New plans for the old Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Minnesota headquarters in Eagan are in early planning stages, according to the 55-acre site’s co-developers.

Real estate developers Opus of Minnetonka and Capital Partners of Edina are working together on the build-to-suit industrial development plans, known as “Blue Ridge Innovation.”

The former Blue Cross Blue Shield headquarters site is located at 3535 Blue Cross Road in Eagan.

“With dramatic shifts occurring in the office markets, we are in the early stages of concept design with various redevelopment solutions,” Opus vice president and general manager of real estate development Nick Murnane said in an emailed statement. “We will be working closely with the city of Eagan and various stakeholders to bring this redevelopment to the Eagan community.”

Company officials declined additional comment regarding the project at this time.

The plans would involve some degree of redevelopment of the land, according to marketing materials released by CBRE.

Two examples of potential redevelopment options are listed and both would construct new buildings on the old HQ site as well as on the adjoining land directly southeast that previously housed a day care center for Blue Cross Blue Shield employees.

One concept calls for two buildings on the properties, 242,800 square feet and 218,700 square feet, with 10 acres left for build-to-suit options.

The second concept consists of a business park with six buildings: two at 119,000 square feet, two at 106,000 square feet and two at 94,000 square feet.

Re-use ‘unlikely’

In March 2023, Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Minnesota announced plans to consolidate operations and move its headquarters into nearby buildings just northwest of the old site, across Minnesota 13. This current base of operations for the health insurance company is also known as the River Park properties.

The Blue Ridge Innovation plans are in very early stages.

Eagan community development director Jill Hutmacher said city staff and developers have had informal discussions about the process for land use, zoning considerations and current site conditions and about community input on previous proposals for the site.

No formal applications have been proposed as of yet.

Any redevelopment into a different land use would need a comprehensive plan amendment and rezoning. Both of those processes would require public hearings.

“The city understands that re-use of the current building is unlikely under current market conditions,” Hutmacher said, speaking generally about the site.

Johnson Brothers interest

Blue Cross Blue Shield announced in early 2023 that it would vacate the 442,000-square-foot headquarters building, with company officials pointing to the rise of the hybrid-work model as the motivation. Next to the old HQ site is the adjoining land parcel that housed a 12,000-square-foot day care center.

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As these sites sat vacant, Johnson Brothers Liquor Co. began eyeing the 55-acre campus as a potential redevelopment opportunity to house a corporate headquarters and warehouse distribution center.

Those discussions moved forward, with the Eagan City Council eventually approving a contentious comprehensive plan land-use amendment.

But by March 2024, Johnson Brothers abandoned those plans, saying in a statement at the time that the site was “not the best fit to meet the anticipated future needs of our company.”

Meanwhile, Solventum, 3M’s health care spin-off, is relocating its Minnesota-based operations from Maplewood to another former Blue Cross and Blue Shield building at 1750 Yankee Doodle Road in Eagan.

Jessie Diggins is grateful for the journey she’s been on since she was a teenager. She wouldn’t trade her career in cross country skiing for the world. It has taken her to places she never could have dreamed of visiting as a kid growing up in Afton, Minn.

After competing at the 2026 Winter Olympics in Milan Cortina, however, Diggins will start the process of sailing off into the sunset. That much is certain following her announcement a few months ago that she planned to retire as soon as the current World Cup campaign comes to a close.

Jessie Diggins, of the United States, competes in the cross country skiing women’s 10km interval start free at the 2026 Winter Olympics, in Tesero, Italy, Thursday, Feb. 12, 2026. The Afton native placed third to win her fourth Olympic medal. (AP Photo/Matthias Schrader)

Asked what she plans to do in the next chapter of her life, the 34-year-old cracked a joke that showed her age, saying, “Well besides knitting and stuff?” She added that she also plans to a lot of gardening in her free time.

If some people think that sounds boring, Diggins doesn’t take offense. She’a been traveling all over the world since making cross country skiing her career. She’s ready to settle down after winning four Olympic medals in total, including a bronze in Thursday’s 10-kilometer interval start freestyle, and three FIS World Cup championships.

“It makes it quite hard to have anything close to a normal life,” Diggins said. “The time has come for me to get really excited about having a normal life.”

That includes as being able to wash her clothes whenever she wants, being able to sleep in her own bed regularly, and to come down with a cold without worrying about how it might affect her livelihood.

Most of all, Diggins is looking forward to spending more quality time with her husband Wade Poplawski. They live together on the outskirts of Boston and plan to call New England home for the foreseeable future.

“He’s been the most supportive person in the world,’ Diggins said. “Now, it’s going got be our time together with me not being on the road.”

That doesn’t mean Diggins will be out of the public eye. She plans to do keynote speaking as a way to continue to make an impact. She’s been a vocal advocate for mental health throughout her career and that isn’t going to change.

“I’m not trying to inspire people by collapsing at the finish line any longer,” Diggins said. “I’m hoping I can inspire people with my words.”

That should be pretty easy considering her experience.

A superpower for Diggins throughout her career has been her willingness to be vulnerable. She’s been open about her struggles with an eating disorder, for example, with hopes of helping people that might be struggling with something similar.

“I’m in this position where I can be there for somebody else,” Diggins said. ” I can give them this gift of, ‘You are not alone.’ ”

That means more to Diggins than winning a gold medal in the team sprint at the 2018 Winter Olympics in Pyeongchang, which provided her the platform to speak up in the first place.

As for the normalcy she’s been seeking for so long, Diggins more or less acknowledged that she will never fully escape the gravitational pull that being an elite athlete has on her life. A bucket list item for her in retirement is completing a 100-mile race.

“I want it to be really scenic and beautiful,” Diggins said. “I really like tough trail. I do not want a dirt highway. I want it to be scrambly.”

She laughed.

“It’s kind of ironic to be like, ‘Yeah I’m going to be done with cross country skiing so I can go run 100 miles on trails,’ ” Diggins said. “It really lights up my soul, and I’m really excited to still give myself these challenges.”

All part of continuing to inspire people.

“I’m going to try to give back in all the ways that I can,” Diggins. “I still want to be the best role model that I can be.”

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Today is Saturday, Feb. 14, the 45th day of 2026. There are 320 days left in the year. This is Valentine’s Day.

Today in history:

On Feb. 14, 1929, the “St. Valentine’s Day Massacre” took place in a Chicago garage as seven rivals of Al Capone’s gang were gunned down.

Also on this date:

In 1779, English explorer James Cook was killed on the island of Hawai’i during a confrontation after Cook’s attempt to kidnap Hawaiian monarch Kalaniʻōpuʻu as leverage to recover a boat stolen from one of Cook’s ships.

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In 1876, inventors Alexander Graham Bell and Elisha Gray applied separately for patents related to the telephone. (The U.S. Supreme Court eventually ruled Bell the rightful inventor.)

In 1984, 6-year-old Stormie Jones became the world’s first heart-liver transplant recipient when the surgery was performed at Children’s Hospital of Pittsburgh. The girl died in 1990 at age 13.

In 1989, Iran’s Ayatollah Khomeini issued a fatwa calling on Muslims to kill Salman Rushdie, author of “The Satanic Verses,” a novel the ayatollah condemned as blasphemous against Islam.

In 2013, double-amputee Olympic sprinter Oscar Pistorius shot and killed his girlfriend, Reeva Steenkamp, at his home in Pretoria, South Africa, saying he mistook her for an intruder; he was later convicted of murder and served nearly nine years of a sentence of 13 years and five months before being released from prison in January 2024.

In 2017, a former store clerk, Pedro Hernandez, was convicted in New York of murder in one of the nation’s most haunting missing-child cases, nearly 38 years after 6-year-old Etan Patz (AY’-tahn payts) disappeared while on the way to a school bus stop.

In 2018, a former student opened fire with a semiautomatic rifle at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, killing 17 people in the nation’s deadliest school shooting since the Sandy Hook Elementary School attack in Newtown, Connecticut, more than five years earlier. (Nikolas Cruz pleaded guilty to murder in October 2021 and was later sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole.)

In 2023, President Recep Tayyip Erdogan announced that more than 35,000 people died in Turkey as a result of an earthquake on Feb. 6, making it the deadliest such disaster since the country’s founding 100 years earlier. (The combined death toll in Turkey and neighboring Syria would surpass 50,000 people).

Today’s birthdays:

Former New York City mayor and businessman Michael Bloomberg is 84.
Saxophonist Maceo Parker is 83.
Journalist Carl Bernstein is 82.
Magician Teller (Penn and Teller) is 78.
Opera singer Renée Fleming is 67.
Actor Meg Tilly is 66.
Football Hall of Famer Jim Kelly is 66.
Republican Sen. Bernie Moreno of Ohio is 59.
Actor Simon Pegg is 56.
Rock singer Rob Thomas (Matchbox Twenty) is 54.
Former NFL quarterback Drew Bledsoe is 54.
Actor Danai Gurira is 48.
Actor Freddie Highmore is 34.
Actor Madison Iseman is 29.

The St. Thomas women’s hockey team was unable to put up much of a fight at No. 10 Minnesota-Duluth Friday night, falling 3-0 to the Bulldogs on the shore of Lake Superior.

After a scoreless first period, Tommies goaltender Julia Minotti continued to keep UMD off the board until the hosts netted a power-play tally at 5:53 of the middle frame. That goal proved to be the game winner, yet the Bulldogs popped in two more in the final period — the first coming short handed at 2:50, the second on an empty net at 18:11.

Minotti finished the game with 32 saves, while her teammates put 24 shots on the UMD goal to no avail.

With the loss, the Tommies (12-18-1 overall, 7-17-1 WCHA) were passed by St. Cloud State and fell into seventh place in the conference standings after the Huskies beat WCHA cellar dweller Bemidji State on Friday. The Bulldogs (16-12-3, 12-10-3) have already clinched a fourth-place regular-season finish in the circuit, 17 points ahead of fifth-place Minnesota State, 14 points behind third-place Minnesota.

St. Thomas and UMD finish their weekend series at 3 p.m. Saturday.

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