What should I know about Lincoln?
A lot of people will talk about Lincoln as
having been the fastest-growing [small]
city in America. It went from 10,000 to
40,000 people in the span of 10 years [2000-
2010]. When a community experiences
that amount of growth at that pace, it’s
impossible to keep up. It’s really difficult to
build the systems within the city organi-
zation that are necessary to accommodate
a community that’s growing that quickly.
It’s also difficult to develop the infrastruc-
ture that’s needed. Over the past five years,
Lincoln has been growing at a very healthy
and stable rate of about 1.6 percent annu-
ally. We are about to experience another
housing boom; there are several hundred
units ready to be constructed in the Twelve
Bridges area.
What’s great about Lincoln — it’s a
historic downtown with a traditional
grid street pattern, but it’s also a suburban
community that’s growing. The city will
accommodate a build-out population of
approximately 100,000-120,000 people [by
2050]. But the general plan that’s guiding
that growth is very mindful of preserv-
ing the traditional and historic downtown
and making that the city center. The res-
idential development as it’s occurring is
being done with both a mind toward con-
necting to downtown, but also preserving
the magnificent open space out here. The
other part of Lincoln that’s growing and
changing is the workforce. This tradition-
ally has been a community where people
lived and slept, and then drove someplace
else to work. Our job growth is increasing
significantly. Some of the projects we’ve
been working on in terms of economic
development have yielded over 1,000 new
jobs over the past four or so years.
What kinds of jobs and in what sectors?
In the industrial-employment sector, there
are a number of projects we’ve complet-
ed over the last few years. One is a carpet
recycling company that chose to locate in
Lincoln, called Circular Polymers. This
company, which started with about five
When new owners come in [to
downtown], they come in with new
investment, new ideas about what to do
with the properties and, quite frankly, a
lot of motivation.”
employees when they came to Lincoln
in 2016, is now about 30 employees, and
they are poised for significant growth.
Another company called TransPak is a
global crating, packing, logistics compa-
ny, primarily to the technology industry
— they are based in Silicon Valley. They
acquired a company called Cases Plus that
was formed in Lincoln in the early ’90s. …
TransPak bought that company and oper-
ates [it] here, but they are now also doing
their traditional crating and packaging
work here in Lincoln. They’ve expand-
ed almost threefold from 25,000 square
feet to about 75,000 square feet and went
from about 20 employees to 55 employ-
ees. These are production/processing jobs.
Another company called GC Products has
an operation in Lincoln — they make con-
struction products for custom interiors for
mostly commercial applications. They had
another business they started in Reno, ex-
pecting they would relocate their Lincoln
operation to Reno, because the conven-
tional wisdom at the time was Nevada was
lower cost, lower regulation, a better place
to operate. After five years in business in
Nevada, they realized it was not what they
had expected it to be, and they relocated
their Reno operation to California. They
took about 25,000 square feet of industrial
space and expanded their workforce from
about 20 to about 45.
What about Lincoln attracted these
companies?
A big part of their decision to remain or
expand here was the ability to retain their
workforce and grow their workforce. One
For an extended interview
with Shawn Tillman, visit
www.comstocksmag.com.
April 2019 | comstocksmag.com
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