The Hidden Costs of "Improving" This Minnesota Highway

Hey everybody, this is Chuck Marone. Welcome back to the Strong Towns podcast. This is going to be like a different kind of episode because I can't remember the last time I had someone live in the office, but OG Strong Towns guy, Matt Steele, used to live in Minneapolis, was a big part of getting Strongtown started in the early days. He Facebook messaged me to the point where I thought, are you going to lose your job, dude? And one of the few people who I've actually like, I'm not saying I convinced, but was like inspired to move up to the Brainerd Lakes area and lives up here with me. Matt, welcome to the Strongtowns podcast. Thanks. Yeah, it's good to be here. I don't feel like you've ever been on before, have you? Or were you in the early days? I don't think I have. I was a part of a few podcasts back in the day, but not actually the voice on the podcast. Okay, well, this is overdue then. You and me and Matthias and Jim and like there's a whole group of dudes here from Minnesota. Yeah, Nate, Nate, Nate Hood. Yeah, Nate's been on a few times, but he's kind of a performer. Indeed. He does comedy now. Yeah. No, I know. It's really good. Okay, we are sitting in my office today because you and I have come together over this crazy highway project that the state of Minnesota wants to do. I don't even know where we should start. I feel like maybe I could go back and talk about the bypass and then you should talk about this project. Does that sound like a good thing to do? That sounds good to me. Okay, so growing up when I was a kid, the North-South Highway through the city is 371. It would come right through the middle of the city. And then there's an East-West Highway, 210. And the North-South Highway runs, you can think of it as running, being an extension of a highway that runs from Minneapolis to like International Falls. That's not exactly right, but like it just goes, I live straight north of Minneapolis. but the interstate runs northwest so what this does is it veers off the interstate and just comes north and then keeps going north so it's a true north south highway the east west one is you can think of it as uh you know from duluth the shipping port of duluth um west to you know just like straight west to it you wind up in fargo but i think if you stay on 210 you end up like Waterton or something like that. You end up in like Southern North Dakota, I think is where you end up. But yeah, basically like how you get from Duluth to Fargo is you take this highway through my city. So when I was a kid, these two highways met in the middle of the city at the historic water tower. Like that was where they came in. We've got this water tower that looks like a castle turret. Is that the best way to describe it, Matt? You're not as enamored with it as I am. I mean, I grew up with it. Is it as historic as the Taco John's? No, I mean, it's a... Not in Strong Town's sense. No, I mean, that's definitely the prominent thing on the corner. And there's, I think, some flags on top in the summer. Yeah. And they've lit it up now. And they put like a Rapunzel hair on Halloween, which is kind of fun. Oh, yeah. So, yeah, that's our goofy landmark. Anyway, when I was a teenager, I worked at Rainbow Foods. I don't know if you know this or not, but at that intersection, there's that big building that's half occupied all the time that has like the pop old papa john's sign and all that and like they've gone out of business but there's a dollar store there is that building used to be a rainbow foods it was a grocery store in the downtown and that's where i worked in the summer pushing carts and like stocking shelves and stuff i remember being out in the parking lot pushing carts and the traffic was so backed up that the lights would turn green and nobody would move because there was just no place to go. Traffic was all backed up up to, you know, where 371 would then veer north and 210 would continue west and you would have what was the Paul Bunyan intersection. So there was this, you know, a cheesy amusement park that was there. Did you know that's where Paul Coles was where Paul Bunyan used to be? Yeah, I remember going there when I was a young kid. Do you really? Okay. When I was a kid again in that same like cart pushing era i was in a band and they would have a community night on sunday night and i was invited my band was paid to come and play for community night so i actually have a old video of my wife who was obviously my girlfriend my teenage girlfriend at the time walking on camera like we were up on stage and they were filming us and she walks like up the side of the stage on camera, like waves goodbye and like leaves my jacket, which I had lent her because it was chilly, left it there for me. And you know, she's a, she's a tiny little kid. And of course I'm a tiny little kid. It's kind of cool. But anyway, that's where Paul Bunyan was. So when I was a young engineer, so this would have been in the like late nineties, I was working for an engineering firm in Baxter and at that point they built this kind of long discussed long anticipated bypass of Brainerd so they went and highway 371 the north south highway instead of coming through town now veers off about what would you say three miles south of town it's quite a way south of town it veers off goes over the Mississippi River and then goes into the adjacent city of Baxter and then meets back up with 210 in a perpendicular intersection with a traffic signal, crosses the railroad tracks, hits a traffic signal, and then continues north to all the touristy areas and small towns north of Brainerd. I remember when we built that because I literally had an office where my cubicle had a window open to them building the bypass. I worked for an engineering firm that today is called Widseth. Back then it was Widseth Smith-Nolting. And right outside our door, like you could literally, like I could have thrown a baseball and hit a dump truck, you know, like they were, you know, out there working. I watched it be built. And then of course watched the Home Depot be built. And the Costco wasn't there. yet but the super walmart was going in and you know there was a bunch of places being built along the highway strip um but i remember that oh yeah man i remember when it all came in and you know we were the engineering firm for baxter the city of baxter and baxter was super excited because they were getting all this development they were getting all this investment they were getting all the Home Depot, the grocery store, a second grocery store, a Target, a super Target expanded, the Mills complex. So you've got Mills Fleet Farm, which is this, I don't know what you would call it, the farm and fleet kind of thing. You've got the Mills Auto Center. You've got the Mills Motors. You've got another Mills Motors. You've got all this real estate that for the city was this massive increase in their tax base, basically hitching on to the highway corridor as it went north, you know, and frontage roads and all that. You can think of all that. And I was part of building that. And I remember, and I've kind of said this before, so this is not like a confession of any type. I was really proud of building that. I remember when the Target came in and I'm like, my city is really growing. My town is really great. Like, this is awesome. We're becoming something, you know, instead of this like backwoods kind of place. We've got all this development. The Paul Bunyan Center went away and we got Kohl's. And I remember my niece, this was a family joke for a while because she's like, we got Kohl's. We've got everything now. And that was really like, you know, a reflection of what thinks her mom might have said who grew up here when it was the middle of nowhere. so all of a sudden you get this highway bypass and it's bam like instant suburban development up and down the highway in a way that as a local engineer at the time i was like broadly celebrating this is great growth and of course it solved the congestion problem in brainerd because now none of the north south traffic goes anywhere near brainerd the east west still runs through the middle of town at high speeds. But the east-west traffic from Duluth to Fargo is a lot less than from Minneapolis north. So now we're sitting here today, and maybe I'll stop talking and you can describe what is being proposed. Because we have this intersection of these two highways, the one that has significant traffic north-south and the one east-west that has lesser amounts of traffic, but still decent amounts, right? Sure. And the history is interesting because I do remember vacationing in this area as a child and sitting in downtown Brainerd and trying to get through and how that was just a nightmare. People celebrated when the bypass was opened. Yeah. Probably except for the business owners in downtown Brainerd. Well, that's an interesting thing to pause on because I think in part of the discussion that we're going to have is that there was mass, I mean, I was in high school, so I probably wasn't as closely tuned into it. But even for me, I remember this is going to kill Brainerd. This is going to destroy Brainerd. This is going to be the end of Brainerd. That was like the dialogue around it. And I mean, I think probably quite accurately in some ways. I mean, Rainbow Foods is gone. you've kind of gutted out the whole core of Brainerd. But anyway. Well, yeah, I know. And so that brings me to the Brainerd Baxter that I know. And so as you mentioned, I moved into the area up here. I came up here from Minneapolis about five years ago now. And I live about 20, 25 minutes east of where we are, about a half hour east of that intersection. I go through there all the time. It's just a standard four-way intersection with two stroads like you'd find in any large suburban area. Yeah. There's a railroad paralleling Highway 210, so that adds some complexity here, which is part of the story behind this current project. But, yeah, it's definitely the busiest intersection in the area, and I guess there's a lot of safety concerns that are driving this. Let me just say, as somebody who moved up here from the heart of Minneapolis, the idea that we have traffic up here, it's just laughable to me. I mean, I don't enjoy sitting in traffic like anybody else. and driving around all these lakes and everything, I feel so blessed to be able to live up here. And, you know, time spent in the car means a lot. It hits a lot differently than it did when we lived in the city and we're stuck on freeways. Yeah. It is funny because they labeled this in their grant application the busiest intersection in northern Minnesota. And I'm like, okay. I mean, that's a list, right? We're the busiest intersection between this and this and this. It's like, yeah, you probably are not the top 100 in the state of Minnesota. But if you look in this, like, you know, kind of more rural area of the state, yeah, it's the busiest of that. It's like saying, you know, you're the skinniest person in obese world, you know, like, or the fattest person in skinny land, you know, like, okay, well, what does that really mean? But it's a marketing. Well, yeah. And I mean, it's interesting. I mean, that gets into the part of the program that funded this and how all those metrics are used to justify projects and select projects. But, I mean, I'll say I'm sympathetic to the need for a project here. Because it is dangerous. It is dangerous. Yeah. But it was built dangerous a quarter century ago. It was built dangerous. And, I mean, who could have ever seen this issue, right? That there's going to be development and then that'll put pressure on the roads. Yeah, you say that tongue-in-cheek. Yeah, I'm sorry. I'm saying that tongue-in-cheek because it is very predictable. But yeah, so... Yeah, because if you build, I mean, this is the thing about the Baxter business model. And I think what I did not get as an engineer that is like so clear today, you know, you build this highway, you build these furniture roads, you build all these accesses. And the more successful it is, the more impossible it becomes to actually use. It chokes itself, it kills itself. And basically that is what you have, is you have this corridor that, you know, the locals would say, oh, we've, you know, oh, it's doing great. Oh, we need to keep this traffic. But the traffic destroys the corridor. It makes it unusable. And it makes it unsafe when it's not unusable. Yeah, exactly. And I mean, I think that leads to where we are right now, which is you just have a lot of people that want different things out of this corridor in a way that's not compatible. And so I think the issue is not that there's going to be a project. It's how the project came about, how it's funded, how we're analyzing alternatives. That's actually a lot more interesting than the need for an actual project. But the project as it stands right now is, and I think you've written about this a few times, there's a button hook interchange that was the most preferred alternative coming out of a lengthy design process. and it's basically a folded diamond that keeps 371, the busier highway. The north-south highway, yeah. Continuous, essentially freeway, at least through this short segment. And then has ramps to the state highway and to local road for all these local businesses. And how this project came to be, at least fill in the details, but a few years ago, our local, I think it was led by the county. He's a county engineer, a guy named Tim Bray. He's a really smart guy, like cool dude. I've known him for a long time, but very much a highway guy. And responding to the needs of the community and his constituents that are demanding improvements here, submitted an application for a pot of state money called Corridors of Commerce, which is funded by the legislature every few years to allow kind of these massive injections of... It seems to me like a slush fund, right? I try not to use that word because I know that it is synonymous with Republicans berating government. Like, oh, it's just a slush fund. But there's really no other description for it than just a big pot of money to do random highway projects in order to get suburban crappy development along it. Well, and so this got $60 million. and then that started the wheels of project planning and I think one of our U.S. senators was here to champion, I don't know if it was a federal contribution or how. Was Tina here or Amy? Which one? I should have done more research. No, I think it was, yeah. Anyway, I do remember that. So everybody's trying to hitch their way into the story of rural Minnesota success. Oh, this major government investment, right. Well if you remember I wrote that article I can remember what it was called but I was quoting someone who talked about Baxter as like the pinnacle of outstate success Like this is what success looks like And they were making the case when government invests in infrastructure here the type of prosperity you get The Baxter strip you know the Costco and Home Depot and Walmart Look at how successful we been This is back in the Dayton administration with these like government investments through programs like Corridor of Commerce So yeah Gosh that interesting Yeah, so basically where that leads us is that there's been a few years of public engagement. I was at a meeting about a year and a half ago, just a meeting that they had at the MnDOT headquarters to look at all the alternatives. And I think at that time, No Build was still an alternative. They had some simpler alternatives. And ultimately they carried this alternative through. I never miss an opportunity to show up and write down a bunch of post-it notes. Yeah, you're an active guy. I'm one of the, well, and I guess I'm weird that way. But yeah, so I was involved with that a year and a half ago. But here we are where they're now trying to get municipal, the state is now trying to get municipal consent from the city of Baxter, which is where this intersection is, for this interchange proposal. and the city of Baxter has I think 90 days from some point in time when they're notified to approve or deny or I think just do nothing which essentially is a tacit approval yeah and it's become this it's blown up all of a sudden it's this big controversy with the local business community and the local chamber of commerce and you and I were both at a meeting about what a week and a half ago now where people were fired up and emotional and I mean on one hand it was good to see this kind of public engagement happening where people are welcomed and I have a lot of respect for the Baxter City Council sitting there for hours hearing people talk about what they care about what they're passionate about their community what they you know but it was a lot of you know I grew up and the town was this way and we don't want to turn it into the Twin cities and things like that we don't want to be anoka and i'm like wake up and look around people anyway i'm getting ahead of myself it's okay because so i live a half hour away and yeah why do all the people in my town come here it's because we're going to costco and aldi yeah home depot and menards and walmart which serves at least in the way that we have structured everything it serves a very valuable purpose for this whole region but it's not unique it's not something and i say this with the most yeah yeah concern for baxter and brainard and the whole area but this you know and this is a beautiful area that's seen a lot of growth in the past few years it's beautiful because of the lakes and the small towns and everything like that people are not moving to this area they're not going through this area because of this little commercial corridor this regional whatever shopping center right this is that's just the mechanics of modern life that serve the whole area including the resorts the lakes the mountain biking areas over by me the small towns etc so let's i feel like there's a ton of things to break down here let me let me let me make sure that people listening understand you because you said oh it's called the button hook but i feel like that does it a slight injustice because this is rather novel and you know the state of minnesota might say that i'm i'm not an engineer and i'm a fraud if i claim i am but i actually have a civil engineering degree in practice for many years and and weeks away from hopefully winning a lawsuit against the state over that but let let's let's let's not digress too much this is a i'm going to say novel design but i was going to say like this is a weird looking design because it has think of an interchange i'm trying to explain this to people listening. Think of an interchange that comes up, it goes over railroad tracks, it goes over a highway, then it continues elevated for a thousand feet with all, it's going to be like earthen embankment with big retaining walls on the side. It crosses another intersection, that's just a local street, and then it comes down again on the highway. But on the side of this, you have six roundabouts, the big kind of highway-esque multi-lane roundabouts. And in order to get, you know, to go east or west, if you're going north and south, you don't just exit on a ramp and go north or go east or go west. You exit, go through at least two roundabouts before you go on your way, possibly up to three roundabouts before you go on your way. And there's a bit of a cultural thing here because I remember when we put our first roundabout in and one of the county commissioners I quoted as saying, and I'm going to paraphrase his quote, there's a guy named Paul Tede. He said, I feel like we fought a war with Europe over things like this. And this to me seems like too European. I remember thinking it's kind of ahistorical because most of Europe was on our side, but I digress. They were reacting to the roundabouts are city thing. Those city folk have, we don't have roundabouts. Oh, and that's still a big part of it, I think. I feel like part of the reaction is people just look at this and they see six big roundabouts and they freak the heck out. You were in the room listening to the business owners. The core argument was this is too complex for people to navigate. I look at it, I'm like, this is probably the, it looks complex from the sky, but like on the ground, I actually think it probably would work pretty well from a traffic flow standpoint. Well, and yeah, I mean, this gets to a bigger question that I've been asking myself and was thinking about before we started, which is why is the dialogue so bad about this project or in general? And I don't think that it's just about the roundabouts. And I don't think that the project team is default for this either. and I will say I mean I know one of the project engineers I've gone canoeing with one of them and I know one of the I've known a bunch of them for yeah long time it's a small town up here well it's a small town and like one of them goes to church with me and one of them has got kids that graduated with my kids so like I've known him since kindergarten of my girls so yeah but I mean and I it's just this kind of reaction to change I think is part of it and I mean the roundabouts don't help. But it seems like people are focused on the things that I'm not focused on. I'm more focused on the cost and the mechanics of how we're doing this. But yeah, at that meeting, I mean, people were just fired up and thinking this is going to be the complete change of the character of the region up here and it's going to force closures of all these businesses and things like that. And yeah, I mean, my preference is I think I mentioned in that meeting was a simplified design, just a regular, I think they called it a quadrant interchange on the... A single point? Well, no, it would keep 371 as the main corridor, basically just a tight folded diamond. Yeah, yeah. And what's interesting though, and I asked the project team about this many months ago, was that, you know, why did they choose this button hook interchange with, you know, essentially these six roundabouts, two frontage roads connecting these two highways and all this stuff. And they did it because it provided greater business access for the business community. And they're now the ones that are in most opposition to the project as it's going forward right now. And so I don't know if there's time with this, but if there is, I'd like to see them just kind of back up and do a simpler option and not worry about the business as much because I know the chamber would hate to hear that, but people are still going to go to Costco. They're still going to go to Fleet Farm and Aldi, you know, whatever. It's just kind of... Yeah. So I wrote four articles about this on the site. I kind of tried to break down all three arguments about congestion, speed, congestion, safety, and then this is an economic development investment. And the one thing that you realize really quickly is that all of the earth moving, all of the roundabouts, all of the land acquisition, all this stuff is being done to provide business access. If you strip out, if you say, we don't care about business access, we're just going to build a really good highway interchange here. And we actually looked at this like in the 90s, the engineering firm I worked at, and I want to be careful about this because I was a young engineer and I was not sitting in the room where these design decisions were made, but I was sitting in the break room with the people making them. So like my recollection is not a firsthand designer recollection, but a secondhand around the designer, right? Like we're talking about it. But in the 90s, when the bypass was being built, there was an examination of putting an interchange in here. I mean, you have two highways that were major highways back then, Strode-ish, but major highways. There was a sense that like they needed an interchange. They looked at it. But as you come up over the railroad tracks and over the highway, what would happen is that it would have come down in the middle of this local street called Excelsior. And back then, Excelsior had very little traffic because there wasn't all the back development. There wasn't the backage road behind the development. there was just Mills Fleet Farm, which is this kind of big, big box that sells guns and wood and auto parts and orange shirts and like this whole cacophony of like weird things, right? I don't know how you describe Fleet Farm to people who haven't been there, but it's a very... If you're from up here, it seems like it's the man's mall. It's a man's mall. Yeah, if you go there during the Vikings game, there's nobody there, right? So anyway, you know, Excelsior would go to Fleet Farm, and it was one of two ways to get to Fleet Farm, but it was the main one. And they were a local business. I mean, that was a chain, or it still is a chain, but they were locally owned at the time. They were locally owned at the time. And had a lot of influence. Well, not only locally owned, they had stores all over the Midwest, but they were based out of here. I mean, it was the Mills family. I mean, I went to school with Stuart Mills. They were from here, of here. They live up the road. You knew them. And they were like the big business owner. They used to have a place in downtown Brainerd that got moved out to this big box store out on the edge. And then they started building the similar big box stores all over the Midwest. They sold it four or five years ago for $6 billion, $5 billion, something like that. Private equity or something like that. It was a big, like, okay. So at the time, you add the Mills building, and then you didn't really have much else. There wasn't a lot of other stuff there. There's certainly a lot of Excelsior hadn't been all the residential development, hadn't been all the other stuff. So the idea was you were going to take out Excelsior. You were going to put a cul-de-sac on the end of both of these roads and you were just not going to use it. And you were going to use what is design drive now. I know you know where that is, but like it's just it's just north of Fleet Farm. You were going to use another access to get in, but it would have been a lesser access. right not a signalized intersection but an unsignalized kind of right in right out kind of scenario and fleet farm was against it and fleet farm was against it and therefore the city of baxter was against it and there was just like this general pushback on building the interchange at that time because of like what it what people thought it would do to the business prospects of that big box store. So I have had this like recurring thing over the years because the way you get to Fleet Farm is you either go to this signalized intersection and then wait for the arrow and then turn in, which is generally safe. The traffic speeds are not all that high there. It's close to the other intersections. So people have not picked up a lot of speed. It's relatively safe or you go 900 feet further north and then you cross over traffic that one is not safe that one we've killed multiple people at we've you know traumatically like had crashes that one has been like a source of three quarters intersections in the biz right a three-quarter intersection on a 55 whatever it is mile an hour road yeah when you if you hit the lights correctly people are regularly going 55 60 miles an hour and i think the posted speed is 60 it's 55 or it's like it's in that range it's not like local street speed it's high speed and i've i've had this recurring question you know how many people are we going to kill so that you can get to mill's fleet farm nine seconds earlier which is really what we're talking about you know like what what how many people are going to die here and i i know mndot has struggled with this because mndot if they had their way would close all these dumb accesses up and down the highway and just have the couple of signalized intersections and a couple of like controlled things where it's actually safe but there's this tension between the businesses wanting quick and easy access for the tourists driving north and you know how many people were going to maim and kill in this corridor and I have found that to be an interesting study of human nature right I remember one engineer I worked with back when we first asked I first asked this question basically making the case that the drivers were idiots who were speeding and being reckless and you know I'm going to say not these weren't the words out of his mouth but this was the general just they got what they deserved because they were idiots and of course that's an appalling way to look at highway design how do you feel about the safety trade-off in this corridor the way i feel about the safety trade-off personally is that we need to have a vision where this corridor 371 the main one going minneapolis to northern minnesota is a grade separated freeway eventually or at least we're deprioritizing local access because, you know, people are expecting to move through that corridor and they should be able to do that safely. With that comes a lot of the issue with, you know, business objections and things like that. But it's like, what's interesting is we've spent millions of dollars or the city, the county, et cetera, on these package roads and other facilities over the past few years. When did that Cypress Drive connection just get made by Highway 210? That That was a big project. Within the last few years. Another big railroad crossing, millions of dollars. The road to nowhere? Well, yeah. And I mean, they do this in preparation of a project like this, deprioritizing access. At least that's what I would assume that expense was about. It's funny because you're right. On the left hand, we justify building what literally is a road to nowhere today. Like it's an insane, doesn't make any sense. Because we're anticipating closing access on the highway. but now we're also you know resisting closing access on the highway yeah well and then another interesting thing is a mile and a half up the road this um what is it novotany drive i think the quick trip just opened up across the street from a huge apartment complex that just got built and that's on another three-quarter intersection that has the safety the same safety concerns as the quick trip for those of you not minnesotan is like a local gas station chain And its opening was as if the second coming was occurring Like it was... Surprisingly a big deal. It was the largest social event that has taken place in central Minnesota in years. Since Arby's opened. Well, so it's just, I think that showed me that, okay, so you have another mile up the road. that's going to be the next issue in 20 years, right? Where there's- Maybe not even, right? Not even, yeah. Because you have, you know, you've got Novotny, you've got, gosh, I can't, there's one with the sort of Burbu. You've got a whole like list of them up there where you've got these weird crossovers. Some of them are even skew crossovers. Yeah. And I live a block from the hospital. Yeah. And you get the helicopter landing on the hospital and unloading people for the ER or what have you. And it happens all the time, right? But it's astounding because in the summer, in the summer you get this continuous flow of people who are seriously injured, maimed, killed on that corridor because of the volume of traffic, the speed of the traffic, and the number of accesses along it, especially these weird left crossovers. Well, and it feels like they need to just get serious about access management, but I can understand why that's such a complicated pursuit because I've seen the type of opposition that they get from businesses. And even if the businesses weren't there, think of the landowners that own all this, you know, even further up the highway, all this valuable land because of the access and the possibility of development, right? Whether they're speculating on it or whatever. and they have a lot at stake to try and preserve their access. And, you know, it's just, it's been interesting to see how strongly the local chamber has staked their claim on this issue. They created this whole, like, campaign website to go against this project. And, you know, have I had a lot of business owners speaking in meetings and writing in the newspaper and things like that. And it doesn't seem like, I mean, in one sense, I understand their concern and they should have the right to voice it, but I hope it's balanced out against all the other interests here, including safety. There's also the sentiment that it's last minute. I think that's part of why this is so strange right now with this dialogue getting so bad and toxic right at the end. There's the sentiment that, oh, this is this crazy plan came about at the last minute, but there's been years of public engagement. there's years more before for the project breaks ground and so i always argued though that the public engagement process i i think that there's been legitimate public engagement over options yeah but whether to do a project or not had no public engagement oh that had no public engagement right i mean that was like we're going to devote our resources to this because we're going to apply for this grant and when we get it you know there the grant was part of a consent count consent agenda so it was never even voted on right it was just like you know uh the beginning of the meeting yeah like hey we'll approve this with along with the minutes and everything else like in one motion yeah so there's a couple dichotomies here that i want to drill into the one is the idea and you brought this up earlier that all of this expense and everything is being built for the businesses all the roundabouts and everything like the only reason let me put it this way if if you're mndot and you're following your you know mandate the thing that you're most concerned about is travel time across distance in the state right like your job is to move people in freight across long distances at high speeds across the state yep and if you look at that and you say well on this north south corridor what we need to do is be able to get stuff from minneapolis the center you know the the the big metro area of the state all the way up to the canadian border and international falls we've got to be able to do that really quick because we got anderson windows up there we've got all this commerce going back and forth like our job is to move traffic we can't slow down traffic through and let's let's you wrote this op-ed with the paper through and we can go through this litany of cities on the way up through elk river through st cloud through royalton through little falls through all these cities that we've in a sense bypassed and made like an efficient corridor going north we get to baxter and oh like everything needs to stop because we've got a costco here and a fleet farm here and a holiday gas station here right If you're MnDOT, you're saying, we're just gonna focus on traffic. And the businesses will have to react to it just like they reacted when we bypassed Brainerd and we no longer have the traffic through the middle of town. The business community reacted and changed. We don't control that. If you did that project, and I'm doing back of the envelope math, I feel like that would be a 15 to $20 million project. What that means is that, in my estimation, $35 to $40 million of what's being proposed here is all of this extraneous access and weird roundabouts and off-ramps and goofy tentacles everywhere. Which, by the way, I think would flow well, but I think the main complaint is this is too confusing for people. all of that confusion is being done in order to provide the highest level of access possible to a handful of local businesses am i misrepresenting that in some way like i i i mean i don't know the exact numbers but i do know that the project would be cheaper if it wasn't accommodating if it wasn't this complicated design with all the the grades that they're going to have to build up in retaining walls and acquisitions, et cetera. One of the chamber things said you're going to have a 30 foot retaining wall. I don't know if it's 30 foot or not. That doesn't seem completely unreasonable though, based on the fact that you've got to drive under it. A 30 foot retaining wall is like insanely expensive. We built that one along College Drive and it was like half the cost of College Drive was a stupid retaining wall. It's really, really expensive to build that stuff. At what point wouldn't it be cheaper to just buy out the holiday gas station and some of the other businesses that are concerned about it? I'm not saying that's a good alternative. Here's the thing. I went to the tax rolls and I said, all the businesses that are directly affected by this, and I included Kohl's and Fleet Farm and the auto dealership right next to Fleet Farm. I included the former Cub Foods, the strip mall there, the liquor store, the gas station. All of that property added together on the tax rolls is worth $41 million. Now, I'm sure they would argue, well, I would want more than that for my property. And I'm like, well, what would you want? Because I want to tax you at that amount. I'm always valuing my property lower when it's being taxed and higher when it's being sold. But you're not talking about, oh, we're spending an extra $40 million to give access to a billion dollars worth of commercial property. You're talking about we're giving $40 million of extra highway spending here to give access to properties that are probably worth around $40 million. I have this problem with, I've dealt with this before in other situations, where the state comes in and then acquires the properties. because I'm like, I don't, I feel like MnDOT giveth, MnDOT taketh away, right? Like, do you have a right to a certain amount of traffic provided by the state to your place? Is that a legal taking if they take it away from you? Well, what MnDOT, I've seen them do is they buy out these businesses because they don't want to have the fight over the taking part, the property value part. I think that what they do is they're buying them out because they don't want the opposition. They want the project to go forward. This is like the smoothest way to have the project go forward. So I feel like what you said makes a lot of sense. If you just want the project to go forward, buy out these handful of businesses that are directly affected and then just make this thing work well. I don't know. Is that insane? I mean, and I don't know the numbers on what the cost delta would be for a cheaper project with a simpler interchange, but there has to be some way to look at that. But I mean, the other factor that's playing in here as well is if you get $59 million from a state slush fund, you're going to want to do a project that's $59 million. That's exactly, yes. You don't want to do a project that's 20. You don't want to do a project that's 80, right? And so I'm sure there was thought that went into the grant submission and all the rest of that. But this whole system kind of locks you in before you even go through the process of knowing what you want. I have an idea. We could do $20 million of art along with sides of the interchange. To get that project cut. Because we'd hate to give money back, right? I'm sure they can find a way to spend it. Yeah, I'm sure they could. No, I agree that the amount of money has kind of pushed the outcomes. You're less constrained from a financial standpoint. And so you're more liberated to do what I think is, and this is ironic given the business sentiment, you've gone out of your way. you've thrown tens of millions of dollars at trying to jack up traffic flow for a handful of local businesses. I mean, the Brainerd Lakes region economy does not depend on people going to a liquor store and a gas station. And you could say, well, Fleet Farm will not do as well. People are going to find a way. People are going to find a way to get to Fleet Farm. People are going to find a way to get. Now, the abandoned Cub food store might not have as much value. Correct. Right? And that strip mall back behind, you know, next to it, that was always kind of dependent on the grocery store traffic anyway. To me, that's gone down in value because you lost the grocery store. That's all happened pre this whole design. Yeah. Right? That happened, you know, I think over a union dispute actually or over, you know, just the grocery business itself is tough. Consolidating, yep. Walmart and Target and another grocery store up the street. Someone was probably going to go at some point. This was the weakest player in the system, maybe. You know, you have this scenario where those businesses, you know, the Taco Bell, maybe Taco Bell gets less traffic if it's harder to get to Taco Bell and more people go to Arby's. But they're putting a Chick-fil-A in, like a not very accessible place, and I can tell you what the traffic's going to be like at Chick-fil-A, I don't know. I find there to be like a deep, I've tried to put myself in the mindset of the MnDOT engineers. And then to me, their mindset is, look, we designed a highway to handle the traffic. Then we threw 30 million plus dollars, $40 million at giving you the best access possible and you don't want it. we should just take it away let's just build the this is build the highway well and i think hey what if they what if they said and i don't think they could do this again because the limitations of the funding source but we're going to take away the complexity of this interchange let's say that's what 20 million dollars and we're going to use that to build one or two interchanges further out the one up by menards or the one down by walmart right and actually increase the length of this corridor that's free-flowing and safe. Yeah. And that would actually be really good for the highway. It would. Uh-huh. And it would be good for, I think, a lot of people in the community to see that as a trade-off. But they're hamstrung here by this grant source being $59 million that needs to get spent on this interchange as part of a safety improvement and separating it from the railroad. And, oh, by the way, it has to get spent or shovels have to hit the ground by a certain date So now that's limiting our ability to pivot on this project. So at some point it becomes, we have to accept this plan. I don't know how much they can modify it, or we have to give back the $59 million or whatever it is for corridors of commerce. They should still consider that. But I mean, that's where these funding sources and grant sources really mess with our decision-making as well. Okay. I want to talk about the corridors of commerce program. But first, I feel like before we pivot to that, I want to talk about that meeting that we went to and the business. I'm going to say this as someone who's lived here their entire life. And it was interesting to watch people get up and talk about the region. And there were tears, there was lots of emotion. Like I've lived here all my life or I moved here because I didn't want to be in the Twin Cities and all this. I grew up on the farm homesteaded by my great-great-grandparents. My family's been here a long time. I watched this city transform from a 371 corridor that had deer forest and deer land and a junkyard and a Paul Bunyan amusement park to now something that besides some trees which would not go away is really indiscernible from every other highway strip from texas to california to oh for sure to florida to like what like it is it's the standard thing you would expect when you get to a suburban area which is i've got a strode i've got a bunch of chain franchise places i've got some barnacles that are local hanging off of that like a little brewery over here and a little uh you know shop over here that are like in strip malls adjacent to some of this stuff but you basically got like your verizon wireless and your arby's and your taco bell and like this this is just standard american highway development yep i'm listening to people and they're talking about this with such deep emotion that somehow this is like a little slice of paradise we're destroying you also have and i don't know if you knew this but i i saw this in the room Most of the people that got up and spoke were not business owners either directly affected by the project or even within half a mile of the project. These were people from, these were chamber people. People from, I mean, you're the mayor of the city up the road which I mean to me if I the mayor of the city up the road I want this highway to run so people actually get to my city I don know why she felt it necessary to show up And I mean I do know why she kind of a preener who's gonna run for higher office. But I'm looking at this from a logical standpoint. And you had one of the local businesses here from Brainerd who should actually be showing up, talking about the redoing of the highway through the middle of town here, which is gonna be- In front of his business. And right in front of his business, is not going to be good. Instead, like out and worried about this. What did you make of the vibe of this? And I feel like the related question is, do you think this actually represents the community at large? In other words, I think there's this sense that if the Baxter City Council votes to approve the button hook, they're all through. Like they'll all lose their jobs. They're all out. And I'm like, I'm not so sure that this isn't just a business phenomenon and not a general population phenomenon. I don't know. What do you think? Well, and here's my little secret about that night. I was out grocery shopping for my family and making a Menards run. I showed up for about 10 minutes and said my piece and left. But I did hear a few of the other people. I mean, the first thing was the parking lot was overflowing at this very large middle school. Yeah. Hundreds of people there. It was packed. It was packed. Yeah. I was surprised I was able to get up and speak so quickly. But I was just curious to see it. And according to some people who sent me messages after, I was one of two people out of that entire night of many hours who spoke somewhat in favor. And I mean, I wasn't a flowery promoter. One person got booed. You did not get booed, but you got a mixed... People weren't sure whether to cheer for you or boo you because you said you were kind of against the project, but then you wanted something that was simpler and would not give it as good access. And I think the people who put that together were like, we're not sure if he's on our team or not. So you got a weird, Hey, that's a win for me. But no, it's just, um, that's what I was struggling with after that meeting because I mean like that business owner you were just mentioning, I know him, I've been mountain biking with him. Great guy. He's a great guy. And I want to respect or I mean like I want to hear and understand the opinions of people that are affected by a project, people that I share a community with, that's a small town. Lots of emotion. And I respect it. But I'm not understanding it either. That's what I've, I just don't quite understand. And I think part of that is maybe because I'm one of these nerds who shows up at a lot of meetings, pays attention to a lot of projects, knows how this stuff happens. So maybe that's why I'm not as phased by it. But, you know, I think a lot of people are just reacting to, you know, reacting out of fear and concerned about change. I mean, we see that manifest with lots of different projects and circumstances and lots of communities. But that was, I don't know, I'm still trying to figure out that dynamic that we saw that night. The chamber president, him and I have chatted a little bit. And him and I have struggled, I think, in our relationship for years because we've tended to end up on opposite sides of these kind of public policy things. The old highway north and south through the middle of town being like the prime one for me. But he said something to me that I think was very valid. and I've been struggling with it, thinking mentally through it since he said it. He said to me, Chuck, you are comfortable with a certain level of collateral damage that I am not comfortable with. I kind of break it down a little bit. And basically he said, I am, Chuck, willing to sacrifice the holiday gas station and the boomers pizza and all the stuff in the strip mall and esser's liquor store and i'm willing to see damage done to them because i think it's for the greater good and he is not so blasé about like the individual harm to these small business owners if i have to admit he's probably right in a sense that like i wouldn't cheer for their like downfall like i'm not like i i don't want to like i wouldn't do something to harm them but i don't look at this as the the main responsibility of the state or the program or you know mndot or the city or what have you is to sustain like once you build a business on a highway your traffic counts must be sustained at all cost regardless of the overall like public impact I don't know. Is that just where he has to be versus where you and I can be? Well, that's what I was trying to figure out. Is this an authentic position that some of those players are taking? Or is it something that they're just obligated to do because they're representing a constituency? And I think it's a little bit of both. But I mean, yeah, maybe you and I just have a different perspective about how this should go. And maybe part of that's informed by seeing what's happened in the past, where a quarter century ago, downtown Brainerd was bypassed. I watch all these businesses struggle. Because, I mean, they were barnacles on the freeway, the highway coming through town. And then as barnacles, you're kind of reliant on the flow. And then the flow went away. And like a barnacle on the side of a ship, when you take it out of water, you stop going around, it just dies, right? Like it doesn't go anymore. And yeah, I mean, I feel like the history of Brainerd is that we screwed up and put in the highway through the middle of the city and we would have been better off if we hadn't like torn our city down and turned it into a drive-through. I think we see different formulas for success and a different definition of success than a lot of the other people that were in that room. You know, an example of that, so I live on, or my town a half hour east of here is on Highway 210 as well towards Duluth. and it's a small town and it's our small town main street a little two lane with a turn lane in the middle and i've told people because there already is effectively a bypass of our town that goes on the other side of a lake county road yeah that i'd love to see the state highway move out of town onto that county road so that we can control our own destiny that we can rebuild the street as something that serves our community rather as rather than just a way for people to get through and let me tell you that is a very different opinion than most people have in the town because most people think if we don't have that state highway going through our town, it's game over. And I think you and I have seen a different way. Who will stop at our gas station? Yeah, I know. But other people maybe haven't seen that different way and haven't seen examples from other communities of a place worth going to rather than driving through, as we used to say. Part of what I've seen asserted here is that no one driving north from the Twin Cities will come through Baxter because it will be too complicated. They will just avoid the Brainerd Lakes area because of this. I've seen this put forth. To me that having lived in Elk River during grad school, having spent a lot of time not just in Minneapolis but in major cities, having driven, is there anyone who lives in Minneapolis who's going to say, I'm avoiding Baxter because they now have roundabouts next to an interchange? No, if anything, I think it's going to consolidate more of the tourist traffic through Baxter because it'll be easier to get through. And then a percentage of those new drivers are going to be going off to the gas stations and liquor stores and big boxes. So I don't see it the same way as a lot of these businesses, but it's hard to get numbers on that. Let's finish by talking about the corridors of commerce program. I feel like since the beginning of Strong Downs, I've been writing about how horrible this program is. Oh, you've got notes on this one? Oh, yeah. Well, I just have the about it from the website. Here's my take. And this is, I don't want to get like overly political, but I did sit in a room with Joe Biden when he was vice president, where he stood up at the lectern and said, you know, the great story of America is that we build, build, build. And he's like pounding on the podium like Khrushchev. We build, build, build, build, build. And it was basically like this mindless, almost like New Deal-esque, the way you become great is to build infrastructure. I feel like Mark Dayton, our former governor, you know, who was the economic development commissioner for a while and basically of kind of the same age generation had this same mindset which was we build build build like we just if you just put money in the infrastructure this is kind of a james overstar there's there's a there's a mind there's a generational mindset and i you know to be fair i think trump is also like this like you know we just build big things and build stuff it's a little bit different vibe than the government should go out and build highways and that's like a good thing in and of itself. I feel like the Quarters of Commerce program is like our worst rendition of this, kind of brought forth and championed by Mark Dayton and now has become this thing that Republicans, Democrats both like because it's a big slush fund of... Everybody gets their projects in their districts and, you know, and it's just interesting because, yeah, it seems like so much of what they do actually works against their own goals. I mean, the two goals that they have are freight improvement and capacity development. And it's interesting because capacity development, then they note that there's a state law from 2025 requiring that we reduce vehicle miles travel, right? So we're already working against that, whether you think that's good or bad or indifferent. And then the scoring criteria, I mean, there's community consensus, project, I mean project readiness that's a project thing but uh freight efficiency economic impact return on investment I don't even know how you score these things let alone how you can score them in a way that doesn't you know they're working against each other in a lot of working against each other so well and I just think the the idea corridors of commerce you don't a corridor of commerce is a corridor that would like move commerce back and forth yeah almost every place i've seen this this this grand funding be used is to create highway strip development like literally a corridor or like an area like a frontage road of commerce exactly to me this is like a big box subsidy bill and i just don't i've never understood why in this state the the party that you know wants reduction in admissions and wants walkable neighborhoods and wants all this stuff would be such a big booster of this program. It's almost like, okay, let me put it this way. I feel like this is the raw meat that we throw the outstate people to be like, hey, we care about you. You're getting your share. You're getting more than your share. You get the quarters of commerce program. and I have felt really like violated and patronized by this program since its inception because of that. And it has its little brother, the, what is it, Transportation Economic Development Program. I mean, there's a few of these slush funds that are funded continuously or by certain legislatures. And yeah, I mean, it's interesting to think that you felt kind of pandered to with this. Yeah, I feel like it is money to pander to rural people in a way that undermines rural vitality kind of in every, you know, it's in every way it undermines who we are and our economy and our jobs and all that. And it's cheered on by, I mean, like I said, like the metro where Baxter is the ideal version of what we're trying to get. Trying to turn every region into a Baxter. But in a way, it seems to work because this is what a lot of people, except for this project and the unique dynamics here, it seems to be what people want is strip development and big boxes. Let's close with this. Here's what I think is going to happen. And I want your take. I think that Baxter will have a vote to approve the button hook. And that vote will lose three votes to two. and then I think they will have a vote to deny the button hook and that vote will fail three votes to two you stole my prediction is that was you're going to say yeah well I mean I wasn't going to maybe do the votes but I was going to say the same thing I think they're going to find a way to like kind of let the municipal consent just kind of die on the vine that allows it to yeah proceed I think they will leave it to the end they will do a last meeting they will be unable to reach a consensus and then it will just be like a pocket veto where we didn't take any action and therefore Save face, but the project moves forward, yeah. That's my guess as well. Okay, so we have the same prediction. Here's, okay, let me give you this next prediction and then we'll quit. I have been told by business owners and advocates of the business community and others that if the politicians do allow this to happen, they will all get voted out of office. Now, these are local races. there's very few people Mayor of Niswa as the exception who are trying to like run for Baxter City Council in order to become governor someday right like it's just not a career path I think these people are generally like trying to do a good job they're not fearing re-election as much as they're fearing like what do my constituents want I don't think any of them lose their position I don't either no and I mean I think that this is the type of thing that's going to be largely forgotten about six months after. After it's in. After it's approved. But yeah, definitely buy when it's in. Right. I mean, I think just like the heresy of roundabouts on College Drive, just like the heresy of the roundabout on South 6th, once it's in, everyone drives them and then goes away. And I mean, if there's any sort of sin that lingers into the future, it's that we overdid it, spent too much, made it more complicated than it needed to be. and we're paying for that down the road. I always thought that if I was in the legislature, you know how like in old Rome, I can't remember who it was, Cato the Elder or something, he would give a speech and at the end of the speech, he'd say, and Carthage must burn or something like that. Like at the end of every speech, he ended with the same thing. I would be like, quarters of commerce must burn. Like that would be, I just, I hate this program. I want it to go away so badly. Well, lucky for you, there's a new slate of projects to be announced in a week. I think November 17th. So we'll see. Oh, I have more to write about. Matt Steele, thanks for coming in the office and joining me. I'm so glad you live in the area. We should do this again on friendlier topics. Sounds good. It's been great being here. All right. Thanks everybody for listening. Keep doing what you can to build a strong town. Take care. This episode was produced by Strong Towns, a non-profit movement for building financially resilient communities. 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