Northfield Mayor Rhonda Pownell discussed the 2018 outlook for the City on KYMN last week. She says Economic Development will play a “huge” role in the future. Adding, “our Economic Development Coordinator, Nate Carlson, has been doing some business visits and Chris Heineman has been hugely instrumental in that as well. In those business visits, they do about 11 of them over the course of a year, and 7 of those 11 are expanding”. Speaking of new
development she said, “the long term care center moving in out there next to the hospital is really good too. I think that we’ll need to find agreement on what that area out there looks like so that we can give clear direction to staff on how we move forward in that area out there”. Additionally, she said, there are people looking at density for downtown and the former Rueb N Stein is currently being renovated. Climate Action planning will move forward, affordable housing will be a huge focus for seniors and lower income people.
History Collaborative goes digital
The Northfield History Collaborative (NHC), a digital library of historical records from the Northfield area, announced that they have completed a grant-funded project to digitize historical materials that document the World War I era in Northfield and Rice County. The digitized materials come from many of the NHC’s 16 partner organizations and include text documents, photographs, illustrations, artifacts, and even sheet music. The new online collection shares the experiences of individuals from the area who served during the war in various branches of the military, in the Red Cross and other humanitarian organizations, as well as on the home front. Project Coordinator Stephanie Hess will be in studio next week to talk more about the WWI project and the Collaborative.
Business, Tourism, Education will move in
The Northfield Chamber will be moving into new space February 1st. There will be lots of acronyms under one roof with the Chamber, including the CVB, the NDDC and the NEC. They’ll all be at 19 Bridge Square, the Allsworth building right next to Neuger. Chamber President Todd Bornhauser said he’s really excited about 2018 for the “synergies” that will take place and the information flow with all of them in the same building. They’ll be able to “walk down the hall” and talk to each other about what’s going on. He’s also interested to see how it changes the pedestrian flow being right downtown.
Garbage hauling changes in Dundas
What’s going on with garbage hauling in Dundas? City Administrator John McCarthy said this week they change over from Waste Management to DSI. Leave your garbage cans out this week, Waste Management will dump them and then come back to pick them up. During the week, DSI will drop off new cans. McCarthy said DON’T put out your recycling cans, those will not be changed out. The first week of January, DSI aka Dick’s Sanitation, will take over services and your pickup day will stay the same.
