Mason City council approves goals, priorities for 2025 (VIDEO)

MASON CITY — The City Council in Mason City recently held a goal setting session to prepare for the 2025 calendar year.

Mayor Bill Schickel says after discussions with staff, the council set four key priorities for next year. Two of those priorities are the continued redevelopment of Southbridge Mall as well as promoting broad-based housing initiatives with a focus on increased owner-occupied development. “You know we’ve done so much with multi-family housing in the downtown area, but multi-family housing, really housing at all levels is important, so that’s one of the goals. The other obvious one is Southbridge Mall, to make sure we get that occupied and flourishing. We’ve had so much interest in there, the food court is looking good.”

The other items are conducting an assessment downtown to evaluate beautification as well as bike and pedestrian friendliness, with the other item being developing comprehensive marketing, communications and public relations strategy and promotion of existing assets.

Schickel says there was a separate session on the mall held recently and he feels 2025 will be a critical time for the mall.   “Really the next 12 months are going to be critical. We would like to see that place filled up within 12 months. I feel like we can do that. We’ve had a lot of people coming to us, expressing interest in what’s going on there. I think we’ll have several announcements regarding that soon. Yeah, we want to see that move forward sooner rather than later.”

The council at their meeting last night officially approved those priorities. Schickel discussed this as well as other topics during the “Ask the Mayor” podcast which you can watch below