The month of February seems to be one of the Chamber’s busiest. We are usually in the midst of planning our major events – Home, Landscape and Garden Expo in March, one of our international trips in March, our first Chamber Challenge 5K, golf tournament in July, gala in November and this year we needed to hire two employees to replace two who left us for greener pastures. But one of the areas of interest amongst our businesses is government – from city, county, state and federal levels and what they will do that will impact area businesses. All levels are looking at their budgets and trying to make revenues and expenses work out – whether this means cuts, tax increases or dipping into raining day funds.
Here at the Chamber we work to stay on top of the top issues our businesses are focused on and one of those issues is light rail. We have been providing input to the county for years on light rail as well as getting our businesses involved in the discussion. We recently had a joint meeting of the Edina and Eden Prairie Chambers’ Government Committee to continue to discuss light rail. For those new to this discussion the draft environmental impact statement is scheduled to be released in the next month or so and this will begin the 45 day comment period. As such, the Chamber is working to eliminate some of the major concerns in our community around the alignment. One of those is the line will have an at grade crossing on technology Drive between Gander Mountain and Rosemount/Emerson, cross Rosemount/Emerson’s driveways, cross Costco’s driveways and continue to the Southwest Station. Traffic is a major issue in this area already and the concern is that light rail will only make this traffic worse by closing the road and driveways when trains come through. Please stay tuned for more information and ideas to help alleviate this problem.
