The two guests of honor at the Minot Area Development Corporation's annual meeting Thursday gave the hundreds in attendance at the Grand International a glimpse at what Minot will look like in the future.
Jay Fisher, the northwest district director of the North Dakota State University North Central Research Extension Center, ended his year as chairman of the MADC board. He said the past year was interesting to say the least, and he was pleased to have had the opportunity to be the chairman during the many challenges MADC and Minot faced during the Souris River flood.
"You think about all the friends and neighbors and the heartbreak of the flood, and I choose to think about all the awesome things that are going on in our community as we continue to move forward," Fisher said. "And today we're going to talk about some more visions for our future."
Fisher then introduced the day's first speaker, Murad Al-Katib, who is president and CEO of Alliance Grain Traders Inc.
"I was born and raised in Davidson, Saskatchewan. So a nice name like Murad Al-Katib is a great rural Saskatchewan name," Al-Katib said to laughter from the audience.
Al-Katib said he was 28 when he went to his wife, who was six months pregnant with their twins at the time, in 2001 and told her he was going to quit his job and start a lentil processing and trading company. Although she didn't speak to him for a week, he soldiered on and turned that original business, Saskcan Pulse Trading, into a multinational company that is now known as Alliance Grain Traders.
The business is a global leader in pulse and staple food processing and distribution, with merchandising offices and value-added processing facilities in Canada, the United States, Turkey, Australia, China and South Africa. The company also produces a pasta brand called Arbella.
In 2007 Alliance Grain Traders built a lentil processing plant in Williston, and Al-Katib called the new Minot plant the real exciting one. He said it will be similar to their plant in Turkey, which is a 78-acre compound composed of eight processing plants producing branded and packaged foods for about 70 countries around the world.
"What we're planning here is we're building in Minot - we're already under construction, we'll be completed later this year - a food ingredient processing plant here for pulses. We're going to take peas, beans, lentils and chickpeas, and we're going to actually mill them into flours. Then we're going to actually separate them out into proteins, fibers and starches, and we're going to make food products out of them," Al-Katib said. "So we see an opportunity to dramatically alter the value created out of the sector here in North Dakota."
Alliance Grain Traders' growth focus is no longer Canada, according to Al-Katib, it's the Northern Plains of the Unites States. He sees pulse production in North Dakota as an area of explosive growth in the state's agricultural sector.
Al-Katib said agriculture is not just food anymore. The impact of agriculture reaches into many other sectors such as health, environment, immigration in the form of skilled workers, and the overall economy.
In 10 years his vision is that U.S. consumers will be eating pulses five times a week. Al-Katib doesn't expect peas and beans to be appearing on plates every night, however. Instead, he said pulses will be in products like baked goods, breakfast cereals, cereal bars, crackers and chips. In other words, the foods we eat every day.
"Why is it going to be in there? It's all about low allergin profile, high protein, non-GMO, gluten free. So if you're a consumer, I think I said a few key words," Al-Katib said. "Guess what? Pulses are all of those things. So that's why I'm excited about the opportunity here."
After Al-Katib's presentation, Fisher took the podium to formally turn things over to the incoming chair of the MADC board, I. Keating COO Matt Kramer, who in turn introduced the next speaker, Minot native Steve Larson, chairman and CEO of Eid Passport Inc.
Larson discussed Imagine Minot, a revitalization project spearheaded by Cypress Development of Portland, Ore., a company Larson heads. He noted another of his Portland-based companies, Eid Passport, is part of Imagine Minot, as it turned the old YMCA building downtown into Eid Passport's new Minot office.
Speaking about the technology sector, Larson said software engineers aren't all that hard to bring to Minot if you can offer them a place to stay. Doing just that is a large part of what Imagine Minot is all about.
After successfully remodeling the old YMCA, Larson realized the same thing could be done to many downtown areas.
"It also led me to believe that there's a possibility of taking some of the other, older buildings and parking facilities, the parking lots, and turning them into apartment complexes," Larson said.
A short video explaining Imagine Minot was played. In the video, it was stated a total of 1,200 housing units would hold around 2,000 residents in the downtown area.
"Minot is typical of many medium-size communities across America, which has seen much of their downtown retail and commercial businesses leave for suburban locations, leaving behind older buildings and paved-surface parking lots," the video stated. "But there is a renaissance across America in many of these same downtowns, as city leaders are rebuilding their urban cores in large part to a realization that budgets do not exist to continue to expand outward in efficient urban service."
Highlights touched upon in the video include a new urban park, a 90-unit apartment complex scheduled for completion by late summer, and a small cafe. The new buildings will take their visual cues from existing structures, meaning they'll blend into the community rather than stick out like a sore thumb.
The video noted how a similar development in Portland has become a stunning success, turning the city's once-stagnant Pearl District into a thriving community.
All these new apartments are great, but as anyone who goes downtown knows, parking is at a premium, and adding 2,000 new people won't exactly help the situation. A unique solution being used to address this problem is building parking right into the buildings themselves in the form of central courtyards that not only offer residents parking, but off-street parking at that.
"It's a big vision. If you look at the whole project, it's about $75 - depending on how many buildings are built - to a $100 million project," Larson said. "And we feel pretty confident that that's very doable."
Larson then opened the floor to questions, and was asked about the price of rent for the new apartments. He said they would be trying to keep it down as much as possible. He would like to keep rent below what is currently considered market value, which Larson said doesn't seem all that fair to renters. He said $500 would be the low end, while the worst-case high end would be $1,400, depending on the size of the units. He noted most of them will be one- and two-bedroom apartments, which will hopefully help keep the price down.
He also noted a nice feature planned for the parking lots that should make working downtown more convenient in the winter.
"And the nice part about building parking over the lots where they are now, they will be covered during the winter, too," Larson said. "So folks won't have to go to work and then come out and get into a buried car. So we're looking forward to that part of it, too."
Another question was about where funding would come from. Larson said they would be able to fund most of it, but they are asking the City of Minot for a little bit of assistance.
"When you look at the size of the project, it's really minimal," Larson said. "We're looking for $3 million on the larger projects, and we'll cover my side of it and then the rest of it there's only two, possibly three lots that we're looking at for a little bit of assistance."
He said Minot would also have to look at possibly upgrading the sewer system, which he said was about 100 years old.
Larson said all the money and effort that will go into rebuilding Minot's downtown, however, will be worth it.
"I will tell you, once complete, it makes a huge difference for companies like ours to help diversify (the city)," Larson said. "You don't want to get caught up on any one thing like oil. You need to bring technology in, and in order to do that it helps to have a unique (area) that draws that type of individual in."
