Civil Municipal - Feb 2024

District, the city also offers all sorts of sports and recreational programs for both children and adults. “We have about 1,500-2,000 participants in our programs annually,” Schaber says. “We also have a beautiful, 18-hole golf course that opened in 1992 (the St. Charles Golf Course). It’s been an asset for our community. It’s privately owned, but we partner with it for multiple events.And, of course,Whitewater State Park, about six miles to the north of us, has been an asset forever. We have a lot of visitors that come from Whitewater.” “Families are an important part of what makes St. Charles great” exclaimed Langholz. “The school district, which includes an elementary and high school, recently completed an $18,500,000 project to greatly enhance their facilities.” The city also has a childcare center that can accommodate more than 100 children. A BUSINESS-FRIENDLY CITY St. Charles is also uniquely situated for business development. It sits between two major traffic routes: I-90 to the south and State Hwy. 14 on the north side of town. In addition, State Hwy 74 runs north/south through its downtown core, which contains many historic buildings and businesses. “We have two traffic generators on each side of us and we’ve had a business corridor along Hwy. 14 for a long time, in addition to our downtown core,” Gastner notes. The story of how its newest economic engine, the Chattanooga Innovation Park, situated off I-90, came to be, speaks well of the city’s foresight and planning. “Back in 2009, in our downtown, we had a fire at a major manufacturer (North Star Foods, a poultry processor), which was our largest employer and taxpayer at the time,” Gastner explains. “It destroyed their plant. In a matter of a couple of days, they went from a company that had just filed for a $3 million expansion to a company that didn’t exist.The community was faced with the question of: ‘What’s next for us?’The city administration explored opportunities with the company about a rebuild; we knew that downtown probably wasn’t the right spot to rebuild a major manufacturer, so we identified 80 CIVIL AND MUNICIPAL VOLUME 5, ISSUE 02