The City of GO!

“Our motto is: The City of GO!!!” was how Mayor Don Hagaman explained the many progressive projects that I saw when I toured Galva, IL (population 2,758) with he and City Administrator David Dyer on Thursday. This northwest Illinois town is not sitting still, waiting for things to happen to it. They have very proactively gone out and helped to create economic development activities themselves.

“We did our own city subdivision to get more new houses built. The first house was built in 1998 and now the subdivision is full. There was a lot of skepticism when the city first did that project.”

Justin West, a factory worker at Mitsubishi Motors in Normal always dreamed of having his own drive-in movie theater. He read about how progressive Galva was towards entrepreneurs, came up to visit and worked out a deal with the city to build the first, if not only double screen drive-in in the USA built for several decades. “They show two double features on Friday, Saturday and Sunday evenings. It holds 250 cars and has been full several weekends. It only costs $5/person to get in, popcorn is $2 and drinks are $2 with refills at half price. It is a great bargain,” Mayor Hagaman told me as we toured the drive-in.

A group of coops and grain elevators in the region wanted to do a unit train loading facility on the BN mainline to take advantage of very favorable shipping rates. They approached Galva, which went to work assembling the land by trading tracts with local farmers to assemble 160 acres in a single plot. The new Lincolnland Rail facility can load out 110 car unit trains (4.4 million bushels/unit train), but more importantly it now offers Galva a wonderful new industrial park. The town is studying biodiesel, ethanol and other possible synergistic businesses. I wouldn’t have expected less from them, after I saw what a “city of GO!” could accomplish.