by Darren Diekmann
news@thenewsleader.com
It has been a long time in the making, and much is left to do, but the emergent Benton Economic Partnership Inc. may soon be legally granted the status that the Inc. at the end of its title describes.
The Partnership received a Certificate of Incorporation from the Minnesota Secretary of State Office on Feb. 3, as an initial step toward that goal. The certificate enabled the organization’s attorney Craig Hanson to file the application for 501(c)(3), non-profit corporation, status with the IRS in February. Applications typically take five to six months for processing. That puts the eagerly-anticipated approval date in July or August, according to Benton County Administrator Montgomery Headley.
The confirmation is not a certainty, Headley said. But the partnership is fairly confident the IRS will decide in its favor.
The idea for the group started back in November 2014 when the county economic development consultant resigned. He had been committing about 10 hours a week to the job while working a full-time position elsewhere.
“The county board thought it was time to re-evaluate their economic program,” Headley said, “so we thought let’s ask people what they thought about our level of effort.”
The Benton County Board of Commissioners invited people from local governments, businesses and schools to a meeting to discuss the matter.
“It was a large meeting, and the consensus from all these folks was that a part-time effort really was not sufficient,” Headley said. “They thought Benton County needed a more aggressive economic-development effort. And that would best be achieved with a single entity, a one point of contact for economic development.”
It was thought this concentration of shared resources would be good for everybody.
“I think, too, there was an understanding that some of the smaller communities like Rice and Foley didn’t have their own capacity for economic development,” Headley said.
Even Sauk Rapids said its community development director really didn’t have the time to devote to aggressive economic development, given all his other duties, Headley noted.
The ideas at the meeting had been informed by other economic development groups in Morrison and Wright counties and St. Cloud.
But now the board took a closer look at these, especially Morrison County Community Development.
It is county-wide and has been operating for about 20 years with an impressive track record, Headley said.
The board met with Carol Anderson, the executive director. She described how the group was established, how it functions and how it’s funded.
“We were really impressed and thought it could be a good model for Benton County,” Headley said.
“In the spring of 2015 the board convened a work group from local governments and businesses to start creating an organization for Benton County,” Headley said. “Since that time this group has met almost monthly to begin the process of establishing this organization – drafting bylaws and articles of incorporation, raising funds and recruiting memberships and so on.”
It took nearly a year of monthly meetings before the group said they felt they had an organization that met the IRS criteria for a 501 (c)(3).