Hey everyone, I'm Sheila Jenkinson, you are listening to the Growing Small Town Nebraska podcast, where my co-host Marcie Sextro and I ask community leaders and business owners about their efforts in revitalizing the Cornhusker State. If you love your small town and you're looking for ways to make it even better, or maybe you're interested in what this revitalization movement may mean for you and your family, join us as we talk with small town Nebraskans making our state the definition of The Good Life.
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Good morning everyone. Today's podcast idea started with an article that I read online called: These Spunky Midwest Cities Show America How to do Winter. Valentine was one of the towns featured in the article, so we reached out to them; and today we're chatting with the mayor of Valentine, Kyle Arganbright, to not only discuss winter activities and tourism, but the revitalization projects that are making this town of a little over 2600 people, a strong Nebraska small town. Welcome to the podcast, Kyle.
Great, thanks for having me.
We're gonna jump right in to revitalization first, and talk about this huge project that you've had in the last couple of years of your main street revitalization. Because I found it really interesting that you had such a broad group of people that helped with it, from the Nebraska DOT to a UNL class, and of course, several community leaders, to get that project going.
Yeah, that Main Street project is probably an eight or nine year process. Our Main Street is actually US Highway 83, so it's a state highway. And the state highway system has one and six year road plans. And the one year plans are those that are funded in bid and then the six year like eventual, and we found that we were on the six year plan for, I think, 10 years. We found out it was it was the second oldest concrete in the state highway system. And we were just having kind of, you know, just deterioration as a result. And so we we got together with the Department of Roads, now the Department of Transportation, to help better define the timeline on the project, but also to redefine how you engage community through these processes. And part of that was engaging with the University of Nebraska Architecture College. We had a group of students come up to help us, you know, initially kind of lay out a process and some ideas for this main street revitalization and that also led to a grant from the Citizens Institute of Rural Design, which is under the National Endowment of the Arts. Long story short, we had a lot of different experts to help us but those experts were there to help the community have a conversation about what we wanted Main Street to look like. So it all culminated with, you know, after some surveys a bunch of conversations we had about two days of meetings in Valentine with all of the designers and all of the engineers and all the stakeholders and collaboratively defined what our downtown was going to look like from bone structure. That process... that construction project actually is 90% completed, we'll call it effectively completed, they did it just this last year, Nebraska's newest Main Street will be open here this as soon as the snow melts.
Awesome. And I'm hoping we're going to have some pictures on our Facebook page of that. Kyle is going to send me some so that but I also saw that there is a main street Facebook page for Valentine. So you can see like all of the different process of them ripping up your street, your Main Street, and putting everything in. So that was very interesting as well.
Yeah. And it was the final product is really using the best practices from everywhere around the country. So we did do like putting some trees that are native to the areas and grasses were putting in the sculpture walk across Nebraska, there's going to be a handful of sculpture, art pieces, on Main Street, we've got a historic main street walking tour, keyed up, we need to execute that. And once this is done, it'll tell the history on every single lot on Main Street and some wayfinding signs. So we're doing all of this but this is just building the place and so we've got to activate it. And so we're, we're now transitioning into, you know, some more entrepreneurship support, business transition support and building kind of an arts culture in town.
It's going to be really exciting to see that. So, I have a funny story about Mainstreet Valentine. I grew up going camping there almost every summer two to three times a summer my dad in fact at some point was a fishing and hunting guide for at Lake Merritt, and so you know, from the time I was little to preteen to teenage years...okay, so picture that...we had friends that lived right off of Main Street in Valentine the Davenports. And our parents were going out, they were good friends. So they were gonna go out and eat. And they left me and a friend of mine from that area, she and I were there. And they said, Now girls, you just stay on this block, don't be wandering around Main Street Valentine. And so we did, but we like walked up and down that block in front of that house. We, of course, met some boys. And so they come back from dining and those boys had their car parked in this alley. And they were like, hiding there. And pretty soon that friend of ours says, Okay, boys, I think it's time for you to go now. So we hadn't fooled anybody. But that's my main street Valentine story. Definitely a soft spot in my heart for Valentine. So it's exciting to see that. So yeah, from going from like the oldest to the newest Main Street. That's, that's cool.
Yeah, it is.
Yeah, I'll tell you with the community conversation to get consensus on this, trees were a four letter word for part of this process. But in the end, we took a vote amongst the stakeholders. And it was...there was no one opposed. That was that was at the meeting. And there were 80 or 90 people from Main Street stakeholders there.
Yeah, that's what it takes. It really takes your community coming together to make those kinds of changes. That's a huge change. You also have a community college campus in Valentine, which is a project that you guys have been working on as well tell us a little bit about that.
Yeah, we built that probably five or six years ago. So we're part of the mid plains Community College region and you know, a little I think a little community envy is good. We always drive through Broken Bow, they had this beautiful mid plains community college campus and humid Plains campus. And Valentine was, you know, an 800 foot office attached to a another office. So we identified it as a need just because Valentine's very rural and access to higher education was difficult. So in conjunction with our sales tax renewals, the sales tax is how we fund a lot of these things. The LB40 portion goes for property tax relief, a portion for infrastructure, and a portion for these projects in economic development. And so we we worked on a partnership with mid plains and said, Hey, if we contribute a big portion of a new building, will you guys, house it and operate it? And, they said sure. So we put it to the voters and the sales tax was renewed, I think we owe like, over 80%. And I think that midplain campus, which we put a million dollars into was approved, I think with 82%. Since we've done that, Valentine's extended campus has gone from the lowest number of total students and total credit hours in the midplain system of Extended Campuses to the highest. So our high school kids are graduating with 20 to 30 hours of college credit. In fact, I think there's a girl that spring that will likely graduate with her associate's degree as she graduates high school. That has been great for workforce development for just retraining and recruiting, particularly during the pandemic when there were a lot of just changes going on. So it's been a phenomenal project for education, an excellent investment for communities.
Absolutely...along with having fiber going to different homes. That's been a big issue in the Sandhills region for a long time is not being able to have the internet as accessible as it is in some other areas of the state. So are you seeing that kind of changing in your area more and more now?
Yeah. So when pandemic hit, all of a sudden, everybody's internet froze up, because people were trying to work from home and do school from home. And we knew it was bad anyway. And we were working on different solutions and ended up doing another public private partnership with Allo. Allo started in Imperial and kind of small town roots. They're now in several states, and we did fibre to the premises. So every building and balance and has fiber to it and is 10 GIG capable. So it's got some future proofing to it. But it's funny with, with community projects and processes. Sometimes there's not like a finish line. You know, so you'll, you're just kind of always chasing your tail or trying to do better. But with fiber, there's a there's a finish line. If you get fiber to the home, people stopped talking about it, you know.
So what we've seen, though, the impact is there's been savings to businesses, for sure, that needed Higher, higher bandwidth internet, but we've also had a lot of remote workers here. So I took a little Facebook survey a couple of months ago, just to see and we have over 25 people working remote in Valentine and two thirds of them have moved to Valentine since the pandemic.
Oh, great.
So we haven't had a business start that has produced 25 jobs in a decade or so. So to compare it, it's been a huge economic boost when people can choose, you know, a little bit more of where they live and still kind of maintain their job.
Yeah that's huge.
Yeah, we've got to get rural Nebraska blanketed with with fiber, and we're getting closer.
Great. Great. So you have a population of a little bit over 2600 people. Are you finding, I see that you have some infill housing. Can you tell us about that? And kind of like I know you have a new project coming up as well about housing. What are you seeing in that area in your region?
Housing is tough. When you get out of the cities and off the interstate, it gets more expensive to build. We're getting creative with it, private developer came in and did a 15 unit affordable housing complex. It'll open here this next summer, but we found that we were running out of lots. So buildable lots add curb and gutter and had utilities, it just didn't. So luckily, the city had 40 acres adjacent to the east side of town right across from the high school right across from the hospital. So really good location. And a couple of about three years ago, we started working with the University again on this process on this project to figure out two things, one, how we can build more affordably. So are there construction methods that like or construction materials that might help achieve more efficiently built homes in rural Nebraska specifically Valenitine? And then the second one is how do we lay out this 40 acres in a neighborhood design that is that is attractive, and and really befitting of the Sandhills, because people that live out here really are here for a reason. But also how, how can we do this as affordably as possible? So keep the utility cost price per watt down as low as possible. So that's all culminated and we've got a final design, and we're just working to get infrastructure to that lot right now. But eventually, it could house 140 to 150 units. I think, as of last calculation,
Will they be single dwelling homes, are they going to be more of an apartment kind of thing?
Everything, everything. So we've got room for apartments, duplexes, townhomes, custom homes and everything in between.
Oh, that's awesome.
We wanted to make sure that depending on how Valentine's population changed over the next generation, we could accommodate whatever those needs were with without building lots that didn't fit that.
Oh, great.
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We are back again with Kyle Arganbright, and we are going to talk tourism. Valentine and Cherry County have just a tremendous amount of wonderful tourism items to see. So we're going to talk about, first of all, we talked a little bit about your main street revitalization and the lighting, but people may not understand how important your choice in lighting downtown really was for your designation as an IDA dark sky park, and then the annual Nebraska star party that you have.
Yeah, so we've been, you know, city council created a policy probably seven or eight years ago where any new light that the city puts up is dark sky compliant. Now we don't regulate private homes and stuff like that, at this point, knowing that this dark sky designation could be possible down the road. So that was just achieved recently. You know, the star party comes out with telescopes larger than I knew they made them and people from literally all over the world. Because it's one of the darkest places in the world to view stars. And every year I think they find a new star or something else unique up there. It's interesting what can become tourism, you just got to kind of look around at what the natural assets are and try to try to protect and enhance them.
It's such a great area for things like that. And then of course you have the waterfalls you have where people go canoeing and tubing. I don't know how many times I've tubed down the Niagara River up there, starting at Valentine. So yeah, it just adds to the whole experience as people come and visit and bring their families year after year.
Yeah, you know, we've been we've been working to diversify our tourism a little bit. In many cases, we were a one trick pony for for the early years. You know tubing and canoeing popped up on the Niobrara and, you know, it achieved Wild and Scenic status. So it was kind of protected and infrastructure popped up around that with a lot of Outfitters. It became a pretty short season, you know, maybe kind of mid June to mid August when when families were going back to school. And so here we had a ton of infrastructure you know, hotels and restaurants and other people catering to tourists and we had this tourist season kind of become a little shorter than it maybe was to begin with some interesting things have happened. We've had, you know, the dark sky and star watching or stargazing party, and we've had golf courses pop up. Probably 12 or 13 years ago, the prairie club came and built a golf course. And there's two 18 hole golf courses. They're both designed by world renowned golf course designers. We did a public golf course because we didn't have a community golf course in Valentine. And that was back with the sales tax renewal and midplain Community College, I think the golf course funds passed by like about 78%. So we built that and Tom Layman who designed one of the courses, the Prairie club, helped design it on behalf of the city, and that's been a phenomenal asset. And then we had a new course open called CapRock Ranch, which was named best new course in the country last year. So we have this new tourism industry of golf that spread our tour season. So they'll open in mid May, and they'll close early October. And then it rolls right into hunting season. So now we're just trying to figure out how to fill some gaps in the winter. So a little bit more so that we can have more of a year round tourist economy, which just helps keep things a little more distinct, a little more stable.
Yeah, one of the things they showcased in that article was the winter bison tours at Golden prairie bison. So I thought that was an interesting thing. Can you tell us a little bit about that?
Yeah, you know, I've not been on that. My neighbor's ranch has bison nd and I get to tour that sometimes when they get out on the road, but they've got bison at the refuge. But there are some ranchers around that will do some you know, agritourism, eco eco tourism. So there's opportunities to get out there and see that a lot of ice fishing that goes on we have Valentine National Wildlife Refuge, which is like 15 miles south of town and Merritt dam, which we've already discussed, and we have people from all over the place come and come and ice fishing. I guess the only problem with ice fishing is is you don't know when the ice is gonna set and you don't know when it's gonna leave? Yeah, it's a flex season for sure.
So you talked briefly earlier about sculpture walk? Can you just expand a little bit more on that?
Yeah, so Norfolk and Grand Island, I don't know which one started, so I'll give them both credit. They created what's called sculpture walk across Nebraska. And so they've created a system where communities can can join the sculpture walk and identify the number of sculptures that they want. So I think we're doing four or five this year in Valentine. And it's $1,000 per sculpture per year. And then on the other side, they've found a bunch of sculpture artists who will either build sculptures or proposed sculptures, and then the communities have kind of a lottery so to speak, to decide which sculptures they get. And so once they're selected, they come, I believe, in typically April or May, and then they'll stay, you know, through the end of fall. And the sculptures are then for sale. So imagine being a sculpture artist, it's probably tough to find galleries to take a lot of big sculptures. Well, these sit outside and people see them. So if they sell, the community gets a portion of those proceeds. So the theory is that it will kind of overtime if the sculpture sells they'll fund itself, which is, which is kind of neat. But there's a lot of I mean, primarily Nebraska based sculpture artists, and we're working to get some more sculpture artists involved from Valentine, but also from the Rosebud Indian Reservation, which is just nine miles north of us and fantastic community and a very artistic community. So see what kind of art we end up with.
Yeah, that's a great collaboration area. And that's such wonderful things that you have going on in Valentine. We really encourage everybody to put you on the list for being able to do a fun summer trip to that area. We just really appreciate you coming on today, Kyle and giving us all kinds of information that's helpful for small towns, but also all the great tourism ideas.
Well, you bet. And we, we there's a lot of tourism we haven't talked about we've got a brewery, we've got a winery, and we've got a vinegary. We've got great restaurants, probably some of the best restaurants in the state.
I agree
A lot of trails. So you know, I think you can go to Valentine and spend three or four days and do something different every day.
Absolutely. We're looking forward to hearing more about it as well as visiting ourselves.
Yes,
I have not been there now for a few years, sadly. So Kyle, we do have one final question for you. Why do you like living in a small town?
You know, I grew up in Valentine. And when I left high school, I thought I thought I was gonna go to the city lights and I lived in a lot of different places and I just kept looking for something that felt that felt like Valentine and I couldn't find it and you know, I think a lot of a lot of it's just the community, the relationships that you can build with people you know, by by working together on projects by living together or living near each other. You know, having a lot of just different connections and multiple connections in small towns makes it really unique. But the other part is the closeness with nature and agriculture is it's just very real in small towns. And that's something I appreciate. And I think it really affects the quality of life in, in many of these rural communities.
So that was a wonderful interview with Kyle, I really appreciate it.
Yeah, I feel like you know, as we do this, we like to keep it at a certain time, but there's always so much to find out about these communities. So we're just gonna keep exploring them all.
Yeah, it's gonna be wonderful. We are excited, because May 10th, we would like you to put on your calendar, if you would like to attend an open house that we're going to be having to celebrate the podcast. We will have it May 10th, here at the Intersect Co-working Space, and it will start at 10am.
Well, kind of. So it's going to be a really fun day for us because we're going to start that morning at 9am. And present for 1 Million Cups Norfolk, so we do invite you to come to that. It's something neat for you to see anyway, and maybe you want to get involved past that day. And then we have our Norfolk Area Chamber ribbon cutting, this is all taking place at intersect co working office space. And then we're gonna go right into our open house. And we'll have that through about one o'clock that afternoon. So looking forward to some cake and some fun times and some munchies and meeting all of you.
Yes, that'll be wonderful. So we really hope that you can attend mark it down on your calendars may 10 for the open house for the podcast.
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