Business View Magazine | April 2020

242 BUSINESS VIEW MAGAZINE APRIL 2020 developers – Launch Properties and Scannell Properties, both of which are marketing light industrial sites in their respective developments. When businesses contact us, looking for five to 50 acres of industrial land, they have choices in Lakeville that they can consider.” “Part of what is going to help maintain and continue to make the industrial park area more viable is that it is currently within a couple of miles from I-35, which goes through the whole center part of the country from Minnesota to Texas and is our corridor to downtown Minneapolis,” Olson adds. “We are expanding our connection road to that interstate highway through our industrial park starting later this spring. It’s a $30 million project, and partnering with Dakota County, we’re expanding it to a four-lane, divided highway with other necessary improvements that go along with that expansion. It will be a two-year project and we’ve received two Federal Highway Administration grants due to the fact that it’s a freight corridor and we will be improving its quality and capacity.” Another incentive that Lakeville employs to help lure new businesses to the city is its use of Tax Increment Financing. “We’ve assisted approximately six or seven projects with that tool in the last four or five years – a combination of distribution and manufacturing type businesses,” Olson explains. “We were able to complete and offset some of the development costs, because even though the sites are actively being marketed, there’s always sewer, water, and street extensions that need to be made to serve the individual properties that are being developed.” Lakeville is also home to Airlake Airport, a reliever airport that’s operated by the Metropolitan Airports Commission, which will be extending water and sewer to its existing hangars, this year, as well as to proposed additional hangars. In addition, the airport’s 4,100 ft. runway is scheduled to be extended to 4,900 ft. in 2022, making it able to handle