The town of Becker could lose up to 75% of its tax base and 150 jobs when the local power plant began to close. Fortunately, town leaders saw it coming and took early action. Conversations began seven years before the first of three generating units was shuttered, and representatives from Becker began to visit and learn from other communities that had undergone the same thing.
Greg Pruszinske, City Administrator, reached out to several resources, such as the National Association of Counties (NACO), economic development groups, and other communities that had gone through similar closures. NACO created a three-day workshop for a team of stakeholders from Becker to discuss the town’s current position, the timeframe for transition, and what they could do to ensure their future.
“We walked out with a high-level strategy for transition,” says Pruszinske. “Then we took an inventory of all the assets present in our town and how to leverage them.”
Those assets included 4,000 acres of buffer property owned by the power plant, an abundance of underground and surface water including the Mississippi River, a main railway line and a local spur, and a robust transportation corridor. There was also plenty of access to power from a nuclear plant across the river. Once they understood the community’s existing assets, Pruszinske and the stakeholder team envisioned a large scale business park that would bring new jobs and sustainable growth to Becker.
Pruszinske credits the town’s early start and the attention to planning for its success. “We developed a land use plan, a parks and trail plan, a transportation plan, and a rail impact study,” he says. “To get the state and federal money that was available, we needed to do some engineering and put some thought into it. Having a plan for all the different pieces is key.”
That planning process not only included groups from the immediate community, but also from the surrounding township, the county, and other nearby communities – tackling the problem not just from the city’s perspective but from a regional one.
Today, Becker has a new recycling company, an expanded trucking company, and a data center that is slated to open. Instead of worrying about the closure of the power plant, Becker is focused on investing in the infrastructure it needs to prepare for the new business activity.
“Be confident in changing the rules if you have to—at any level,” Pruszinske says.
“We were willing to change zoning or land use, within reason, as part of our planning, but we also tried to align our planning with county and other communities to make it easier for contractors and businesses to work within the rules. Instead of saying ‘We can’t,’ we asked, ‘Why can’t we?’”
From a city perspective, Becker invested in its own capacity by carving out time and some funds to specifically address the issue of transition. Then, it leveraged its own investments to attract additional funding from state and federal sources. The town also worked hard to define areas where it needed outside expertise – such as engineering, financial modeling, and grant writing – and brought those experts in to help.
“We focused on collaborations, collaborators, and opportunities to partner with federal agencies, the state, and private nonprofits,” says Pruszinske. “That’s what a just transition looks like.”
