Meeting Recap - January 19, 2016

Cindy Carlson opened the meeting with the Pledge and Nils Friberg offered an invocation.

 

Our guests today were Ken and Judy Dalager, parents of our speaker, Kevin Dalager. Bob Barmore's guest was Sandy Hillsdale and Dave Hoel's guest was Rich Pieper.

 

John Risdall announced that Carole Miller died last week after a battle with cancer.  She will be missed by all who knew her.

 

Don't forget the Board meeting next Tuesday at 11AM.

 

Next weeks program will be a Club Assembly with a focus on the upcoming Gold Plate Dinner.  Future programs can be found in the left hand column.

 

 

Paul Fournier has a birthday this week, and he noted that he is at that tender age where your family gives you flannel-lined jeans for your birthday.   Several Rotarians, all of them younger than Paul, fessed up to owning flannel-lined jeans and I'm also considering the purchase after this past week's cold weather.  Congratulations, Paul!

 

Mark Beiswenger introduced today's speaker, Kevin Dalager.  Kevin is Mark's nephew, son of Ken and Judy, husband and father of two kids, and a New Brighton resident.  Kevin's engineering degree is from Iowa State and he has been with Mortenson Construction for 18 years.   Mortenson is a 60 year old, 3rd generation company with 4,000 employees and over two billion dollars in annual earnings.  Kevin is a construction executive on the new Vikings Stadium, supervising all the concrete, plumbing and electrical work for the project, which was the topic of today's presentation.   Construction for the new stadium began in December of 2013 and is scheduled to be completed by July of 2016.  At 1.7 million square feet, it is nearly twice the size of the Metrodome that it will replace.  It will seat 65,000 for regular season football but is expandable to 72,000 for special events.  The addition of many more club seats, lounges and suites as well as more spacious concourses and public areas will make the new stadium "state of the art".  Interesting details like the clear roof and giant 55 foot wide by 95 foot tall doors make the stadium even more distinctive.  The stadium will host the 2018 Super Bowl and 2019 NCAA Final Four, and has configurations for baseball and other events.  Kevin emphasized the challenges of designing and constructing a project of this size and complexity and his slides drove home the point. The iconic design required massive concrete pours, 26 million pounds of steel to support the roof and giant cranes to lift the steel roof trusses into position 300 feet above the ground.  It's also challenging to coordinate the efforts of hundreds of subcontractors to get the project done on time and on budget.  Judging from the progress to date, Kevin and his team have what it takes to do the job.  (Mark would probably say that Kevin learned everything he knows working at Beisswengers Hardware)  For more on the project, click here.  Dana and Kevin are pictured below.