The Strong Towns Podcast
A major highway project is pitched as a safety upgrade — but at what cost to the community? Today, Chuck is joined by Matt Steele, a fellow Brainerd-area resident and longtime Strong Towns member. They unpack a highway interchange that's been proposed in nearby Baxter and the long-term trade-offs that shape strong (or fragile) places.
Transcript (Lightly edited for readability)
Hey, everybody. This is Chuck Marohn. Welcome back to the Strong Towns podcast. This is going to be 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 and was a big part of getting Strong Towns started in the early days. He Facebook messaged me to the point where I thought, "Are you going to lose your job, dude?" He's one of the few people who I actually inspired to move up to the Brainerd Lakes area and lives up here with me. Matt, welcome to the Strong Towns podcast.
Thanks. Yeah, it's good to be here. I don't feel like I've ever been on before, have I? Or was I 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 them.
Okay, well, this is overdue, then. You and me and Matthias and Jim—there's a whole group of dudes here from Minnesota. Yeah, Nate, Nate Hood. Yeah, Nate's been on a few times, but he's kind of a performer, so...
Indeed. He does comedy now.
Yeah, 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, 371, would come right through the middle of the city. Then there's an east-west highway, 210. The north-south highway runs—you can think of it as running, being an extension of a highway that runs from Minneapolis to International Falls. That's not exactly right, but 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, you can think of it as from Duluth, the shipping port of Duluth, west to—you know, just straight west. You wind up in Fargo. But I think if you stay on 210, you end up in Waterton or something like that. You end up in southern North Dakota, I think. But yeah, basically 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. 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, not in Strong Towns. That's definitely the prominent thing on the corner. There are some flags on top in the summer, yeah.
They've lit it up now, and they put Rapunzel hair at Halloween, which is kind of fun. 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 the old Papa John's sign and all that. They've gone out of business, but there's a dollar store there. 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 stocking shelves and stuff.
I remember being out of 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 where 371 would veer north, and 210 would continue west. You would have what was the Paul Bunyan intersection. So there was this 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 cart-pushing era, I was in a band, and they would have a community night on Sunday night. I was invited—my band was paid to come and play for community night. So I actually have an old video of my wife, who was obviously my girlfriend, my teenage girlfriend at the time, walking on camera. We were up on stage and they were filming us, and she walks up the side of the stage on camera, waves goodbye, and leaves my jacket, which I had lent her because it was chilly. She left it there for me. 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—this would have been in the late 90s—I was working for an engineering firm in Baxter. At that point they built this kind of long-discussed, long-anticipated bypass of Brainerd. So 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. Then it 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. Right outside our door, I could have thrown a baseball and hit a dump truck. They were out there working. I watched it be built, and then, of course, watched the Home Depot be built. The Costco wasn't there yet, but the Super Walmart was going in. There was a bunch of places being built along the highway strip, but I remember when it all came in.
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 the Home Depot, the grocery store, a second grocery store, a Target—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 onto the highway corridor as it went north, with frontage roads and all that you can think of.
I was part of building that. I remember—and I've kind of said this before, so there's not 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. This is awesome. We're becoming something," instead of this backwoods kind of place. We've got all this development. The Paul Bunyan Center went away and we got Coles. I remember my niece—this was a family joke for a while, because she's like, "We got Coles. We've got everything now." That was really a reflection of what things her mom might have said, who grew up here when it was the middle of nowhere.
So all of a sudden you got this highway bypass, and it's bam—instant suburban development up and down the highway, in a way that, as a local engineer at the time, I was broadly celebrating. "This is great growth." 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's 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.
Sure. Yeah. 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, probably except for the business owners in downtown Brainerd.
Well, that's an interesting thing to pause on, because I think 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 the dialog around it. 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, no. So that brings me to the Brainerd-Baxter that I know. As you mentioned, I moved into the area up here from Minneapolis about five years ago now. 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 are 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 is still kind of laughable to me. I mean, I don't enjoy sitting in traffic, but driving around all these lakes and everything, I feel so blessed to be able to live up here. Time spent in the car means a lot. It hits a lot differently than when I lived in the city and we were stuck on freeways.
But yeah, it is funny, because they labeled this in their grant application "the busiest intersection in northern Minnesota." And I'm like, "Okay..."
It's like, that's a list, you know?
You're the busiest intersection between this and this. Yeah, you probably are, but you're not in the top 100 in the state of Minnesota. But if you look in this more rural area of the state, yeah, it's the busiest of that. It's like saying you're the skinniest person in obese world, or the fattest person in skinny land. Okay, well, what does that really mean? But it's marketing.
Yeah. I mean, it's interesting. 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'll say I'm sympathetic to the need for a project here, because it is dangerous. It is dangerous. But it was built dangerous a quarter century ago. I mean, who could have ever seen this issue, right? That there's going to be development, and then that'll put pressure on...
You say that tongue in cheek?
Yeah, I'm sorry. I'm saying that tongue in cheek because it is very predictable.
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 so clear today. You build this highway, you build these frontage roads, you build all these accesses. The more successful it is, the more impossible it becomes to actually use. It chokes itself, it kills itself. Basically that is what you have. You have this corridor that, the locals would say, "Oh, we've, 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. 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. 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—and I think you've written about this a few times—is a buttonhook interchange that was the most preferred alternative coming out of a lengthy design process. It's basically a folded diamond that keeps 371, the busier highway, the north-south highway, continuous, essentially freeway, at least through this short segment, and then has ramps to the state highway and to local roads for all these local businesses.
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...
It's a county engineer, a guy named Ray. Yeah, he's a really smart guy, cool dude. I've known him for a long time, but very much a highway guy.
Responding to the needs of the community and his constituents that are demanding improvements here, he 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 for...
I try not to use that word, because I know that it is synonymous with Republicans berating government, "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.
So this got $60 million, and then that started the wheels of project planning. I think one of our U.S. Senators was here to champion—I don't know if it was a federal contribution, or...
Was Tina here or Amy? Which one? I should have done more research. No, I think it was... I think it was, yeah, anyways...
They worked their way into the story of, "Oh, this major government investment..."
Well, if you remember I wrote that article. I can't remember what it was called, but I was quoting someone who talked about Baxter as the pinnacle of outstate success. "This is what success looks like." They were making the case that when government invests in infrastructure, here's the type of prosperity you get—the Baxter strip, the Costco and Home Depot and Walmart. "Look at how successful we've been." This is back in the Dayton administration, with these government investments through programs like Corridors of Commerce.
Gosh, that's 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. 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 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 consent from the city of Baxter, which is where this intersection is, for this interchange proposal. The city of Baxter has 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. 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.
You and I were both at a meeting about what, a week and a half ago now, where people were fired up and emotional. I mean, on one hand, it was good to see this kind of public engagement happening, where people are welcomed. 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... But it was a lot of, "I grew up in the town 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 I live a half hour away. Why do all the people in my town come here? It's because we're going to Costco and Aldi, 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 concern for Baxter and Brainerd and the whole area, but 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 shopping center. 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 make sure that people listening understand. Because you said, "Oh, it's called the buttonhook." But I feel like that does it slight injustice, because this is rather novel. The state of Minnesota might say that I'm not an engineer and I'm a fraud if I claim I am, but I actually have a civil engineering degree and practiced for many years and am weeks away from hopefully winning a lawsuit against the state over that. But let's not digress too much.
This is a—I'm going to say—novel design. 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 1,000 feet with all—it was going to be an 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. In order to go east or west, if you're going north and south, you don't just exit on a ramp and 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.
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 this quote, there's a guy named Paul TV—he said, "I feel like we fought a war with Europe over things like this. And this, to me, seems 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 a city thing. Those city folk have them. We don't have roundabouts. 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. Yeah, 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 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? I don't think that it's just about the roundabouts. And I don't think that the project team is at fault for this either. 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 a long time. Small town up here.
Well, it's a small town. One of them goes to church with me, and one of them has got kids that graduated with my kids. So I've known him since kindergarten of my girls. But I mean, it's just this kind of reaction to change, I think, is part of it. 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. My preference—I think I mentioned in that meeting—was a simplified design, just a regular—I think they called it a quadrant interchange or the single point...
Well, no, it would keep 371 as the main corridor. Basically just a tight folded diamond, yeah.
What's interesting, though—and I asked the project team about this many months ago—was why did they choose this buttonhook interchange with 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. 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 businesses 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, whatever. It's just kind of, yeah.
So I wrote four articles about this for the other side. I kind of tried to break down all three arguments about congestion, speed, congestion, safety, and then this is an economic development investment. 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"—we actually looked at this in the 90s. The engineering firm I worked at—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 my recollection is not a firsthand designer recollection, but a secondhand around the designer. 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 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. Back then Excelsior had very little traffic because there wasn't all the back development. There wasn't the back edge road behind the development there. There was just Mills Fleet Farm, which is this kind of big box that sells guns and wood and auto parts and orange shirts—this whole cacophony of weird things. I don't know how you describe Fleet Farm to people who haven't been there.
If you're from up here, it seems like it's the man's mall.
It's the man's mall. That's, yeah. If you go there during the Vikings game, there's nobody there. So anyway, Excelsior would go to Fleet Farm, and it was one of two ways to get to Fleet Farm, but it was the main one.
They were a local business. I mean, it was a chain, or it still is a chain, but they were locally owned at the time.
Well, not only locally owned, they had stores all over the Midwest, but they were based out of here. I mean, 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. They were 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. Then they started building 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, yeah, something like that.
It was a big... Okay, so at the time you had them, the Mills building, and then you didn't really have much else. There wasn't a lot of other stuff there. Certainly Excelsior hadn't been—there wasn't all the residential development around it and 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. You were going to use what is Design Drive now. I know you know where that is—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, not a signalized intersection, but an unsignalized kind of right-in, right-out kind of scenario.
Fleet Farm was against it, and Fleet Farm was against it, and therefore the city of Baxter was against it. There was just this general pushback on building the interchange at that time because of what people thought it would do to the business prospects of that big box store.
So I have had this 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 traumatically had crashes. That one has...
It's a three-quarter intersection in the mix, right? A three-quarter intersection on a 55—whatever it is—mile-an-hour road.
When you hit the lights correctly, people are regularly going 55-60 miles an hour. I think the posted speed is 60. It's 55 or—it's in that range. It's not local street speed, it's high speed. I've had this recurring question: how many people are we going to kill so that you can get to Mills Fleet Farm nine seconds earlier, which is really what we're talking about? How many people are going to die here?
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 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 how many people we're going to maim and kill in this corridor.
I have found that to be an interesting study of human nature. 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. I'm going to say these weren't the words out of his mouth, but this was the general gist. They got what they deserved because they were idiots. 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 from Minneapolis to northern Minnesota, is a grade-separated freeway eventually, or at least we're de-prioritizing local access. Because 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 business objections and things like that.
But what's interesting is we've spent millions of dollars—or the city, the county, etc.—on these back edge roads and other facilities over the past few years. When did that Cypress Drive connection just get made by highway 210? That was a big project within the last—another big railroad crossing. Millions of dollars.
The road to nowhere.
Well, yeah. I mean, they do this in preparation of a project like this, de-prioritizing 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 justified building what literally is a road to nowhere today—it's insane, doesn't make any sense—because we're anticipating closing access on the highway. But now we're also resisting closing access on the highway.
Well, and then another interesting thing is a mile and a half up the road, this Novotny Drive. I think the QuikTrip 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 same safety concerns.
QuikTrip, for those of you not Minnesotan, is a local gas station chain, and its opening was as if the Second Coming was occurring.
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 just showed me that—okay, so you have another mile up the road that's going to be the next issue in 20 years, maybe not even, because you've got Novotny, you've got—gosh, I can't remember—there's one with a certain Caribou. You've got a whole list of them up there, where you've got these weird crossovers. Some of them are even skew crossovers.
I live a block from the hospital, and you get the helicopter landing on the hospital and unloading people for the ER or what have you. It happens all the time. It's astounding, because 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. Even if the businesses weren't there, think about the landowners that own all this valuable land because of the access and the possibility of development, whether they're speculating on it or whatever. They have a lot at stake to try and preserve their access.
It's been interesting to see how strongly the local chamber has staked their claim on this issue. They created this whole campaign website to go against this project. You've had a lot of business owners speaking in meetings and writing in the newspaper and things like that. 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 this sentiment that, "Oh, this crazy plan came about at the last minute." But there's been years of public engagement. There are years more before the project breaks ground.
I've always argued, though, that the public engagement process—I think there's been legitimate public engagement over options, but whether to do a project or not had no public engagement. That had no public engagement. 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..." The grant was part of a consent calendar, consent agenda. So it was never even voted on. It was just at the beginning of the meeting, "Hey, we'll approve this along with the minutes and everything else in one motion."
So there's a couple of 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. Let me put it this way: if you're MnDOT and you're following your mandate, the thing that you're most concerned about is travel time across distance in the state. Your job is to move people and freight across long distances at high speeds across the state. 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, 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. Our job is to move traffic. We can't slow down traffic through..." You wrote this op-ed with the paper through—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 an efficient corridor going north. We get to Baxter and, "Oh, everything needs to stop, because we've got a Costco here and a Fleet Farm here, and a Holiday gas station here."
If you're MnDOT, you're saying, "We're just going to 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?
I don't know the exact numbers, but the project would be cheaper if it wasn't accommodating—if it wasn't this complicated design, with all the grades that they're going to have to build up and retaining walls and acquisitions, etc.
One of the chamber things said you're going to have a 30-foot retaining wall. I don't know if it's 30 feet or not. That doesn't seem completely unreasonable, though, based on the fact that you got to drive under it. A 30-foot retaining wall is insanely expensive. Ridiculous. We built that one along College Drive, and 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 did. I went to the tax rolls, and I said, "All the businesses that are affected, directly affected by this"—and I included Kohl's and Fleet Farm and the Mills auto dealership right next to the 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, "MnDOT giveth, MnDOT taketh away." 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?
Well, what MnDOT—and 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 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. I don't know. Is that insane?
I mean, 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—you don't want to do a project that's 20. You don't want to do a project that's 80. 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 the sides of the interchange to get that project, because we'd hate to give money back.
I'm sure they can find a way to spend it.
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 that, I mean, the Brainerd Lakes Region economy does not depend on people going to a liquor store and a gas station.
You could say, "Well, Fleet Farm will not do as well." People are going to find a way. You're going to find a way to get to Fleet Farm. People are going to find a way to get there. Now, the abandoned Cub Foods store might not have as much value. That strip mall back behind, 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. That happened over a union dispute, actually, or just the grocery business itself is tough. When you're competing with Walmart and Target and another grocery store up the street, someone had to—someone was probably going to go at some point. This was the weakest player in the system. Maybe.
You have this scenario where those businesses—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 at a not very accessible place, and I can tell you what the traffic is going to be like at Chick-fil-A. I don't know.
I find there to be a deep—I've tried to put myself in the mindset of the MnDOT engineers. To me, their mindset is, "Look, we designed a highway to handle the traffic, then we threw $30 million plus, $40 million at giving you the best access possible. And you don't want it, so just take it away."
Let's just build the highway.
Build the highway well.
And I think, "Hey, what if they"—and I don't think they could do this again, because of the limitations of the funding source—but "We're going to take away the complexity of this interchange. Let's say that's $20 million, 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." 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, 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 from 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 with 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. There were tears, there was lots of emotion. "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 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 Florida to—whatever. It's the standard thing you would expect when you get to a suburban area, which is, "I've got a stroad. 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 shop over here that are in strip malls adjacent to some of this stuff." But you basically got your Verizon Wireless and your Arby's and your Taco Bell—this is just standard American highway development.
I'm listening to people, and they're talking about this with such deep emotion that somehow this is a little slice of paradise we're destroying. You also have—and I don't know if you knew this, but 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 chamber people. People from—I mean, you're the mayor of the city up the road, which—I mean, to me, if I'm the mayor of the city up the road, I want this highway to run so people actually get to my city. I don't know why she felt it necessary to show up. I mean, I do know why. She's kind of a preener who's going to run for higher office. But, you know, I'm looking at this from a logical standpoint.
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 going to be in front of his business, which is not going to be good. Instead, he's 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 buttonhook, they're all through. They 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, 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. Hundreds of people there. It was packed. It was packed. I was surprised I was able to get up and speak so quickly, but I was just curious to see it. 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. I mean, I wasn't in favor.
One person got booed. You did not get booed, but you got a mixed reaction. 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 good access. 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. That's what I was struggling with after that meeting. Because, I mean, that business owner you were just mentioning, I know him. I've been mountain biking with him. Great guy. He's a great guy. I want to respect—or, I mean, 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. I respect it, but I'm not...
Understanding it either. That's what I've—I just don't quite understand. 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, maybe knows how this stuff happens. So maybe that's why I'm not as fazed by it. But I think a lot of people are just reacting out of fear and concerned about change. I mean, we see that manifest with lots of different projects and circumstances in 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 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. Basically he said, "Chuck, you're willing to sacrifice the Holiday gas station and the Boomer's Pizza and all the stuff of that strip mall and Esther's liquor store, and you're willing to see damage done to them, because you think it's for the greater good. And I am not so blasé about the individual harm to these small business owners."
If I have to admit, he's probably right in the sense that I wouldn't cheer for their downfall. I don't want to harm them. But I don't look at this as the main responsibility of the state or the program or MnDOT or the city, or what have you, is to sustain—once you build a business on a highway, your traffic counts must be sustained at all cost, regardless of the overall 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? 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 watched all these businesses struggle because, I mean, they were barnacles on the freeway, the highway coming through town. As barnacles, you're kind of reliant on the flow, and then the flow went away. Like a barnacle on the side of a ship, when you take it out of water and you stop going around, it just dies. It doesn't go anymore. I mean, I feel like the history of Brainerd is that we screwed up in putting the highway through the middle of the city, and we would have been better off if we hadn't torn our city down and turned it into a drive-through.
I think we see a different formula for success and a different definition of success than some of the other people that were in that room. An example of that—so I live in a town a half hour east of here on highway 210 as well, towards Duluth. It's a small town, and it's our small-town Main Street, a little two-lane with a turn lane in the middle. I've told people, because there already is effectively a bypass of our town that goes on the other side of the lake, a county road, 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 than just a pass-through 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.
Who will stop at our gas station?
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.
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. 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 Towns, I've been writing about how horrible this program is. Oh, you got notes on this one?
Well, I just have their "about it" from the website.
Here's my take, and this is—I don't want to get 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, "The great story of America is that we build, build, build." He's pounding on the podium like Khrushchev, "We build, build, build, build." It was basically this mindless, almost New Deal-esque, "The way you become great is to build infrastructure."
I feel like Mark Dayton, our former governor, 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. If you just put money in the infrastructure..." This is kind of a James Oberstar—there's a generational mindset. To be fair, I think Trump is also like this, "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 a good thing in and of itself."
I feel like the Corridors of Commerce program is our worst rendition of this kind of brought forth and championed by Mark Dayton, and now has become this thing that Republicans and Democrats both like, because it's a big slush fund.
Everybody gets their projects. It's just interesting, because 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. It's interesting, because capacity development—they note that there's a state law from 2025 requiring that we reduce vehicle miles traveled. We're already working against that, whether you think that's good or bad or indifferent.
Then the scoring criteria—I mean, there's community consensus, project readiness, that's a project thing. But 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—they're working against each other.
Working against each other. So well. The idea—Corridors of Commerce, a corridor of commerce is a corridor that would move commerce back and forth. Almost every place I've seen this grant funding be used is to create highway strip development. Literally a corridor or an area, like a frontage road of commerce. To me, this is a big box subsidy bill, and I've never understood why in this state, the party that wants reduction in emissions 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 Corridors of Commerce program." And I have felt really violated and patronized by this program since its inception, because of that.
It has its little brother—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. 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 way. It undermines who we are and our economy and our jobs and all that. It's cheered on by—I mean, the metro area, 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. Strip development and big boxes.
And 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 buttonhook, and that vote will lose three votes to two. Then I think they will have a vote to deny the buttonhook, and that vote will fail three votes to two.
You stole my prediction. 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 kind of let the municipal consent just kind of die on the vine. It allows it to 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 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 are very few people—mayor of Nisswa is the exception—who are trying to run for Baxter City Council in order to become governor someday. It's just not a career path. I think these people are generally trying to do a good job. They're not fearing reelection as much as they're fearing, "What do my constituents want?" I don't think any of them lose their position.
I don't either. I mean, I think that this is the type of thing that's going to be largely forgotten about six months after it's approved. But, yeah, definitely by when it's in.
I mean, I think just like the heresy of roundabouts on College Drive, just like the heresy of the roundabout on South Sixth. Once it's in, everybody drives them, and it goes away.
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. We're paying for that down the road.
I always thought that if I was in the legislature—you know how 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. At the end of every speech, he ended with the same thing. I would be like, "Corridors of Commerce must burn." 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 being announced.
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.
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