“But we’re mindful of the fact that we’re going to err on the side of safety as we’re still in this mess,” he said.

In late July, Rockwell City will be a pass-through meeting town for cyclists doing RAGBRAI on their way to Fort Dodge.

Calhoun County Expo will be in Rockwell City July 7-11. Sweet Corn Days, Rockwell City’s largest celebration, will be back on Aug. 7, Heinlen said.

Rockwell City will also host its Live on the Square concert series again this summer, featuring “really good local talent,” Heinlen said.

The largest infrastructure project the city has undertaken recently is an $8 million new sewer treatment plant, Heinlen said. Construction on the project has started, but the bulk of the work is going to be done in the springtime after the ground thaws, he said.

“They’re hoping to have it done in the fall of 2021 and have it operational before we go into winter,” he said.

The past year has also brought a new partnership between Rockwell City and another Calhoun County town.

“We’re running Rockwell City water out to our neighbors out at Twin Lakes,” Heinlen said. “They’ve got a water supply problem and the DNR mandated that they do something, so they came to us and we’re going to run Rockwell City water out there.”

He said the city’s water line is also branching out to the truck stop at the junction of Iowa Highway 4 and U.S. Highway 20.

The new water lines won’t bring any new revenue to the city for now, but Heinlen said it could become a revenue source in the future. But most importantly, the people of Rockwell City won’t be affected by the water partnership, he said.

“It’s not going to hurt our residents,” Heinlen said. “We didn’t want them to suffer anything because of this project.”

The water line is mostly completed, the mayor said, adding that he expects Twin Lakes to connect to it within the next month or two.

In 2020, Rockwell City also completed a road reconstruction project on Brower Street near South Central Calhoun Elementary School. B & S Tiling, of Lake City, was awarded the $520,000 contract in April to give a facelift to two blocks of Brower Street, between Lake Street and Court Street. The project also included about 200 feet of Main Street going west from Brower Street.

This project was years in the making, Heinlen told The Messenger in April.

“We’ve been planning on doing the project for a few years now; we’ve had it on our radar,” he said.

But a few years ago, when a school bond passed for a project at South Central Calhoun Elementary School, which is located along this stretch of Brower Street, the City Council decided to hold off on the road update. Heinlen said the council knew that the school construction project would bring heavy trucks with very heavy loads onto the road, adding more stress to the pavement, so it decided to wait a year or two.

“The street was getting very badly deteriorated and then when they started hauling those heavy loads across it, it really got deteriorated, so we’re glad we waited,” he said.

The city council approved a $625,000 general obligation bond in June to fund the reconstruction project.

Visitors to town may notice some construction around the city square, Heinlen said. Some investors have purchased a few of the buildings that have been empty for a while and are in the process of renovating them back to the original look of the buildings, he said.

“We’re kind of running out of empty buildings on the square now,” he said. “That’s the good news.”