In the early days of the George Floyd riots, while the police were overwhelmed, someone smashed a car into Thurston Jewelers on Lake Street in Minneapolis.  The store was overrun by looters. The display cases were smashed. Lloyd Drilling says he was lucky that the most expensive jewelry was in the safe. Anything that could be carried out the door was stolen.

“So, that basically put us out of business for a few months, and we had to rebuild the store and fix it back up,” says Drilling.

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The jewelry store bounced back, but the customers did not.

In the town that pioneered the movement to defund the police, the homeless population is present on most city blocks. Open-air drug use is so common it doesn’t attract attention and petty crime plagues the businesses who were able to re-open.

As a result, Drilling says, the suburban population which used to push his business from surviving to thriving does not come downtown anymore. “I think they feel like they are unsafe in the city, in this area and in the [other] areas. They’re a little scared to come down here,” says Drilling.

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Criminals make every aspect of business difficult in downtown Minneapolis. Koby Rich opened a cosmetic store. He keeps a painted rectangle of plywood on the front door of Rich Girl’s Cosmetics because vandals keep breaking the glass on his front door. He’s tired of spending money to fix it.

“It makes it tough because vandalism it causes, you know, when your windows get busted out, when you get your doors kicked in when you get your whole store tore up,” says Rich.

Jim Schultz with the Minnesota Private Business Council says there is a direct link to the rise in criminal activity and the leadership of Governor Tim Walz. “A lot of Democrat leaders in the state got behind really reckless policies when it comes to policing and crime,” says Schulz. “And the result was the greatest increase in violent crime in Minnesota’s history. And Tim Walz has presided over that. Minnesota’s businesses continue to feel the effects of that.”

Even without the crime, business owners and business leaders say Minnesota, with Governor Walz at the helm, has not been friendly to job creators.

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The state has the highest statutory corporate tax rate in the United States at 9.8 %. Doug Loon with the Minnesota Chamber of commerce says the Walz administration missed opportunities to grow jobs because the Governor had other priorities. “Many progressive policies passed by the legislature and signed by the Governor have limited the private sector from reaching its economic potential,” says Loon.

The chamber says Minnesota now ranks 47th out of all the states in the nation for job creation and 46th for Gross Domestic Product.

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Kent Bergman opened the Campanelle restaurant in Lino Lakes, a suburb of Minneapolis. He endured the covid lockdowns. But burdened with taxes and regulations, he’s still living off his own savings, unable to take home a profit. “With all the mandates and everything coming down on us as a restaurant a small business we are in, the state’s making it almost impossible for a small business or a restaurant to make it,” says Bergman.