Staff photo by Clay Schuldt Jeff Rosatte, Director New Business Development Department of Employee and Economic Development (DEED), spoke to a full crowd at the New Ulm Country Club on community approaches to economic development.

NEW ULM — The Director of New Business Development at the Minnesota Department of Employee and Economic Development (DEED) gave a presentation at Friday’s Hot Topics Lunch at the New Ulm Country Club.

Rosatte is responsible for all business development activities, the regional business development specialist who provide technical service to businesses and communities and works with companies to locate and expand in Minnesota.

Rosatte presented general strategies for healthy economic development in communities like New Ulm and used real life examples from communities as examples.

In general, a community needs a mission, vision and goals. The entities working on economic development should have an appropriate role to prevent a conflict of purpose.

“Different organizations with overlapping strategies will create conflict,” Rosatte said.

Rosatte said economic development is the product of long-term investments and is dependent on functioning economic institutions and cooperation between the public sector and private sector. He warned against conflating economic growth and economic development. Economic growth is an increase in output, economic development is concerned with quality improvements, the introduction of new goods and services, risk mitigation and the dynamics of innovation and entrepreneurship.

Public-Private partnerships are considered the most sustainable models for economic development, but must include clearly defined roles, expectation, communication and strategies built on consensus and clarity.

A community with a Chamber of Commerce and Economic Development Corporation requires strong leadership and stronger buy-in from investors. The city led program can also work in communities with strong private sector partnering and leadership.

Some of the examples of communities with strong economic development included Hutchinson; Ames, IA; Mt. Vernon, IL and Carrol, IA.

As a contrast Rosatte used Cedar Rapids, IA as example of what happens when economic development entities don’t work together. The city of Cedar Rapids decided to take the lead on economic development and the private organizations went in a different direction. With two opposing entities there was a split in investors which led to a downturn in economic development.

Rosatte said there are some communities that believe economic development will take care of itself, but this is a failing strategy. He admitted there were some communities in the Twin Cities metro area that were able to get along without a formal economic development strategy, but these were in the one-percent

At the end of the presentation Rosatte answered audience questions. One question was about Rochester’s success with economic development. Rosatte said nearly all of Rochester’s marketing and support is run through their economic development group RAEDI. Rosatte said RAEDI is well known and established so anyone looking to develop in the area knows who to contact. He added that Mayo is a large enough entity to have its own economic development operation, but their role in the Rochester community is known and the different entities cooperate.

Another questions was if there were incentives to attract remote workers to New Ulm. These are employees who work on their computer and could theoretically could live anywhere.

Rosatte said there were no major incentive to bring remote workers to New Ulm due to its size, but larger communities like Duluth had success with that area. Duluth was able to bring in millennial mobile workers by offering high quality of life at a lower cost than the Twin Cities. The community also made the city more inviting by changing the laws allowing outdoor food service. Small changes like this can make a community more attractive. The most important change was an embrace of broadband internet.

“Broadband is critical for infrastructure,” Rosatte said. In the modern day high speed internet is like any other utility. He said no business can run on dial-up.