Feb. 24—EAST GRAND FORKS — The East Grand Forks City Council hopes to create master planning for its industrial park as one of its top goals in 2024.
Over the last month, East Grand Forks city staff, City Council members and Mayor Steve Gander have met to discuss current, past and future priorities in strategic planning meetings. Across two meetings, city staff gave updates on department priorities and plans, and members of the City Council gave feedback and brought their own ideas.
From those meetings, the council decided economic development strategic planning, which includes the search for a new director of economic development and industrial park master planning, and figuring out cannabis policy will be top priorities in the next year.
As part of a larger economic development planning initiative, the city wants to create a master plan for its industrial park. The industrial park is the area east of Fifth Avenue Northeast and mainly between Highway 2 and 10th Street Northeast.
In the past, the city and the Grand Forks-East Grand Forks Metropolitan Planning Organization have looked at the road and transportation plans for the area, but a wholesale look at the area hasn’t been done.
“I think this is the right path,” council member Brian Larson said. “It’s hard to believe there will be any new businesses out there until the infrastructure is brought up to snuff a little bit. It’s pretty hard to attract anyone to that area at the moment.”
The plan initially will be done by city staff working to combine previous transportation studies, current city data on the area and input from local businesses into a singular plan. Driving this plan is the intent to help already-established businesses succeed before the growth of new businesses in the area.
That help could take several forms and timelines. The biggest issues facing East Grand Forks for industrial growth are public infrastructure and available land — the City Council, city staff and members of the East Grand Forks business community
have all agreed that the lack and quality of public infrastructure
, like roads and utilities, and the lack of land in general within the city, hampers the city.
“From a planning standpoint … you don’t really have a lot of property in city limits that isn’t already platted,” said Nancy Ellis, community development director.
The only choice the city has for larger plats of industrial and commercial space would be annexing land, Ellis said. According to City Administrator Reid Huttunen, they would hope to have a framework for the plan done by summer.
Another priority for the city is the transition of the city’s Economic Development Authority to a new director. Director Paul Gorte is retiring later this year and the city is having conversations about what the next director role will look like and what the director and EDA should do moving forward.
Tied in with that conversation is how that role and the EDA should evolve, and what its role is in the city’s economy. That also means whether a new director should have a marketing focus and background or some other set of skills.
“The first step in marketing should be an inventory of who are we, what do we have to offer? What do we hold dear? What do we value? What attributes do we have right that are probably pretty cool but maybe underutilized?” Mayor Gander said.
The council and staff also discussed whether the city should centralize communication operations or if the city should continue doing it department by department, as it’s currently done. The last time the city visited this topic was around eight years ago, when a citywide marketing plan was created. That’s where its current “Life Connected” branding originated, but the city never fully executed it, Huttunen said.
“I would say the gap there was that we were all, as staff, handed this new logo and a binder and told, ‘here’s the new marketing plan,’ and that was the end of it. There was no execution,” Huttunen said. “That’s not the fault of anybody. There’s nobody in the city staff who has that (marketing and communications) skill set, so it just kind of ended there. (The plan) is still on my shelf covered in dust.”
The council’s consensus was to avoid doing what it did last time, as it would likely lead to the same result — a plan that the city rarely uses. Next, the council will finalize whether the next EDA director should have a marketing focus, and perhaps restructure city positions to better serve the city’s marketing and communication needs.
Even though cannabis has been legal in Minnesota since August, the process of implementing rules and regulations for legal sales is still in its infancy. Minnesota, which still doesn’t have an official director of the Office of Cannabis Management, has been ramping up efforts, but local governments still haven’t gotten much guidance on how they can effectively regulate cannabis.
At present,
East Grand Forks has a moratorium on the sale
, distribution and manufacturing of cannabis within the city. However, that moratorium will expire at the end of the year due to state law. Under the current law, the city will have to allow at least one business to operate within its jurisdiction.
The council wants to form a task force to discuss and study it further.
“We need to have a task force, and I think we should set up that task force last week,” council member Ben Pokrzywinski said. “Personally, I don’t know if I want that anywhere other than downtown, because I don’t want college kids driving throughout neighborhoods to some backwoods location to visit a business.”
Cannabis legalization also means that the city has to create zoning rules for the manner and method in which these new businesses can exist and operate. While much of the licensing will be handled by the state, local government units are tasked with the process of fitting them into their zoning codes. And questions still remain on what local regulations can and cannot exist.
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