At the June 17 Albertville City Council meeting, the council discussed Main Avenue NE reconstruction and how it will affect the Albertville Friendly City Days parade in the future and Shop STMA spoke to the council.
Main Avenue reconstruction
City Administrator Adam Nafstad told the council that the city is in the beginning stages of preliminary design for Main Avenue NE’s reconstruction. The pavement on the road is coming close to being 20 years old and has held up relatively well, but there are many utilities that need to be replaced underneath Main Avenue NE.
The powerlines on Main Avenue will also need to be upgraded and the city has been wanting to upgrade the system in this area to an underground electric system for a long time. Albertville received a $1.5 million local street improvement grant and has been budgeting for the project, which is estimated to cost around $6.5 million.
The reconstruction on Main Avenue NE would be from County Road 37 to County Road 18/50th Street.
“We would be looking at starting this project a year from now right after Friendly City Days, getting half the project done in time for Friendly City Days in 2026, but there’d be another half of the project south to continue to complete in 2026,” Nafstad said. “I think we could accommodate Friendly City Days, with the exception of the parade.”
Albertville Friendly City Days will still be able to occur in Central Park in 2026, but the parade route will need to be changed. Mayor Jillian Hendrickson asked if the second phase of construction could begin after Albertville Friendly City Days in 2026 to avoid changing the parade route.
Nafstad stated that doing so would be very costly for the city since construction usually begins in May. Councilmember Aaron Cocking suggested having the parade route for that year on Barthel Industrial Drive NE.
“I completely agree, this is the most perfect parade and route that I’ve ever seen, it’s so ideal. I also would suggest that Friendly City Days parade is one day,” Cocking said.
Other council members brought up the idea of staging the parade in one of the middle school parking lots. Nafstad suggested possibly utilizing the portion of Main Avenue that will be completed by that time and having the rest of the parade route go down another street.
The plans for the Main Avenue NE reconstruction will be brought to the council in the future.
Shop STMA asks about advertising
Shop STMA Vice President Courtney Wiest also attended the meeting to speak about the organization and ask about advertising in local parks. Shop STMA began in 2010 as Shop St. Michael as a way for local businesses to collaborate and learn from each other. In 2015, the organization became Shop STMA to include the city of Albertville and it now has over 100 members of the organization.
“Since then, we have really had a push to try to bring in more members from the business community. Over the last year, we launched Discover STMA. So Discover STMA is shop local, live local, play local,” Wiest said.
Discover STMA is a way for community members to discover local businesses, jobs and events so that they don’t have to venture outside of the St. Michael-Albertville. On Shop STMA’s website at shopstma.com/discover-stma, people can access job openings, what local businesses are in the community and upcoming activities and events.
Wiest stated asked the city of Albertville about the advertising approval process. Shop STMA would advertise the Discover STMA program through 12-by-12-inch signs on fences in parks.
The fences could be located in areas such as pickleball, baseball and tennis courts and would help bring more exposure to the Discover STMA program. Shop STMA hopes to put dynamic QR codes on the signs so that they would be able to know how many interactions there are with the signs at certain parks.
“Staff is going to ultimately need some direction as our code isn’t set up to allow for this. We recently did some changes to allow baseball to do some advertising, we’ll have to make modifications to the code,” Nafstad said.
Nafstad asked if Shop STMA is a 501 nonprofit and Wiest stated that Shop STMA is working towards becoming a 501 organization, but the organization is a nonprofit. The council agreed that they support Shop STMA advertising on park fences, but city staff would need to work to make changes to the city code to allow it.
Modifications to city code could allow Shop STMA to advertise on fences where baseball isn’t advertising at. Wiest said ideally Shop STMA would like the signs to be located by the fence entrances or nearby where people gather, so people can access the QR code.
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