BLAINE, Minn. – (March 22, 2018) – It was 1988 when Jean Keely came to Blaine. But her interest in engineering started when she was a kid.
“I saw an advertisement for a women in engineering program, it was a summer program between your junior and senior year in high school so I applied for that and was accepted with about 30 other high school women and just going to that, it was a one week program, they gave us a little bit of every type of engineering and from that I decided I wanted to go into civil and environmental engineering, and that’s what I did and then I graduated from the University of Wisconsin Madison,” Keely said.
When Keely started, Blaine was a town of less than 40 thousand people with lots of open space and several farms. Now 30 years later Blaine has grown to be the largest city in Anoka County with more than 62 thousand people. And, Keely has had a front row seat to this growth. As first the assistant city engineer and now the city engineer for the last 13 years she can recall many large projects that took years to become reality, including the Highway 65 and County Road 14 interchange.
“That project took 3 traffic signals off of highway 65 and put two overpasses on our local streets but then also put the interchange in with 14 and that’s a huge safety improvement on highway 65 and that took many years of coordination with MNdot, Anoka county, other agencies, also getting the Ulysses Street service road in from 109th up to Paul Parkway, that was an interesting process to work with, with MNdot, MNdot said they’d help the city coordinate that project but we had to buy the axis’ off of Highway 65 and that’s the first time our city attorney and I worked on a project like that,” Keely said. “It was very challenging, it was a lot of work but very successful, a lot has happened along Highway 65 because of the service road being in place.”
It has now been several years since that first interchange went in on 65 and Blaine continues to push to add another one.
“There’s a coalition that our mayor and public works director are part of for future improvements on highway 65 and Anoka County and MNdot are a part of that process too and MNdot is working on a study right now to actually help move a future project forward, the city’s highest priority would be an interchange on 109th and 65,” she said.
Keely enjoys seeing the big projects come to fruition but spends many of her days working on small details and answering questions.
“I’m always trying to answer questions for residents and that comes through emails, phone calls, people coming to the counter, trying to answer engineering type questions about sanitary sewer water streets, storm sewer and then new development questions, and then also everything we do goes to the council for approvals so everyday we’re working on council items, getting information together for the council, so they understand the facts so that they can make decisions at council meetings, and so everyday it revolves around what we need to do for the residents and for the council,” Keely said.
Keely was recently honored as the 2017 Municipal City Engineer of the Year by the City Engineers Association of Minnesota. The award meant a lot to Keely who has been involved in the organization her entire career.
“It was a huge surprise, it means a lot to me because it came from that organization that I’ve been a part of for all these years,” she said.
As a city engineer it can take years to see your work make an impact for a community. Continuing to help the city and the region grow is something that motivates Keely every day.
“There’s projects out there that are still coming, I’ve worked on a 35W coalition group, their technical advisory committee for the last several years and project’s actually going to be out for bid this fall, and it’s a four year project, where 35W is going to have a Minn pass lane added,” she said. “Just to see when those project come to fruition and that are successful and working with Anoka county every day, we have several projects coming up with the county and with our own development so there’s a lot of stuff, a lot of exciting things coming for Blaine.”
