Rachel Johnson, President & CEO, Area Partnership for Economic Expansion (APEX)

The APEX region, Northeast Minnesota and Northwest Wisconsin, is growing and there are many opportunities for businesses and lifestyle, but there is also an issue that needs solving, particularly in relation to the workforce. “One of the biggest challenges we have right now for attracting and retaining workforce is housing because workers can’t find adequate housing,” said Rachel Johnson, president and CEO of the Area Partnership for Economic Expansion (APEX).

What have been the main highlights and key milestones for APEX in the last 12 months?

This past year was our 20th year as an organization. We took this anniversary as an opportunity to reflect, work with our members, and reexamine who we are, what we do, and how we can improve our region. We took the time to do strategic planning with our members. We did five months of engagement and focus groups, collecting data and input from them to inform who we wanted to be in the future. 

The result was a refreshed mission framework for the organization with a focus on four priority pillars: attract, connect, advocate, and grow. The framework defines our work within those four buckets as part of how we communicate the work we’re doing in a more organized fashion and with a clear message, informed by our investor members. 

How is APEX attracting investment to promote economic growth and push overall business development in the region?

There are a couple of things that we’ve been doing. In the attraction pillar, we are working to elevate and build upon our brand on the state, national and international stage. We want to create a compelling rationale to attract that investment. We are trying to showcase who we are, what we do, our big ambitions and vision as a region. We’re known for manufacturing. Duluth’s Cirrus Aircraft is one of the largest airplane manufacturers in the world – and it’s here with dozens of other industrial makers and builders. We showcase the iron ore mined on the Iron Range that gets shipped from the Port of Duluth – Superior, the furthest inland freshwater seaport, at the tip of Lake Superior to steel makers on the Great Lakes. Minnesota provides 80% of the iron ore used in America’s first-pour steel.

We also have four major academic institutions in the region, which equates to about 22,000 students. This investment in learning sparks innovation for young minds and thought leaders. These are the people concentrated on building opportunities for ideas and people to flourish.

In terms of the international stage, I was part of a U.S. delegation to Sweden. There were five of us from Minnesota who went there to learn about clean hydrogen and green steel. We’re positioning ourselves, making connections, learning from experts in other parts of the world, and bringing those learnings and those technologies to our region to drive new investment, expand and grow our economy.

Which industries do you expect to present opportunities for growth for the region?

Cleantech manufacturing is particularly interesting, partly because the state of Minnesota has clean energy goals to be carbon-free by 2040. That policy goal helps attract cleantech manufacturing, and there is potential for growth in that industry segment. But there are also challenges. According to an annual Enterprise Minnesota survey, manufacturers are feeling more pessimistic than ever before, which is interesting. Among the factors that they cited were new government mandates that make it more costly and challenging to do business. Still, I think that there is some optimism and growth opportunity as businesses are embracing technology, automation and new markets to grow their business. 

The other areas that we see growing in this region are related to healthcare. In the last two years, Essentia Health, which is one of our major employers and a healthcare provider for the region, built a new, nearly $1 billion regional healthcare facility. That has been a catalyst for growth as well. You’re not only attracting physicians but also all the other healthcare workers. A four-year medical school program may be coming to Duluth in the next two years.

There are other opportunities as well. Recently, there was a major helium discovery near Babbitt, in Northeast Minnesota. It is a significant discovery on a worldwide scale. We’re looking at what opportunities that discovery could bring to our regional economy. 

To what extent does APEX’s location, north of Minnesota, close to the Canadian border and the Twin Cities, contribute to attracting interest and investment to the region? 

That is partly what contributes to our trade opportunities and potential. The United States is a major trade partner with Canada, and we do have that proximity. What makes our location unique and competitive is that the Port of Duluth-Superior is a diversified multimodal shipping hub, offering global cargo transport through the Great Lakes-St. Lawrence Seaway System, a land-based intermodal cargo terminal, free-flowing major highways and direct Class I rail service to the East, West and Gulf Coasts. The APEX region, as it’s currently defined, is seven counties in Northeast Minnesota, and three counties in Northwest and Wisconsin boasts a robust transportation network, which is definitely a factor with companies that are looking at locating in the area.  

With the Duluth-Superior Port there has been a real intention to develop trade routes and relationships in recent years. For example, the UK and the Nordic countries are promising partners. Coming from the interior United States, out through the St. Lawrence Seaway System, and across the Atlantic, it’s a quick route over to Europe. There has been an effort to develop some of the container shipment corridors along this route. That has been growing, in addition to some of the other commodities that the port is known for, which include iron ore, grain and limestone.

In the years to come, shipping by sea will be more important, especially when we think about companies worldwide that are interested in sustainability. Shipping goods on the ocean or the Great Lakes is a significantly less carbon-intensive way to move goods. 

We’re seeing international opportunities where companies need to consider their carbon footprint in their supply chain. That is a growing opportunity that helps position our region as a competitive advantage.

What initiatives is APEX carrying out to build a strong labor force in the region?

One of the biggest challenges we have right now for attracting and retaining the workforce is the lack of adequate housing. One of the ways APEX has leaned into problem-solving workforce challenges is to solve housing. After extensive conversations with regional municipalities and employers, there was a huge demand for housing directly impacting the ability to hire and retain staff across most of our employment sectors. Meanwhile, in a lot of cases, communities didn’t have capacity, the right zoning or shovel ready sites to have housing built. The handful of homes built in our communities in a year is not keeping pace with demand. Whereas we could fill several hundred homes in a year and not match the deficit. Regional employers’ current and future workforce projections are much greater. 

Based on that mismatch, we got together with some other leaders in the community, and we created Northland Housing Partners. It is a nonprofit organization that is an employer-led catalyst for housing development. This unique group manages a loan fund for developers to help pencil out projects that would otherwise not happen. Our first project was officially funded in 2024, and conversations continue with new housing developers across the region.