Crookston’s hotels, motels, and businesses are enjoying plenty of patrons this week, and that trend is set to continue for the foreseeable future as local construction projects continue to bring contractors to town. Contractors working on the RiverView 2020 project, the American Crystal Sugar outage, Canadian Pacific and overflow from Digi-Key in Thief River Falls are putting heads on beds, eating, and shopping in town.
Crookston Area Chamber and Visitor’s Bureau Executive Director Terri Heggie said Crookston’s hotels and motels were operating this week a nearly full capacity. “Yesterday, I went around to all of our hotels and one motel because I realized the parking lots are consistently full,” said Heggie. “In visiting with the owners and general managers, I found out that because of the construction going on presently in Crookston, we are almost at full capacity with an influx of construction workers. There are a lot more vehicles, a lot more traffic in town. They are giving business to local restaurants, gas stations, shopping here and of course staying at our hotels.”
Both American Crystal and RiverView Health are currently undergoing significant projects that combined are estimated to pump around $40 million in labor into the economy. Ryan Wall, Factory Manager, says American Crystal’s infrastructure and processing project currently has over 100 contractors on site from as far away as Minneapolis. “Every summer we do an outage, and we bring in a handful of outside contractors in the range of 50-70,” said Wall. “But over the next 18 months, we are investing $40 million in infrastructure and processing equipment. So that’s brought in a lot of extra people. I think on-site we’re well over 100 contractors, and that’s an influx of people that normally aren’t here. It’s a big investment for American Crystal and the community.”
Included in the project will be a new diffuser which Wall describes as the heart of the factory. “The diffuser, I call it the heart of the factory,” said Wall. “After you slice the beets you put them into a tank. And at the high temperatures and the right PH you pull the sugar out of the sugar beets so, it diffuses into a solution. Then we use that solution, moving forward to create sugar.”
RiverView Health’s project will support nearly 400 construction jobs between the groundbreaking in April, and it’s completion in 2020 according to Lance Norman, Vice President of Clinics and Ancillary Services. “We have a total impact as far as the construction and services to that of $23 million in projected labor,” said Norman. “That is equivalent to just under 400 construction jobs throughout that period.”
Norman said footings for the new building at RiverView began getting poured this week and that work will continue for about the next eight weeks. “We were able to take down an existing building in preparation for the site,” said Norman. “We’ve cleared that in the last week and just this Tuesday our first footings were poured in the southwest corner of the building. We anticipate the footing completion and starting on steel over the next eight weeks. We have an onslaught of upcoming additional construction work inclusive of the footings as we ramp up and start working on the base of the floor.”
Heggie said these projects along with others in the area help Crookston flourish by filling the hotels, motels, restaurants, and shops around Crookston. “As I have been out and about visiting with local businesses, eating lunch or dinner, you can see the construction workers are out eating at our restaurants and the gas stations,” said Heggie. “Traffic has picked up in Crookston which part of that might be street construction going on right now. But you can see that there is a lot more activity going on, which directly impacts our community and businesses. Hopefully, this keeps continues on, and I’m excited to see that these big projects will take us into next year. And we should continue to flourish as a community with these projects going on.”
