AFG “has designated Lamoni, Iowa as a premier location to develop technical e-solutions to common rural problems that can be upscaled to the state level and beyond.”
Agile Fractal Grid Has Plans for Lamoni
By Bill Morain
Lamoni Chronicle
Most residents of Lamoni have been aware of numerous visits by a prestigious company, Agile Fractal Grid/Tech-You-Topia, over the past year to work with local leaders in evaluating the city’s broad-based needs with an eye to solving problems. The company has designated Lamoni as a premier location to develop technical e-solutions to common rural problems that could be upscaled to the state level and beyond.
Dr. Ronald Toll, Vice President for Community Relations, has summarized the company’s current perspective on how this cooperative venture could benefit Lamoni, Decatur County, and ultimately to rural America at large. His summary follows:
With hard work, strategic planning, and careful investment, Lamoni/ Decatur County has bootstrapped its own economic development. Success is reflected in the addition of new companies (Zoomers, Freedom Racing), a new motel (Cobblestone Inn) and improvements to the I35, Exit 4 interchange. Further, employers and residents of Lamoni/Decatur County benefit from gigabit speed, fiberoptic connectivity to 99.6% of all businesses and residences.
Lamoni is now ready and able to take a transformational leap forward that will result in our community becoming a cutting edge, platform empowered, economic development center that supports multiple and varied services and business opportunities. This change will establish the City of Lamoni as nothing less than one of the most powerful edge computing IoT platform-based, digital marketplace communities in the United States.
To achieve this vision of our future, The City of Lamoni should develop a relationship with a value enterprise partner to establish itself as a rural, national model with the goal of achieving the following outcomes:
1) Expand the existing fiber network through the deployment of 5G broadband;
2) Establish a high-tech, high-touch, entrepreneurship and innovation development facility, the Lamoni Tech-You-Topia Center, to be housed in a downtown building;
3) Designate a Lamoni Entrepreneurship District, with a size of approximately 3 square blocks, in the downtown area immediately surrounding the Lamoni Tech-You-Center;
4) Identify an investment partner to support the renovation of selected buildings within the Lamoni Entrepreneurship, along with the razing of blighted structures;
5) Develop partnerships with national telecommunication, edge computing, and platform based companies with a goal of establishing the following outcomes:
a) Establishing a comprehensive E911 system to improve response time and quality;
b) Support creation of new businesses, especially platform-based (Zoomers is essentially a platform company, as is Freedom Racing);
c) Expand the current ‘industrial park’ to be a true industrial center/distribution center;
d) Stabilize and then expand the tax base by creating jobs to retain current citizens and incentivize immigration to expand the population of the City;
e) Deploy the infrastructure necessary to establish a precision/smart farming infrastructure
f) Develop a unified community portal (website) to centralize the dissemination of information, support marketing of the community to outside constituencies, and create broad-based citizen engagement