Minnesota

It's the state where the "big water" of the Mississippi really gets running, each drop of the river beginning its 90-day journey to New Orleans from the beautiful Lower St. Croix that forms Minnesota's border with Wisconsin. It is a state of independent thinkers, where a professional wrestler was elected governor and independent minor league baseball has its strongest affiliate in the St. Paul Saints. And it is one of the few states in the region with a growing population, new residents being drawn by a quality of life that, like the state's populace, could best be described as "authentic."
        Tim McShane, vice president of national accounts for Minnesota-based and nationally prominent construction firm Ryan Companies, offers a perspective on the Upper Midwest as a whole.
        "The upper Midwest has a stable and diverse economy and is known for its work ethic and quality of life," he says. "The economy is not dependent upon one or two sectors, but has strong representation in high tech, medical devices, health care, business services, agriculture, forest products, and finance which results in steady growth and resiliency in difficult economic times."
        McShane says the qualities that have enabled Minnesota to be ranked as "the most livable state" for six years running by Morgan Quitno Press have also allowed his design-build firm to grow, encompassing more than $750 million in construction volume in 2001, administered from office in five U.S. cities.
        The state's industrial profile is still dominated by Minnesota Mining & Manufacturing (3M). But the state's biotech, life sciences and medical device industries have also been there for a long time. Witness locations by the likes of Medtronic, Cargill Dow, Protein Design Labs and, yes, there is 3M again, with 3M Pharmaceuticals. A new cog in the life sciences infrastructure machine will open in 2003: a 50,000-sq.-ft. (4,645-sq.-m.) lab-based business incubator adjacent to the University of Minnesota. That's not a bad location, as the university ranked fourth in 2001 for launching start-up companies.
        Protein Design Labs has purchase a 29-acre (11.6-hectare) tract in Brooklyn Park, part of the northwest Minneapolis-St. Paul metro. And the Fremont, Calif.-based biotech player has filed plans with federal drug regulatory agencies that indicate that the company will spend some $200 million in building a facility on the site. Elsewhere in the Twin Cities metro, PDL will spend $10 million to upgrade its 74,000-sq.-ft. (6,660-sq.-m.) production operation in Plymouth.
        A March survey of 256 Minnesota manufacturers conducted by the Minnesota Department of Trade and Economic Development showed that they expected both production and employment to stabilize this year. While only 16 percent projected increases in plant and equipment investment, a quarter of them predicted hiring increases by this point in 2002.
        "Manufacturing is an important component of the state and national economies and while the sector took a hard punch in 2001, it wasn't a knock-out blow," said Analysis and Evaluation Director Bob Isaacson. "The apparent stabilization of Minnesota's manufacturing sector is a strong signal that we're ready to grow and compete against our global competitors."
        Statewide, residents and companies alike had to be pleased by the Tax Relief bill, which contains $843 million in net property tax relief, with 10 percent for commercial/industrial property. The state legislature also passed a $10-million Biomedical Innovation and Commercialization Initiative.
        A signature mixed use development from the Twin Cities' multifaceted United Properties is the Eagle Point Business Park, a 120-acre (49-hectare) office, high-tech and commercial center that most recently welcomed a 100,000-sq.-ft. (9,290-sq.-m.)service center for Bremer Financial Corp. More than 300 employees will fill the facility when it opens in November 2002. Bremer Financial Corporation is a privately-held, $5.1 billion regional financial services company owned by the Otto Bremer Foundation and our more than 1,800 employees. The company, founded in 1943 by Otto Bremer, is headquartered in St. Paul.
        United's July 2002 outlook noted the ongoing consolidation efforts of such downtown Twin Cities stalwarts as Wells Fargo, General Mills and Target Corp. The freeing up of industrial space by ADC Telecommunications did not help matters. But countering that trend was the Best Buy project.
        In a state known for the Mall of America, Dayton-Hudson and Target Corp., it should come as no surprise that the state's biggest corporate headquarters news of the year, and among the biggest projects overall, is the near-complete $160-million location of a retailer, Best Buy Companies, in the first-ring Minneapolis suburb of Richfield, which likes to call itself "the urban hometown."
        The 1.5-million-sq.-ft. (139,350-sq.-m.) project, which brings personnel from scattered corporate facilities onto one four-building, 28-story campus, began in the spring of 2001, and is slated for completion in 2003 -- although the company's 5,500 corporate employees will begin trickling in 500 at a time in December. Despite a recently announced 18-month moratorium on global store expansion plans, the corporation is still aiming to add up to 2,000 more corporate employees between now and 2006 to support the company's growth, with a store count now standing at 1,900.
        When Best Buy moves in, the city will also realize $8.4 million in annual property taxes, ten times the amount collected before the project. Adding to the "incentives" that favor the community will be an estimated $14 million in annual employee spending in the city, not to mention the intangible value of Best Buy's rescue of a failed mixed-use project that had left homeowners holding the bag and a tax increment financing district aching to be used.
        The strongest case for Richfield, however, was retaining people, and thereby retaining the homegrown culture they had developed since the company got its start in the Twin Cities in 1966. Since the project was launched in 1999, the number of corporate buildings in nearby Eden Prairie grew from an already-stretched eight to 14, with three of them owned.
        "The real estate team went out and worked with Opus Northwest to analyze the complete metro area," explains Project Director Della Kolpin. "Then we started to focus in. A key issue was retaining our existing employee base. We did a scattergram, and found out where the centroid was."
        Where it was couldn't have been drawn up more neatly: nearly in the center of Richfield and its dormant project.
        "It really was an amazing thing, how the location landed within that whole parameter," she says. "We became aware of it once the city made a call to Opus."
        Part of the entire strategy involved efficient transportation of those employees, a goal that inspired the company to hire a full-time transportation coordinator.
        How they move around once at work was also paramount.
        "Not having everybody under one roof becomes very non-productive," says Kolpin, citing the impromptu meeting as a linchpin of the company culture. "Casual collisions are an integral component to our company and to our culture. This new campus will allow that to happen."