MANKATO — Jim Swanson helped redraw the road map in Minnesota during his 44 years in the state transportation department, both in the Twin Cities and in south-central Minnesota.

But Swanson’s knack for building bridges, laying groundwork, making connections and looking far down the road — people skills not typically taught in engineering schools — might be his greatest talents, according to people who watched him work. Those political, communication and strategic-thinking skills were key to numerous projects getting done that would have otherwise happened years later or not at all, said former Mankato City Engineer Ken Saffert.

“That’s really the true engineering,” said Saffert, who was city engineer for 31 years before his retirement in 2009. “It’s not just math. You have to figure out how to make it happen.”

‘Big bear kind of guy’

Swanson, who is celebrating his 65th birthday today and retiring next month as the top executive in the Minnesota Department of Transportation’s Mankato-based District 7, connects with congressmen and county commissioners, top MnDOT officials in St. Paul and rural landowners along a proposed construction route.

In a public meeting, standing before a large group of people — some of whom might be upset with a road plan or the lack of progress on a project like Highway 14 — Swanson comes across as a “down-to-earth, big bear kind of guy,” said Al Forsberg, who has worked on projects with Swanson since becoming Blue Earth County engineer in the late 1980s.

“He’s just a picture of integrity and diplomacy and being very friendly and out-going in a very common, down-to-earth way,” Forsberg said.  “... So he’s got that good dirt-under-the-fingernails way to communicate with everyone out there. Nothing pretentious about Jim.”

He’s also the guy who has decided where billions of dollars in road funding should be spent, trying to strike the balance between maintaining an aging road system and meeting the demand for new and expanded roads to promote safety or economic growth.

In recent years, especially, there hasn’t been enough money to meet all the needs. But Swanson had the contacts in St. Paul and the persuasive skills to get key projects done that otherwise might have withered as they awaited funding, according to Saffert and Forsberg.

“He’s definitely a strong advocate for south-central Minnesota,” Saffert said “He believed a lot in teamwork with the individuals in the region.”

The four-lane Highway 14 expressway between Mankato and Owatonna, set to open in its entirety this summer, is an example. So is the new interchange on Highway 14 being constructed on the east side of Mankato. Another is the Highway 60 expressway that will be done by 2018, providing a good four-lane route from the Twin Cities to Denver.

Swanson’s also credited with pushing elected officials in Mankato to think ahead 20 years, a planning process that led to the Victory Drive extension and the new Highway 22 heading north toward St. Peter and the rapid development on Mankato’s northeast side and Highway 14 improvements on North Mankato’s west side.

‘Organize it and make it happen’

The high-regard that Swanson is held in was demonstrated by the near-success of a piece of legislation pushed by Mankato Sen. Kathy Sheran this year to rename the North Star Bridge over the Minnesota River the “Jim Swanson Bridge.” It had strong support in the Senate but ultimately couldn’t overcome the tradition of only name roads and bridges after people who are deceased.

So Swanson had mixed feelings about the effort. It was an honor that they tried, but ...

“I’d have to be dead,” he said.

And Swanson has plans for the retirement years that will begin July 6. There’s traveling (by road). There’s a new convent in New Ulm that might need some finishing touches (his daughter, Sister Anna Swanson, lives there.) There are grandkids to attend to and maybe some college engineering students to mentor.

First, though, he has one thing to figure out.

“That’s going to be one of my hardest things in retirement, figuring out how to not work,” Swanson said.

He grew up on a farm near Maynard that had no running water. His dad, an insurance agent, had health problems that prevented him from doing physical labor, so Swanson, his four brothers and sister handled the farm work.

“We were pretty used to doing things on our own,” he said.

Most of what he needed to know about engineering he learned on the farm — the degree from the University of Minnesota just sort of verified it, according to Swanson.

“When you ran a farm and did a lot of stuff, you had to figure out how to do things and organize it and make it happen,” he said. “And it was always time-critical.”

In fact, all the Swanson boys became engineers while their sister and her husband took over the farm.

As for those personal and political skills, Swanson said they came from the farm, too. The family had no television the entire time he was growing up, meaning free-time was spent working, playing games, visiting neighbors and helping at other nearby farms.

“You learned to communicate with people,” he said. “You learned to talk with people.”

‘Starting at the bottom’

Following in the footsteps of his older brothers, Swanson went into engineering. But first came some junior college basketball — he was a 6-foot-4-inch guard/forward — and a period of suffering through health problems related to excessive blood clots, a condition he inherited from his father.

After recovering, and realizing that farming wasn’t an option physically, he worked as a technician for MnDOT in the Twin Cities — inspecting the new storm sewers being constructed as part of the I-94 freeway.

“Talk about starting at the bottom!” Swanson wrote in a retrospective he penned for the newsletter that goes out to the 300 District 7 employees who work for him.

He earned his engineering degree five years later and worked on some of the biggest road and bridge projects in the Twin Cities during a boom-time in infrastructure construction. By 1987, he had been promoted to a management position in Mankato and got the top job — district engineer — five years later.

In 1993, Swanson was asked to take the assistant commissioner job in St. Paul during the administration of Gov. Jesse Ventura and oversaw most of what MnDOT does statewide. Four years later, he was back in Mankato as the district engineer but the connection to MnDOT headquarters and the Capitol continued to pay off for south-central Minnesota, Forsberg said.

“He established contacts and developed knowledge on how those projects were working and brought those ideas down here,” Forsberg said.

Swanson’s career — from technician to assistant commissioner to district engineer — is impressive enough to capture the attention of engineering students at Minnesota State University’s Department of Mechanical and Civil Engineering, where he serves on an advisory council made up of local engineers.

Swanson has talked to many classes, from freshmen to seniors, and invited them to spend an afternoon at the MnDOT lab, said Prof. James Wilde.

“They know something about the real world when they get out of school,” Wilde said.

The also know that engineering is as much about communication as it is about design and construction.

“That’s another thing that he’s often talked about to students, that they need to be able to speak in public and learn how to write,” said Wilde, who considers it an important warning. “A lot of students go into engineering because they don’t want to do that.”

‘I drive everywhere’

Swanson lists a few projects — like a Highway 14 expressway to New Ulm — that he wished could have been accomplished. But he’s quietly satisfied with what’s been accomplished during his tenure.

“There’s always more you’d like to do, there’s no doubt about it. But we tried to do all we could do with the limited dollars. ... Hopefully, I’ve served the public well.”

Starting July 6, it will be time to relax. Part of that will involve hitting the highway.

“I love traveling,” said Swanson, who won’t be climbing aboard an airplane to do it. “I drive everywhere.”

Trips to both coasts are in the future. And there’s a good chance he’ll be checking state transportation websites when he maps out his route — looking to see where the road construction projects are. Don’t tell his wife, Arlene, but he might be looking at the websites with a different purpose than most drivers who are plotting a road trip.

“My family accuses me of trying to find construction projects to drive through instead of avoiding them,” Swanson said. “We’ve looked at a lot of projects over the years.”