Dakota County has one of the busiest roundabouts in the south metro, and a decade of fixes has not stopped the crashes. The two-lane roundabout at Kenwood Trail (County Road 50) and 185th Street (County Road 60) in Lakeville has logged 300 crashes in the past two years, more than almost any other intersection in the county. Most are sideswipes and fender benders, but county traffic engineer Tyler Krage says the severity is climbing. The county has tried enforcement, overhead signs, new striping with a buffer between lanes, and pedestrian-crossing signs since the roundabout opened in 2015, and it has combed MnDOT and Federal Highway Administration research, yet a recent study concluded the current layout will likely keep producing high crash numbers. Krage points to volume rather than speed. The intersection carries 47,000 vehicles a day and is growing 2.7 percent a year, which is where two-lane roundabouts start to struggle. Three options are now on the table. The first levels the center island for sight lines, moves the pedestrian crossings back into a Z-formation with beacons, and adds in-ground lane markings. The second keeps those changes and adds a bypass right-turn lane off Kenwood and 185th. The third removes the roundabout and returns the intersection to a coordinated traffic signal with double left-turn and through lanes. “It’s been a hot topic,” Krage said. The county will bring in consultants and hold public engagement over the next year before it decides, so the alternatives analysis and the eventual build are all still ahead.
Source: Star Tribune (Tim Harlow), July 19; Dakota County project materials
ENG Turning empty offices into apartments is an engineering problem before it is a real estate one, and the lessons travel straight to the Twin Cities. A structural feature on office-to-residential conversions makes the case that the hard part is what the drawings do not show. Every older building carries hidden deficiencies and conditions that never mattered in office use but govern a residential conversion, so the work starts with a baseline investigation of original plans and a structural condition assessment with foundation and soils review. The structure has to be rechecked for new residential loads and layouts, while construction sequencing has to account for temporary loads from stored materials and demolition. The site needs monitoring through the work to catch movement or new cracking early. With office vacancy pushing owners in downtown Minneapolis and Saint Paul toward conversion, this is live work for Minnesota structural and civil firms.
BIZ Two of the largest engineering firms in the world are circling a merger, and the target is not backing down. Arcadis, the Dutch design and consultancy giant, confirmed on July 24 that it received a second unsolicited proposal from Canada’s WSP Global to acquire all of its shares, at €51.50 per share in cash and WSP stock. Arcadis had already rejected an earlier WSP proposal of €48.50 as inadequate, citing strategic and cultural fit and deal certainty. Its board says it stays confident that its standalone plan is worth more than the offer. Arcadis runs 34,000 staff in 30 countries on €4.9 billion of 2025 revenue. WSP is a comparably sized global competitor with a substantial Minnesota and U.S. presence. A combination at that scale would reshape the top tier of the industry, which is why a bid this size is worth watching even while it stays unsolicited and non-binding. WSP is not standing still while it waits. This week it also won all three lots of the UK Environment Agency’s national groundwater-modelling work that is a growth area for Minnesota water and environmental practices too.
Sources: Arcadis (GlobeNewswire), July 24; New Civil Engineer, July 24
WORKFORCE Two southwest Minnesota counties will share a highway engineer, a sign of how thin public-works engineering staffing has gotten. Pipestone County commissioners agreed on July 14 to lend county highway engineer Nick Bergman to neighboring Murray County through the end of 2026 after Murray’s engineer retired and the county could not quickly hire a replacement. Bergman will split his board meetings between the two counties and spend up to about 86 hours per month on Murray’s work, with Murray reimbursing Pipestone at $150 per hour plus employment costs. Pipestone used the same arrangement with Lincoln County a decade ago. There is opportunity behind the headline. Counties that cannot staff an engineer in-house lean harder on shared services and on consultants for design and program delivery, and that gap is widening across Greater Minnesota. The same pull shows up even where a county keeps its own engineer. Lee County, Iowa just hired a consulting firm to inspect and load-rate a dozen aging timber bridges, the kind of specialized second look that tends to go to an outside firm rather than county staff.
Sources: Pipestone County Star, July 23; Daily Democrat (Fort Madison, Iowa), July 22
WORKFORCE The talent squeeze is structural, and firms and agencies elsewhere are answering it by building the pipeline years earlier. A new Minnesota Business Partnership survey found 45 percent of Minnesotans would leave the state for a good job, which undercuts the old assumption that people who land here stay. Two models from other states are worth copying. The University of Nevada, Reno just wrapped a summer camp that puts high schoolers on its earthquake shake table and into water-resources and materials labs, with the explicit goal of making an engineering degree feel attainable. Massachusetts runs its students through paid co-ops with MassDOT, where they do bridge inspection, design review, and construction documentation before they graduate, and many are hired on. One student called the co-op a tryout for the career. ACEC Minnesota already runs its Emerging Leaders and scholarship programs on this logic, and the survey is the reminder that the firms and agencies reaching students earliest are the ones that will have engineers to hire a decade from now.
Sources: Minnesota Business Partnership survey; Star Tribune, July 21; KOLO, July 23; UMass Lowell, July 22
BIZ The answer the profession keeps landing on for the labor squeeze is to do more with fewer people, and the tools are arriving fast. A Nature Cities report from this year’s International Conference on Computing in Civil Engineering frames automation and robotics as the field’s response to labor shortages and an aging workforce. The examples include quadruped robots and drones collecting point-cloud and digital-twin data for bridge inspection, sensor-equipped drones inspecting complex rooftops, and connected sensors and aerial monitoring tracking noise and air quality on active sites. The recurring caution is that the built environment is becoming data-rich but not yet knowledge-rich, so the value is in turning the data into decisions, and that the shift has to stay human-centered rather than displace the workforce. Minnesota firms are already piloting drone inspection and building information modeling, which is the near-term practice curve. It is the same squeeze that has counties sharing engineers. The productivity tools are worth the investment.
ENG A North Carolina school district found reinforcing steel missing from buildings that stood for 35 years, and the clock to fix them will not move. Wake County Public Schools in North Carolina is spending $5.6 million on emergency structural repairs at three elementary schools after inspections turned up missing rebar and compromised beam and roof connections in buildings that a forensic review says were never built to the architect’s specifications. Structural engineer Cody Johnston has warned that the failure mode to fear is a sudden collapse with no warning, and that the ongoing investigation could surface more. Every repair has to be finished before students return on August 21. The lesson carries to Minnesota’s heavy K-12 facilities work. An engineer carries a critical duty to say plainly when a schedule or a structure is riskier than an owner wants to hear.
Source: ABC11 (WTVD), July
ENG Denver is turning leftover asphalt into rain gardens, and the delivery model is worth a look for Minnesota cities under stormwater permits. The city’s Swift Implementation of Green Infrastructure program is converting unused pavement in the Five Points neighborhood into bioswales and rain gardens. Sunken planted basins with engineered soils and curb cuts will pull street runoff off the road, slow it down, filter it, and keep peak flows out of the storm sewers and the South Platte River. Ten sites are set for completion this year, and the program pairs the stormwater work with an equity aim in a neighborhood short on tree canopy and past investment. Green stormwater infrastructure built at neighborhood scale in the public right-of-way, tied to street projects, with maintenance and equity planned in from the start is a transferable delivery model for Minnesota firms working MS4 permit programs and low-impact design.
Source: Denver7, July
ENG Researchers have built a cheaper building damper out of pressurized sand, and it holds up in the cold. A team from Southern Methodist, Ole Miss, and Lehigh has developed a damper that dissipates the energy of building sway through friction between sand particles, in place of the oil-filled hydraulic dampers that steady tall buildings and long-span bridges against wind and earthquakes. In testing across temperatures from 60 degrees Celsius down to near freezing, and with moisture present, it matched or beat the hydraulic version, and the researchers pitch it as inexpensive and low-maintenance. Perhaps a motion-control device that stays reliable through hard winters and costs less to maintain is a useful tool for structural engineers designing towers, stadiums, and pedestrian bridges here in Minnesota.
Source: New Atlas, July 23
ENG The Middle East’s coastal megaprojects are a lesson less in scale than in how a profession captures what it learns. A New Civil Engineer essay by the Institution of Civil Engineers (ICE) volunteer leading a regional guidance document argues that the value of the Gulf’s port and reclamation, from Egypt’s $150 billion Ras El Hekma to Saudi Arabia’s Amaala marina and the UAE’s Saqr port, is in the durability and delivery lessons it is generating under punishing conditions. Extreme heat and salinity chew through steel and reinforced concrete in a few years, so materials and details that pass in mild climates fail early. Asset management is being pulled forward into the start of design rather than bolted on later. The author’s real worry is that the hard lessons stay locked inside individual firms and projects, which is why ICE is codifying them into shared guidance. Minnesota firms can swap heat and salt for freeze-thaw and de-icing chloride, and the same discipline applies, design for durability and for the asset’s whole life, and treat what did and did not work as knowledge worth sharing.
BIZ DEED is touring Minnesota to hear what is holding small businesses back, and the list should sound familiar to small firms. Minnesota’s Department of Employment and Economic Development (DEED) brought its Choose Minnesota roundtable to Duluth on July 21, where owners told commissioner Matt Varilek about the constraints they are experiencing. They included trouble hiring and keeping workers and not enough child care or housing to support the people they do hire, on top of this summer’s wildfire disruption. These are the same things that constrain small engineering practices. Varilek said the point is to carry unmet needs to the legislature. The series has already stopped in St. Cloud, Rochester, and Bemidji with the Twin Cities still to come.
Source: Northern News Now, July 21
BIZ The 10 percent import surcharge lapses today, but the tariffs that drive materials costs stay. The temporary surcharge imposed on most imports in February under Section 122 of the Trade Act hits its 150-day limit and expires today, July 24, with no extension pending. The relief is narrower than it sounds. Steel, aluminum, and copper are tariffed under Section 232, not Section 122, and those duties remain. The proposed Section 301 replacement at roughly 10 to 12.5 percent is still awaiting sign-off and is not yet in effect. Construction input prices were up 7.1 percent over the year through June, with metals still climbing.
Sources: White House, February 20; Federal Register, June 4; AGC, July 15
Crash Modification Factor (CMF). A multiplier that estimates how much a specific design change or safety treatment will raise or lower crashes at a location, drawn from the Federal Highway Administration’s CMF Clearinghouse and the Highway Safety Manual. A value below 1.0 predicts fewer crashes, above 1.0 more. It is the number that lets an engineer compare Dakota County’s three options, from leveling the island and reworking the crossings, to adding a bypass lane, to reverting to a signal, on predicted safety rather than intuition, and increasingly it is what an owner wants to see standing behind a recommendation.
Build your bench: ACEC Minnesota’s Leadership Development Series for mid-career professionals runs September 2026 through April 2027 in a 24-person cohort, and the four-session Emerging Leaders program for early-career staff runs this October and November.
The (Almost) Daily Brief publishes most weekdays: policy, funding, workforce, and industry news for Minnesota’s engineering firms, in a few minutes of reading.
