‘Open on 65’ Aims to Help Businesses Affected by Construction in Itasca, Aitkin Co.

In Minnesota, road construction is inevitable, and it mainly takes place during the peak season for “going to the lake” in destination communities like Jacobson, Swan River, Warba, Goodland, and Pengilly. With road construction affecting those communities, a project was started to hopefully keep customer traffic flowing through the summer.

Roundabout road construction on Highway 65 North and Highway 2 has affected many small businesses in the Itasca and Aitkin counties, drastically impacting what normally would be their busiest season. It’s left business owners worried for the winter months ahead.

“It’s cut into our flow of people coming through here,” said Kris Manetas, co-owner of Swan River Red Eye Saloon and Eatery. “A lot of our customers are pretty loyal and they’ll go out of their way to get to us. But then the ones that aren’t regulars will, they’ve just decided they’re not even going to come down this way. I’ve heard that from several people. ‘Well, we’ll just wait until the construction’s over and then we’ll come and see you.’ Well, that impacts our bottom line significantly.”

Tourism brings in roughly $100 million and employs over 1,500 people in Itasca County alone, so when construction like this takes place, it can affect many small businesses on those roads.

“We make a significant amount of our income over the summer months from May to probably … September,” explained Kim Korpi, co-owner of Fred’s Store in Goodland, “and we’ve lost probably over half of our revenue this summer from this project. So it’s not great, but we’ll muddle through.”

“Highway 65 is like an interstate usually in the summer and this summer it’s…dead, now it’s like a county road,” added co-owner Kerri Eiden.

The detours not only affect the businesses in those areas, as the roads that drivers are suggested to take may not be the best to travel on.

“The intended detours of country road or gravel road, which is proving to be very disruptive to those local residents because, where they might only see a couple cars a day, they’re now seeing semis, and the roads and the infrastructure simply wasn’t designed for that,” said Itasca County District 3 Commissioner John Johnson. “So it’s been very impactful to their quality of life out in the country where they’ve chosen to live.”

That is why Johnson has partnered with North Star Marketing to start the “Open on 65” project to hopefully bring awareness to these businesses affected by the construction.

“My first and foremost desire is to help financially support and inspire people to go the extra mile and continue to come to these businesses even though it’s a little inconvenient right now,” Johnson elaborated. “So we can help them build up the financial support and continue to sustain their operations through the summer because much of the revenue that’s needed to get through the winter is earned in the summer.”

He conintued, “I’m also just trying to bring to light an unintended consequence of major construction projects in rural Minnesota in hopes that MnDOT will take a slightly different look at construction projects in rural Minnesota and maybe handle them a little differently in terms of 20- and 30-mile detours, completely taking traffic patterns away from businesses that rely on that just to get through their year.”

The Highway 65 North and Highway 2 roundabout construction project started on April 8th of this year. The project is expected to be completed by this fall.