Ben Lundgren, on KCSI this week, caught listeners up after a skipped month. The Red Oak native, who took over as MCDC executive director in August 2025, spent the visit on three threads: a revived county REAP committee, a Southwest Iowa Rural Summit in Oakland, and the organization’s newly adopted stance on economic development.
On August 29, Lundgren joined Tim Fridolph and Dave Carbaugh as Southwest Iowa delegates to the state REAP Congress at the Iowa Capitol. Resource Enhancement and Protection is authorized to receive up to $20 million a year. It has traditionally been funded at $12 million. Delegates voted to recommend the full $20 million, along with an extension of the program’s sunset clause. Legislators still have to act on those recommendations. Lundgren’s takeaway was practical: showing up raises the odds of hearing about programs in time to use them. “If you’re just not aware they exist, it’s as if they don’t exist.”
The Oakland summit closed with Debi Durham, director of the Iowa Economic Development Authority and the Iowa Finance Authority. She pressed for rural feedback, not only metro numbers, because that input shapes state incentive programs. The point that stuck with Lundgren was power. Durham was not talking only about data centers. Any large manufacturer or other high-load user can run into electric or natural gas infrastructure that is not there — and extending it is often expensive. Lundgren said that has changed how he looks at big commercial and industrial prospects. Power availability now comes first.
Durham also sketched the wider grid. Coal and natural gas still supply most electricity across the Midwest market Iowa sits in, with wind and solar a large share here. She flagged saturation and local opposition, and said she sees nuclear — including modular plants — as a bigger part of the mix in coming years. To put the scale in local terms, Lundgren estimated Montgomery County, served by MidAmerican Energy and Southwest Iowa Rural Electric Cooperative, at roughly 15 megawatts of continuous use and 20 to 30 megawatts at peak. A micro data center proposed with FMTC in Red Oak would be about one megawatt or less. Projects being discussed elsewhere in Iowa run from an estimated 10 megawatts to campuses in the hundreds.
That gap is why MCDC’s board asked for a position. The resolution it adopted does not name data centers. It calls for responsible ordinances that balance new development with the interests of people already here, and it leans against a blanket moratorium where ordinary regulation can do the job. Red Oak superintendent Ron Lorenz helped draft it. Lundgren and Lorenz summarized it for the Board of Supervisors in September and asked for openness to projects that make sense. A power outage the night before kept that meeting off the livestream.
Lundgren closed with the standing invitation: anyone looking to grow a business, or wanting to talk through any of this, can reach him at 712-621-8900 or at growmocoia.org
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