Star Tribune
Record $25 million gift will help upgrade Abbott Northwestern surgery, critical care capabilities
A historically large donation is financing Allina Health’s historically large expansion of surgery and critical care services in Minneapolis.
The foundation of Best Buy founder Richard Schulze will announce Thursday that it’s committing $25 million to Allina’s 10-story expansion of Abbott Northwestern Hospital in Minneapolis. The donation is the largest in Allina’s history and will support a project that is just underway — with webcams showing the demolition of a parking garage to make room.
“Normally we’re not big proponents about investing money in hospitals,” Schulze, 82, said in an interview ahead of Thursday’s announcement. “[But] I’m a big believer in what’s going on at Abbott Northwestern.”
The billionaire businessman said he was drawn to support Abbott Northwestern for its work expanding critical care, a high-intensity specialty that treats life-threatening illnesses and injuries.
Thirty large operating suites will replace some of the cramped confines in the hospital and make space for new surgical technology and techniques. The new tower will include four floors of single-patient rooms, replacing older rooms.
The donation reflects a pivot by Schulze’s foundation away from funding research on regenerative medicine — the search for treatments that restore function in damaged organs and tissues — and toward health care access. Recent donations include $5.5 million to Children’s Minnesota for its neurosciences program and $20 million for a new heart and stroke center in Naples, Fla., which will collaborate virtually with Allina’s experts in Minnesota on patient care.
“We do invest in areas where we think there’s a high probability of success. Unfortunately [research has] not been a winning formula for us so we’ve moved more in the direction of health and wellness … treatment of patients,” Schulze said. “We think treatment for patients with a wide variety of conditions is a better way to spend our money.”
The funding is a boost for Allina, which like many hospital systems is facing financial challenges even as it upgrades its flagship Minneapolis hospital and other facilities. The provider reported a $148 million loss in the second quarter of 2023 on the operation of 12 hospital campuses and more than 60 primary care clinics across central Minnesota and western Wisconsin.
Financial woes prompted the health system earlier this year to delay plans to replace its Cambridge, Minn., hospital.
Schulze said it may be risky to invest in a struggling health care organization, but, “anything you’re doing in the world of medicine today is risky.”
The addition of inpatient beds, other than psychiatric beds, requires a state health review followed by a legislative waiver to Minnesota’s hospital construction moratorium to prevent wasteful excess capacity. The Abbott expansion is the largest construction project in Allina’s history, but didn’t require review because it will replace existing beds.
Allina’s board voted in 2022 to authorize $1.2 billion in spending through bonds and other funding mechanisms to build the tower.
Abbott is licensed for 972 beds, making it Minnesota’s third largest hospital by inpatient capacity, but only 638 beds were in use in 2021, according to the most recent state data.
Allina leaders are scheduled to offer more details at a groundbreaking Thursday afternoon for the project, which will be part of a broader reorganization of the Abbott campus. An expanded parking ramp will open south of the hospital campus, which will be redesigned with new roadway entrances and underground walking tunnels to connect the buildings, according to plans filed with the city of Minneapolis.
Mark Dienhart, chief executive of the Edina-based Richard M. Schulze Family Foundation, said the foundation may end up doling out more money to hospitals in Minnesota and Florida, where Schulze now lives.
“He wants to see the positive results from what he gives away in the here and now … rather than betting on something very complex happening,” Dienhart said of the shift away from funding research. “I wouldn’t be surprised to see these kinds of things continue.”
“I honestly think he used to understand how tariffs work,” Cuban said. “Back in the 90s and early 2000s, he was a little bit coherent when he talked about trade policy and he actually made a little bit of sense. But I don’t know what happened to him.”
Speaking in Pittsburgh on Thursday, Trump’s running mate, Ohio Republican Sen. JD Vance, pushed back against the Harris campaign’s claims that tariffs would hurt the economy. Vance described the tariffs as a way of discouraging imports and boosting American manufacturing.
“If you are a business, and you rely on foreign slave labor at $3 a day, the only way to rebuild American manufacturing is to say, if you want to bring that product made by slave labor back into the United States of America, you’re going to pay a big fat tariff before you get it back into our country,” Vance said.
Back in Wisconsin, Amara Marshell, freshman at UW-La Crosse, said she showed up to support Harris because she is concerned about what a second Trump presidency could mean for reproductive rights. Like her friend, sophomore Avery Black, Marshell is also excited about the possibility of electing the nation’s first female president.
“Women deserve to have power over their own bodies,” Marshell said. “We shouldn’t have to not be able to get an abortion just because of a president.”
Mary Holman, an 80-year-old retiree from Fort Atkinson, Wis., said she hasn’t been to a rally since former President Barack Obama’s first campaign in 2008. But Holman said she decided to get off the sidelines this cycle because she views the election as a fight to preserve democracy.
The Minnesota Department of Natural Resources will auction off state lands in popular northern counties next month.
The public land — in Aitkin, Cook, Itasca, and St. Louis counties — will go up for sale during the Department of Natural Resource’s annual online public land sale from Nov. 7 to 21.
“These rural and lakeshore properties may appeal to adjacent landowners or offer recreational opportunities such as space for a small cabin or camping,” the DNR said in a statement.
Properties will be available for bidding Nov. 7 through Nov. 21.
This all can trim for print: The properties include:
40 acres in Aitkin County, with a minimum bid of $85,000
44 acres in Cook County, minimum bid $138,000
1.9 acres in Itasca County, minimum bid $114,000
Minneapolis city officials say razor wire, concrete barriers and fencing will be removed from around the former Third Precinct police station – which was set ablaze by protesters after George Floyd’s police killing – in the next three weeks. The burned-out vestibule will be removed within three months with construction fencing to be erected closer to the building.
This week, Minneapolis City Council members have expressed frustration that four years after the protests culminated in a fire at the police station, the charred building still stands and has become a “prop” some conservatives use to rail against city leadership. Most recently, GOP vice presidential nominee JD Vance made a stop outside the building and criticized Gov. Tim Walz’s handling of the 2020 riots.
On Thursday, the council voted 8-3 to approve a resolution calling for “immediate cleanup, remediation, and beautification of the 3000 Minnehaha site including but not limited to the removal of fencing, jersey barriers, barbed wire, and all other exterior blight.”
Council Member Robin Wonsley said the city needs to acknowledge that many police officers stationed in the Third Precinct “waged racist and violent actions” against residents for decades.
Council Member Aurin Chowdhury said the council wants the building cleaned up and beautified “immediately.”
“We cannot allow for this corner to be a backdrop for those who wish to manipulate the trauma of our city for political gain,” Chowdhury said.
Council Member Katie Cashman said the council shouldn’t be divided by “right-wing figures posing in front of the Third Precinct and pandering to conservative interests.”
“It’s really important for us to stay united in our goal, to achieve rehabilitation of this site in a way that advances racial healing and acknowledgement of the past trauma in this community, and to not let those figures divide us here,” she said.
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Israel’s proxy war with Iran leaves young children in Gaza and Lebanon burned from head to toe
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