Nick Dehner stood before the Muscatine City Council on May 12, 2026, with plans for a new building. Dehner, director of manufacturing for Musco Lighting‘s operations in Muscatine, Iowa, described a 94,000-square-foot fabrication and warehouse building for the company’s Stewart Road plant, and he told the council, “All of our welding will happen in an air-conditioned environment… It’s going to be such a dramatic improvement.”
According to Voice of Muscatine, the $17 million expansion is expected to create 25 jobs over several years, and the climate-controlled building will handle the last stage of Musco’s fabrication process. “We are looking forward and seeing growth ahead,” Dehner said. “This planned expansion represents our continued commitment to the community.”
That commitment runs back half a century. Musco is headquartered in Oskaloosa, about 90 miles west, but the Business Record reports that “Muscatine serves as the company’s primary high-volume manufacturing facility.”
Photo Courtesy Musco Lighting
Joe Crookham, a young lawyer, met Myron Gordin, an engineer planning a small hand tools business, in February 1968. In 1976, the partners bought Muscatine Lighting Manufacturing Co. with the intention to help the struggling company remain part of the community for good.
Six years later, the company took a gamble. Musco debuted its truck-mounted Musco Light system on Sept. 18, 1982, at Notre Dame Stadium for a nationally televised night game between Notre Dame and Michigan. “It was a risk because it was gonna cost a lot of money to manufacture the trucks, but it certainly paid off because it led to a lot of additional interest into what we can do,” Beth Danowsky, Musco’s community development manager, told KCRG. The system has since lit presidential inaugurations and every “A Capitol Fourth” concert since 1986.
The company also learned to keep its light where it belongs. Danowsky told KCRG that Musco’s early floodlight-style fixture drew neighbor complaints on a field in Boulder, Colorado, and that the company has since focused on “figuring out how to get all of the lighting on the field and away from neighborhoods or roads where it could be a distraction or hazard.” Musco says it has helped more than 100 sports facilities adopt responsible lighting practices through its partnership with DarkSky International.
Today, Musco makes lighting for Little League fields, stadiums, and racetracks, as well as transportation customers including airports, rail yards, ports, and shipping terminals. In December 2025, the company announced that Des Moines-based Insane Impact, a mobile LED screen and video wall company with nearly 100 employees, would join Musco. CEO Jeff Rogers described, “This builds on our team’s 50-year journey of responding to market and project requests for products and services that enhance the experience surrounding youth sports.” In June 2026, Musco was also named Official Sport Presentation and Broadcast Lighting Provider for the LA28 Olympic and Paralympic Games.
Youth fields remain the company’s largest line of work. In 1992, Little League Baseball and Softball asked Musco about lighting a regional tournament site, and Musco says safety initiatives from that partnership “provided the basis for an enduring partnership that has led not only to better game nights for millions of young athletes—but also to safety initiatives that have helped reduce injuries to players, spectators, and volunteers by 80 percent.” With U.S. Soccer, Musco committed to designing and building 500 mini-pitches nationwide ahead of the 2026 World Cup.
Photo Courtesy Musco Lighting
In 2014, Burlington’s Bracewell Stadium became the first high school stadium in the country with LED lighting. In West Des Moines, a Youth Sports Equity Grant from Musco and the National Recreation and Park Association funded an accessible mini-pitch for Can Play, an Iowa adaptive sports nonprofit. “The mini-pitch gives kids a safer and more inclusive outdoor space to enjoy a wide variety of sports and activities,” said Can Play founder Melissa Clarke-Wharff.
Musco lit the original Field of Dreams movie more than 30 years ago and returned to light the Major League Baseball stadium in Dyersville. At Casey’s Center, which Musco describes as Iowa’s largest indoor arena, 192 LED fixtures light the playing surface of the 17,000-seat venue. In Muscatine, the company fitted LED fixtures to the existing poles at Kent Stein Park, which draws about 100,000 visitors a year. The company reports the upgrade cut energy use by 56% to 81%, depending on the field, compared with metal halide lights.
At the Iowa 80 Truckstop in Walcott, billed as the world’s largest truck stop, Musco says its LED system uses 61% less energy than the metal halide lights it replaced, cutting costs and reducing the carbon footprint. In Des Moines, the company supplied 231 LED luminaires for the Iowa Department of Transportation’s Northeast Mixmaster interchange, which carries more than 150,000 vehicles a day.
Video Courtesy Musco Lighting
The 2026 expansion follows an earlier one. In June 2024, Musco opened a 28,000-square-foot pole manufacturing and aluminum fabrication building north of its main Muscatine factory. “We’ve been a part of Muscatine for almost 50 years,” Vice President of Manufacturing Nick Smith said at the time. “This investment in the community and our team sets us up for continued growth and future opportunities.” Construction was scheduled to start in June 2026, with completion expected in summer 2027.
Musco has invested in Oskaloosa as well, completing a 74,000-square-foot office renovation and expansion there in summer 2025. By September 2026, it had opened a 30,000-square-foot product testing building and announced a public green space, the Community Commons. Musco plans to open an 86,400-square-foot test dome there in early 2027.
Much of the growth needs welders, and Musco grows its own. “We’ve developed multiple welders in Muscatine,” Smith told the Business Record. “We’ve hired them while they were still in high school, worked with them part time until they graduated and then brought them on full time. That’s been very successful.”
Photo Courtesy Eastern Iowa Community College
In 2026, Musco earned an Iowa Top Workplace award from the Des Moines Register for the fourth consecutive year, based on employee feedback. “This recognition is especially meaningful because it comes directly from our team members,” said Musco President Shelly Herr.
In Muscatine, the city named its new 122,000-square-foot Musco Sports Center for the company, a major supporter of the project. City leaders reported more than 12,000 visitors by January 2026 after the center opened in late 2025.
For Musco CEO Jeff Rogers, the anniversary year is about what comes next. “Celebrating our 50th anniversary is a chance to reflect on where we’ve been and invest in where we’re going,” he said. In Muscatine, that next step is a climate-controlled building full of welders, expected to be finished in summer 2027.
Photo Courtesy Musco Lighting
