McAlister

CEDAR FALLS — Retired longtime Cedar Falls City Administrator Richard “Dick” McAlister, a Marshalltown native and Class of 1971 MHS graduate, was recently honored with a Grow Cedar Valley Legacy Award for his efforts to boost development in the bustling college town about an hour northeast of where he grew up.

In a video accompanying the award, Cedar Falls Utilities (CFU) General Manager Susan Abernathy remarked that McAlister has played a part in “nearly everything this community has accomplished in the last 50 years,” specifically highlighting his role in facilitating the Cedar Falls Industrial Park, which started on just 120 acres and has expanded exponentially since then.

“It’s hard to look at anything in our community that doesn’t have his fingerprints on it in some way,” she said.

Other major projects he had a hand in include the library and community center, the recreation center, Walter’s Ridge Golf Course, the Falls Aquatic Center and numerous street improvements in coordination with the Iowa Department of Transportation (IDOT).

“I cannot think of anyone more deserving of the Legacy Award in the Cedar Valley than Dick McAlister,” Abernathy said.

McAlister, who graduated from Iowa State University with a degree in urban planning, first arrived in Cedar Falls in 1975 as a city planner and ended up spending his entire 43-year professional career employed with the city before retiring in 2018. In 1988, he was named the city’s director of administrative services, and in 1998, his title was changed formally changed to city administrator.

“I was fortunate enough to be involved in a lot of big projects. Sometimes, it’s all just about timing. When cities start to grow, they start to need certain things like rec centers and pools and city hall expansions and those kinds of things, so I was involved in a lot of public-type projects,” he said. “Probably the biggest one was the creation of our industrial park that came around in the mid ’80s.”

He recalled Cedar Falls Utilities gifting the initial land for the industrial park about two miles south of the UNI campus and planning a grand opening on a Saturday with plans to give the land away to a company willing to invest in creating jobs and growing the tax base.

“And nobody showed up,” he said with a laugh. “I thought at that stage, ‘OK, this career’s done,’ but fortunately, things picked back up a little after the middle of the ’80s and John Deere did a lot of outsourcing, so that industrial park filled up really quick. And we’ve probably added four, five, six additions to it since then, so that was probably one of the biggest projects in terms of creating a tax base and jobs.”

Today, the park covers about six square miles and includes large employers like a Target distribution center, and it is still expanding to the west of Hudson Road. McAlister also played a key role in routing the major highways that run through Cedar Falls to create a connection making the industrial park even more attractive.

“When we’ve had success in this metropolitan area, it’s when we’ve put aside turf. It’s when we’ve put aside differences of opinion on things that really aren’t related to the project itself, but when we all sat down together and said ‘Let’s accomplish this goal,'” he said in the video accompanying his award.

McAlister has stayed connected to Marshalltown through the years — his mother Patricia passed away in February just a month shy of her 99th birthday — and told the T-R he even considered applying for the city manager job here before opting against it.

“Marshalltown’s still a great city. When I grew up there, it was a great education system. They had some big industries there with Fisher and Lennox. Those are still there, so it’s a good city to grow up in,” he said.

And while he’s humbled to receive the recognition from Grow Cedar Valley, McAlister was quick to credit the employees he worked alongside as well as mayors and city council members to bring so many of the aforementioned projects to fruition.

“And fortunately, the projects were successful, so it’s kind of a team effort and I was just there at the right time, I think,” he said.

These days, McAlister serves on the CFU Board of Trustees, and he noted that Cedar Falls was one of the first cities in America to create its own fiber optic communications utility back in 1994, which helped to draw businesses to town and continues to serve as a point of pride.