don’t know that the Gift of Warmth Film Festival was this past weekend. They don’t know that the Stories & Stones Cemetery Walk is coming in two weeks. They don’t know that Fall Fest is October 8th…
Granted, I don’t know how difficult this is to do. If it takes hours to put something up there, then that’s an issue, as most municipal staff has enough on their plate. So maybe the sign should point to the town’s website address, Facebook page or other source of local information. Though also from page 138 of the Stellar SIP: “This form of communication is especially important to those residents who are not actively engaged on social media.” While I am picking on Culver here, I do so because I see it daily. It’s not a Culver only problem. The signs in LaPaz suffer from the same wasted potential.
Another piece that is lacking is the Regional use of the signs. Again from page 138 of the Stellar SIP: “The electronic boards will also allow us opportunities to cross-promote our communities… Many of our communities no longer have a newspaper, and some have only weekly newspapers, so adding this communication tool would provide our citizens and visitors an important way to learn about what is going on locally in Marshall County.” Culver’s Lake Fest, Fall Fest and Holiday Hop should be appearing on our neighboring community signs. The Blueberry Festival and the Bremen Firemen’s Festival should be appearing on Culver’s sign.
This is not meant to be a bash on any of the groups involved. Marshall County Crossroads is doing many good things. It’s just a bit of frustration on the lack of follow-thru. Things like this, which have so much potential, often fall apart in the execution. I readily admit that I’m speaking from my understanding of initial goals, which may well have changed. I readily admit to not knowing the logistics of implementing messages for the signs. My criticism comes from the perception of lost opportunities that I see with the Culver sign on an almost daily basis.
So I tell my employees, don’t come to me with problems without including potential solutions… Here are my three quick suggestions:
- Define what each community wants their sign to say about them. I doubt the message will be “It’s 12:30pm.”
- Find the right person in each community to manage the signs. If there is not a municipal employee available or capable, cast the net further. A set of rules can be established by the municipality (should be done anyway) and let a trusted individual run with it.
- Explore ways to turn the cross-promotion over to Marshall County Tourism. I realize their mission is to bring in people from outside the community, but Culver’s sign was placed to be visible to people that are crossing the County on State Highways. Isn’t getting some of them to stop, the point? A side issue here is that when I went to the Marshall County Tourism Calendar, there are no events in September. REALLY!?! Not even the Blueberry Festival… So maybe this isn’t a good suggestion.
As usual, this is me basically talking to myself and my small cadre of Lurkers. If offered this task, I would take it on, but I’m not in the mood to publicly push it, since lately my efforts to help have been poorly received in Culver… and I don’t feel connected enough to take this on regionally without support. This is just another rant, getting something off my chest that has been bugging me.
LaPaz Commons has Started
LaPaz Commons is the LaPaz component of the Riverside Commons IHCDA LIHTC project we are currently constructing. The eight units in LaPaz were always slated to be the last to come under construction. In the last week, site work has begun in preparation for building construction this Fall.
LaPaz has a effluent sewer system, where each residence or business has a septic tank associated with their sewer line. Only the liquid effluent from the septic tank enters the municipal lines and is ferried on for treatment. Most of the LaPaz system is gravity collection, but then the final leg pumps it to the Bremen sewer plan for treatment.
As part of this project, the Town of LaPaz will be improving Troyer Street. We wanted to get the sewer taps in place prior to the street improvements, so as not to disturb the new street construction. If you look closely, you can see the green sewer pipes stubbed up showing where the connections are ready to hook-up to the new townhouses. The taps are complete, the septic tanks are set and we’re ready to roll!
Thomas Excavating has done this work and you can see where they also have the building pad prepared. Hundt Concrete will begin excavation on footings and frostwalls here as soon as they complete the last two buildings in Plymouth. We’re pushing on this to get everything out of the ground before winter. We hope to get paving placed as well. That would make the site much more navigable this winter. We’re hoping the Farmer’s Almanac is wrong, but best to prepare for the worst!
READI Applications
Last Summer the South Bend Elkhart Regional Partnership (SBERP), of which Marshall County is a part, announced their intention to go after READI grant dollars in much the same way they did with the Regional Cities Initiative a few years ago. Culver Sand Hill Farm was asked to participate as the developer for a project in Plymouth. Easterday Construction Co., Inc. would serve as General Contractor. This project was a small (13 unit) townhouse project on Water Street in Plymouth.
The READI program is being administered through the Indiana Economic Development Corporation and is modeled after the successful Regional Cities Initiative. The funding is designed to leverage State funds in order to bring in private funding on projects the region’s municipalities want to see move forward. It offers up to 20% READI dollars as a match against a minimum participation of 20% municipal participation and 60% private investment. This makes it difficult for larger public projects like parks, trails and social programs to move forward, where there would be no return on the private investment, but provides a great opportunity to meet other goals.
We were pleased that the City of Plymouth wanted to work with us on this and were happy to help, as it fit with Culver Sand Hill Farm’s continued housing efforts. While not a LIHTC project, such as The Paddocks and Riverside Commons, it was an effort to bring additional workforce housing to downtown Plymouth. This adds to Plymouth’s downtown revitalization and it would be within a block of River Park Square, the newly renovated Rees Theater, Wild Rose Moon and adjacent to downtown businesses. Thank you to Mayor Mark Senter and City Attorney, Sean Surrisi, for their vision and help moving this forward! I approached the Town of Culver to see if they wanted to do something similar. I was told that a straw pole of council members indicated there was interest and they would support our application. This came “last minute” and we spent most of a weekend putting an application together, so that Culver could benefit as well.
South Bend Elkhart Regional Partnership was successful in their bid, securing $50 Million dollars for the Region. That was great news. There’s been some confusion about how this would proceed, but both projects were included in the application, so were thought to be secure. There was back and forth at SBERP on whether other projects not in the original application could be considered. In the end, it was decided they would be considered, so that opened other opportunities. It’s still unclear whether projects in the initial application will be given more weight in considerations.
In Plymouth, Culver Sand Hill Farm has worked with the city to put together another application for an E-Hub. This is envisioned to be an entrepreneur incubator with spaces available to encourage new business starts. This project has been on Plymouth’s radar for years and this appeared to be a perfect opportunity to move it forward. This is an exciting opportunity for the city and should be a benefit to Marshall County as a whole.
In Culver, there has been a lot of false starts and back & forth on READI. Culver Sand Hill Farm continued to support the idea presented in the original application, while making some changes to make it better. As Culver’s partner in the Stellar applications, we were ready to step up and help again. We were the only ones from Culver to attend the mandatory information meeting in Argos and were encouraged by SBERP representatives to proceed.
Culver Crossroads created a READI subcommittee, only to disband it when Culver decided not to participate in READI. (We also discussed the possibility of an E-Hub project with Culver, but the committee had different goals in mind and we couldn’t arrive at a viable project.) In the last few weeks, Culver reversed course and decided to submit a housing project application with another, out-of-town, developer rather than proceed with us. Things happen. While disappointing, pushing it without support would be foolish.
Another partner in all these applications has been Brent Martin of SRKM Architecture. He provided the graphics included here and have helped advocate for these projects. Brent has been helpful in articulating a vision for the sites we’re considering.
We’re looking forward to helping Plymouth in their efforts. We should find out if our applications were successful sometime this Fall, making these 2023-2024 projects. Wish us and the City of Plymouth luck!
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