Ramstad: On election’s eve, voters in Minnesota’s fastest-shrinking county confront rising costs

— Chad Metz farms outside this town midway up the state's western border and helped build the grain bins on his cousins' farms just across the line in South Dakota.

He manages the Browns Valley Hardware Hank, the largest store in town, which recently expanded with a farm supply business called Tough Ag. He's also an emergency medical technician, teaches Sunday School at the Catholic church, serves on the Browns Valley economic development association and is standing for re-election Tuesday to a second term on the Traverse County Board of Commissioners.

"If you're involved in one thing, you're going to be involved in 20," Metz said. "Hopefully someday my children have the opportunity that I've had, that my dad had, that everybody has had to be able to come back to this small community. You know that that's why we do what we do."

Communities of all sizes and kinds depend on do-it-all people. This part of Minnesota that Metz helps make go — long known as the continental divide between waters going to the Gulf of Mexico and those going to Canada's Hudson Bay — developed a new distinction in recent years.

Already the smallest of Minnesota's 87 counties in population, Traverse County's population fell 6% between the 2020 census and the latest update in July 2023, making it the fastest-shrinking place in the state.

Minnesota overall is experiencing the slowest population growth in its history. For more than three dozen counties, that slowdown takes the form of outright decline. Which means the people in them are at the forefront of one of capitalism's great challenges — how to stay rich without one of the three engines of economic growth.

Chad Metz manages the hardware and farm goods store in Browns Valley, Minn., and is running for re-election to the Traverse County Board of Commissioners. (Evan Ramstad) I'm using "rich" in its broadest sense. Minnesotans may not think of themselves as rich — and incomes and net worth vary widely, of course — but as a place and people, we are some of the wealthiest on Earth. And we definitely don't want to become less so.

Yet without a turnaround, Minnesotans in counties that are shrinking in population must become more productive or develop more natural resources to maintain their wealth, let alone increase it.