Year: 2019

EXCERPT: “Northeast Minnesotans have a favorable view of the region’s economy, and a third say their household income has increased over the past year, according to the Rural Pulse 2019 survey of more than 1,560 Minnesotans just released by the Blandin Foundation. Respondents of the region also feel job losses have declined steadily since the 2016 ...

EXCERPT: “Transportation Commissioner Margaret Anderson Kelliher today announced 221 state road and bridge projects that will be worked on across Minnesota this year. The projects, some of which are already underway, will help maintain the state’s roads and bridges, improve safety for motorists and support thousands of construction jobs across the state. Anderson Kelliher also announced 66 ...

EXCERPT: “MinnPost hit the road on Tuesday, April 2, for an event in Collegeville, hosted in partnership with the Eugene J. McCarthy Center for Public Policy & Civic Engagement at St. John’s University and the College of St. Benedict. Part of our MinnPost Social series, the gathering featured a conversation with MinnPost reporters Gregg Aamot ...

EXCERPT: “A surprise to many looking for child care on Care.com this week, when the site pulled tens of thousands of its listings. The Wall Street Journal reports Care.com removed nearly 47,000 listings, just as the paper was investigating the website’s caregiver vetting process. In Minnesota, the state’s nearly 3,000 listings were slashed to a little more than 300. It’s added ...

By: Kelly Asche, Research Associate There isn’t a week that goes by here at the Center where we don’t use U.S. Census information in some form. Its importance in creating our research and helping to develop good policy cannot be understated. If you were to quickly breeze through our research for this year, you would ...

EXCERPT: “At the weekly Herreid Livestock Auction here, area ranchers no longer see as many cattle buyers checking out the cattle as the animals move through the ring. ‘We’ve still got 12, 15, 18 buyers there, but it’s not like it used to be,’ says Joe Vetter, auction co-manager. But the buyers really are there ...

EXCERPT: “The problem of housing affordability, long a concern in popular big cities, has moved to rural America. Nearly one-fourth of the nation’s most rural counties have seen a sizeable increase this decade in the number of households spending at least half their income on housing, a category the federal government calls ‘severely cost-burdened.’ Those counties, none ...

  We wrap up our conversation with Brad Finstad, state director for USDA Rural Development, about rural policy and its impact on rural communities and how the Center helps with the understanding of complicated issues.

EXCERPT: “The Minnesota Department of Health (MDH) Opioid Prevention Pilot Project involves eight communities across the state. Based on six months of data, these communities are expected to cut patient pill use by nearly 765,000 pills per year. In addition, 147 patients are receiving care for opioid use disorder, and Greater Minnesota now has 21 new ...