LATEST NEWS From the Minneapolis/St. Paul Business Journal

If you haven't already, please mark your Blackberry or MS-Outlook calendar for September 19-23 to reserve the dates for IAMC's fall 2009 Professional Forum in Minneapolis-St. Paul, Minnesota.

Make a personal commitment now, and plan to attend the Minneapolis-St. Paul Professional Forum. In tough times like these, the value of professional networking and education might be double or triple the value in good times. There's more at stake. In addition to the workshops and presenters, the Forum will feature networking events at three local landmarks. The Sunday evening Early Arrivals Reception will be at the Mill City Museum. The Monday Evening event will take place at Orchestra Hall, and the Tuesday night finale will be at Landmark Center. These venues were selected with the advice and support of the Forum's Host Committee. The Minneapolis Hilton & Towers, the premier downtown hotel, will serve as Forum headquarters. And last but not least among reasons to attend this Forum is Minneapolis-St. Paul itself, a gem of a place to visit and experience.

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With a business-friendly climate, and high quality of life, Minneapolis/St. Paul, Minnesota is positively:

• Ranked in the top 20 of Forbes' 150 best places to do business.
• The city with more live theater seats per capita than any other city except New York.
• Recognized by Suffolk University as 10th most competitive state based on human resources, infrastructure, technology, and business incubation.
• Listed as one of the 10 best cities in the country in which to live by Money Magazine.
• Applauded as one of the safest cities in the nation by Gallup.

A global competitor, Minnesota exports to almost 200 countries around the world. Local companies benefit from a 1990s initiative reducing property taxes, lowering workers' compensation costs and eliminating the sales taxes on all capital equipment. Residents enjoy high quality education, transportation, and social and environmental services.

In short, Minneapolis/St. Paul, Minnesota is positively a great place to grow a business.

Gov. Tim Pawlenty

In February 2007, Gov. Tim Pawlenty was joined by a group of business, government, academic and civic leaders to announce the launch of GetGo Minnesota, a new online exchange to create networking opportunities between entrepreneurs, investors, service providers and industry organizations.

"If the future is about innovation, Minnesota wins. Our history tells an extraordinarily robust story about breakthrough ideas that went to market and around the world," Pawlenty said. "In this hyper-competitive global marketplace, we need to find new and better ways to keep and grow the best ideas here. GetGo Minnesota will help us do just that."

IAMC future site, the Hilton Minneapolis.

by John W. McCurry

Local officials in Itasca County, Minnesota describe their county as having 1,000 lakes and more than 1,000 miles (1,609 km.) of snowboarding and skiing trails.

Soon, state and federal regulatory agencies permitting, this 3,000-square-mile (7,770-sq.-km.) county of 43,000 people in the state's north central region will have three major industrial projects that draw superlative descriptions of their own in the steel, energy and paper manufacturing sectors. The manufacturing jobs the projects anticipate creating are welcome news in Minnesota's Iron Range, which has lost some 16,000 iron ore industry jobs since the late 1980s.

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