My interview was with Ron Gabrielsen.

Saturday, September 22, 2001

My interview was with Ron Gabrielsen. The subject was economic development. The answers to my questions were not what I had expected.

The conversation with Gabrielsen, the new county administrator, taught me a few things. I learned that if he has anything to say about it, economic development will get the right kind of attention from Freeborn County. I also learned that we are lucky to have landed someone with Gabrielsen’s talents for one of our county’s most important leadership roles.

Gabrielsen has only been around here for a month or so, and he admitted he doesn’t have a lot of specific answers yet. I imagine it’s hard to learn what makes a community tick when you’re trying to remember the names of hundreds of employees and when garbage pickup day is.

He was more than willing, however, to talk about his philosophy.

&uot;I think you should help create an environment for business to succeed,&uot; Gabrielsen told me. &uot;I do not think government should provide all the resources.&uot;

Sometimes people, myself included, tend to have the wrong idea about what economic development means. It’s easy to fall back on the idea that it simply means &uot;getting businesses to locate here.&uot; What’s harder to understand or even fathom is how one does that. Do we pay them? Do we go through the yellow pages and call some – &uot;How would you like to come to Albert Lea?&uot;

According to Gabrielsen, the best thing for a government to do is to decide what kind of identity its community wants, then create conditions that allow that identity to develop.

Owatonna, for example, helped build itself up, in part, by getting Cabela’s, then making the conscious decision to encourage motels, restaurants and the like to spring up around it. It created easy on-off ramps from the Interstate to pull traffic off. Owatonna is now a town that took advantage of its I-35 location, drawing visitors from the Twin Cities and around the region.

Other towns have different strengths, although some find it hard to figure out what they are. Gabrielsen told me of his old city, in northern Wisconsin. It was a lumber-industry town for many years, and many of the locals still saw themselves that way. But lumber was the past; the future in Northern Wisconsin, Gabrielsen said, is tourism. It was a town with a bit of an identity crisis.

Here in Albert Lea, we’ve got somewhat of an identity crisis of our own. Are we trying to be like Owatonna, taking advantage of the freeways, building more exit ramps, putting resources into the areas near the interstates? We’re already doing much of that in the East Main and North Bridge areas.

Are we a charming, historic, tourist-type town? If so, we need to invest in downtown revitalization, beautification, and lake restoration. Large community groups are trying to convince everyone that these are the goals we should work toward.

The first step is to figure out what you want to be. Then, you lay the foundation.

Gabrielsen listed some obvious but important things to develop if you want to create a strong business climate: Good transportation systems, a low crime rate, strong educational systems and health care to build a good labor force, and a government that is genuinely interested in the concerns and values of its residents. Put these pieces in the right places, decide what you want to do, and then go out and lay the foundation.

It’s not something you rush into. &uot;My style is, I work slow, I don’t rush. I weigh as many factors as I can,&uot; Gabrielsen said.

Gabrielsen also told me that once he’s got a sense of what the county’s goals should be, he’s going to put a sign up in his office listing twelve of them. When somebody comes in with an idea, he’s going to ask how it helps the county reach those twelve goals.

&uot;I’m 50 years old, and I can only work on twelve things at a time,&uot; he joked.

– – –

Somebody asked me to print this. It’s one of those weird things that somebody with way too much time on their hands must have come up with:

* The date of the terrorist attacks: 9/11. 9+1+1=11.

* Sept. 11 is the 254th day of the year. 2+5+4=11.

* After Sept. 11 there are 111 days left to the end of the year.

* 119 is the area code to Iraq and Iran. 1+1+9=11.

* The Twin Towers, standing side by side, looked like the number 11.

* The first plane to hit the towers was number 11.

* New York was the 11th state.

* The following phrases have 11 letters each: &uot;New York City,&uot; &uot;Afghanistan,&uot; &uot;The Pentagon&uot; and &uot;Ramzi Yousef&uot; (convicted of orchestrating the 1993 WTC attack).

* Flight 11: 92 on board. 9+2=11.

* Flight 77: 65 on board. 6+5=11.

As our photographer put it, this says nothing of the thousands of numbers involved that don’t add up to 11, but hey, it’s kind of interesting anyway.

Dylan Belden is the Tribune’s managing editor. His column appears Sundays.