Kelly Newman

For any major project (and I’ll just go ahead and call Regents Hall major, you know, $64,000,000 – pretty soon you’re talking real money) there are hundreds of people who each have important parts. Once a project has passed the planning and design phases and it’s getting ready to go, the superintendent of construction becomes the person who has to put all of those hundreds of important pieces together, and make them flow.

Our superintendent is Kelly Newman, but we call him Beetlejuice. He makes the work go. Kelly is committed to treating his folks and our sub-contractors’ people fairly and well. He listens maybe more than he speaks, but when he has something to say, people listen and they appreciate the way they are treated. His goal is always to deliver the best value he can to St. Olaf.

Kelly was also the superintendent for Boldt on the Buntrock Commons project and played a huge role in the overall success of that facility. He also led the Tostrud Center work and has been with the Regents Hall project since the first days. Kelly has been with Boldt Construction for 21 years.

He is a native of Moose Lake, MN, just down the road from Boldt’s Minnesota office in Cloquet. He has 4 kids, 4 grandkids, 3 dogs, and a Harley Street Bob to occupy his “spare time”, and resides in Forest Lake, MN.

I have to take a minute for a ”small world” story. In 1988 my folks retired and moved to a year around lake home that’s just between Moose Lake and Barnum and east of I 35. They got into the community right away and loved living in small town Minnesota with a great church, inexpensive golf, and a morning coffee group for my dad that I called the Liars Club. I sat in with those guys several times and it was an interesting group to say the least! They met at the Chef Café in downtown Moose Lake every morning at 10:30 for years. It’s unknown if there was ever an actual chef in the café, but there definitely wasn’t when I was there!

We got started building the Buntrock Commons in September of 1997. One morning in the Chef Café my dad was talking about this great big project that his son was building at St. Olaf College. One of the other guys said, “What are you talking about? MY son is building that project.”

That evening Kelly and I both got phone calls from our dads, and we’ve laughed about it since. The dads probably argued and joked about whose kid was a bigger part of all that for years. Over the past few years both of our dads passed away, and pretty much everyone in both families feels like it was probably the Chef Café coffee that did them in!

Kelly says, “The best thing about working on St. Olaf jobs is the people. Everyone at St. Olaf has been great to work with over all these years. Beside that, where else do you get to build buildings the way St. Olaf does? The designs are great and they use materials everyone likes to work with. Those that will last and look good way into the future.”