Consultant to help find tenants for ex-state facilities

The state has agreed to spend nearly $250,000 on a private consultant to help three communities find new tenants for institutions the state abandoned in recent years.

The Iowa Economic Development Board voted Friday to hire a national company, Matrix Design Group, to assist the towns of Toledo, Clarinda and Mount Pleasant. Gov. Terry Branstad closed a juvenile-detention facility in Toledo in 2014 in the wake of allegations that girls had been abused by staff. In 2015, Branstad ordered the closures of mental hospitals at Clarinda and Mount Pleasant, which he contends were outdated and inefficient.

The national consulting firm is to help officials in the three towns seek new tenants for the empty institutions. It also is to develop a “toolkit” for the economic development department to use in the future to help communities find new uses for vacant facilities.

The closures were controversial, partly because each cost the communities dozens of solid jobs. Democratic legislators and the state workers’ union sued Branstad over the closures. He prevailed in the suit focusing on the Toledo institution. The lawsuit involving the Clarinda and Mount Pleasant institutions is now before the Iowa Supreme Court.

The Clarinda mental hospital could be particularly tough to refill, because the southwest Iowa town is isolated and the main building is 128 years old.

"It really has been hard, just to watch all these people go out and staff lose their jobs and now we have this big building sitting here empty," Meredith Baker, an administrator who oversees the institute and an adjacent state prison, told the Associated Press recently.

The money for the consultant came from a federal community-development fund.