As year ends, 3M's resort is still for sale and many Minnesota employers still seek workers

The 3M sign came down in late summer at its Wonewok corporate getaway north of Park Rapids.

"That really tied it up for the rest of us that this is happening," Rich Halvorsen, a neighbor of the resort on Big Mantrap Lake, told me earlier this month.

Halvorsen and I met at a little roadside cafe a few miles from the lake in May. It was just a couple of weeks after 3M announced that it was selling Wonewok, which it had owned since the 1950s as a conference center and employee retreat in northern Minnesota.

In my first year writing business columns, Halvorsen is one of several hundred people who kindly told me things I believed you would want to know. As the year ends, I caught up with some of them again.

That afternoon in May, Halvorsen and I drove around Wonewok and as close as we could to it, then we went to Park Rapids to look up old documents and photos of it at a museum. He later went out on the lake and took a photo of its empty boat house. The resulting column was one of the most popular that I wrote in 2023.

In those first weeks after 3M announced the property was for sale, anxiety washed through the town and the neighbors on the lake. After some lake association gatherings over the ensuing months, Halvorsen said, "People were starting to come back off the ledge."

The shape of the property is unusual, with narrow peninsulas into the lake. That makes it unlikely the neighbors' worst fears — that Wonewok will be cut up into small parcels — will happen. "If you set back a few hundred feet from the lake, you're on the lake on the other side," he said.

A 3M spokesman said this month that Wonewok is still for sale.

In downtown Minneapolis, the Dayton's Project and IDS Center attracted some small retailers to sell goods to holiday shoppers this month. A block away from all of that action, the owners of gift boutique Kobi Co., Kobi Gregory and her mother Tasha Harris, are on track for their holiday sales goals.

I first met them in the summer, when it seemed to me that their relatively new store was the happiest place in downtown Minneapolis.

While Gregory minded the store through the fall, Harris participated in two business accelerator programs. One was hosted by Minneapolis-based Metropolitan Economic Development Association, or MEDA. The other, by Goldman Sachs, involved several hundred Black women entrepreneurs, including four others from Minnesota, and two trips to New York.

Harris said she learned so much that she, Gregory and their co-worker Evealina Vang will take a few days in early January to strategize. In 2024, they hope to develop a new client base with businesses that seek out products for employee rewards and incentives.

Initially, Gregory and Harris aimed their goods at the "yoga moms" they met at farmers' markets and pop-up retail events. With the opening of their retail store at 48 S. 9th St., they started offering candle-making classes for birthdays and other celebrations, still chiefly involving women, Harris said.

"For the last three years, we were throwing spaghetti on the wall to see what stuck," Harris said. "This fall was an opportunity to slow down and reflect."

The topic I explored most in this column is the new trait of the Minnesota economy that I believe will be influential for years to come: labor scarcity. It's a topic I encounter even when I'm not seeking it out.

Last month, after riding around with Metro Transit executives for a column on electric buses, one of them asked if I would write about their recruitment efforts for drivers and maintenance workers. There are about 100 openings, and this year, for the first time, the agency created an apprentice program to teach anyone who is interested about bus and rail maintenance.

In October, I stopped by the St. Paul Public Works Department's Snow Summit to discuss its snow-clearing work, a challenge I experienced on April 1 when I was out — despite the snow — reporting a column on the city's financing debate. At the Snow Summit, I met the city's HR staff who were recruiting drivers, snow ticketers and other workers.

That effort has gone well, Lisa Hiebert, the department's spokeswoman, said last week. The later-than-usual arrival of significant snow has allowed the department to get drivers trained. Some promotions this month created a few more entry-level openings, however, and the fleet might not be fully staffed if a snow emergency hits before the end of January.

Along with Metro Transit and the state transportation department, the cities of Minneapolis and St. Paul are jointly training people to get commercial driver's licenses to qualify for such work.

"We've had to come together as agencies to remind people there are good jobs in the public sector, and to bring them in and train them on the job," Hiebert said.

Finally, because at Christmas I'm reminded of toy tractors I received as gifts from my farming grandparents, I want to share something I learned last summer while reporting a column about John Deere's exit from the plow business.

As we talked about the company's history, Deere archivist Neil Dahlstrom mentioned that the firm will create a special exhibit of farm toys in 2024. A company spokesman last week confirmed the exhibit will open in May at the John Deere Pavilion in Moline, Ill.

It will include a wooden goat wagon from 1912 and, no surprise after the success of the Barbie movie this year, a Barbie doll from 2007 wearing a pink John Deere T-shirt.