PERRY, Iowa — Just days after the last of the winter snow melted here last month, workers descended on the corner of Second Street and Otley Avenue. In a matter of weeks, they had finished installing water, electric and sewer lines for the Perry Career Academy, a campus of Des Moines Area Community College that will train 450 adults and high school students in the vocational arts.
The academy, a $3.1 million, 17,000-square-foot facility, will employ about 30 people in this city of 9,500 northwest of Des Moines, which like a lot of communities in the Midwest has been groping toward economic sustainability in the 21st century.
