Taylor Kathol Vice President
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If the last year has shown anything, it’s that Vermillion has a track record for being noticed. The big news is that Vermillion was named the best small-town arts scene in the country in a USA Today People’s Choice contest. This is only the most recent recognition. In the last year, Vermillion was featured in the Smithsonian Magazine as one of the best small towns to visit in the U.S., The Bluffs Golf Course was featured as one of the top 5 golf courses in South Dakota, and the world-renowned National Music Museum was recognized for being one of the best immersive music experiences in the world,
listed among attractions found in Liverpool, Barcelona, Las Vegas, and Paris. We’re being noticed, and for good reason. Vermillion has a lot to offer, both to tourists and the people who call it home.
The VCDC continues to work on housing. In 2024, we sold 16 lots at Bliss Pointe and built a 9-unit apartment. City Council approved the first private developer’s Tax Increment Financing for North 42 across from Ace Hardware, paving the way for much needed additional 35 housing units in Vermillion. A total of 45 housing lots will be coming on-line at the Jack Powell Addition and Jolley Addition in 2025. Currently, the VCDC is working with the city on two larger multi-family projects, for which we hope to break ground this summer. Housing is important to attract new businesses, retain graduates, to assist in expanding current businesses and to bring Vermillionaires back home.
Over the last few years, we have followed a path of member growth and retention. In 2024, membership grew 14%. We retained over 92% of our members, resulting in an increase of membership to 372 members - a new record total! Currently, we’re sitting at 380 members, fast approaching a new milestone of 400.
We’ve been expanding our efforts
to collaborate with the county and our surrounding communities. Collaborating in a historic first, the VCDC led a small-town summit inviting partners from Yankton, Gayville, Centerville, Irene, and Wakonda to grow the region. These towns have citizens that spend dollars and work in Vermillion.
The VCDC is also working with county officials to bring Southeast Farmers Co-op to Clay County. Agriculture is very important to South Dakota and the Vermillion area. Working with Clay-Union Farm Bureau, we’ll again be hosting an ag tour and a harvest celebration later this year.
We believe the VCDC is the heart of the Vermillion area’s business community, and we are proud of the work we do. That said, we wouldn't have anything to work for if not for the people of Vermillion. All of these achievements happen because of you: our members, our citizens, and our community! As we move forward, let’s continue to build new paths of success.
VCDC President & CEO
I want to express my gratitude to all our donors for Grow Vermillion. Because of your contributions, the VCDC raised $2,047,648 for the Vermillion area, smashing our original $1.5 million goal. And because we carried out the campaign in-house, utilizing grassroots volunteers, VCDC board members, and VCDC staff to design materials and make asks, we completed Grow Vermillion at a lower cost than any of our previous campaigns.
Thank you, from the bottom of my heart, to everyone who contributed to Grow Vermillion (monetarily
or otherwise) for an amazing capital campaign.
The money raised for Grow Vermillion will be used for housing development, workforce and talent recruitment, and community enhancements. We’re making strategic investments in new and existing business properties around town. Manufacturing, service, healthcare, and education are our big priorities for growth, and we’re expanding our efforts to develop the working population and increase accessibility to childcare.
We also have a significant amount earmarked for improving quality of life, supporting cultural events, and creating public amenities. This last tenet of the campaign is especially important because, in addition to creating housing and employment opportunities, we also want to build a community where people want to live. Already, we’ve contributed funds to the development of new pickleball and tennis courts in Cotton Park, a project that’s been years in the making. We broke ground on the courts at the beginning of May, and they’re slated to be completed this summer.
The reason any of this is even possible is because the awesome people of the Vermillion area are united in their vision of a growing and prosperous community. We’re
lucky, because not every town has that—a committed, passionate, interested group of people that really knows how to get things done. Who are they? They’re business owners. They’re entrepreneurs. They’re Grow Vermillion donors. They’re professors at USD. They’re farmers. They’re city employees. They’re the staff of the VCDC. We have an incredible group of movers and shakers here in Vermillion, and I can’t wait to see what we build together in the coming months and years.
2024-2026 Board of Directors, Chair
grifolsplasma.com
Our second annual Downtown Trick-or-Treating event saw hundreds of costumed families descend on main street for candy and goodies. Tables lined the street from the Trunk-or-Treat at the Vermillion Public Library all the way to the Ratingen Platz. Businesses, nonprofits, and student organizations from USD all participated. New this year, trick-or-treaters could get their portraits taken by master photographer Aaron Packard at the No. 7 Center Gallery.
Agriculture is a huge part of life in our slice of the Midwest, so to thank our ag producers for all their hard work, we threw a party at the end of harvest season! Reid Jensen of the Clay-Union Farm Bureau spoke on the importance of agriculture both as a livelihood and as an economic driver, and Olson Sod Farms was honored with the Friend of Agriculture award for their work in improving southeast South Dakota.
Our biggest event of the year keeps getting better. The 9th Annual Standstill Parade of Lights saw the addition of a stage to the event, where, in addition to performances from VADO, Vermillion Community Theatre thespians performed songs from their then-upcoming musical take on A Christmas Carol. Vermillion NEXT hosted a soup bar to keep attendees toasty warm through the night, and WNAX 104.1 The Wolf showed up to cover the festivities live on radio. See you in December for the decennial parade!
Part of our mission at the VCDC is the economic development of the Vermillion area, and recently, we've been expanding our efforts beyond city limits and to neighboring towns like Wakonda, Irene, and Meckling. To this end, we hosted our first ever Small Town Summit, which helped connect leaders of small communities so that we can all work together.
We learned about funding opportunities, economic development strategies, and city development courses. Presenters included Jessica Meyers of Porchlight, Allison Larson of South Dakota Rural Development, and Jared Hybertson of Centerville Economic Development.
This year's Annual Celebration was a huge success, featuring speeches from community leaders on the arts, an appearance from Governor Larry Rhoden, and twenty-three brick award winners.
Congratulations to our award winners!
Community Leader OTY: Rachel Olson
Chamber Member OTY: Nick Slattery
Family-Owned Business OTY: Coffee Cup Travel Plaza
Spirit of Entrepreneurship: Mamacita's
Mayor's Award: Heidi & Blaine Schollerman
V-NEXT Young Professional OTY: Hanna DeLange
It seems like we're doing more and more ribbon cuttings every year, because we're up to fourteen since our last edition. We've cut the ribbon for Hočoka Indigenous Marketplace, Doc's Bar, the Boys & Girls Club, Mamacita's, Sanford Health Equip, Recharge Training, KVHT 106.3 (for our new McVicker Plaza Radio Studio!), Hello Ruby & Kasey Designs, Dunes Dermatology, The Nutrition Den, Murph's Appliance, All Done Up, and Ace Hardware's new Outdoor Power Showroom.
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The biggest event at The Bluffs Golf Course returns June 6–8. Hundreds of players from around the U.S. and internationally will join Vermillion locals to compete in the tournament. Highlights include the Ladies Pro-Am held in conjunction with the competition, the shootout at hole 10, tournament Calcutta, and community feed sponsored by the VCDC!
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Join the VCDC and South Dakota Farm Bureau for the 2025 Southeast Ag Tour on July 15. This year, our host sites are the SDSU Southeast Research Farm and Nutrien Ag Solutions, where guests will get a firsthand look at two operations vital to the agricultural sector of the region.
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Oktoberfest returns to Vermillion on September 26. Enjoy Wiener Schnitzel and local beer, assemble a team for the Bohemian Tractor Pull, dress up for the costume contest, try your hand at Hammerschlagen, and compete in the stein holding competition, all while enjoying polka music at the Ratingen Platz.
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As anyone in our office will tell you, I’m a pretty busy person. Between managing overall strategy, maintaining the website, taking/ editing/posting event pictures, designing graphics, producing publications, working with ad partners, and doing a thousand other little things, I have my hands full most of the time. If I take on a project outside of the normal universe of VCDC events, it must be important. That’s not to say that it’s rare for me to do so—quite the opposite—only that I have
to figure out what’s worth pursuing. Once in a while, though, an opportunity arises that’s just too good to pass up. That’s how it was with the Best Small-Town Arts Scene 10Best people’s choice contest. For the uninitiated, twenty towns under 30,000 people were in the running for the honor of Best Small-Town Arts Scene, each selected for their unique arts and cultural offerings relative to their size. Vermillion was chosen for its sculpture walk, public murals, community arts support, university
arts activities, and for being the home of the National Music Museum. Uniquely, voters get to cast one vote every 24 hours. I’m often asked whether the VCDC had any hand in getting Vermillion into the contest. I would that that were the case, but we never received any solicitation for entry. The towns on the ballot were all chosen by a panel of travel writers and entertainment journalists, which shows how notable Vermillion is in its own right. I didn’t even hear about the contest directly from USA Today, who hosts the 10Best awards—I found out when Shannon Cole, director of the Vermillion Cultural Association and steely-eyed steward of the arts, emailed me asking for help promoting it.
Tourism efforts are the great joy of my job. My favorite project is the annual Visitor’s Guide because I get to distill all the best things about Vermillion into one package. I love writing about the dining, recreation, and community events that make Vermillion so vivacious, and I love sifting through the thousands of photos we get every year to find the perfect shots to show off our town. The Visitor’s Guide is perhaps the single biggest project I do. It takes weeks of work writing and editing, sourcing pictures, designing
graphics, and doing layout, and even more time selling, obtaining, and placing ads. There is also considerable expense involved in printing thousands of guides and, upon request, mailing them around the country. The 10Best Awards nomination was a windfall. For once, someone outside of Vermillion wanted the world to know how great we are. And for free! All we had to do was get people to commit to voting every day until the contest closed.
The weeks following the announcement were spent getting out the vote any way we could. That meant social media posts every week, top placement in our Monday Messenger email newsletters, and, for me, shameless mentions of the contest on most of my phone calls. Over the days, Vermillion climbed the leaderboard. I was live on the KVHT Classic Hits Morning Show plugging away when we hit number
one, to the jubilation of everyone in the booth. When the online leaderboard disappeared for the final week of voting (a quirk of the contest engineered to stir anticipation for the results), we switched our messaging from “let’s get Vermillion to number one” to “keep Vermillion at number one so we can win this thing.” Because of the structure of the contest, winning doesn’t take popularity so much as it takes consistency. Sure, lots of people will vote once, but will they vote every day for four weeks? That’s what makes this win so special—it’s proof of Vermillionaires' dedication and community pride. We made this happen because we love our town. We made this happen together.
The effects of the award and our newfound notoriety are still in their early stages. I predict that we’ll start to feel them as we get into summer and observe greater attendance at events and foot traf-
fic in town, though it’ll take a while before we’re able to measure anything and track trends. Tourism spending especially can be a difficult number to calculate, which is why we look at hotel occupancy and Business Improvement District (BID) revenue collected by the City of Vermillion. For that reason, we’ll only be able to confidently speak to the effects of the award about a year from now.
On a final note, the ultimate tally remains a mystery, as USA Today’s 10Best doesn’t release that information. We’ll never know how much we won by, but if you ask me, I’m sure it wasn’t even close.
VCDC Comms. & Tourism Manager
SD (605) 670.2945
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Total Employment in clay county
Source: Federal Reserve Economic Data
average annual unemployment rate in Clay County
median household income in clay county & South Dakota
Source: US Census Bureau
Source: Federal Reserve Economic Data Note:
Source: City of Vermillion Annual Budget & Financial Report, Exhibit 4
Total Chamber Memberships
Source: Vermillion Area Chamber & Development Company
Chamber membership breakdown
Source: Vermillion Area Chamber & Development Company
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