Dakota County feels in shape to weather air merger fallout

Late last month, Mayor Mike Maguire led off his annual State of the City address with a rousing tribute to Eagan's success attracting new buildings and great jobs. Nearly $100 million, he said, was spent last year alone on commercial and industrial projects.

And it's a story he's sticking to this week, in the wake of a merger announcement between Delta Air Lines and Eagan-based Northwest Airlines, which is bound to bleed jobs.

"We are not," he declares, "a one-company town."

Indeed, the merger appears to be hitting a corner of the Twin Cities area that is as well positioned as any to handle it. Dakota County so far this decade has added twice as many jobs as any other metro county, according to state-compiled job figures. And Eagan is the region's second-leading city in that same department, with job growth that exceeds that of entire counties such as Anoka, which has several times as many residents.

"All of the Ecolab research is here," said Eagan's spokesman, Tom Garrison. "Wells Fargo's mortgage stuff has been concentrated here. The technical piece for this region for the U.S. Postal Service is here. The medicals -- the Blue Crosses, the Delta Dentals. Major trucking. Thomson [ West, the publishing giant] is in its own league as our largest employer."

That's not to say that the city or the wider southern metro area is pooh-poohing the impact.

"Nothing is on the horizon that matches what we could end up losing over the next one to three years," said Bill Coleman, executive director of Dakota Future, an economic development agency. "And it's a real psychological issue when you lose the headquarters of a highly visible Fortune 500 company. That's a real negative."

The secondary impact would be widespread, the mayor concedes. It would affect "anybody from the Caribou [coffee shop] that maybe sees a lot of Northwest employees come through on the way to or from the office ... to a printing company that maybe has a contract with Northwest to print any of their internal communications."

The merger took on a political dimension in the southern suburbs by the end of the week, with DFL legislators promising hearings next week to examine what's going to happen and with a veteran Republican from Lakeville, home to many Northwest employees, saying the state needs to take a hard look at its climate for business.

"This is just another hit to the southern metro from Northwest, and it's getting pretty devastating," said Rep. Mary Liz Holberg. "Our corporate tax rate is a lot higher than Georgia's. It's more and more evident to me that the cost of doing business here will continue to really hurt the state by driving jobs out."

Conversely, officials in Eagan say they've been down this same runway, having seen a huge employer swallowed up by a distant entity, only to remain the city's biggest source of jobs, far exceeding the figure for Northwest.

In 1996, when Thomson Corp. of Canada bought West Publishing, then a major employer in Eagan, "there were a lot of these same concerns and questions" about whether the city would lose large numbers of jobs, Maguire said. Today, Thomson West is the Eagan-based flagship of a Thomson Corp. division.

The company says it plans to keep a substantial portion of those jobs in town, without specifying what would happen to the roughly 1,000 workers now at the corporate headquarters.

"The challenge is how that would shake out, and how long it would take for that to happen" said Mark Jacobs, staff liaison to the Dakota-Scott Workforce Investment Board. "But it's fair to say that job growth in Dakota County has been very good -- and pretty diverse."