BEMIDJI — Three new roundabouts are in sight for Bemidji’s Paul Bunyan Drive after the City Council approved the Minnesota Department of Transportation’s final layout for the 2026 project.
The resolution to approve the layout included requiring a new memorandum of understanding with MnDOT for the eastern portion of the corridor, which seeks to guarantee more roundabouts wouldn’t be installed there in future projects.
The project slated for 2026, according to MnDOT Project Manager Matt Upgren, will replace three traffic signals at Menard’s entrance, Middle School Drive and Hannah Avenue with roundabouts. The signal at Highway 71 will remain as is, and the project will last a single construction season.
“A season long meaning, say, early May until end of October, maybe into November, weather dependent,” Upgren said, “to get to substantial completion, as we call it, you know, the following year. There's always warranty work, punch list items, things like that. But the goal is to have it back open to traffic.”
Initially, MnDOT presented a vision for a longer stretch of this corridor, farther east to Bemidji Avenue. After a previous council rejected MnDOT’s six-roundabout proposal by a split vote in 2019, MnDOT narrowed the focus and spent years collaborating with community members and stakeholders for a new design.
Roundabouts slow down traffic around intersections and change the types of collisions that happen — from T-bone wrecks to glancing blow impacts, according to the agency. MnDOT District Engineer Darren Laesch emphasized the financial impacts crashes have on a community and how roundabouts would change that.
“When we analyzed that whole corridor ... that crash cost was estimated at $2 million a year," Laesch said. “This project, the kind of vision that we adopted, would reduce that by $660,000 a year. So that's a cost that our whole community absorbs every year because of these crashes.”
The council’s motion on Monday, Oct. 7, included requiring a memorandum of understanding with MnDOT, with Bemidji Mayor Jorge Prince among others on the council wanting assurances the rest of the corridor will be left as is.
"Then we have something in writing that we can put in the bank. Because in talking to a lot of the businesses, I get the feeling that some of them agreed to this compromise because they believe part of the compromise was that the rest of the corridor would remain the way it is,” Prince said. “And I think without that, they may not have expressed the same views.”
Further complicating the decision is $18 million in federal grant funding — specifically the Department of Transportation’s Rebuilding American Infrastructure with Sustainability and Equity, a highly competitive grant with a percentage earmarked for rural projects that meet federal transportation objectives.
During the lengthy discussion, council member Emelie Rivera expressed concern about what could happen if the Council were unable to move the project forward.
“If we don't give municipal consent ... maybe it’s a hypothetical question, but how are we going to be able to prove that we acted reasonably?” Rivera asked. “It's our job to apply the facts and find reasons to base our decisions, and I'm worried that if we have inadequate findings, that it would result in the reversal of Council decisions.”
Rivera said she didn’t feel as though the Council had been backed against a wall.
“We've had plenty of opportunity to be involved. Some of us more than others, all the way through this process,” Rivera added. “The time commitment of the volunteers, the time commitment of staff, the Council members who've gotten these updates all the way through — if we keep looking for confirmation bias, we'll probably find it.”
Hannah Avenue and Middle School Drive will be under construction in 2025 before the Highway 197-Paul Bunyan Drive project, which is slated to begin in 2026.
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