Politics & Government

Q&A: Marion City Manager Lon Pluckhahn. Part One, The Challenge of Keeping Ahead of Growth

City Manager Lon Pluckhahn sat down for an interview with Marion Patch to address some issues that could be discussed in the near future in Marion. In Part One, we discuss how the city is managing its growing population.


Marion City Manager Lon Pluckhahn sat down with Marion Patch recently for an interview on the state of the city, projects the city is looking at, and what challenges it can expect to face in the near future.

Editor's Note: The following is an edited and abridged version of the interview. 

Marion Patch: As broadly or as specifically as you want to get, what are some of the issues that are facing Marion right now?

City Manager Lon Pluckhahn: Well there's always the challenge of keeping up with your infrastrucutre and services. The city receives funding from the state in the form of a road use tax and that helps keep our roads up to date, but because Marion is a fast growing community, and we keep adding roads, and adding roads, and we don't have additional money to help cover that.

In between censuses it can get pretty tight. We are looking at having a special census done somewhere in the 2015 time horizon. We're working with the U.S. Census Bureau on that now to get it scheduled and figure out exactly how much it is going to cost.

Find out what's happening in Marionwith free, real-time updates from Patch.

Marion Patch: So is that to just try to give you a picture of how many people are in Marion?

Pluckhahn:  It would be a certified census, just like the 2010 one, but it would be an update of that so it would accurately reflect what our current population is. Marion has been a fast growing community for quite awhile, and because of that, it does present us with the opportunity to do another census and to capture more revenue than we would have otherwise.

Marion Patch: What is the nature of the growth? Where is it happening and why do you believe it's happening?

Find out what's happening in Marionwith free, real-time updates from Patch.

Pluckhahn: We've been growing actually in both directions. There's been a lot of residential growth to the south, and then some to the north and some to the east.

A lot of the reason for the growth I think has to do with the attractiveness of our school systems, the city also has a very low crime rate. That's appealing, and a combination of those things really has made us a destination community for a lot of people. 

Marion Patch: It's of course better to be growing as a city than the opposite, but when I listen to a lot of the debates at the city council it appears that the city may not have been designed for the population that it is growing toward. Is that one of the things that you're trying to do, to grow the infrastructure to meet the population you're seeing?

Pluckhahn: One of the things that has been a challenge for us is that our traffic capacity meets the traffic demands that are out there right now. We've really put a lot of effort in the last couple of years into trying to get ahead of growth, and to build a lot of these roads and transportation improvements before it starts to grow up around them. 

We've had cases where we've had to go back and try to real build a road and add capacity while it's under traffic, which is always more complicated to do instead of building it before everything has grown up all around it.

Marion Patch: When it becomes a tangled mess and all that.

Pluckhahn: Yeah, and that's why you've seen we've put a lot of emphasis on getting a lot of these major road connections built over the last couple of years.

We've done some other reconstructions to help the existing roads operate more smoothly as well, but a lot of our emphasis has been on making more north south, east west connections-- filling out the grid, as it were.

Marion Patch: Marion of course has that nice uptown area that people identify it with, but obviously that's not the entire town. How do you see the character of Marion changing with all of this growth? What is it growing into, or becoming?

Pluckhahn: Marion does have a real sense of identification with the Uptown area and in specific areas of town.

One of the challenges for the city as a government incorporation, is a lot of the times people tend to identify very strongly with one school district or another, and if you identify with the school district you're not necessarily as in engaged in the community at large.

So it's our challenge to make sure that we have that broader view of Marion, not just as a segment of Linn-Mar or Marion Independent or what havey ou, but as in Marion the community. We have to do a lot of outreach for that, to make sure we have good representation on our boards and commissions, for example.

As far as what Marion is becoming, Marion for a long time has been considered sort of the residential suburb of the Cedar Rapids metro area. But we're getting large enough now that we're developing enough interest and pressure to develop and even bigger commercial core. Our population is sufficient now to support more commercial business in Marion, where people don't necessarily have to go to other communities to get the stuff that they need. 

Tune in tomorrow for more from this interview with City Manager Pluckhahn, including big city projects the city is planning.


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