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RABBI RACHEL: NPR's Main Street radio coverage of rural issues is supported by the Blandin Foundation, committed to strengthening communities through grant making, leadership training and convening. We invite you to visit the Main Street website. Go to www.npr.org, where you can hear today's program at your convenience, as well as other Main Street reports. The address again is www.npr,org.

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Good afternoon, and welcome to this special Main Street radio show. We're broadcasting live from Ely today, a small Northeastern Minnesota town on the edge of the wilderness. I'm Rachel Rabbi. And you can probably tell we're set up on one of the busiest corners in town on the green outside Piragis Northwoods Company and the Chocolate Moose. 20 years ago, the battle over the Boundary Waters Canoe area was being fought here in the town of Ely. Landmark legislation passed in 1978 prohibited logging and mining inside the wilderness and sharply reduced motor use.

Some predicted it would also strangle the town of Ely, long dependent on the steady flow of tourists. But instead, Ely is experiencing something of a renaissance. New upscale businesses selling wilderness gear in Northwoods furnishings line Main Street. New people have moved to town. Tourism is at an all time high. Let's talk about what's happening here and in other small towns.

Mike Hillman, a fourth generation Elyite and local historian, is with me here in Ely. Jim Creel, a rural sociologist and director of the Blandin Community Leadership Program joins us from our studio in Saint Paul. Welcome, gentlemen.

MIKE HILLMAN: Thank you, Rachel.

RABBI RACHEL: Our phone lines are open for your questions and comments. You can reach us today by calling us at 1-800-537-5252. Mike, let's start with you. Your father lived here, your grandfather, your great grandfather. Would they recognize this Ely?

MIKE HILLMAN: No. It's been gentrified, I think, past the point that any of the original old settlers would have ever envisioned.

RABBI RACHEL: Is it an improvement?

MIKE HILLMAN: It's different. I think that you can't escape what was meant to be. And it just happened that the mining people came here because the iron was here. The iron lasted about 80 something years, and then they didn't need it anymore. I think I learned more last summer from when the Cornish American Heritage Society came to town because they go to old mining towns.

And they were so impressed with Ely because there was a life here and a vibrancy. And I think for the old town people, what might be missed is the fact that change is a very difficult thing to accept. And some of the old people will say to me, what do you think about this really? And I'll say, look at the town. Look how beautiful it looks. Have you ever seen it looking this vibrant?

And you can see that there's a sense of pride and I think a gratefulness maybe now that's starting to be appreciated because we had something after the mining to build on. It's not perfect. Maybe the economic curse of Ely is that it's always been one economic base. That's why I'm so happy that Patty's going to be on later because we do have other things going here. Ely was dependent on mining. When the steel demand would miss a year, everyone would be laid off, and it would be hard times.

Last winter, with the El Niño conditions, it was very tough here. We didn't have any snow. And if you don't have any snow, you don't have any skiers. And if you don't have any snow, you don't have any snowmobilers. And so we really felt a pinch. That's why the Ely Economic Development Council is trying to reach out a little bit. We've got a business park. 10 years ago it was the veterinary clinic and a revenue building.

And now it's blast him out to the home of Steger Mukluks and hallmark cards. There's some wonderful things happening at the state of Minnesota. Revenue building is there. So we're having something other than tourism. But I'm grateful.

RABBI RACHEL: So Ely is not known just as an old mining town?

MIKE HILLMAN: No, I don't think so.

RABBI RACHEL: Was there a point where people had to stop looking backwards and start looking forwards? Was that a very deliberate change of perspective?

MIKE HILLMAN: Well, we never wanted to be a tourist town. Some places seem to be born for tourism and other places have tourism thrust upon them. When The Pioneer Mine shut down in April 1 in 1967, the town chased other mining phantoms. They looked for copper, and then they looked for nickel. There was operations south of Babbitt. Every test shaft that went down, it was going to be a bonanza. They were drilling for gold in the 1980s on the bed of Shagawa Lake. So we--

RABBI RACHEL: So they didn't let it go quickly or easily?

MIKE HILLMAN: No, no. There's a pride that these people are hard rock miners. These were the men that went underground. They were the elite of mining. This was a very close knit. I'll give you a great example. We're sitting on what used to be the turf hall, the old Shagawa Hotel, and next to us was the old Ely Shopper, which is now the Piragis Northwoods company, and upstairs is the Brandenburg Gallery.

Brent Spink was having-- he's a local artist. He's having an opening. Joe Seliga, the canoe builder, is standing next to me. And we've got little doilies on our hands and tiny sandwiches, and Joe turns to me and he says, isn't this something? Here you and I are above the old Ely Shopper with doilies on our hands, eating canapes in an art exhibit, and you're the only person I know.

He said, do you remember the days in the park when if somebody new came into town that everybody would be talking? Who's that with the Henning family? Oh, that's his uncle Bob. OK. And everybody would be placated. And that's changed now. It's kind of a repeat of history in the 1880s, 1890s, 1910. This was a place to come to because it had good jobs, a quality of life and opportunity. Many people came, 41 different countries, that's what's on the US steel registry for people that came to work here.

111 years later, people are coming here again. Every year there's less wilderness permits, but there seems to be more people in town because I think the one thing that people tend to miss when they talk about the wilderness is that people relate to wilderness through place. And it's very important to have a place that's near a wilderness like the Boundary Waters. And it does my heart good because so many people now are coming here because they realize it's a wonderful place.

RABBI RACHEL: Jim Creel, you're a rural sociologist. You make it your business to study small towns. The fact that Ely had to turn away from its mining roots, or at least let go long enough to move ahead, is that something we're seeing repeated over and over again in small towns?

JIM CREEL: We see it-- I think, as you said, Rachel-- over and over again. And sometimes communities are not quite as successful as Ely has been in terms of redefining themselves. People move to a place because they can make a living there. And then they develop an identity around that. We're miners, or we're farmers, or we're lumber people or whatever. And when the economic function of the community changes, we have to change our identity.

I thought Mike's story about looking for every kind of mining possible was very typical of what happens in communities. In business, we say we've developed a core competency. And we'll go with that core competency. Well, communities develop a core competency and an identity, but when those economic plates shift, then the challenge for the community and its leadership is to say, if we can't exercise these core competencies, what other resources do we have around us? And what other kind of identity and skills can we create for ourselves as a community?

RABBI RACHEL: 20 years ago, we had people say, if the 1978 legislation restricting the wilderness is passed, Ely will die. It will be a ghost town. And as we sit here today on one of the busiest corners of town, it doesn't look like a ghost town. Jim, is what happened in Ely quite unusual?

JIM CREEL: Well, at the risk of offending thousands of listeners, our ability to predict which communities are going to live and die based on truly external knowledge of that community is pretty hit and miss. I think Ely is a classic example of a community in which the leadership-- new and old people who cared passionately about the community-- looked at their opportunities and invested heavily in making some changes.

We have a large history in the state of Minnesota of predicting which communities are going to live and die. At one time, Minnesota had a history of trying to create experimental communities because we thought certain small towns were going to disappear. The basic asset any rural community has, any community has any neighborhood has, are the people who live there.

And if the people who live there are willing to not necessarily embrace change and say this is the greatest thing ever, but to accept it as a reality and say, how are we going to manage this in a positive way? How are we going to continue to live here and maintain some positive values about this place? There's no guarantee that a community like Ely will die. There's no guarantee that it will live either. But those kinds of predictions that we tend to make as outsiders and experts usually underestimate the power of a community to pull itself together and to continue forward.

RABBI RACHEL: When we covered the town of Comfrey after the tornado, or when we were in Breckenridge or Ada after the floods, the thing that we as a staff were struck with over and over again is people's unbelievable tenacity. It didn't matter that the town was gone mostly, or the town had been flooded, or most of Main Street was gone or City Hall was gone, all they kept saying is, we will rebuild. We will rebuild. That real sense of this is our place, and we don't want to pick up and move 15 miles down the road to another town.

This is our town. It may not look like it did yesterday, but it's our place. Is that something that is we see often in small towns, or is that something that we see in any size towns? That real sense of, this is our place, this is where we stay.

JIM CREEL: I think the sense of place is important. I mean, we tend to identify ourselves in terms of place. I'm from, and then we name a place. Or if we're in an urban area, I'm from such and such a neighborhood. I lived in Saint Paul for 15 years. I was from the East side. That was an identifiable place. But along with that are those emotional connections. People aren't just in a place, they're also in relationship, not to the place alone, but to the other people who live there.

In Comfrey, in ADA and East Grand Forks, part of what kept people there is that it wasn't just their town, it was their community. It was their home. There are relationships there. There's history there. Our identity comes from that, and it's part of that. And not that we can't change those things, but if there's-- we are a mobile society. We're a society that's talking about living in cyberspace, and yet the realities of life where we get our affirmation, where we find meaning, where we raise our children, where we grow old, where we bury our dead, are in named places within which we have deep relationships with other human beings.

RABBI RACHEL: Our phone lines are open today. You can call us and tell us about your town. 1-800-537-5252. There was a comment made by one of the other people I talked to about this show. And their comment was that some towns seem to have almost a suicide mentality. That they can't get over what is gone on before. And they are so still wrapped up in what isn't anymore that they're almost unwilling to move forward. Mike, how did the people here get themselves to finally take the mining out of their hands and move forward?

MIKE HILLMAN: Well, I don't think we really did that. I think Ely will always recognize its mining heritage, its lumber heritage, its voyageur heritage, the heritage of Native American people. It has a history here that goes back a long ways. One of the things that I think that people were afraid of here is that what was here was almost going to be engulfed. I asked Charles Kuralt's film team one day, I said, you've come back here now for three or four episodes of American Moments. I said, surely you must have another place that you could find an American moment.

And Izzy Blackmon, his photographer, turned to me and he said, Charles likes Ely because Ely remembers who founded it. It remembers who it was. And somehow this has been melded into the new town. And I think maybe more than anything else, people say, why did Mr Kuralt buy the radio station? And his response was, I don't want Ely to lose its voice.

And I think by giving local people a chance to run that station-- Jim Brandenburg called one day, and I'd never met him, and he said, I got to meet you for lunch. And he came in and he said, you're the synergy between the old and the new town. You're the thing that made it kind of meld together because it would be such a shame to lose such a rich history and an identity. And the people that are coming here, they're the people that go down.

4 years at the Soudan mine as a historian, it was people that came from other places that were fascinated by what went on here. What I would say to Old Town people, they would say, boy, you sure talk to outsiders a lot. And I'd say, if you're not going to use it, you're going to lose it. The one thing you can take with you is your history. You can take your town's history. You can take your family's history. And if you don't share it with people, if you don't talk to them, it'll be gone. And 20 years from now, you'll miss something.

RABBI RACHEL: We have Norman from Ely on the phone with us today. Good afternoon, Norman.

NORMAN: I was just kind of wondering what the school enrollment is now compared to what it was in 1978?

MIKE HILLMAN: That's a big problem. I couldn't give you a straight answer, Norman, but I can tell you this, one of the big concerns that we have here as a community and one of the reasons why Ely wants to diversify to get the right kind of businesses here, our school enrollment has dropped quite a bit. And we're doing what we can. The one thing about tourism, the one thing about being a desirable place is you have to have a lot of money to get a place on Burnside.

You have to have a lot of money to get Lakeshore here. And a lot of people that are coming are retirement people. We need to have something that will bring people into town that are raising families. And people like Bill Henning and the Ely Area Development Council are doing their best to see that we try to do that.

RABBI RACHEL: Our phone number, 1-800-537-5252. I'm Rachel Rabbi, and we are broadcasting live from Ely, the corner of Sheridan and Central on this Friday afternoon. Leif Anchor.

LEIF ANCHOR: I'm here with Ben Johnson, who is a graduate student in the Department of History at Yale. He's visiting Ely. He's been studying Ely, in fact. It's part of his studies at Yale and its various periods of conflict and growth. And he has a question for our guests.

BEN JOHNSON: Sure. I started coming up here eight years ago, I guess, when I was a freshman at Carleton College. And as many of the panelists have noted, the growth in Ely is meteoric and noticeable. Every year it seems like a couple of new buildings have gone up, but I wonder if this is entirely a good thing? It's certainly good that Ely has been able to find a replacement for the jobs lost with the decline of the iron mining industry.

But I remember other towns and know of other towns, many in the West, which have seen such rapid tourist development and so many well-heeled outsiders coming in that the cost of living skyrockets your property. You may not be making any more money, but your property values increase by four or five, six times. So somehow you have to come up with the money for the excess taxes.

Builders have no incentive to build for modest homes or apartments for folks if they can sell a million and 1/2 dollar cabins to people from Minneapolis or Chicago. So I guess my question for any or all of the panelists is, is Ely growing too fast? Is it in danger of becoming a sort of tourist colony of the Twin Cities?

RABBI RACHEL: Well, why don't you address that, Mike. What do you think about the change?

MIKE HILLMAN: I think it's inevitable.

RABBI RACHEL: But is it a huge concern?

MIKE HILLMAN: I think because the number of people that can come into the Boundary Waters has been set at a certain limit that that's going to help things. I think in 20 years, you're going to see Northern Minnesota spread out down towards the North shore. Our population is going to get bigger as the lakes get bought up here. There's some wonderful property going down Highway 1 in that country.

I think you're going to see more and more people that want to get out of the cities and are going to be looking for places. The alternative is Norway, Michigan, where the mining men came from the Upper Peninsula to mine iron here. Norway, Michigan had nothing to fall back on. Like most mining towns, it was a geological rose that blossomed for 80 years and died. The alternative, I mean, I'm concerned about it too.

I don't want to see the town here turn like the front range, where you go back to a little town up in the mountains and all of a sudden there's so many new people there that nobody remembers the stories. And that's a concern that Charles Kuralt had.

RABBI RACHEL: Jim Creel, is that a problem? How you change and how you adapt to the change. Should there be a concern for Ely that tomorrow it will wake up and be Wisconsin Dells?

JIM CREEL: It probably won't happen tomorrow, but the day after tomorrow I might start worrying about it. I think it's a well poised question. I don't think Ely has a choice anymore. It's going to grow and tourism is going to grow as long as there is a section of the economy that has a high degree of disposable income. I think the question is, is how do you manage that growth? As Mike mentioned earlier, we have to keep in mind that Ely is really trying to make some progress in terms of diversifying its economy.

Mike mentioned Bill Henning and his organization, they're doing some joint powers agreements with the school district and surrounding townships so they can be more effective in diversifying the economy. But if I had a word of advice for Ely, is keep struggling with your vision, and for any community. What is it that we want to be and what are the boundaries we want to put on this?

I think, again, Mike is very wise. The settlement pattern, if you will, of tourism settlements, retirement homes, second homes, this kind of thing, as Minnesotans up North to the lake used to mean going to Brainerd. Well, drive through Brainerd some Friday evening and say to yourself, gee, this is a good rush hour traffic. So now we see the expansion to the Grand Rapids Area, the North Shore.

If you look at Cook County, the population changes there. They have marvelous little signs on Highway 61. Tired of the rat race, stay in Cook County. In 10 years we're going to put up little signs in Cook County saying, tired of Cook County, go someplace else. It's called the Oregon syndrome. But I think managing growth for a popular destination area like Ely will become a significant piece.

And part of the Boundary Waters issue is going to start taking on the character of people who want to move up there and use that as not tourism country that you come to visit but recreational area that you consume locally based on larger disposable incomes. I think it's a real challenge for Ely or any other community for whom tourism is a part of their economic mainstay.

LEIF ANCHOR: Ben Johnson, you've got a follow up question.

BEN JOHNSON: Yeah, just actually to follow directly on what the guest was saying. I mean, I think you're right. I think Mike is right to suggest that it's not a question between going-- there's no question that Ely can't go back to pre-Boundary Waters status. But I wonder if it's a question of really of nothing or complete unregulated growth. And so I guess I would ask as a follow up, if any locals or local political organizations, including perhaps conservationists with common sense are trying to come up with ways that Ely can manage its growth, or if this is just something that people worry about?

Another guy who works in the stockroom at the grocery store told me that his property taxes have gone up six times since he bought his house 10 years ago. Is anyone doing anything about this yet in Ely or is it just something that people talk about over a beer or coffee?

MIKE HILLMAN: We are putting together-- and I wish Bill probably Henning could address it better than I could. But right now, I think that if you look back on Ely's history, I addressed a group from Saint Louis County Historical Society in May of 1995, and they said, what's happening here? And I said, I think what's happening here is the old town and the new town are melding together. The Holiday Inn was coming online. The Super 8 Motel was coming online.

I think people finally right now in 1998 are just really realizing and just beginning to believe how much growth this place is going to see. I hope that I'm lucky enough to be sitting next to Bill Mills 20 years from now with you underneath the canopy talking about where it's gone and were we right? Some people are concerned about that 9 million acres. That's what Ernest Oberholtzer wanted in the first place was a 10 million acre wilderness here. What are we going to do with the Superior National Forest? Big questions.

RABBI RACHEL: Jeannie from Stillwater is on the phone with us. Jeannie, go ahead with your question.

JEANNIE: I'd like to say that I'm glad that the Ely language is the same. I detect an accent with the people from Ely. And my question is that we have gone up to a family camp for years and years, and I've heard that there are conflicts with the camps in the area. And I'm curious about what kind of relationship you see between the camps and the town of Ely, and what can be done to better those relationships?

MIKE HILLMAN: I don't see any problem. I don't see any resentment. How can I dislike somebody for coming up here and wanting to spend some time and love the place a little bit for the same reason that I do? I think the thing that I would ask of people coming here is to practice good stewardship. And remember that this is a special place. The people that I learned the country from back in the late '50s and early '60s, these were people that took care of the place.

They practiced no impact camping. They had reverence for the country. And I would say, if you were coming up here, we're really pretty friendly people. And if you meet us halfway, we'll meet you halfway. And if we see that you're a good camper who appreciates the country and willing to take care of it, I think we'll make you feel welcome.

JEANNIE: Well, I'm glad to hear that. I love it up there.

MIKE HILLMAN: You come up there, ma'am. You call a radio station. If anybody gives you any trouble, you ask for Iron Mike.

JEANNIE: All right. Thank you.

RABBI RACHEL: That's the answer. Our phone line this afternoon, 1-800-537-5252. This is a special Main Street broadcast coming to you live from Ely. We've invited a trio of Ely business owners to stop by and give us their perspective on the community. Bill Mills family has run a clothing store in Ely for 85 years. The JD Mills Company just up the street from us now is operated by his son. Patty Steger Holmberg moved to Ely 20 years ago.

In 1986, she opened Steger Mukluks. And finally, Rosie Ernst, the owner of the Ely Barbershop, which has been in business for two years. Thank you all of us for stopping by and taking Mike off the hook, who had to answer for the entire community and all the citizens of Ely. So you can help him out a little bit. Let's talk about some of the questions that have already come up in the conversation today.

Bill, when you and I talked on the phone and we talked about the Ely renaissance you said, this is not a renaissance. Things are not as good as they were when the mine was in town. Talk to me about that.

BILL MILLS: Well, that's true. That's true. But we've switched around to where there are visitors and our summer residents are an important part of the economic base here. It's not too recent when we had a lot of people working in the woods, but they got the Forest Service so paranoid that they're going to be in a lawsuit that it's almost knocked out and things like that.

RABBI RACHEL: Well, Bill, let's talk about your business, which is a good example of a business that operated during the heyday of the mines and in the after mine era and now in the new tourism mode here in Ely. Have there been many changes since your father ran it to when your son has run it? Do you have to gear up in a whole different way to appeal to Ely as it is in 1998?

BILL MILLS: Well, basically a customer is the same kind of a person as you and I are. We got to know his wants and we supply them. That's what you're doing. I was born two doors down from here. And Jim Brandenburg now has the apartment. I was born in the front room of that building up there. If you look upstairs, the right window, that's the room I was born in. I played ball on the street out here.

One time one of the older boys, he had a 14-foot plank. And we got two sleds, and we started on the top of the hill in the wintertime, went all the way down the hill here. The cops were watching. We were so fast. We got away from them.

RABBI RACHEL: Patty and actually you were one of the ones who told me, not even in the old, old days, just the old days, 20 years ago you could walk down the middle of Sheridan street and not have to worry about somebody hitting you with a car.

PATTY HOLMBERG: That's pretty true. I was going to make a comment on with Bill. The population here is a lot lower than it was. When I first moved here, the population was a lot higher. So the boom that you're talking about is a relative thing. It's a tourism boom is what you're seeing. And you're seeing a lake home boom. You're not seeing an actual boom to the city of Ely in terms of population.

Population was, I think, 6,000 when I moved here. It's four now. So, no, in the winter, everybody here will recall that a lot of the Main Street businesses closed up in the winter. You couldn't get in. Well, actually, main streets shifted to Chapman in the winter. And so the local people mainly shopped at Pamida and Bill Mills clothing store and as everybody recalls, the hardware stores are over there.

So the Main Street where the tourism businesses existed just kind of closed their doors and all went to Florida, I guess. I don't know where they all went.

RABBI RACHEL: Patty, you opened your business 20 years ago at a time where some people were saying, get a good look at Ely because it is on its way down. That's the time where you came in and opened Steger Mukluks.

PATTY HOLMBERG: Well, I'll correct that. I moved to Ely 20 years ago, but my business-- in 1987, I opened up my doors in Ely. That was my first store on Main Street.

RABBI RACHEL: And was your business-- or is any successful business in Ely geared to the tourism trade? Does it have to be?

PATTY HOLMBERG: I'm sorry. I didn't-- does it have to be to succeed?

RABBI RACHEL: Yes.

PATTY HOLMBERG: If you want to succeed in a big way, yes. I would say that any of us that are really catering to the need of tourists and the people. But I have to say on the other side of that coin for me-- and Rosie, I'm sure, too, as well as Bill-- you're looking at three people that cater and sell a lot to the people from Ely and the area. A huge chunk of what I sell goes to the people in this town. Rosie's customers are mostly local. Bill's are as well or not, well, formerly. He's retired now. His son runs it.

BILL MILLS: 13 years.

PATTY HOLMBERG: He golfs mostly now.

RABBI RACHEL: So you still sell a lot locally, even though tourism is a big part of your business?

PATTY HOLMBERG: I would say, I don't know what the breakdown is financially on ours, but I would say regionally, locally, we sell a tremendous amount of goods up here because it's cold. And what we sell is warmth. So the people here need it. It works out really well for us. And the reason I started this business here was not because I thought I was going to sell goods to people coming from out of town, I intended my business to sell to people that live up in this cold region.

RABBI RACHEL: And it was a bonus.

PATTY HOLMBERG: And the bonus was tourism.

RABBI RACHEL: Rosie, let's talk about your situation. Because it's a little bit different than Bill's and Patty's. You wanted to live in Ely, but you had to figure out something to do so you could live in Ely.

ROSIE ERNST: Right.

RABBI RACHEL: And everybody needs a haircut. So how did you come up with a Barber shop? How did that work?

ROSIE ERNST: Well I sort of turned a hobby into an income. When I looked around and I came from working at a camp setting in the area and talked to different people who were also folks who were here year round but felt estranged from the town. And they were scared to death to get a haircut in town not for very good reasons necessarily, but I thought, well, at least they would come and get a haircut.

And so that's what spurred me to decide to go to barber school and see if I could make it work. But mostly, I just looked for openings in the situation to see what would work up here. And the more that I looked around, it started to appear that a barber shop was what was needed. And I talked to a lot of men in town when I would come up and visit friends from when I lived here before, and they said, yeah, absolutely a barber shop is needed.

And you have to be open before 6:00, and you have to be open after 5:00 or before 8:00 in the morning and after 5:00. So I came up with some crazy hours of 6:00 in the morning till 6:00 at night. And it works because they were there to meet people's needs.

RABBI RACHEL: Is it all worth it so you can live in Ely?

ROSIE ERNST: Sure.

RABBI RACHEL: This was the plum?

ROSIE ERNST: Yeah.

RABBI RACHEL: To be able to live here?

ROSIE ERNST: Yeah.

RABBI RACHEL: Are you concerned about--

ROSIE ERNST: It's not worth it if you don't get any time to--

RABBI RACHEL: Enjoy it.

ROSIE ERNST: --do whatever you do, whether it's ATV travel or fishing or canoeing. And so I run a business that there are two employees, myself and Jeff Dahl, and we only work-- we're only open four days a week. And that's why we have three days to go canoeing. And some people have a hard time with that. But then when they think about it, they realize that that's why we're here.

RABBI RACHEL: I don't have to get their hair cut Tuesday. They can wait till Wednesday.

ROSIE ERNST: Yeah.

RABBI RACHEL: Let's talk about some of the issues that were brought up in our earlier conversation. What about property taxes? I know, Rosie, when you and I talked you said, hard to buy a house. It's expensive, and it's getting more expensive. Is that the downside of the popularity of Ely, of the growth of Ely for you?

ROSIE ERNST: Sure. It's something that I anticipated. I come from the East Coast originally, and I worked in coastal towns when I was in college in high school. And so I knew what I understand the tourism economy. And when I came here, I saw it coming here. And I knew that in those towns, it's pretty much split. There's the people who serve everybody, and then there's the people who own everything.

And they're not the same people. And I hope that doesn't happen to the extreme that it has happened on the East Coast. But I think it's possible here if we don't look at our zoning and make some decisions.

RABBI RACHEL: So be smart about growth?

ROSIE ERNST: Mm-hmm. As I understand now, it's more laissez faire and more targeted towards, let's get some more industry here, which makes sense. But I think some things could be done in terms of zoning and local taxes that could protect the old town and go from there.

RABBI RACHEL: Jim Creel, is that a very important factor? You've talked about growth. Change is inevitable, but should towns be very careful about the way they manage that growth and be very proactive instead of reactive?

JIM CREEL: Well, obviously, yes. Change is inevitable. Development requires some intentionality. I think communities that are in the process of changing-- and you notice one of the earlier speakers reminded us that at least within the municipality of Ely, the population has gone down, not up. And yet we have folks then living out on the lakes who want goods and services, drive on our streets, whatever.

So growth and development are not necessarily the same kind of thing. And I think that's the challenge for any community that has the kind of opportunity that Ely does. How do we manage growth in a useful way? And how do we maintain some of those core values that make us an attractive place to live? And as Rosie talking about her barbershop, and we're smart enough to take three days off, so we can go out hunting or fishing or just enjoying the woods.

For many people in tourist towns, during the peak season-- whether that's the winter or the summer-- the reasons they moved up to Ely or Cook County or down to Lanesboro to enjoy that environment, once you get hooked into the tourist trade, those are your peak seasons. And if you're going to make a dollar, you're going to have to work awfully hard at that time. So it's true for the individual, and it's also true for the community.

I was just in a tourist community earlier this week, and they were talking about recreational opportunities. And every recreational opportunity they identified was for outsiders. There were no public beaches. There were no things that were-- or very few things, I should say, that were available for local residents to use. They were all geared for a tourist economy and not open to local participation. And so the quality of life actually for year round residents had gone down, not up.

And I think that's part of what I mean about the difference between change and development. Change means things aren't going to stay the same. Development means there's some intentional positive outcome for what's happening to our community.

RABBI RACHEL: We have Jean from Ely on the telephone with us. Good afternoon, Jean. Jean, have we still got you on the line? Our phone number is 1-800-537-5252. If you would like to give us a call, that would be great. 1-800-537-5252. Leif.

LEIF ANCHOR: You've been throwing the name Bill Henning out a lot here. I've got Bill standing right here with me. He wants to make some comments.

BILL HENNING: Yes. Thank you. And hi, Jim and everyone here. We talk about Ely's development, and we'd like to talk about the community and economic development. Bill knows. He's a member way back of the Ely Area Development Council. As a matter of fact, the records go back to 1910 to something where economic development was an issue with the community. It's been alive and well. We are developing.

Let me just back up. The Ely Area Development Association and Council is an area-wide economic and community development organization of about 30 members. And it ranges from business people right across the board. And the purpose-- I'll read one of our classic. We do have a vision statement. And it's very important because it came from this group about four years ago. The EADA vision is to work cooperatively to create economic opportunity for a stable-- talked about that-- and diversified-- we talked about that-- economy-- and here's the key part that's always in the equation-- while maintaining our quality of life.

And that is the issue we work towards constantly. What's happening in the recent development? We're bringing fiber optics coming to Ely, Minnesota. This was not a plan in the years past. From a market standpoint, the providers don't see it as a good market, but we convinced them that Ely is a good market. And so we have fiber optics coming up here. We have a hybrid cable modem system coming up here this year in 1998. What does that do for us?

That does everything the rest of the world is saying, telecommunications. You can live in Ely, Minnesota, in a business park. You can have your business in a business park on a trout lake, on a recreational trail system that includes skiing, hiking, walking, biking, snowmobiling. This is our business park. It doesn't look like a business park. I got to tell people, these lots are for sale. They keep thinking it's a recreational park. It's our business park. We have--

RABBI RACHEL: This is the only place where I've ever seen a grocery store billboard that had their internet address, www.zupes.com.

BILL HENNING: Telecommunications, the internet, we are the place.

MIKE HILLMAN: We'll polish on the net.

BILL HENNING: If you're selling everything from meat at zupes to telecommunicating with the Department of Revenue doing the exact same operations they do in Saint Paul in Ely, Minnesota-- we have 50 people up here in the Department of Revenue. We're just going to build a $2.2 million new building up here in the business park hooked up to fiber optics. And so the other side, the back office operations, we have that capability. We are ready for the businesses down in the cities and wherever to come up.

RABBI RACHEL: Thank you so much. We have Cole from Duluth on the line with us. Good afternoon.

COLE: Good afternoon. My question dovetails nicely, I think, with what he was just speaking about. I didn't catch his name because I was on hold. But what hard data do you have showing that growth could or would take place in the Ely area, specifically, apart from tourism just due to technological changes? The T1 lines and the modem lines that he's talking about.

BILL HENNING: I think that it's going to have a tremendous impact because irregardless of where this place sits-- and it's very fortunate to sit on the edge of a two million acre wilderness. But it's got a quality of life. It's a good place to come to do business, a good place to come to live, a safe place, a clean place. You talked about, John, in the Twin Cities about beaches for private people but not for the public. We're blessed with beautiful recreation areas here. I think that people are going to come here to do their business on the net because it's a nice place to live.

RABBI RACHEL: Thank you for your call. We're going now over to Fargo, where Wayne is waiting on the line with us. Good afternoon, Wayne.

WAYNE: Yes, good morning. I should say good afternoon. I just wanted to relay an experience I had working out in Colorado, in aspen, Colorado. And I think the town up there really needs to be proactive about their zoning. So when they do recover some of their population-- you said they'd gone down in town. It had gotten sad up in Aspen where literally the people who worked in the town had been driven out by really super high priced stores.

They couldn't afford houses in town anymore. And you ended up with these sad little spots where a few trailer houses would be strung out along the mountain roads. And I mean, of course, I'm talking about mega houses that were $10 million, $20 million houses put on their own little mountains. But also right in the town itself, an apartment literally two bedroom would cost like 1,500 a month. It had gone crazy there. And I hope that doesn't happen. I think that would be zoning where you--

PATTY HOLMBERG: That's a main concern of ours too here. I think all of the business owners in this town are concerned about just what he's addressing. If you tax your workforce right out of a community, where do they go? Where do they live? Do they live 20 miles down the road because the taxes are lower? That's something that I think most of this business community would like to see addressed by the city fathers, by the people that can have an impact on there.

We need to reevaluate the tax structure. When you were talking about this fellow before you that had bought a house and within the 10 years he's lived here, his taxes had gone up six times. That was not-- he wasn't exaggerating. The taxes have gone way up in this town. The prices of a home, I would say, when I moved years ago, when I first got my place in town, businesses in town were good. The buildings in town were running in the 20,000.

And you could buy a building in town for around 20,000. Bill remembers this period. You could buy a house in town for 10 or less sometimes depending on how rundown it was. Now those same homes and businesses are running four times that amount of money easily. So we have a huge inflation factor going on. But, again, the taxes have gone up with that. And it is a huge concern. It needs to be addressed.

RABBI RACHEL: And Jim Creel, isn't that one of the problems in rural Minnesota, when the jobs come, and the people can stay, and there is work then there's no place to live?

JIM CREEL: Well, it's a major issue in rural Minnesota. We've got two major issues related. One is the available labor pool. It's hard to believe in rural Minnesota, but there are jobs that could be filled. And right now, we don't have the population to do that. And then secondly, where are people going to live? And the issue sometimes isn't so much where people are going to live, but where can people afford to live?

I think we can talk about a price of a house going up double or triple, whatever, that's not very significant if wages keep pace with that. But if your purchasing power doesn't increase and the cost of housing increases, then it says something about where do people who aren't at the top end of the economic scale, where do they live? And I think that's-- and that's affecting not just tourist communities or communities that are developing a tourist industry like Ely.

But you can go to Holly, Minnesota, you can go to Gaylord and find the same issue. And part of that also relates to it costs more to build a house in rural Minnesota in terms of the gap between what many lenders will consider the equity in that home and the actual building costs. So I think, well, we're talking about Ely here. One of the things we want to recognize for all Minnesota communities right now is this serious challenge in terms of providing affordable housing for-- if we can put it this way, sort of those of us who are the common working person.

RABBI RACHEL: And working wages, because isn't that always the downside of a tourism economy that people call those-- on the wage scale, lots of times they're part time. They don't have benefits that go with them. They are marginal wages in part.

PATTY HOLMBERG: And we need people. We need families to move into this town. We need children in our school. Our population is aging here. And Mike was talking about addressing and you were too before. We need some young, vibrant couples that have lots of ambition to move to this town with their children and/or have children or start families. We need more of that kind of community.

BILL HENNING: That's a healthy community with families.

RABBI RACHEL: All ages.

BILL HENNING: All ages.

RABBI RACHEL: All ages.

MIKE HILLMAN: Yeah, but what price for beauty? That's the question. There are people that are coming up here that are falling in love with this place. The problem isn't so much with tourism it seems. It seems it's with people that want to live here, whether it be on a full time or part time basis and are willing to pay darn near any price to do it.

How can I deny somebody? If you want to pay four times what something's worth, this is America. And that's what's happening here. I can't stand the city anymore. I don't care. I want out.

BILL HENNING: Well, that's where the tax problem should come. The raise in the value of that property, the increased taxes should be paid by the buyer of that piece of property, not his neighbor like you're doing today. It's the legislature knows the problem, but they don't have the guts to do what they should do about it.

RABBI RACHEL: Let's do a show on that sometime, Bill. Right now we're going to go to Maple Grove where we have Jim on the phone line with us. Jim, go ahead with your question.

JIM: Hey, Mike. It's not really a question. I'm a displaced Elyite. I moved out of there 15 years ago. Mike, you might recognize my voice.

MIKE HILLMAN: OK.

JIM: I used to be the Mead manager at the IGA there.

MIKE HILLMAN: Yes, I remember you.

JIM: You remember me?

MIKE HILLMAN: Yes, I do.

JIM: I just wanted to say that the quality of life up in Ely is really great, and I've been spending more time up there because of my mother's situation. And I'm thinking about quitting my job down here, which I have a good job and trying to get back up to Ely. And I never thought that would happen. But--

RABBI RACHEL: So Jim it's--

JIM: I'm sorry.

RABBI RACHEL: Jim, it wasn't the cappuccino on every corner and the Panini sandwiches that drove you from Ely?

JIM: No. It was trying to get a good job. Ely was dying when I left back in the '80s, '84.

MIKE HILLMAN: It was hard times. People should remember that the 1980s was probably the hardest decade that this town has seen.

RABBI RACHEL: And so, Jim, you'd come back if you could?

JIM: Yes. I think I can. I've had a couple of job offers, and I'm hoping to line one up. I just turned it down about six weeks ago, but I think I can still get the job. Mike, you left too. Didn't you?

MIKE HILLMAN: Yeah, I did. Yeah, I did.

JIM: But I'll tell you, every time I come back to Ely, I listen to you when I can't on the radio.

MIKE HILLMAN: Well, bless your heart.

JIM: I'm meaning to stop up and say, hi, but--

MIKE HILLMAN: The coffee pot is always on.

JIM: I hear you.

RABBI RACHEL: Jim Creel, is that a problem? People moving away, young people not having anything to stay for, which is why they're leaving. I know somebody talked to me about a graduation gathering in one of the Northeastern Minnesota towns. It was not Ely, but it wasn't far from here. And they asked a show of hands how many of those young people felt that they could find a job or that they planned to stay in their home town. And the hands that were raised were very much the minority. Does that continue to be a concern?

JIM: Yeah, it really is. I don't know how to answer that. I can tell you that if I didn't have a job offer, I wouldn't even be thinking about it. But I've had some offers to come back up there, and then I started thinking about it. And what it has to offer is what I want now. Instead of this hustling down in the city trying to make a buck and taxes are going crazy here. I think it'd be a lot better to move back up there and have the old quality of life I've had before.

RABBI RACHEL: Jim Creel, how would you respond to that?

JIM CREEL: Well, I think there's two pieces in there. One is the ability to have jobs for anybody of any age, and the other is sometimes we have to be careful about our mythology about all kids should stay home. I think the issue isn't whether the graduating class leaves or not. They may leave for all kinds of reasons, including creating their independence, experiencing the world or whatever.

But when they start to settle down and create families and engage in that sort of career building or job building, is it possible for them either to come back to their rural community or some other rural community? And I think that's a serious challenge. And I think one of the outstanding things about Ely is not only is it a beautiful place to live and has that draw for people who grew up there and people who just pass through, but it is outstanding as a community that's really grappling with its issues.

When we've listened to the voices of people from Ely in the Ely area today, I think one of the lessons learned for all of us, and certainly for myself, is the power of local people to really engage in productive and healthy ways and not always agreeing with each other, but have enough passion and concern for their community that they're willing to do something about the future of that community.

And while Ely may be and continues to be a beautiful tourist spot, it truly is a beautiful place to live because of the people who are there and are willing to take some risks in terms of building that community.

RABBI RACHEL: And Jim Creel, is that in part not just the people who have lived here their whole lives but embracing the new people who have come to town and the new leaders in town. Is that part of the mix here?

JIM CREEL: I think so. I'm a neighbor. I'm in Grand Rapids. I'm only a little ways down the highway on 169. And I'm sure Ely is like many other places. If you've been there 20 years, in some ways you're still a newcomer. And unless you have a grandparent out in the cemetery, we will wonder about. But yet Ely has allowed a wide range of people in that area to call that place home.

And I think when you talk to people in Ely, while they may disagree, they may disagree not because they're strangers or old comers and newcomers, they disagree because they are people who care passionately about where they live. And that's a great common element. And I think that's what helps hold that marvelous community together.

RABBI RACHEL: Do you agree with that, quickly, Mike?

MIKE HILLMAN: Yeah. Very much so. I'm sitting at a table with gentlemen I've known all my life and two women that I've known for a few years. And no question in my mind, the new people coming in have made an impact for the better.

RABBI RACHEL: We're out of time today. Jim Creel and Mike Hillman, thank you for joining us. Bill Mills, Patty Steger Holmberg, Rosie Ernst, thanks for stopping by. This special Main Street radio broadcast is a production of Minnesota Public Radio. Our engineers are Rick Basinski and Cliff Bentley on location, Steve Griffith in Saint Paul, our producer, Sarah Meyer. Executive producers are Mel Sommer and Kate Smith. Field producer, Leif Enger.

The Sigurd Olson essay was read by Dave Schliep. We'd like to Thank The Chocolate Moose and Piragis Northwoods Company for allowing us to broadcast from this corner today. We invite you to visit the Main Street website. Go to www.npr.org. You'll be able to hear this program as well as other Main Street reports. The address again, www.npr.org.

NPR's Main Street coverage of rural issues is supported by the Blandin Foundation, committed to strengthening communities through grant making, leadership training and convening. Minnesota Public Radio's Main Street team is Leif Enger, Dan Gundersen, Mark Steil, Kathryn Winter and myself, Rachel Rabbi.

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LORNA BENSON: I'm Lorna Benson on the next All Things Considered for all the discomfort the July heat brings. It's also the best time to find homegrown sweet corn. That story on the next All Things Considered weekdays at 3:00 on Minnesota Public Radio. KNOW-FM 91.1.

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