Povich: It's also about saving lives

BAXTER - Highway improvements mean more than just saving time to Jim Povich, assistant district engineer for the Minnesota Department of Transportation office in Baxter.

It's not just years (saved by an infusion of dollars into a project), but lives, Povich said.

The engineer related a personal story Wednesday as Gov. Tim Pawlenty unveiled his $2.5 billion transportation investment program at the MnDOT office in Baxter.

He recalled Oct. 24, 2003, the date he learned that Curt Eastlund, a Baxter-based project development engineer, had died in a head-on, two-vehicle crash on Morrison County Road 8, a two-lane road. Povich said the task of breaking the news to the 49-year-old man's family fell to him.

"That was a bad two-lane road with a lot of fatals on it," he said.

"We average a fatal a year," Povich said of the Nisswa to Pine River stretch of Highway 371. "To a lot of us this is not acceptable."

MIKE O'ROURKE can be reached at mike.orourke@brainerddispatch.com or 855-5860.