MV’s infrastructure moving forward
Missouri Valley Mayor, “It’s getting there”
By Don Harrold, Executive Editor
editor@enterprisepub.com
Missouri Valley Mayor Roger Marshall sees a city with infrastructure needs and room for growth that is moving forward.
“I’m upbeat about the whole town because I’ve lived here my whole life,” Marshall said. “And things that people see that I see maybe don’t realize that it’s a good thing.”
Asked about residents’ top issues, Marshall first pointed to water bills. “Probably the water bills,” he said. The city is working to correct billing problems. Asked whether it appeared to be a “handshake issue between one billing system and another,” Marshall said yes.
“I think so. Yeah. That’s what we’re basing everything on anyway,” Marshall said. “And our staff’s been working their butts off trying to get this situated, and I understand people are frustrated. I just hope that people will understand, and most do, and not take it out on our staff, you know? It’s not their fault.”
Marshall said he spoke that morning with the city’s billing clerk. “I mean, she’s got a list of things she’s going through, and she just goes through them as it comes up, and she’s doing a good job,” he said.
Marshall also discussed proposed Erie Street rezoning as part of the city’s future. “That’s another thing that, to me, is kind of exciting,” he said. “Yes, we’re gonna rezone pretty much the whole corridor. Business, which does not take away from the residential. You can still have a house. You can still have an apartment building. With this, you can have multi-housing units, which we need, but you can also — we’re looking long term.”
Marshall’s long-term vision for downtown includes less truck traffic. “Oh, definitely,” he said.
Marshall said truck traffic’s biggest effect on downtown businesses may be pedestrian traffic. “I don’t know that it hurts business that much other than pedestrian traffic,” he said. “You know, you can stand and wait for a long time to get across the street if you’re walking.”
He said the bypass could also change how people feel downtown. “As far as parking, you know, you can park and there’s room to open your door, but it’ll be so much nicer to be able to open your car door and not have to worry about a semi running by,” he said. “And I just think it will help local people feel better about being downtown. And hopefully, we’ll get more business, you know, in turn, and everything will work out that way.”
Another issue is finishing the city’s fire hall. “We have an issue with the fire hall getting finished,” Marshall said. “And that’s another deal that’s pretty exciting. I mean, we’ve got a brand-new addition to our fire hall, but we haven’t had an open house for it yet because there’s still some things that need fixed.”
Marshall said city projects take time. “Government’s slow,” he said. “I don’t care what form of government you’re working with. It’s slow.”
An archaeological survey delayed planned work on Fourth and Seventh streets. “We were gonna completely redo Fourth Street and Seventh Street this year, but the government got in the way, and we had to get an archaeological survey, which took time, and it’s done, but now it’s too late to get that done this year,” Marshall said.
Asked whether spring 2027 is the likely timeframe, Marshall said, “Yeah.”
Marshall said he also wishes the work could happen now. “Oh, I wish it would too,” he said. “We all wish it would. Nobody’s, you know — none of us in local government, we’re not trying to put things off like that. We want it done just as much as anybody, maybe more. But, you know, you want free money, which this archaeological survey is tied to a grant for the water, you gotta jump through the hoops.”
Asked what is going well in Missouri Valley, Marshall pointed to the town overall. “I’m upbeat about the whole town because I’ve lived here my whole life,” he said. “And things that people see that I see maybe don’t realize that it’s a good thing.”
He pointed to street and water infrastructure. “These streets, we all know they need redone. We’re gonna get them done,” Marshall said. “If you look, we’ve done — and we, I mean the city, before me — been replacing the streets as we go along, and we’ve got some nice concrete streets now. And when we did that, we put in new water mains along there, so that type of thing. We’re working toward our infrastructure. We got a long ways to go, but it’s getting there. It’s just gonna take time.”
Asked whether Missouri Valley should remain a small town or grow while maintaining its small-town feel, Marshall said, “That’s hard to say. I think it’s maybe both, you know, 50/50 on that.”
Growth has geographical challenges. “Years ago, we tried to annex a bunch of ground to the north,” Marshall said. “And that was voted down. The only way we can really grow is to annex. Our problem is, to the west, it’s all floodplain.”
Marshall said land west of town has development possibilities, particularly with the bypass. “I mean, it can be used,” he said. “Obviously, there’s businesses out there, and there’ll be more, I hope, when the bypass goes through. We’ve got possibilities for expanding that area out there.”
Marshall also wants Missouri Valley to expand east. “But I wanna go to the east also, expand out that way,” Marshall said. “I don’t know if we can get that done or not, but expansion would be good. We need more housing. We need more business.”
Marshall cited recent business openings. “We’ve got two new businesses just opened last week, and that’s great,” he said. “We got a new restaurant that opened a couple weeks ago. That’s great.”
On social media, Marshall said, “I like that we can post notices for things that’s happening in the city,” he said. “I don’t like things that get posted about the city, about our employees, that are false or inflammatory. I just — you know, the problem with Facebook is you can put anything on there you want. People read it, people believe it, and there might not be a word of truth to it.”
Marshall said the city stopped Facebook comments because employees spent too much time correcting posts. “We cut out comments on the city’s Facebook page because our staff was spending too much time going on there and correcting things that were posted,” he said.
“So, let’s just stop it.”
