The St. Paul Area Chamber of Commerce and the Minneapolis Regional Chamber have made no secret of how difficult it is to keep a dues-based association afloat in an era where many employers have gone virtual and are more prone to sell their services online and around the world than within their local geography.
Is it time for them to merge? The question, which has been raised more than once across the St. Paul Chamber’s 157 years in operation, has resurfaced, this time with more organizational energy and public process.
Jeff DeYoung, a recently retired partner from the Baker Tilly accounting firm, told a crowd of more than 700 onlookers during the St. Paul Chamber’s annual dinner at the downtown RiverCentre on Thursday that the St. Paul and Minneapolis chambers formed a joint task force to debate the pros and cons of a possible merger. The task force, which met for the first time on Wednesday, also will consider whether the two chambers might remain independent of each other but share certain services, such as information technology.
“It could be that we stay separate and we decide that there’s some joint things that we’re going to work on together,” DeYoung said. “This has been a conversation that a lot of you have had … why do we have so many business chambers? Why do we have so many business associations?”
“Are we at a point where we now look at things from a Twin Cities and community perspective, versus one side of the river or the other? … Or do we want to stay in our separate areas?” he added. “We know that we have to keep a local presence, and we’ve heard that loud and clear. We’re not going to abandon that.”
Regional focus?
DeYoung said members of the task force brought a variety of views to the table, from those gung-ho for a merger to those opposed. The subject of a possible chamber merger has been broached before, with members in 2010 raising concern that west metro priorities would overshadow St. Paul issues. Bloomington and Minneapolis maintain a larger tax base than St. Paul and east metro suburbs like Maplewood, and a growing number of large employers have left downtown St. Paul to head westward.
Among them, the design and engineering firm TKDA left the capital city and moved to Old Shakopee Road in Bloomington, relocating some 300 employees from the UBS Tower at the Town Square complex on Cedar and Minnesota streets. Cray, Inc., the supercomputer company, left downtown St. Paul for Bloomington around 2016.
While St. Paul and Minneapolis mayors may advocate side-by-side for public transit, affordable housing and other regional interests, questions around the fate of particular sports teams and where their stadiums might land have sometimes set east metro and west metro political interests against each other.
Still, both chambers could benefit from fewer overhead costs or other economies of scale.
To stay afloat financially, the St. Paul Chamber has in recent years staffed and hosted smaller business advocacy organizations like the Minnesota Hmong Chamber of Commerce and the Minnesota Black Chamber of Commerce, while also offering its WorkStream consulting services to business retention programs in suburbs like Maplewood and Roseville.
The Minneapolis Chamber launched an investigation of its own finances last year after projecting a $500,000 deficit, leading to the abrupt resignation of longstanding president and chief executive officer Jonathan Weinhagen.
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