At the landmark Cascade Lodge on Lake Superior, owner Michael O’Phelan was hopping this past week, getting ready for a full house of guests eager to enjoy the beauty of the North Shore on a long holiday weekend.

But O’Phelan wasn’t too busy to heap scorn on state politicians who couldn’t agree on a budget in time to prevent a government shutdown.

“I’m just absolutely livid that these representatives and senators and the governor can’t figure this out,” O’Phelan said. “It’s time to step up to the plate and do what they need to do.”

The shutdown that began Friday closed nearby Cascade River State Park, a development that O’Phelan feared would knock down traffic to his restaurant from park campers. A brief shutdown won’t be a big deal, but O’Phelan worries about a longer-lasting impasse.

Experts do, too. They say an extended shutdown won’t send the state back into a recession but would have ripple effects statewide both predictable and unforeseen.

How long?

The key question for the economy is how long the shutdown lasts, said Tom Stinson, who was the official state economist until he was furloughed along with around 22,000 other government workers deemed nonessential.

“If the shutdown is over with in the middle of next week, the impact is going to be minor,” Stinson said. “There will be some lost income for state employees, there will be some lost income for construction workers, there will be some lost income for social services. But it’s not going to be the kind of thing that will make a noticeable impact on the state’s economy.”

The shutdown probably put a drag on the economy even before it started because of all the time people in and out of government spent preparing for it instead of doing more productive work, as well as all their personal belt-tightening, said Toby Madden, regional economist with the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis.

The longer the shutdown, the more serious the secondary effects, Stinson said. Most state-funded construction spending will be on hold during the prime construction season. Social service agencies that get state money will start running out of reserves. People will eat out less and the tourism industry will suffer.

Hamline University political scientist David Schultz estimates that adding 23,000 state workers to the unemployment rolls — a calculation he made on an earlier estimate of layoffs — would spike Minnesota’s unemployment rate from May’s 6.6 percent to 7.4 percent. Secondary job losses would add more misery.

Construction industry hard hit

Dave Semerad, CEO of Associated General Contractors of Minnesota, said he expects thousands of construction jobs to be lost in an industry already struggling to recover from the recession.

“In this industry people do most of their work and make most of their money in the summertime,” Semerad said. “They’re not going to be able to save, they’re going to postpone purchases, many of them are going to lose their health care benefits, they’re going to have to make other arrangements for day care, they’re going to make other arrangements for educational expenses.”

The Minnesota Racing Commission warned before it shut down that the state’s two horse racing tracks — Canterbury Park and Running Aces — would have to close in the absence of regulators, resulting in the layoffs of 1,700 employees at the tracks and their card clubs. Not only would the tracks lose all revenue from the busy holiday weekend, the commission predicted that more than 3,000 other people such as jockeys, trainers, grooms and others in the industry could be out of work.

Northern Minnesota’s forest products industry fears a long shutdown because logging in state-owned forests has stopped. Timber from state land supplies is up to a fourth of all the wood harvested in the state, said Scott Dane, executive director of the Associated Contract Loggers and Truckers of Minnesota.

“It’s going to have a very serious and detrimental impact on the logging operations in Minnesota. Not only for the loggers who are working the woods but also for the mills they supply with wood that make our paper and wood products,” Dane said.

“We’re probably going to find a whole bunch of things affected by this we didn’t think about,” Schultz said.