ABC Newspaper

By Peter Bodley

A new $20 million federal grant has been awarded to the planned Highway 65 project in Blaine that will replace four signalized intersections at 99th, 105th, 109th and 117th avenues with grade-separated interchanges.

The announcement was made at the June 27 Anoka County Board meeting with Commission Chairman Matt Look stating he had received a call from U.S. Sen. Amy Klobuchar’s office. Chief Transportation Officer Joe MacPherson said he got notification of the grant, as well.

“It means the project is now almost fully-funded,” MacPherson said.

The new money comes on the heels of action by the Minnesota Legislature in late May to approve $102.75 million for the project from two sources - $68.75 million in trunk highway bonds in the transportation bill and $34 million in general fund cash from the state bonding bill.

MacPherson said the project had previously been awarded grants totaling $40 million, mostly from federal dollars, toward the estimated $163 million project cost.

With the latest grant, the project will move ahead with completion of the final layout followed by final design work, environmental documentation and right of way acquisition phases, MacPherson said in a follow-up interview.

The goal is to bid the project in 2025 with construction to start in late 2025 or early 2026, he said.

“It will take two to three years to construct,” MacPherson said.

In addition to the four interchanges, this project, which is being led by the city of Blaine in partnership with the county and the Minnesota Department of Transportation, will stretch from 97th Avenue to 119th Avenue and include eliminating other street and driveway connections to Highway 65 through the construction of frontage and backage roads. Work on the project began in August 2018 when MnDOT, the county and cities of Blaine, Ham Lake and Spring Lake Park collaborated on a Planning and Environmental Linkages study of Highway 65 from County Road 10 in Spring Lake Park to Bunker Lake Boulevard in Ham Lake.

That looked deeper into environmental, watershed, economic and business impacts than a typical study, MacPherson said.

“Most important, there was very large public engagement process that was able to identify potential issues,” he said.

In fact, this was the first PEL study conducted in the state.

In talking with Blaine Mayor Tim Sanders, they agreed that the PEL study “seems to be key” to getting the funding, said Commissioner Julie Braastad, who chairs the board’s Transportation Committee.

It has taken less than three years to reach the point where the project is almost fully-funded because the first federal grant was awarded to Blaine in late 2020 for work on 99th.

Look was amazed by the short amount of time it has taken to get the Highway 65 funding compared with the Highway 10 projects in Anoka and Ramsey.

“It took 16 years to get the money for those projects,” Look said. “But I think we learned some skills from that process that helped with Highway 65.”

Kudos to staff, he said, and that was echoed by Commissioner Julie Jeppson, who served on the Blaine City Council before she was elected to the county board last year.

“This a really big deal,” Jeppson said. “But it is only one section of three and we need to focus on next steps for those projects.”

Those are identified in the PEL study as improvements from 119th Avenue in Blaine north to Bunker Lake Boulevard in Ham Lake and from 97th Avenue in Blaine south to County Road 10 in Spring Lake Park.

Calling the new grant award “pretty exciting,” Commissioner Jeff Reinert said that 65 is a state highway and has four of the most dangerous intersections in the state, yet it has been the county and city that have taken the initiative and put in a lot of effort.

But Commissioner Scott Schulte said that MnDOT has been a “fabulous” partner on the project.

The $20 million federal grant comes from the US Department of Transportation’s Rebuilding American Infrastructure with Sustainability and Equity] program, which funds projects with significant local or regional impact, according to the DOT website.

The Biden Administration allocated $1.5 billion to the RAISE program for 2023, its website states.