Kari Kopnick; “Minnesota is full of people who are a lot like Washingtonians”

So I just spent a few days back in the cold tundra that I used to call home. Before I made my home on Benson Hill here in Renton, I lived in Minnesota.

Minnesota is full of people who are a lot like Washingtonians. There are more Scandinavians back in the Midwest; less density of people in neighborhoods and less traffic and it’s really, really cold in the winter, but in both states the folks are nice.

I grew up in Bloomington, Minnesota in the shadow of the Mall of America. Well, where the MOA is now—back then it was an old baseball and football stadium—an outdoor one if you can imagine that. But now it’s a place where tourists flock to shop. And I really do think you can buy anything that you could possibly need there and a whole lot of things you would never, ever need.

This trip back I noticed that Bloomington is actually a lot like Renton. It’s an inner ring suburb, meaning it was one of the first places people fled the cost and crowding of the city for their own little home. It’s big, covering a huge amount of area. And Bloomington has a real industrial base just like Renton.

In both towns you go from the neighborhood that has new condos and quad homes to the old “war boxes” in a block or two. You have a nice downtown, although ours here in Renton is better, and we are getting some really decent shopping with the Landing—not a mall with an amusement park in the middle, but it has what we need.

When I was growing up a thousand years ago, Bloomington was the third largest city in Minnesota. As of January 1st Rochester, MN is the third largest.

Rochester feels like a smallish city. My family and I spent New Years Eve visiting old friends in Rochester.

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Well, we weren’t really visiting friends. We were visiting our Cheezeball family, they may not be related officially, but we bonded early on trying to catch those little crunchy “food product snacks” after a friend threw them for us. That was 20 years ago. We’ve been there for each other ever since, so it’s better than family. A whole passel of us made the trek to Rochester to celebrate the New Year and all our new beginnings.

The folks we know in Rochester moved to Southeast Minnesota for a job at the Mayo Clinic and are still there 10 years later.

Getting to Rochester from Bloomington is like driving to Olympia for us, except instead of driving thru what feels like one continuing city; you pass a million farmsteads, some of them still clearly producing crops during the 5 month growing season. And the terrain is flat like the ocean. Flat, flat, flat.

On New Year’s Eve, the Rochester town paper had a feature about how the City of Rochester was annexing some neighborhoods so they could provide services for the people there. Sound familiar?

The Rochester City Council has been talking about annexation since the 90s. And it was all voluntary. Not everyone is happy about it of course. That’s how things go. Some folks think things were just fine as is. But like here in Renton, the services were really needed. People needed one place to call to get their city related issues handled.

And like it will be here in Renton, things are changing.

Like building the Mall of America right where Minnesota Twins Star Harmon Killebrew hit homeruns.

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And like the super fancy boutique stores going in where there used to be five and dimes.

And even like having a Starbucks just about everywhere you can want one in my hometown now; including Target. I’m not complaining. I’m just noticing

The times, they are a changin’.

Now I have to go listen to some Bob Dylan.

Happy New Year!

Kari Kopnick