BEMIDJI — Maybe you’ve heard: Bemidji is open for business despite actively recovering from the devastating June 21 storm.

Visit Bemidji, the city’s official tourism agency, has been creating social media videos with different businesses declaring that they are open following the storm. One clip even features Minnesota Sen. Amy Klobuchar, who visited Bemidji on July 25.

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Although most businesses reopened relatively soon following the storm, other popular Bemidji landmarks have remained closed, including Diamond Point Park, one of the area’s most beloved parks. A milestone in the storm recovery was reached on Monday when the park officially reopened to the public.

However, residents are bound to notice the park has fundamentally changed.

A microcosm of the city, Diamond Point lost countless trees, even one that housed a nesting bald eagle. Some pavilions have damaged rooftops. Many standing trees are broken in half. Others are slanted and bent thanks to the 120-mile-per-hour winds that hit the area. In the place of removed tree stumps is disturbed soil.

The park serves as a reminder of the historic destruction the storm caused throughout the Bemidji area. All-in-all, Beltrami County estimates $8.3 million worth of public infastructure damage.

Optimism for the future

Damage from the storm has been recounted by the city and the county. But how were individual businesses affected by the storm and what is the outlook for Bemidji’s economic future in general?

Bemidji Area Chamber of Commerce President Scott Turn believes that business owners share an optimistic viewpoint of the future, despite many economic hurdles faced at the federal and state levels.

“There’s a lot of uncertainty right now in the business economy; you have all these unknowns,” Turn said. “(Bemidji has) a lot more optimism of maybe some things are going to improve now. We just came out of a historic storm, right? And so businesses are like, ‘Well, if we make it through something like this, things can only get better from here.'”

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Scott Turn

Turn mentioned that the optimism, despite newfound economic hardship, is only natural.

“It’s probably our nature here,” he said. “I think we have a lot of entrepreneurs here, too, that work hard and can kind of see their businesses growing. Our downtown is really healthy. We are starting to see businesses relocated to the Bemidji area … We feel like, if we work harder, we can make some better things happen here and for the most part, that’s worked so far.”

Evaluation of Bemidji’s economic future is an ongoing topic of discussion for the chamber. However, the discussion recently ramped when Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis Regional Outreach Director Ron Wirtz visited Bemidji.

Wirtz attended a Youth Professionals Network monthly luncheon on Aug. 6, spoke with local businesses and gave a presentation during a BankIn Minnesota convention held between Aug. 5 and 7 at the Sanford Center.

Wirtz oversees Federal Reserve Bank District 9, which encompasses all of Minnesota as well as Montana, the Dakotas and parts of Wisconsin and Michigan. Overall, there are 12 Federal Reserve districts, with the Minneapolis district being the third largest in land mass, yet the smallest in terms of population.

The Federal Reserve System is the nation’s central bank. It sets monetary policy, regulates and supervises larger banks like JP Morgan and Wells Fargo, provides financial services and sets interest rates.

Wirtz spends time educating and learning from communities, but much survey work is done to gather data. This data is not fully representative of the area it covers, however, as Wirtz noticed optimism in Bemidji, which contradicted survey work.

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“The one thing that I found is that people up here seem to be a little bit more optimistic and a little bit busier than what we (saw) with a lot of survey work,” he explained.

This is precisely why the regional visits are important.

Such visits help Wirtz and the District 9 team better understand challenges faced by individual constituents and business leaders from smaller sects of the much larger district before making economic decisions. Visiting simply ensures better engagement that can help decipher new and unique patterns.

“It’s really good to get in the real economy and listen to what businesses are saying,” Wirtz said. “Talking to businesses at the chamber office, that really helps us understand, ‘Does this match what we’re hearing and what we’re seeing in the data?’

“Sometimes, what we hear from businesses might be a first sign that we have to start looking at the data for new signals that things are changing. We started hearing about businesses slowing their hiring before we started seeing it in the data.”

Local impact

Wirtz found that Bemidji is still affected by national and state economic concerns like tariffs, inflation and labor forces, which is not surprising.

In terms of tariffs, it is impossible to know their widespread impact at this time. However, Turn noted that some local businesses sell products nationally and have profited from the tariffs.

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Turn was more focused on documented issues, such as unfunded mandates being passed down to counties, cities, businesses and consumers as the federal government makes vast changes and the state faces a deficit in the coming years.

“There’s a lot of cost shifting happening at the county level,” Turn said. “Something’s shifted from the state to the county and now the county has to pay for that themselves. Counties and cities can’t just find revenue. The only easy way to find revenue is through taxes, and so that’s probably our biggest concern here.”

Another major concern is a housing crisis. Housing is being built in the area, but Turn fears it is not being built quickly enough, somewhat leaving the area a year or two behind demand consistently.

Turn also highlighted a reliance on tourism and how the storm potentially impacted the industry. The long-term effects on tourism are impossible to know at this moment, but indicators do exist.

One such indicator is how well hotels are performing. Turn said that presently, some Bemidji hotels are full but are not necessarily at capacity. Additionally, with an increased flux of traffic to help the city recover, many hotel visitors could be here solely for work and may not be contributing much to the economy.

Another indicator is decreased border crossings between the United States and Canada. Canadian travel to the United States is the lowest it has been since the COVID-19 pandemic, which is something that could prove to negatively impact Bemidji’s economy, Turn believes.

Other highlighted concerns included a need for a larger tax base — with a larger tax base, the area could better handle expansion and unfunded mandates — an aging labor force, the need for more labor and potentially higher taxes to deal with the economic pressures.

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Turn explained that the chamber is helping businesses navigate these challenges, but some will be implemented shortly, like new mandates.

Overall, the Chamber is working with the city and Bemidji Area Service Collaborative to develop a comprehensive plan that will help pinpoint issues, like housing, so that barriers can be identified and rectified to help boost the economy.

The comprehensive plan could be completed by the end of 2025 or the beginning of 2026.

National economic health

One can track how well the economy is doing, but it is an ever-evolving thing that is nigh-on impossible to predict.

Wirtz explained that the national GDP — gross domestic product — saw a 3% rise in Quarter 2, which followed a 0.5% dip in Quarter 1, for an average of 1.2% growth nationally. Minnesota is lagging behind, with a 2.4% decline in Quarter 1. Big swings on imports and investments, as well as uncertainty about inflation and tariffs, skew these numbers a bit.

Unemployment and labor markets factor into this discussion. Bemidji has a lower unemployment rate now than it did in 2019, at 3.9% compared to 4.7%. However, Bemidji’s rate is still higher than Minnesota’s statewide unemployment rate of 3.3%. Presently, fewer people exist in the labor market, which also skews figures.

Wirtz described two fundamental ways to grow an economy: increase productivity or increase the number of workers, either naturally, through migration or by convincing more people in a given place to work.

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He stated that evidence suggests these principles are not being followed as uncertainty continues. However, the national economy is still strong.

It is impossible to predict the economy; it can fluctuate rapidly at times and deviate from mainstream predictions. That is precisely why Wirtz and other Federal Reserve officials must travel to communities and gather first-hand experience to keep up with trends and stay ahead of the curve.

And it was discovered that Bemidji businesses face economic pressure from every angle — federal, state and storm — but have displayed resilience and optimism for their economic future.