Star Tribune
Celebration marks the start of $195M rebuild of Hwy. 65 in Blaine
City leaders in Blaine have been talking for nearly 20 years about remaking traffic-choked Hwy. 65 to address mobility and safety.
At long last, the project is ready to roll.
This year, the north metro city and Anoka County secured the last of state and federal dollars needed to pay for the $195 million project with the goal of transforming one of the state’s most dangerous highways into what one lawmaker called the “future of transportation.”
“This is absolutely incredible,” Blaine Mayor Tim Sanders said during a Thursday event to celebrate the project’s full funding and thank all those who pushed the ball across the goal line. “Ultimately, it’s the 72,000 residents who are extremely excited about this road project coming to fruition.”
Two years from now when work begins, motorists traveling on Hwy. 65 will feel the pinch. Then again, driving through a construction zone may not be any more maddening — or slower — than it is now as bottlenecks form at many hours of the day, and motorists and pedestrians attempting to cross the highway face waits that often seem interminable.
“There is that time with a lot of orange cones and a lot of folks on the street that people gripe about, that day will come,” said Gov. Tim Walz during the celebration attended by state lawmakers, Anoka County commissioners and transportation officials, law enforcement and personnel from the Minnesota Department of Transportation. “But it’s the other side of that day where we’re all looking forward to,” Walz said, noting the 5.8 million Minnesotans who will benefit from the project.
When completed in 2028, Hwy. 65 will operate like an expressway. Stoplights at four interchanges between 97th and 119th avenues will be replaced with underpasses or overpasses with on- and off-ramps with roundabouts. Some access points that don’t currently have stoplights will be closed and new frontage roads built to connect motorists with the new interchanges.
The project also will include sidewalks and biking trails to facilitate safer crossings and improved transit facilities.
While the new road won’t have any additional travel lanes to handle the daily traffic of 60,000 vehicles, the layout is expected to drastically speed up trips for motorists and reduce crashes, officials say.
“This is a big deal,” said Rep. Frank Hornstein, DFL-Minneapolis. “Blaine will be the multi-modal capital of the metro. This is the future of transportation.”
Minneapolis street sweeping begins
Minneapolis Public Works crews will start their annual fall street sweeping Tuesday, a process that will last into November.
Hot pink “No Parking” signs will be posted at least 24 hours before a street is swept. Vehicles left on the street will be ticketed and towed. Parking will be banned from 7 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. on the day a street is swept or until the street is cleaned and the signs are removed.
A Street Sweeping Schedule Map is available on the city’s website. The city also has a service allowing people to sign up to get an alert automatically by email or text.
That hasn’t ebbed with Simpli-Fi. The startup incorporated in 2018 as a company based out of Florida that integrated technology systems together in commercial buildings to work as a single unit. But business sputtered when the COVID-19 pandemic began, and Campbell had to make staff cuts to his team of 16 employees. He called it one of “the worst times” of his life.
“But during that time is where we made a pivot,” Campbell said.
He set out to find a new technology, eventually spotting NASA’s electronic nose thanks to Brown Venture Group, a St. Paul based firm that supports Black, Latino and Indigenous tech startups. Campbell’s brother, Paul Campbell, is a partner at the firm but said he recused himself from the investment decision.
Chris Campbell was skeptical of the electronic nose’s capabilities at first but sprung for a commercialization license after spending a year researching the technology. By this past summer, he had moved the company to Minnesota and specifically the Osborne building because both are “known for device creation,” he said.
Simpli-Fi’s sensor packs some of the science of gas chromatography and mass spectrometry — which require huge machines — into a sensor the size of a dime, Campbell said. Using nanotubes, the sensor picks up metabolic qualities in the air and breath, he said.
For now, the company is focused on the C. diff-sensing Provectus Canary device, which scans the air around a hospital patient to detect the bacteria that causes the infection, which has gastrointestinal symptoms like diarrhea. The company is working toward the U.S. Food and Drug Administration’s approval for using the sensor to detect various diseases.
A Minneapolis man was sentenced Friday to 20 years in prison for murdering his neighbor in their North Side apartment building last year.
Walter Lee Hill, 59, had pleaded guilty on Monday to second-degree intentional murder. He will get credit for having served nearly a year in jail.
Police were called to the Gateway Lofts on W. Broadway Avenue last November on a report that someone was shot. Officers found Donald Edmondson, 60, dead on the floor of his apartment with a gunshot wound to the chest.
A video camera in the hallway showed Hill knocking on Edmondson’s door, reaching into his sweatshirt pocket and firing his gun once. Hill then left in his Lexus, which officers found near Elliot Park downtown.
They spotted Hill walking nearby, asked for his ID and arrested him when he said something to the effect that they had the right guy.
A witness told police they saw Hill shoot Edmondson, and another said there had been an ongoing dispute between the two. Two days before the murder, Hill had called police because he believed neighbors were breaking into his apartment.
In a statement, Hennepin County Attorney Mary Moriarty said Edmondson “should still be alive. A violent act committed with such disregard by Mr. Hill has taken him from his family. This sentence delivers accountability and protects our community, and I hope it brings some measure of peace to Mr. Edmondson’s loved ones as they attempt to move forward with their lives.”
ROCHESTER – Buoyed by strong growth in the health care industry, Minnesota’s third-largest city continues to outpace the rest of the state in job creation.
The Rochester Metropolitan Statistical Area added about 7,000 jobs over the past year, a 6.3% year-to-year increase, according to the September jobs report from the Minnesota Department of Employment and Economic Development (DEED). By comparison, Minnesota as a whole was up 1.2% during the same time period. The next closest region to Rochester was Mankato, which grew 1.6% year to year.
Much of the growth in Rochester MSA, which includes Dodge, Fillmore, Olmsted and Wabasha counties, was driven by a 15% year-to-year increase in the education and health services sector. The sector employed 62,435 people in the region in September, nearly half the overall workforce.
The strong job numbers come as Mayo Clinic breaks ground on the first phases of “Bold. Forward. Unbound. In Rochester.” The $5 billion project — the largest investment in Minnesota history — is expected to bring about 2,000 construction workers to Rochester in the coming years.
While Mayo has not said how many employees it plans to hire once the new facilities open, local economic development officials expect the impacts of the expansion to reverberate across the region.
“As their growth goes up, the rest of the economy grows as well,” said John Wade, president of the Rochester Area Economic Development, Inc. (RAEDI). “If you think about neighboring communities, too, there will be more housing opportunities and job opportunities and businesses looking to expand.”
Wade said he also sees potential for growth in other sectors tied to Mayo, such as hospitality, which makes up more than 8% of the region’s workforce. Precision manufacturing and medical technology were also identified as potential growth sectors.
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