(Radio Iowa) – City officials in Glenwood are exploring the use of tax incentives to spur redevelopment of the Glenwood Resource Center campus. The state run institution that has provided residential care for people with profound disabilities is scheduled to close in 2024. State officials have suggested that Glenwood’s City Council designate the campus as an urban renewal district. It means property taxes in the area that would otherwide go to the city, county and school district COULD be used to finance infrastructure improvements. Laurie Mead Smothers is a member of Glenwood’s City Council.

“That doesn’t commit us to doing anything, it just makes that an urban renewal area for whatever’s to come up there in the future,” she says. The campus covers 380 acres. Mills County Economic Development Director Andrew Rainbolt say one idea is to develop multiple forms of housing on the site, given its proximity to Highway 34 and the Omaha-Council Bluffs metro.

“I think we’ll have some redevelopment of existing buildings. A lot of them were built as residential buildings and so hopefully we can redevelop those into some affordable and potentially some market-rate multi-family (housing),” he says. “Part of the campus is envisioned to be some high end estate housing.” Glenwood Superintendent Devin Embray says the school district hopes to take over the administrative building on the campus and convert it into an innovation center.

“We’re going to put in place Cyber Security, Robotics and Digital Mass Communications and hopefully Firefighter 1 and 2 in that program for the fall of 2024,” Embray says. “However, it sits on a centralized power plants and we would have to move it off the power plant in order to have it independent from the other buildings.”

There’s also an effort to convert other facilities into veterans housing.