Animals from all over the world right here in Brainerd

BY CAROLINE JULSTROM Brainerd Dispatch

BRAINERD — It all started with a pet raccoon.

Kevin Vogel and his wife, Kelly, have been running Safari North Wildlife Park in Brainerd for 12 years, but Vogel said his love of collecting animals began when he was a child. One of his friends had a pet raccoon, he asked his dad if he could have one too, and, as he said, “it’s all been downhill since then.”

Safari North sports a 10-acre safari experience, camel rides, a petting zoo, a parakeet encounter and a chance to feed giraffes. The zoo is home to more than 120 animal species, most of which stay in Brainerd year-round, taking shelter in heated barns during the colder months.

The exceptions to this rule, the alligators whose enclosure was broken into by a parkgoer in pursuit of her wallet in 2020, are rented from a provider in Georgia.

General admission day passes can be purchased in person or online for $19.99 for adults or $15.99 for children 12 and under. Vogel said he and other zoo owners discuss ticket pricing with each other to make sure they’re not over or under-charging.

Vogel said he leans on his staff to make the complicated work of maintaining a zoo possible.

“To do a business like this, you have to be a politician, a banker, a marriage counselor, a veterinarian, a carpenter, electrician, a plumber,” Vogel said. “I mean it covers all bases of everything possible.”

Vogel said it can be difficult to give up control over jobs to delegate them to other staff, but learning how to do it comes with age. Safari North employs about 30 people during the summer, around 10 of which are fulltime employees.

“Our zookeepers are really good,” Vogel said. “We have a good, good staff. They’re out here, you know, they’re with the (animals) every single day, and they know if something’s off a little bit.” Safari North also has a veterinarian do monthly herd health checkups on their animals, to ensure they are healthy and happy. For miscellaneous health needs, Vogel said he’s built up a network of colleagues he can contact if he or his staff notices a problem.

Because many of Safari North’s positions are seasonal jobs, there are a few young people who work there in the summer, when they’re off school.

Aiden Davis, 14, was handing out sticks covered in seeds for attendees to the parakeet encounter. Davis said the birds might get a little annoying sometimes, but the job was worth it because not many places hired people his age.

Alexis Johnson also started working at Safari North when she was 14 and, four summers later, she’s still there.

Though Johnson does a variety of things at the zoo, this time she was manning the carrot stand at the giraffe feeding station.

“I’m loving it,” Johnson said with a smile.

Johnson said she enjoyed seeing people’s faces as they look at the animals, especially happy children.

Safari North’s animal care team is currently made up of about seven people who are responsible for the animals’ feeding, cleaning and other chores. Tori Narlock, Meghan Lacy, Mercedes Julifs and Grace Gumiela are among the members of the animal care team.

“So the station workers work more with the public and the people, handing out food for feeding,” Lacy said. “And instead we come in early mornings, we let everything out, which sometimes is difficult because sometimes the bears don’t want to come out. We have to try and coax them out with treats. Then we prep all of our food, chop up a lot of things, and then we do our loops. We all kind of have a system and we all feed different animals each day and — yeah.”

“Yeah,” Narlock said. “And then the last two of us in the day put everything back in!”

The women seem to enjoy their job, but it’s not without its hazards.

“Grace has a problem with the birds,” Lacy said.

“Yeah, your rose breasted cockatiel got me in the ear yesterday,” Gumiela said to Vogel. “Because I’m the only one that wears earrings! I think it’s something shiny and new that they’re like, ‘Yeah!’”

Vogel said Julifs had been working at Safari North since she was around 15, when the zoo opened.

“Those girls are rockstars,” Vogel said. “We couldn’t have a better team than them.” instrumental in the Brainerd Destination Downtown business contests, joined Close Converse in 2007, working with leasing and sales in office spaces and retail and more. Close joined the business in 2002 and specializes in business brokerage and investment properties.

Besides bears and bitey birds, the zoo houses a wide range of animals including Capuchin monkeys, tigers, capybara, pallas cats, foxes and wolves. New to Safari North this summer are Gunnar the Rhino, a southern white rhino whose enclosure neighbors the giraffes, and the zoo’s very own clouded leopards, who have yet to be named.

Before labor, Vogel said Safari North costs about $100,000 to run. He couldn’t pinpoint how much they spent on food, but said all the meat they purchased for the animals probably amounted to 30 or 40 thousand dollars.

Vogel said his son, Zack Vogel, 20, and daughter, Cheyanne Vogel, 26, seem perfectly poised to take up the family business.

While Zack Vogel is currently enrolled in Central Lakes College and studying welding, his father said he’s interested in the physical aspects of maintaining the zoo. Cheyanne Vogel, on the other hand, is very interested in animals. Together, their interests make up two halves of a whole zoo.

Although Vogel didn’t have any specific plans for the business’s future, he said Safari North will continue to expand in size, attractions, and visitor growth. Vogel said the zoo is making improvements to itself all the time.

CAROLINE JULSTROM, intern, may be reached at 218-855-5851 or cjulstrom@brainerddispatch.com.

Close pointed to the development this year of The Lofts on Novotny in Baxter.

“When Corner Lot began to consider development opportunities outside of Florida, Central Minnesota was one of the first places we looked.” said Andy Allen, Corner Lot CEO, in a news release when the The Lofts on Novotny projectwas announced. “That part of the country is near and dear to my family, and we spend a large part of our summers in the region. People are drawn to a lifestyle of outdoor activities, and Crow Wing County has so much to offer.”

Close said Allen lived in Jacksonville, Florida, all his life.

“As someone that grew up in Florida, south Florida, saw Jacksonville boom, he looks at this and says, ‘This is just like Jacksonville,” Close said of a lunch conversation the two had. Close countered the Brainerd lakes area was so much smaller. Allen concurred but said, the culture, the growth, everything was so much like Jacksonville.

“He’s very, very bullish on the area,” Close said of Allen’s positive outlook on central Minnesota, leading to his thoughts on the benefits of an outsider’s perspective.

The Lofts on Novotny represented the Florida group’s first development outside of Florida. The 64-unit, threestory apartment building was quickly filled with renters in what developers describe as apartment homes. There are plans to build a second apartment building in Pequot Lakes.

Strong market and changing mindset

In terms of office, commercial and industrial vacancies, Close said the area has a healthy supply with not too little and definitely not too much. Five years ago there were a lot of vacancies.

“We’re a strong market,” Close said, noting it’s finding the right person to fit the open space.

Kwik Trip is building in Baxter. Close said a new Veterans Administration clinic will be here in the next three years.

“We went for a long period of time with very little new construction,”

Grotzke said. “So what was happening is buyers and tenants were choosing to take existing space and make it work or just not doing stuff because they weren’t building. Some of it was the uncertainty. Some of it was the cost. Interest rates have not come down significantly.”

While some costs like lumber did go down, labor went up, Grotzke said. But there are more people now looking to potentially build. He said in the past when people outgrew their location, if they owned it they sold it and built something somewhere else. If they rented, they moved out. But recently that wasn’t happening and landlords weren’t building many multi-tenant buildings.

Multi-tenant buildings along Highway 371 in Baxter are about $30 per square foot plus other things a business needs to add on such as operating expenses, taxes, insurance, maintenance and utilities. So businesses could pay that or lease existing space

Chris Close

for $12 a square foot per year. National tenants were able to move into spaces where a local tenant, who might be able to afford $8 to $14 per square foot but not $35 a square foot, just didn’t build and instead tried to find a place that would work.

“In the past, we’d have retail centers with quite a few vacancies,” Grotzke said. “Now it’s one here, one here, one here, one over here. … People are buying existing stuff just because they can’t afford to build. And so that’s helped push up sale prices.”

Close noted two things also changed mindsets. He pointed to the murder of George Floyd in 2021 in Minneapolis, which prompted protests and riots across the country and the pandemic. The New York Times reported protests erupted in at least 140 cities across the nation. The COVID-19 pandemic was officially declared in March of 2020.

Close said those events shifted people’s mindsets to opportunities to move to a lot of beautiful places and smaller communities they could be part of with technology and remote work. People may have thought about those moves before, but those events may have pushed them to actually do it, Close said. Being able to own 10 acres in the Brainerd lakes area or be on a lake for less money than a metro area, and still have the amenities and technology, made it attractive and suddenly more possible.

“I think there’s been a real migration, not just to Brainerd but to others of those that were originally vacation destinations,” Close said. “It’s like, ‘This actually could be a full-time destination.’ And I think that’s what’s happening.”

What will peak baby boomer retirement bring?

In addition, Close noted the baby boomer generation, which Forbes reported is now retiring by more than 10,000 a day or four million a year,