Lakeland Currents, your public affairs program for north central Minnesota.

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Welcome to Lakeland Currents, I'm your host Todd Haugen.

Our guests on this edition of Lakeland Currents are a couple of really busy people and they have made time to come and visit with us for our show today.

We have the City Engineer from Bemidji and Director of Public Works, is that right, Sam?

Correct.

Sam Anderson is here and Jorge Prince the mayor of Bemidji is here as well.

Gentlemen welcome to Lakeland Currents.

Thank you.

Nice to have you here today.

You guys always have a lot going on, and we only have about a half hour for this show so we can't get into everything that you are always working on but the idea of having you on the show today was to talk about some of the road construction projects especially that the city has coming up this summer and to a certain extent even though we don't have all the details nailed down next summer, meaning the summer of 2026 as well.

Couple of very busy summers are coming up.

First of all, this coming summer there are a number of projects Sam to talk about around the city of Bemidji.

What can you summarize those fairly quickly.

I can summarize them as quickly as I can.

Yes we're having one of our busiest summers that I could think of in recent memory going back to even the Sanford Center construction.

We have three large road projects this summer, they will be three separate contracts, two of them we're going to be doing basically our annual street projects where more people are customary with them, one that we fund locally, one we fund with some other dollars.

The routes, the segments that we're talking about are a stretch on Hannah Avenue up by the hospital.

We were just up there last year doing a little bit of work, we're going to do a little stretch over there.

We're going to do another portion down by our 15th Street water tower.

Those that are familiar with that area it's Norton Avenue, we've done the part to the north of 15th Street, now we're going to go south of 15th Street and do a couple blocks in there off of that stretch of Norton.

There'll be a small of 14th Street Northwest that we're going to do as part of that, so that's kind of tied together.

Then on the far east side of the lake, same contract, there's a gravel road currently called Taft Avenue, some folks maybe have never driven on it, it's a little dead end street.

We worked with some land owners and got enough right of way there to actually do appropriate turnaround for fire trucks and so we're actually going to look to pave that street this year, so that's one contract.

The other one that we're looking at doing is Park Avenue.

This will be a stretch between 15th Street and the trunk highway so it's about a half a mile long, that's going to be a full replacement curb and gutter, the works.

We're going to look to narrow that road a little bit, still accommodate some parking, calendar parking, but we're looking to add a nice sidewalk on the east side of that stretch where there is no pedestrian improvements currently so that'll be a nice connector route there.

The other big road project that probably folks have been hearing about is the city is going to be doing our portion of a joint project with MnDOT this summer, that's the trunk Highway 197, RAISE grant project.

The city has two city streets attached to that project that we're going to take on this summer in 2025 and that's Middle School Drive and Hannah Avenue.

Middle School Drive most folks can assimilate in this area because of the location next to the Middle School, of course.

We're going to be starting from 23rd Street so by the orthodontist office and the ball fields and going north up to just short of the highway this year on that side.

And on the east side, so Hannah Avenue where Simonson's gas station is we're going to do that stretch again from 23rd Street North just short of the highway by Burger King/ Simonson's and then what we maybe we'll get to if we have time in the 2026 construction year so another year from now MnDOT then will be doing their section of the state highway, which maybe folks have been hearing about, and that goes from essentially L&M Fleet's entrance there by Gillette Drive where the airport is all the way east to Hannah Avenue at Simonson's gas station.

That's a big project that they're taking on.

The funding is shared between the two entities.

We got a federal highway grant for that project, it's a RAISE grant, city's doing ours in 2025, MnDOT's looking to tackle their project in 2026.

So those are three of the big city street projects going on this year, a little bit unusual for us to have that much work, I'm estimating about $10 million in total so that's a lot for us to take on in one season.

Other than that you can sprinkle in a lot of other public works type projects and we can certainly go into however much detail you'd want to talk about on those but those are the big ones.

Well, you know, again unfortunately we only have about a half hour for our show but that's got to be, yeah you already said it Sam, but that's got to be a lot busier than normal.

I mean just the Middle School Road Project would seem because it involves two roundabouts right, that's a huge one all by itself.

There's actually three on just our city streets.

Well, yeah.

We're going to add one at 23rd and Middle School which is where the orthodontist office is, folks that have been there, we're also at the Target entrance, I would call it, which is across the street from Tires Plus, that entrance there is looking to have a roundabout installed.

Then on the east side, when I say east side I said the Hannah Avenue side of that whole complex of Target and Marketplace at the Simonson's entrance with Burger King that first little frontage road that folks are familiar with if you want to get to the Wells Fargo there or kind of the back part of the the north side of the Marketplace parking lot that will have a smaller roundabout in that intersection there.

So there's actually three in totality for our city street project and that's not even getting into MnDOT's project but that's just our local legs.

So that roundabout will end up being pretty close to that new roundabout eventually that will be on Paul Bunyan Drive Northwest on 197 right?

Correct, and all that analysis has been done in totality, we understand there's going to be one intermittent winter where we've got to battle through until the state highway gets done, but all of that design has been done in comprehensive with one design firm to look at stacking issues, those peak times in the day are we going to have issues, are they going to conflict with each other and everything is working in that modeling as far as that goes so close in proximity, correct but figured out at least on paper to say that that shouldn't be an issue with how these roundabouts will function.

Well there are a lot of questions to ask about those various projects but Jorge your part of this being the mayor of Bemidji I mean you've taken and I'm sure will continue to take a lot of feedback from the public about, you know, the various ideas and the various agreements and some disagreements about what's being done, what's all that been like?

Well, there are very strong opinions I think in our community about this project and really about roundabouts in general.

I remember when I first ran for office I was asked along the campaign trail are you for or against roundabouts and you know my point of view on that was well it's a little bit like asking me am I for or against a door or window.

In the right place makes all the sense in the world, in the wrong place it's a problem.

So to me I've always looked at, you know, intersection configurations as to what makes sense for the specific intersection and sometimes it's finding the best solution out of a bunch of solutions that maybe aren't that great, and to give you an example, the Anne Street roundabout that went in.

We looked at different options for that intersection and honestly when I looked at all of those I didn't feel like any one of them was the perfect solution if you will, but I felt that the roundabout was the best solution of what was available, and so I talk to citizens about that roundabout that's already there and has been a couple years now, about how they feel about it, some love it, some hate it, and I think a lot of it always seems to come back to how well other motorists utilize a roundabout because we hear that a lot like they work well when people know what they're doing but often people don't and so that is a challenge.

I mean I myself have been on that roundabout and suddenly someone's in the right lane next to me and realizes that they can't continue through by being in the right lane so suddenly they want to be in my lane and you know we have have a kerfuffle if you will.

That's people learning and getting used to it and certainly if you're, you know, part of that kind of experience you're going to see that negatively.

So as the feedback has come back I think as some of our intersections in our community have changed be they roundabouts or J-turns or whatever they might be, there's a certain amount of learning and not everybody's gotten there at the same speed so that in turn I think impacts the public comment.

But generally speaking I'd say people have very strong opinions I think one direction or the other.

It seems to me that opinions are affected though by not only how long the roundabouts are actually in place, but also how often one drives them because not everyone in our city drives through those roundabouts on a regular basis and it would seem to me, speaking from the position of someone who initially was a skeptic and was rather negative I'll say about roundabouts my original opinion, but the more I use them the more I like them and, you know, I find that they keep you moving as long as you understand how to use the roundabout and then as long as you're also wary of those who are going through the roundabout who may not know how to use the roundabout.

I think another piece of that is who are you in terms of how you're utilizing the roundabout.

So you take the roundabouts that are on Division by, you know, the high school, when school is letting out that is a constant stream of traffic.

So if you're coming out of the high school you think that's great because traffic's flowing, if you're on the interstate however and you're trying to exit on that road going one direction or the other you might be sitting there quite a while before you can access it the way you want.

So when I asked do you like that roundabout the perspective is going to change based on whether you're a frequent user trying to get off the interstate or whether you're coming out of the high school because you're probably going to have two very different perspectives, so from a public policy standpoint you're trying to find the best overall solution for the community which means you're balancing in essence those two types of users and trying to figure out what makes the best sense realizing that any decision you make is going to have a potential negative consequence for some portion of the population because again you're back to that there isn't a perfect solution where every user gets everything they want out of it.

It's a growing community and it's going to mean more and more of these kinds of projects, maybe not necessarily more roundabouts, but you know there's the cycle of road improvements really never ends does it.

It doesn't and, you know, being an elected official's pretty interesting work because you're balancing what the community is asking you for, all segments of the community that have different ideas, along with what your professional staff is telling you because, you know, I'm not an engineer, I rely on Sam and other people in the city public works and engineering department to provide me that technical information.

In my private life I also work with a team of engineers because we design products and you can go through every piece of engineering design and analysis and have a lot of certainty about what's going to happen but you really find out when it's done, that's just how it works, and all you're trying to do is bring them the best expertise, with the best information that you have at the time, and so I think that's the hard part is you know a lot of times it's easy to judge something in retrospect but you don't always have that luxury when you're making decisions, you're just trying to make the best call with the information you have.

Speaking of when it's done, these projects, and there's so many of them, really do especially the Middle School and Hannah Avenue projects really do have to be done this year right, I mean you can't just sort of put them on the back burner and say well we'll finish that in the spring because then a whole new thing starts.

Correct, yeah, the intent is to try and tackle both projects, both segments, we're breaking it essentially in half.

The goal is to try and get them each done in one construction season.

Now does that mean that maybe the grass isn't quite where we want it in the spring of the following year and there's a little bit but the intent is to get it all open to traffic, that's the big thing.

What is the impact to those local residents, what is the impact to those folks that want to go through the entire corridor?

So that is the goal for both projects is to get them done at least to that point where everybody's essentially functioning as normal.

There might be some folks coming in and doing a last little bit of cleanup, what we would call punch list stuff, but the intent is to tackle them and be done 'done' for the better part of the end of 2026 with even the MnDOT project being completed so it is hopefully going to be a two-year project broken essentially into two segments.

Because Hannah Avenue and Middle School Drive serve as important detours and also access points for some of the businesses in that area because this has a huge impact on those businesses doesn't it.

Exactly, yes, and we actually, through the course of the last 18 months to two years since the project's been in design we've had in-person meetings with all of those businesses, the Target folks, the Home Depot folks, all of those direct impacts.

We've also had open houses to invite the general public to come and get informed about the project.

But we've actually created a traffic phasing plan even within the project being closed primarily to those people that just want to go through those streets, we've actually phased it in a way to keep one half at a time allowing the contractor to work but keeping parts of it porous enough that we can get individuals and users for those businesses in from certain directions even during the project.

We never look to close properties at any point in time.

Some folks have this conception that well I might have to close for a month is that what you're telling me, and there's never a case that we do that.

We do road construction with traffic involved, we just try and limit those folks that think that they're just going to use this corridor to get from one point to the other on one side of it.

If you have to access those businesses we look to accommodate that during construction, is it painful, it's not as easy as if it's not being touched certainly but we have a plan in place that's going to create that and that includes deliveries, you know, normal retail customers, additional signage that might be needed to get folks to where and so we're going to look to train folks and kind of flip things around.

Is it going to be ideal as if we had no construction, absolutely not, but certainly that's the kind of stuff that we do on the front end to make this as least painful as we can for those users.

So the scope of these projects is so huge that as you talk about access to businesses Sam and you know this is just really essential to them for their customers to be able to get to them but since the projects are so big it's really hard to construct a special access say for instance to these businesses that's there temporarily during the project isn't it, I mean you just have so many other things to do you can't hardly do that too.

Correct, there are situations where we have some flexibility.

An example I'll give you, and Jorge had mentioned it earlier, when MnDOT did that Highway 71 project back in 2022 and they built that initial roundabout at the Anne Street intersection they had enough right of way there that they were able to accommodate a bypass road to keep traffic kind of around, so they were able to build a part of that while still kind of keeping that north/south movement.

We're more limited with the space that we have.

There is an instance at 23rd and Middle School where we are going to be constructing a bypass road around that eventual roundabout, but to your point Todd, I think we're going to find ourselves doing more of a flip-flop scenario in this case we're going to do like the north half of Middle School on the west side, and then we're going to do the south half of Hannah Avenue at the same time and so what that does is kind of keeps a little bit of that flow so a user could come in from the highway on Hannah for instance cuz that's still going to be open and then they can get into that major parking lot complex.

Those that are familiar with the area of the Target/Marketplace section they can get in from the east and then when those are done they'll flip the traffic and they'll do the north half of Hannah and the south half of Middle School.

Now they can drive on the newly completed part so even amongst the project there's short iterations where the access will be basically unaffected or they'll be driving on the newly installed infrastructure even during the same summer and so it sounds messy and it is going to be a very complex project but we're doing it in a way to try and keep the availability to those businesses as best we can.

I know engineers like you schedule these projects out and figure out well where should we be by this point in the summer to be sure that we're actually you know at or very near completion by freeze up in the fall but are you going to have to start by hitting it really hard, Sam, do you think the crews are going to have to work extra hours each day or through the weekend.

We're anticipating a full summer, we're at this point anticipating a five-day work week.

What we're going to do is we're actually going to incentivize the contract.

We found that there's two ways to do it, there's the carrot and the stick.

Historically we've always had the stick, if you're late here's your liquidated damages, here's the cost of that interruption to service for those customers.

Now we're getting more into that well let's have the carrot so is there an incentive for them to get creative, does the contractor want to work more days, we'll certainly accommodate whatever they're willing to do if they want to work seven days a week I'm okay with that.

We'd like to get done in August, if they would if they want to, but we are anticipating it to be a full summer.

We are hoping to hit the ground running by mid-May is historically when the road restrictions are lifted from the winter thaw.

We are hoping to be done and paved by late-September it might trickle a little bit into October, you get much later than that and we're kind of at the mercy of what kind of a winter are we going to have.

Some years you could be paving well up till Thanksgiving, we saw that two years ago, but more than likely you're probably talking mid-October is kind of your end all date for paving, concrete, those type of things just based on cold weather.

Jorge we've been talking about these road projects, especially you know Highway 197, Paul Bunyan Drive Northwest, which again isn't coming until the summer of 2026 but we've been talking about these for many years already but the scope of this thing has grown I mean with the roads around Paul Bunyan Drive Northwest added into the project now for the summer of 2025 that we've been talking about how did it grow like that into something that was not just Paul Bunyan Drive Northwest?

Well I don't know if it's grown per se, I'd say it's changed because you might recall the first iteration involved the entire corridor going all the way down to where the new Caribou and CVS Pharmacy is, so you know that piece of it because we had to do that overlay a while back because of how bad pieces of that road had gone.

That piece really you know from say Applebee's on isn't going to happen so you know now that got pulled back.

At the same time when we were able to get this RAISE grant it allowed us to apply in partnership with MnDOT for funding so suddenly we had I think about three and a half million dollars to go work our side of it which then allowed us to do a little bit more with our streets.

Now we always were going to have some obligations there because where the city streets connect into MnDOT's roundabout project we were always going to be responsible for that, but I think that additional funding allowed us to take a good hard look at everything and try to, as Sam talked about earlier, have one engineering firm look at the entire project and tie it all together and especially when you're on Middle School Drive and you see all those different entrances for Culvers, for the frontage road in front of Target, for the Target entrance, for Dondelingers, Midnight Sun, the pool and spa place, there's a lot going on and so cleaning that up and better organizing that I think is really, really important and that's going to happen so I think that's good.

But I do want to come back and just touch on something that you said earlier about businesses.

You know many of those businesses are going to endure two full years of construction.

They're going to go through the first phase with the city and then they're going to go through the second phase with MnDOT and that interruption is significant.

You know in my 35 years in business I've had to deal with road construction in front of businesses I've operated in the past and it's a disruption and I think the challenge there is often when you change people's traffic patterns, they don't always go back there's other people who figure out other ways around the city and it doesn't ever go back so that's a real concern and I know that that's at the forefront of our department's mind and our staff's mind about how can we work to really make this as easy as possible understanding there's definitely going to be some short-term pain here for long-term gain.

And you know that's a piece of that with signage and those kinds of things as well because we have a lot of tourists and that is a heavy tourist corridor.

Not every tourist that enters our city knows where everything is or how to access it and so those are all the kinds of concerns that we'll be working through this summer, but I think staff and MnDOT have both done a pretty good job of anticipating some of that.

Well I hope and I would assume that it's reassuring for businesses at least to hear that you guys and you know the whole project organizers understand that access to these businesses is huge and it's cut off for very much time at all that's a really, really big deal.

But that's understood and you know hopefully if there is any, you know, delayed access or somewhat limited access it's very, very short term.

Decorating this whole project when it's done is an issue, you know, I believe the council has talked about there was a proposal to add trees to the concluded project and there's not a lot of trees in that area right now but it's been sort of a direction for the city of Bemidji to try to involve more trees and green space in the various projects that they do, but that would be kind of a departure in that area since there's not really very many trees there now, what's the current plan, how many are there going to be a number of trees added to the road project when it's done?

Yeah I think in totality between the city streets of Hannah, Middle School and the trunk highway itself, you're probably looking at a few hundred trees.

It seems like a pretty exorbitant amount keeping in mind you plant these now and they're 2.5 in diameter so they're not going to look very robust now.

The renderings that we produced for council to review in tandem with our design team gives you a sense of what it might look like in 20 years and you start looking at maybe some of these 12 in diameter trunks you know up there in a pretty big corridor.

I guess it was an option for the community to think about is it a different way I mean corridors typically for highways are pretty bland, I mean there's not much to there.

This is one that's a pretty big corridor that goes right through our business community so is there kind of that aesthetics piece that we wanted to entertain above and beyond maybe some landscape beds and some of the other.

The rumors I hear I guess throughout the community is there's some frustration with some of the roundabouts that have been installed and just kind of the the dull look essentially of the inside and from my standpoint at a public works, it's the maintenance, it's the you know there's more than just the pretty picture of what that looks like and there's costs associated with that and MnDOT really does kind of put the onus on the city to decide what do you want it to look like.

You essentially as the city have to pay for any of those upgrades, MnDOT's job is to get a vehicle and a driver to the locations in a safe manner using the standards they have, they're not so concerned about it looking pretty and so that's up to the city or whatever entity that the highway is involving that needs to make that call, and so we kind of navigated that process to come up with some ideas of how to make it look a little nicer in terms of landscaping.

You can't put trees in the roundabout though, right, I mean in the center area of the roundabout those have to be designed so that I mean cars occasionally do go right over the top of that roundabout don't they?

As far as the trunk highway goes with MnDOT they are very concrete on their liability in terms of trees or physical obstructions within the circle, now that doesn't mean you can't do anything, I mean you can do some shrubs and bushes and things that would not impact a vehicle and have those kind of issues, so we are going to explore that with this new project.

Now on the city-side we have a say in what we would like to see.

There's roundabouts in this community, actually just right down out from Lakeland here at the Sanford Center facility, that has boulders and trees and stuff in the center of the circle, that's certainly up to the city to decide and so we aren't proposing any trees in any of the circles for any of the project the city legs or the MnDOT section but the city is actually going to entertain doing some larger landscape boulders and try and spruce up a little bit differently on the inside of a couple of our roundabouts on Middle School Drive.

Just over a minute left to go in our show as we're wrapping up already.

Jorge I mean how do you feel about the trees, I mean, and is there more that you want to add to this what's been said so far.

I'll just say two quick things.

The first is you know the corridor is changing dramatically because we have a trail system there, too, and so I think part of that tree cover is designed to enhance and work with the trails, but council has been very much aware and concerned about these trees potentially impacting visibility of businesses and so I think staff have been given quite a bit of latitude to work with individual businesses to make sure that what we're doing there is going to work for them, so that's one way we're trying to address that.

Okay.

Sam final words as we have just about a half minute left of our show today.

I don't, I appreciate you inviting us on.

I love an opportunity to, I feel like we try to be an open book about what's going on in our community as far as stuff and I still hear that people aren't necessarily aware of the full scope of the project and we do our best and we do open houses but the word doesn't always make it as far as I would hope it would make it and so we're certainly open for any questions that folks have and I'm always around for a phone call and a conversation.

Sam, Jorge, thanks for being here for this edition of Lakeland Currents.

All right.

Thank you.

That's it for our show.

Thanks for watching Lakeland Currents.