“Think about electricity — we just turn it off and on. Broadband should be the same way.”
That’s what Heartland Forward’s Executive Vice President Angie Cooper told Telecompetitor in an interview last week. Heartland Forward describes itself as a “think and do tank” focused on 20 states it defines as the heartland: Alabama, Arkansas, Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Michigan, Minnesota, Mississippi, Missouri, Nebraska, North Dakota, Ohio, Oklahoma, South Dakota, Tennessee, Texas, and Wisconsin. …
According to Heartland Forward and Cooper, as its representative, access to broadband is the single most important economic issue facing the United States heartland today.
They offer as proof…
As proof of the claim that access to broadband is a leading economic issue, Cooper cited a 2021 Deloitte study that found that “a 10-percentage-point increase of broadband penetration in 2016 would have resulted in more than 806,000 additional jobs in 2019, or an average annual increase of 269,000 jobs.”
While Heartland Forward’s focus was initially on the “three A’s” — availability, affordability, and adoptability — they have, more recently, focused on affordability and adoptability.
In October 2020, 55% of Americans teleworked; 16 months later, in January 2022, full-time telework dropped to 43%, and by October 2023, full-time telework rates had decreased to 35%. Current data, however, indicate that about one-third of Americans are working a hybrid schedule, alternating days at the office with days at home (or away). These trends offer benefits to rural spaces where robust broadband capabilities can support a wide range of telework experiences.
An Agricultural Economics article from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln proposes that telework can create self-fulfilling prophecies of community gain. The article asserts that improvements in technology will lead to increases in the number of people teleworking and speed the transition from paper to digital economies. At the same time, new businesses that never relied on paper processes will provide fertile ground for new telework opportunities. These can be expected to create favorable conditions for employees and potentially reduce worker churn.
Running beneath these trends, however, is a question: Do telework opportunities help local communities grow? A report from the W.E. Upjohn Institute for Employment Research finds positive correlations between the number of teleworkers and population growth. The report also identified a positive correlation between seasonal housing and telework; the report suggests these trends indicate that seasonal home growth occurred in areas with natural amenities, and that those amenities could be viewed as making those places more attractive for potential “work anywhere, from anywhere” earners.
They talk about the value of natural amenities in attracting teleworkers, but something I find even more compelling is the opportunity to close or at least blur the childcare gap…
At the same time, affordable housing and childcare remain challenges for many communities. A survey conducted by the Kansas Office of Rural Prosperity of residents ages 21-39 identified childcare obstacles as a barrier to jobs or starting families. The same report recommends supporting programming for K-12 students that highlights the positive aspects of living in rural spaces, indicating the need for long-term, long-tail strategies aimed at youth from infancy through high school.
Telework, however, can mitigate some childcare shortage needs. The U.S. Office of Personnel Management proposes “telework as a workplace flexibility to support employees with caregiver responsibilities, especially young minor children and/or adult dependents for whom an employee provides services essential to their health, well-being, and/or activities of daily living.” While most employers will remind employees that telework arrangements are not intended to substitute for childcare, many may quietly acknowledge that fixing a PB&J is roughly the equivalent of a water cooler break and also incorporate a “flex time” approach to work-from-home arrangements.
Fortuitously, these trends coincide with increasing rates of broadband adoption. Household income (which translates into affordability) remains the single largest barrier to adoption. Strategies to address affordability, particularly where that might stand in the way of telework, can have far reaching community and economic impacts. Encouraging data from a variety of sources supports efforts to promote telework capabilities.
Mesabi Tribune reports on increase in construction employment…
In recent years, financial commitment from the federal government to rebuild and expand critical American infrastructure has been a boon for the construction industry. Stemming from the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, CHIPS and Science Act, and Inflation Reduction Act of 2022, federal funding announcements for infrastructure projects have totalled $552.8 billion as of June 2024. From building and expanding critical railroad corridors to securing clean water and broadband internet in rural communities, the American construction industry has its work cut out for it.
Despite these sizable financial commitments, the construction industry faces a major labor shortage. Largely due to the aforementioned infrastructure developments combined with recent large private sector construction projects, Associated Builders and Contractors—a construction industry trade association—estimates the sector needs to hire over 500,000 workers to satisfy current demand in 2024.
Here’s how Minnesota looks…
At the metropolitan level, there is a strong positive correlation between the overall health of the local economy and construction-specific job growth. In general, locations with the most total employment growth were more likely to have strong construction job growth, while metros suffering from job losses were more likely to cut back on construction hiring. These trends highlight the fact that job growth tends to reinforce itself. When a city adds more workers in one part of the economy, it often needs to create more homes, office space, and services to accommodate them, which helps create more jobs in other parts of the economy as well. In many of these high-growth cities, construction job growth significantly outpaced total employment growth over the past five years.
This analysis was conducted by Construction Coverage, a website that provides construction insurance guides, using data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. To determine the locations with the biggest increase in construction jobs, researchers calculated the percentage change in construction employment between 2018 and 2023.
Here is a summary of the data for Minnesota:
Percentage change in construction employment (2018–2023): +10.4%
Percentage change in total employment (2018–2023): +0.5%
Total change in construction employment (2018–2023): +10,450
Total construction employment (2023): 110,960
Median annual wage for construction workers (2023): $65,770
For reference, here are the statistics for the entire United States:
Percentage change in construction employment (2018–2023): +4.4%
Percentage change in total employment (2018–2023): +4.9%
Total change in construction employment (2018–2023): +262,990
Total construction employment (2023): 6,225,630
Median annual wage for construction workers (2023): $55,680
Hopefully this stands Minnesota in good stead when broadband deployment begins.
It’s been a while since I’ve been able to talk about fun, successful uses of broadband in rural Minnesota. I’m glad to share the following story from MPR News…
The town of Morris lies in west central Minnesota. The small town and its population of some 5,000 is surrounded by farms. Morris is probably best known for its University of Minnesota liberal arts campus.
In downtown Morris is the Inherit Clothing Company. Inherit curates, designs and sells modest, feminine, on-trend styles for its customers.
MPR’s senior economics contributor Chris Farrell was fascinated to learn in a recent visit that Inherit is largely an e-commerce business with global sales. He joined MPR News host Cathy Wurzer to share his takeaways from a conversation with Inherit CEO Amy Ekron.
A recent study shows that Minnesota is ranked sixth in the nation for business, with high marks coming from areas judging the state’s competitiveness, workforce, infrastructure, economy, quality of life and business friendliness.
This comes on the heels of additional accolades the state has received recently, like their ranking for best state for independent retailers, according to a B2B Reviews study, and the Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport was named the best U.S. airport in 2024 by Travel + Leisure.
“These rankings are a testament to our focus on investing in key areas that make our businesses and economy strong: job training, workforce development, child care, and broadband access,” said Governor Tim Walz. “Businesses in top industries, from health care to renewable energy and manufacturing, understand the benefits of investing and growing in Minnesota.”
Here’s how Minnesota compared to other top states…
The underlying hypothesis of this paper is that operators offering agritourism activities on their farms require broadband to connect with potential customers, promote their business and services through social media and other online channels, and process payments and bookings online. Broadband access is also important for small business marketing, online visibility, and rural tourism (Federal Communications Commission [FCC], 2018; Salemink et al., 2017).
They found…
Our results show that broadband speed adopted in 2012 was significantly associated with the number of agritourism operations in 2017 nationally, after controlling for other covariates. This supports the hypothesis that adoption of fast broadband internet helps farmers to connect with potential customers in offering agritourism services. Counties with a higher number of agritourism operations and farm proprietors in 2012 also had a higher number of agritourism operations in 2017, and local wealth was more significantly associated than local income with the growth of agritourism operations as discretionary spending matters in this context. Additionally, natural amenities were positively associated with the number of agritourism operations, while environmental pollution had a negative association, as expected. The results also show that proximity to metropolitan areas plays a vital role in the success of agritourism operations. Importantly, however, the association between broadband adoption and agritourism success does not exist in rural areas when they are considered separately, for reasons described above.
This study thus sheds light on the association between broadband adoption and agritourism operations, demonstrating that improved adoption can lead to additional income-generating opportunities for farmers in counties with large metropolitan populations, but this is not the case for smaller and more remote counties. It remains to be seen if this result still holds with the next Agricultural Census, which will allow a panel data analysis. We acknowledge the limitations of this analysis, as we used broadband data from 2012. This means that the absolute speed thresholds may now be outdated. However, we suggest that the associations between higher broadband penetration and agritourism success remain relevant. Future work could address the impact of Land Grant University-based extension and other outreach educational programs on broadband utilization and the costs of broadband expansion in rural areas, compared to the benefits. These studies will benefit from using more recent broadband data in conjunction with more up-to-date agritourism numbers.
We review the existing empirical literature on high-speed broadband.
We consider the most relevant socioeconomic effects of modern broadband.
We find huge benefits in terms of economic growth, productivity and resilience.
Effects on employment are more ambiguous.
Positive socio-economic effects take hold only after broadband adoption.
I went in and took a deeper dive into their conclusions and have shared them as bullet points:
In line with both previous reviews, we find that new broadband Internet has a positive and significant effect on GDP at the aggregate level for all studies using country-year panel data. When this result is contrasted with the findings of the older broadband literature, a nonlinear relationship emerges. While the older literature suggests that there seems to be a minimum threshold of broadband quality for economic benefits, the newer literature points to diminishing returns beyond a certain level of broadband quality. However, evidence for diminishing returns may also be because demand for innovative and new bandwidth-intensive services develops and increases over time. Hence, there might be a longer time lag before the full benefits of high-speed Gigabit connections become apparent in GDP or consumer surplus, and these benefits are not (yet) captured in the data used in the available empirical studies.
Findings on employment effects also tend to be consistent with the older literature, with most studies finding positive links between (basic and new) broadband and labor market outcomes. However, some studies also find insignificant or even negative employment effects. Both strands of literature relate these ambiguities to heterogeneous effects with respect to differences in urbanization and the skill level of the workforce. While the latter suggests that the effect of broadband is significant mainly for high-skilled workers, the comparatively stronger effect of broadband in remote areas suggests that these regions catch up with more economically developed urban areas once sufficient broadband infrastructure is available.
Like the literature on basic broadband Internet, we find strong evidence of the positive effects of new broadband Internet on productivity. However, the effects may vary according to the sector studied and may emerge only over time and in combination with strategic and organizational investments. This also corroborates well with the broader empirical literature on ICT and productivity (Cardona et al., 2013; Jung and Gómez-Bengoechea, 2024)) which shows that ICT is evident in the productivity statistics. The productivity effect grows positively over time and ICT investment necessitates complementary organizational investments, skills, and industry structures.
In contrast to the previous surveys, we include other relevant outcome variables. We find additional GDP-relevant effects associated with increases in rents and house prices, which is in line with the basic broadband-related literature (Ahlfeldt et al., 2017).
Limited evidence supports the positive impact of new broadband on education and human capital, aligning with older literature.
Regarding the ICT–energy–CO2 emission nexus, which has become increasingly relevant in the empirical literature in the last decade, ICT elements can have positive environmental effects on society, especially in developed countries where the use of ICT is high and which at the same time show low levels of ICT production. Although this externality is of minor importance, it is also policy relevant, as it shows that it is not necessary to decouple ICT from economic growth to achieve positive environmental effects. However, further ICT availability and adoption is warranted to enhance the usage of emission-reducing enabling technologies.
Whereas the above-mentioned effects implicitly all rely on “economic normal times”, the lockdown periods during the Covid-19 pandemic showed that digital infrastructures and services are of great importance for the resilience of economies in “times of economic crisis”.
In times of economic crisis, this also includes work from home, contributing not only to higher labor productivity compared to low-quality broadband Internet connections but also saving commuting time and thereby increasing leisure and thus consumer utility (Barrero et al., 2021a; Barrero et al., 2021a). Therefore, the total benefits of broadband are largely underestimated if, for example, only GDP-related effects are considered.
Thanks to Steve Kraus I had the opportunity to join the Office of Broadband Development on a visit with folks in Waseca to talk about broadband use and need. We stopped to visit the library, the superheroes of the pandemic era, especially in an area without ubiquitous broadband. We visited with the Warden of the federal women’s prison and several stops related to farming or ag business. They are great stories of people making smart use of technology.
9:30am – Board of Commissioners Meeting and OBD Presentation
It was great to meet the Commissioners in the person, after meeting them through Zoom last summer. There were 12 people in attendance. They discussed a number of topics but I focused on broadband. Hannah Buckland from the Office of Broadband Development gave a presentation. Commissioners had questions about communities with excellent broadband, such as Rock County and NW MN.
11:00am – Visit to Waseca-Le Sueur Regional Library
We spoke to librarians about how their Digital Equity plan evolved. Initially, they had one person who did digital training, which wasn’t enough for a library system with nine locations. Also, the classes weren’t well attended. It turned out there was need but patrons needed them on-demand. So, they shifted to helping patrons on a question-by-question basis. Then we thought about a more system way to address the needs.
They have 9 libraries and only one has more than one person behind the desk.
5 libraries are open fewer than 23 hours a week
Very little tech training for staff
Most patrons don’t have jobs that require digital skills. So, they don’t have basic skills. They need help. Users share their passwords. People feel shame.
Many people have phones only for technology so they come in for needs – such as related to telehealth.
Need more reliable broadband for distance higher ed.
Most frequent questions are about printing
They still circulate hotspots. They had 500 hotspots until grant ran out; now they have around 20 and that’s because of vocal demand.
They want to help but we don’t have the capacity. Theydid a survey with patrons are learned that people like to figure things out on their own, then learn through videos.
The dream solution is to have Digital Navigators. They want to promote creativity online and content producers.
A plan from OBD is to have noncompetitive grants for libraries. But the budget and timeline are vague. There will be funding available and this is in line with what it’s for.
Favorite COVID stories:
They held a Folktales and Fairies online event where kids from all over the world attended. And they were able to get authors who would not have been available if it required travel. Even author-to-author connections were unusual and outstanding.
11:40am – Tour of AURI Bioindustrial Innovation Center
Alan Doering, Senior Scientist for Coproducts
The tour says it all – with great enthusiasm. AURI works with businesses to test and research their technology. A lot of what they work on is creating sustainable solutions, such as replacing plastic with byproducts that are biodegradable. They need broadband to promote and remote what they do but they need serious broadband to transmit and process data remotely.
It is a nice example of how broadband contributes to sustainability.
12:15pm – Lunch at U of M Southern Research Outreach Center (SROC)
Lunch provided by Lush Cakes
Jason Stenzel, Director of Operations at SROC
Exploring how SROC is helping to bridge the digital divide in all sectors of the Agricultural Economy
Warden Michael Segal, Federal Correctional Institution Waseca
Upskilling and education for incarcerated individuals. Warden Segal will walk through his philosophy of corrections and discuss some unique and creative tools implemented at FCI Waseca.
Fun to learn about U of M Southern Research Outreach Center. One of the things they do is track local weather. Apparently, checking the local tracking of local weather is a popular activity with local farmers and beyond. Folks use broadband to access the information but the SROC uses more to upload and process the multiple factors associated with all aspects of weather measures.
Also interesting to learn about broadband in the federal women’s prison. Warden Segal is clearly dedicated to presenting inmates with opportunities to improve their lives in and out of the prison, including a wide range of educational opportunities. Broadband has bee essential in delivering remote education.
1:30pm – Jeff Huelsnitz (Huey) Farm
Jeff will discuss precision planting and agriculture and demonstrate some of the equipment used in this critical sector.
The Hueys have a large family farm but are also precision ag equipment dealers. They got interested in precision ag early and have become local experts. They talk about the difference that precision ag came make – for example they track seeds as they are sown, including skipped and double-seed drops, which apparently can cost 20 bushels per acre. They are often able to improve precision rates from 95 percent to almost 100 percent by helping people adopt precision ag. They also talk about the importance of time management in farming and how much can be spent or save regularly.
Inherent in precision ag is the need for broadband. Often a farm with want FTTH, a wifi network and cellular access to cover the needs of the farm business and crop tracking in the field. Hueys admit that their connectivity is fine, but not great. They work with some folks who have broadband that’s less than fine and want to work on precision-ag-adjacent solutions – but really can’t. No need to buy the best equipment if you can’t get online. In that case maybe there’s a way to make the tractor faster or find other fixes. But a farm without broadband is missing opportunities and going back to the first stop of the tour, that means loss of profits but also minimizes sustainability for the land.
While most of us were gleefully chasing down the Northern Lights last weekend, the New York Times (via Yahoo News) reports on another side…
The powerful geomagnetic storm that cast the northern lights’ vivid colors across the Northern Hemisphere over the weekend also caused some navigational systems in tractors and other farming equipment to break down at the height of planting season, suppliers and farmers said.
Many farmers have come to rely on the equipment, which uses GPS and other navigational technology and helps them to plant more efficiently and precisely by keeping rows straight and avoiding gaps or overlap. But over the weekend, some of those operations in the Midwest, as well as in other parts of the United States and Canada, temporarily ground to a halt.
In Minnesota, some farmers who had planned to spend Friday night sowing seeds were hamstrung by the outages. “I’ve never dealt with anything like this,” said Patrick O’Connor, owner of a farm about 80 miles south of Minneapolis that mainly grows corn and soybean.
O’Connor said that after being rained out for two weeks, he got into his tractor around 5 p.m., hoping to spend the night planting corn. When he received a warning about his GPS system, he called a technical help line and was directed to a message saying there was an outage and nothing could be done to fix it.
It’s all happening right as farmers are rushing to get the 2024 crop planted.
“The good news is those radio blackouts for GPS may only last for a few hours or half a day,” says Dr. Terry Griffin a Professor & Cropping Systems Economist at Kansas State University. “My message is: if this is a radio blackout then patience is your best bet. Go check the NOAA website and if the planetary K-Index is red instead of green then go have an early lunch.”
Beyond the inconvenience of delayed field work, there could be real dollars lost to such an extended outage.
From an agricultural perspective, Dr. Griffin has been studying the economic impacts of GPS outages for several years. He’s found that even a few hours to half a day of lost GPS signal can come with a cost for farmers. That’s especially true for farmers who miss an optimum planting or harvesting window. Pushing field work later into the season can ultimately cost them yield and performance during the season.
“There are there are some real penalties and real dollars that come into effect when we’re not able to do field work,” Dr. Griffin said.
That said, it depends on the time of year and the regions impacted. A January disruption would likely have less impact than one during planting or harvest.
Dr. Griffin says while GPS satellites have been in use and in orbit for many years – the first launched in 1978 – civilian use of GPS is relatively new.
He believes these new space weather events will come with a learning curve.
“This was the first solar cycle maximum we’ve had that’s going to be big with satellite communications,” Dr. Griffin said. “So, we’re going to find out some things.”
It’s not yet archived but an hour ago, I heard on MPR an interview with the MN farmer from the NY Times article. He talked about how it isn’t just a matter of using the GPS to make sure the rows in the field are straight. The GPS helps keep track of the soil quality, historical needs of the plants and more and distributes seeds and nutrients based location. So it made sense to wait until the solar storm was over rather than forge ahead using “tradition” sowing practices.
Also when asked if he thought this might happen again, the farmer said yes – if it’s happened once, it will likely happen again.
Interesting both in terms of the things the engineers and scientists need to learn about all aspects of precision agriculture and the value that the farmers put on using precision ag tools!
The Minnesota Technology Association is pleased to announce that it has been awarded a $285,000 grant from the Department of Employment and Economic Development (DEED) for technology workforce development. This funding comes as part of a $20 million initiative from DEED to prepare more Minnesotans for in-demand careers. Read more about how MnTech will be leading this initiative for the technology sector in our latest blog post.
Imagine your nonprofit gets an email from someone who wants to make a $10,000 donation in cryptocurrency. Do you junk it, flag it or follow up? Marlise Riffel at Iron Range Partnership for Sustainability (IRPS) chose to follow up. Spoiler alert – it worked out! I wanted to tell her story to educate, not advocate. There are a lot of toads out there, but Marlise was smart enough to figure out how to work with a prince.
IRSP “is dedicated to maintaining and improving the economic, environmental and social characteristics of our area so that our residents can continue to lead healthy, productive and enjoyable lives.” One way they do that is by acting as a fiscal agent for organizations, such as Recycling Electronics for Climate Action (RECA).
The email in question actually came to RECA from their GiveMN profile but was forwarded to Marlise, who is Chair of the IRPS Board. She read a personal-sounding email offering to donate $10,000 in cryptocurrency. Marlise replied and asked some questions. The donor said he had worked with RECA and someone on staff recognized the name. So that helped legitimize the offer.
The next question was why use cryptocurrency? Turns out donating cryptocurrency can allow the donor to avoid paying capital gains tax on the appreciated value of the cryptocurrency AND still get the tax deduction for the charitable donation. (Here’s more info on the specifics.)
Satisfied that the donor was legit, the next step was to figure out how to turn crypto into tangible money. Marlise called the local bank; they didn’t know enough to help with the process. So Marlise went to Google. She found a few third parties that would help transfer the funds. The first company she tried was also not helpful and didn’t feel right. The second option, Crypto for Charity was a better fit for her.
Crypto for Currency had helpful online support and they had staff that got back to her and walked her through the processes. She had to provide:
501c3 letter
Employee ID Number
Full name (or organization)
Once that cleared, they were added to the Crypto for Charity’s Charity-base, a database of nonprofit organizations able to accept cryptocurrency. I found it helpful to check out the donor portal to see the presentation of potential charitable donations. It reminds me of the Give to the Max database that I think can help nonprofits get found by new donors.
The next step was to set up what I think of as a merchant account. A financial partner to take the crypto from the donor and turn that into a deposit in your bank account. Marlise went with Bill.com. There is no fee. She had to give them banking info, including the routing number. They told her when to expect the funds.
That was last Friday. I was nervous for her. But midafternoon she got the good news. The donation was $10,000; the deposit was for $9996.
I’m happy for everyone involved. Marlise asked good questions and found good partners. I’m sure there are other good partners but again, this post isn’t meant to advocate crypto or promote any specific partner but just introduce a new way to accept funds with the same caution you’d use with any financial transaction. Something worth considering should you get an email from a potential donor.
There are so many interesting things happening because of broadband these days: telehealth, remote work, precision agriculture and then there are some that are less easy to fully understand, at least for me. So, I’m starting to track those topics more and want to share what I learn, including today’s announcement from the Minnesota Department of Commerce …
The Minnesota Department of Commerce is one of multiple states to enter into a settlement with TradeStation Crypto, Inc. The settlement resolves the investigation into TradeStation’s cryptocurrency interest-earning program. See consent order.
TradeStation is a Florida-based corporation that provides cryptocurrency-asset-related financial services to retail customers and institutional customers in the United States, including investing and trading services. From February 2021 to June 2022, TradeStation offered a cryptocurrency interest-earning program to Minnesota investors. Under this program, investors passively earned interest on crypto assets by loaning them to TradeStation. TradeStation maintained total discretion over the revenue-generating activities utilized to earn returns for investors. The company offered and promoted its crypto interest-earning program in Minnesota and the United States at large via its website and various platforms.
TradeStation is alleged to have failed to comply with Minnesota securities registration requirements and, as a result, offered and sold securities in Minnesota that were unregistered or did not meet an exemption for registration as required by state law. …
The $1.5 million multistate settlement, on behalf of 51 United States jurisdictions, is the result of a North American Securities Administration Association (NASAA) task force of eight state securities regulators from Alabama, California, Mississippi, North Carolina, Ohio, South Carolina, Washington and Wisconsin. The task force determined that during the offering period, TradeStation engaged in the unregistered offer and sale of securities via its cryptocurrency interest-earning program.
In Minnesota alone, there were at least 155 active investor digital asset trading accounts collectively valued at almost $300,000.
TradeStation will pay each state a fine of $29,411.76, for a total of almost $1.5 million. The company will also cease offering, selling, or renewing its crypto interest earning program until such activities are compliant with applicable state and federal securities laws. TradeStation has repaid investors, including interest and earnings.
They offer assistance if you have a crypto currency issue:
Minnesota Consumer Service Center
Minnesota consumers and businesses with concerns or complaints about crypto investments or other securities concerns can contact Commerce’s Consumer Service Center:
In part, I’m sharing this because I want someone to attend and tell me about it. But also, it’s a great opportunity to get folks interested in cyber security and that would be a nice industry cluster for rural Minnesota! From the nonprofit, ITExperience…
We are Introducing our new Cyber Investigator Interactive game
You will be able to Join a team of cybersecurity investigators as they respond to a series of different cyber-attacks. Travel through three different industries to help them conduct interviews, stop the attacks, solve puzzles, and restore things to normal.
Duration: 1: 30mins
Do you want to have fun playing a game and also learn a lot about how cyber detectives work on a day-to-day basis?
Governor Tim Walz today announced that Meta will build an $800 million, 715,000-square-foot data center in Rosemount, supporting approximately 100 operational jobs and at least 1,000 skilled trade jobs at peak construction.
“Minnesota is excited to welcome Meta to Rosemount – a win for our state that will bring dozens of jobs and invigorate the local economy,” said Governor Walz. “Today’s announcement is a testament to our commitment to making Minnesota a top state for business, innovation, and investment in our workforce.”
“We are extremely happy to make Minnesota and Rosemount our new home. We are committed to playing a positive role here and investing in the community’s long-term vitality,” said Brad Davis, director of data center community and economic development at Meta. “Rosemount stood out as an outstanding location for our newest data center thanks to its great access to infrastructure, deep pool of talent, and amazing community partners. Our thanks go to all of our partners that have helped get us here.”
“This $800 million investment will undoubtedly shape the future of our city and bring about positive change and opportunities to our community. Beyond Meta’s investment, its commitment to our schools, nonprofits, and STEM education programs will undoubtedly makea great impact,” said Rosemount Mayor Jeff Weisensel. “As we welcome Meta to Rosemount, let us embrace this opportunity for progress, innovation, and community enrichment.”
Located on a 280-acre parcel of land in UMore Park, the project will contribute millions in tax revenue through local property taxes, fees, and other indirect revenue streams. Like all of Meta’s data centers, the Rosemount Data Center will be supported by 100% renewable energy, and Meta will work with partners to add new renewable energy resources to the grid. The campus will also achieve LEED Gold certification after commencing operations in 2026.
Thanks to Steve Kraus I had the opportunity to join the Office of Broadband Development on a visit with folks in Waseca to talk about broadband use and need. We stopped to visit the library, the superheroes of the pandemic era, especially in an area without ubiquitous broadband. We visited with the Warden of the federal women’s prison and several stops related to farming or ag business. They are great stories of people making smart use of technology.