August 2024

A business that focuses on home decor and refinished furniture is back with expanded offerings in downtown.Jessica Oachs of Painted Life said she decided to reopen this spring in her old location, at 109 Main St.

Not long after becoming CEO of Nuvera in 2019, Glenn Zerbe made an audacious pitch to his board of directors: Spend upwards of $250 million – two and a half times what the company was worth – to rebuild the broadband provider’s internet framework across southern Minnesota with fiber-optic lines.The idea, which Zerbe said was backed by a year’s worth of building a business case for it, was to position the company to meet people’s growing demand for greater and greater bandwidth – as entertainment, school and work moved online – with the increased capacity and speed of fiber, which uses flexible, thin glass wires to transmit data using light signals.“What’s the next chapter of a 115-year-old company?” Zerbe said of the endeavor, framing the move as a generational decision for a business that dates its origins to the New Ulm Rural Telephone Company, which began operations in 1905.On Tuesday, Nuvera officials joined state lawmakers and others at the rural homestead of Scott and Missy Dreckman, north of Essig, to highlight the progress the company has made on its fiber initiative, particularly in Brown County, which Zerbe said served as a pilot project to aggressively begin the work in 2021.