The Name Game

At the Duluth city council’s agenda-setting session of July 16, 2015, Councilor Howie Hanson introduced two resolutions. One proposed naming the Little League fields at Wade Stadium for the late John Baggs, a longtime College of St. Scholastica coach who had devoted much of his life to youth baseball. The other proposed naming two softball fields for Dick Swanson, a longtime basketball and softball coach at Denfeld High School.
“Both of these projects are located in District Four, my district,” said Councilor Hanson. “Both have grassroots beginnings and strong support.…We were going to enter into a traditional city process on this,  [but] according to the last communication I got, it’s five months out. And I find that unacceptable, frankly. And so that’s why they’re before us tonight.”
City Attorney Gunnar Johnson chimed in. “Councilor Hanson came forward a few months ago with the idea to name some fields over at Wade Stadium. He did fill out the applications [but] the [Naming] committee basically issued a ‘no recommendation.’ They weren’t against this or for this. They basically [said] it’s up to the council at this point. So that’s kind of been the process, and that’s where it sits.”
I was a little puzzled by the mention of a special committee that named things. As far as I could remember, when the city named things after people, it had always been done by a vote of the city council. But apparently there was more to it than that.
Some councilors were cautious. “I have absolutely no reason to doubt the appropriateness of these namings,” said Councilor Joel Sipress, “but I do also think that it’s very important to follow an established process and have appropriate documentation. There are namings that are potentially very sensitive or perhaps even controversial, and if we make an exception to the process in one case, I think it opens us up to problems in the future. Attorney Johnson mentioned that the committee charged with looking at these things did look at this, and the conclusion was ‘It’s fine, but we don’t necessarily recommend it.’ Is there any way we can get some sort of documentation of that prior to acting on this Monday, so we can at least have it in the record that the process was followed, and there was a conclusion drawn, before we vote?”
“Councilor Sipress, I will look into it,” replied Johnson. “Your documentation may be just my word or an email from me. But I will do what I can.”
“That would be sufficient,” said Sipress. “Thanks.” And the council moved on to other matters.
At the July 20 council meeting, however, when the naming resolutions came up for a vote, Sipress still had concerns. “I’m going to move to table these resolutions,” he said, “—and I do it reluctantly, because I understand the intent behind this. We have a certain process we follow with suggested naming, and this is done because naming things can be a very, very sensitive issue, and it’s very important that it be vetted properly, that we have assurances that the family is in support, that the community is in support…. Before I could feel comfortable supporting these, I would want to just see some documentation that indicates the community support for this…. And, again, it’s not because I doubt the merit of this case, but…if we make an exception to our procedure [and] go ahead and proceed with these namings without documentation of the appropriate community and family support, we’re going to be in a position where we may be asked to name things…without proper documentation, and at some point we’re going to do something unfortunate that may cause hurt or even insult the community.”
The council voted to table the resolutions. Even Councilor Hanson voted to table them. It was nice to see everyone being so prudent and responsible.
On July 22, Councilor Hanson forwarded two emails to the other councilors. One was from Dick Swanson. “I understand you have decided to rename the softball fields at Wade in my namesake,” wrote Mr. Swanson. “That is a very nice gesture and I appreciate that on behalf of all the teams, coaches, and players who have played there.”
The second email was from John Baggs’s widow Colleen. “Hello Howie,” she wrote. ”Thanks for spearheading this project. I am in full support of the Western Little League field naming in honor of John.”
That was enough community support for the council. At their July 27 meeting, they voted unanimously to approve both resolutions of support for naming the athletic fields.
At this point, I wasn’t really focused on the issue. It was nice to see some citizens getting some well-deserved recognition, but in the grand scheme of city politics it was a small matter. I forgot all about it, until I attended the monthly meeting of the city Parks Commission on August 12, where the naming resolutions were included on the agenda as informational items. The meeting was long, as Parks Commission meetings tend to be. Nearly three hours passed before the naming resolutions came up. And that’s when a couple a strange things happened.
First, out of the blue, Parks Commission Chair Ed Hall introduced a resolution to the commission that wasn’t on the agenda. Hall said that the city’s naming process did not allow for input from the Parks Commission. The new resolution corrected that by asking the city to include the Parks Commission in the naming process when park assets were involved. The resolution itself made sense, but the timing didn’t. Why wasn’t it on the agenda? And why couldn’t it wait until another meeting, when it could be on the agenda, and the public could be aware of it? Why the sudden rush?
Parks commissioners, apparently, did not share my puzzlement. With no discussion, they unanimously approved the new resolution.
Second, Parks Director Kathy Bergen asked the commission to table Councilor Hanson’s athletic field naming resolutions. The day before, Bergen said, she had received an email from the mayor’s office telling her that Hanson’s proposals needed to go to the Naming Committee for review.
This baffled me. Hanson’s proposals had been winding their way through the public process for four weeks, and all along the city attorney had advised councilors that the decision was in their hands, because the Naming Committee had issued no recommendation. On July 27, the council had made the decision to proceed with the naming of the fields. But now, apparently, at the last minute, their decision was no longer valid.
Ms. Bergen seemed a little confused herself.  “The only reason I put this on the Parks Commission agenda was to inform them of the city council decision. It was not for any other reason….My uneducated interpretation of what I heard at the city council meeting was that it was done, and I was conveying that information to the Park Commission. But that’s not what I heard just more recently….So now we’re kind of going backwards a little bit.”
Councilor Hanson, who had been sitting patiently in the audience for three hours waiting to speak, got a little upset. “Why is it being delayed?” he demanded. “What is the motivation to delay it?... I believe in the mission of these things, and my constituency has asked me to run these [proposals] through…. I want to be able to tell them what we are doing. Just today I had family members that are beginning to ask me, ‘Well, what’s going on here?’”
Now that something simple had turned complicated, I decided to look into it. The next day, I contacted people in City Hall and worked to uncover information on the mysterious Naming Committee—which, again, I had never known existed. Mayor Ness apparently heard about my calls. On August 26, I received an invitation to meet with him to discuss the issue.
When I sat down in the mayor’s office on August 28, Ness told me that the whole thing was “a small matter,” but one that he feared might get blown out of proportion if all the facts weren’t known. He was concerned, he said, because the Naming Committee had only been formed two years earlier, and this was the first naming proposal to come forward since then. He felt it was important that the process be followed correctly.
“There hasn’t been a proposal that has come forward before,” he said. “Now that we have a policy in place, this first one is important, because it sets the precedent of how these things should be handled in the future. If you don’t follow the process correctly the first time, then the next time somebody comes forward with an idea, they can say, ‘Well, the last time you just went directly to the council, and they didn’t have to step through all this process.’ That’s why we need to take a step back this time around and say, ‘Let’s really understand this policy that has been now put in place.’…. [In] the emails that I’ve had with Howie, from the beginning [I’ve said,] ‘We have a process. Go through the process.’”
I asked why city staff hadn’t imparted this information to the council during the previous four weeks—and why, in fact, they had been giving the council contradictory information.
“They were probably not as aware of how this is supposed to work as they probably should have been,” said the mayor. “My sense is that people think that this is something personal, and it’s not.  And I sometimes kick myself. Why do I care about honoring this process? But it is a process that we have….It is a better process than no process, so let’s prove that the process works by actually moving through it.”
The Naming Committee, he went on, was composed of city staff and “respected historians,”  whose purpose was to review naming proposals with a level of professional scrutiny that was often absent when groups of passionate citizens advocated naming things.
“The idea was to say, listen, the responsibility of naming public places needs to be done with some thought to the history of our city, to involve more people, rather than kind of a political initiative to bring something to the city council. So that was the whole reason why we brought historians together and said, ‘Think about what are the best practices....How can it be a thoughtful process in which a person can make a proposal, state their case?’ …Through that process, it hopefully will strengthen the proposal and have a thoughtful analysis of the proposal prior to coming to the city council.”
According to the mayor, the full naming process for city assets should include the following steps:

• Somebody makes a proposal to name something after someone, which goes to the

• Naming Committee, which studies the proposal and sends its recommendation to

• The relevant city commission (such as Parks, if the proposal is for something in a park), which votes on the proposal and sends it to

• The mayor, who makes a recommendation and sends it to
• The city council, which approves or denies it.

The mayor said that the Naming Committee would be meeting on August 31 to review Councilor Hanson’s proposal, and he expected they would probably approve it. “There’s no damage done at this point,” he said. “Yes, it’s going to take a little bit of time for the Naming Committee and the Parks Commission to weigh in, but certainly within the next couple of months, it will have gone through that process, and it’ll come back to the council for a final vote—and, I think, in doing so, that the public will now be aware, and councilors and city staff will all be aware that there is a process in place….That will now become the established way that we consider naming proposals.”
Hearing it put like that, it all made perfect sense: There had been some procedural mix-ups and miscommunication along the way, but now everything was getting straightened out. But something was nagging at me, and it was not until the next day that I realized what it was: Councilor Hanson’s proposal was not the first naming proposal to come before the city in the two years since the Naming Committee had been formed. There had been another one, quite recently, and that proposal had hardly followed any process at all.
In May, a beloved city employee named Thom Storm retired from a 40-year career at Chester Park. He had touched many lives during his long career, and paroxysms of gratitude gripped the city. Hundreds of people showed up for Mr. Storm’s retirement party. On June 16, a special event with live music and refreshments was held in Chester Bowl to honor Storm. A beaming Mayor Ness proclaimed to the cheering crowd that June 16 would henceforth be known as “Thom Storm Day” in Duluth. As an added bonus, the Chester Bowl Ski Chalet was renamed the Thom Storm Chalet.
In that case, there was no Naming Committee involved. The proposal never went to the city council for a vote. The process, such as it was, involved two steps:

• The Chester Bowl Improvement Club decided to rename the chalet after Storm, and

• The Parks Commission approved the renaming two weeks later.

Moreover, to a large degree, Storm had been allowed to choose what he wanted named after him. On May 13 (and this is why I record all these meetings), Director Bergen told the Parks Commission, “The Chester Bowl Improvement Club formed a committee that… actually asked Thom, ‘How would you prefer to be recognized?’”
At the same May 13 Parks meeting, City Councilor Joel Sipress, who two months later would be fretting about public process with regard to Hanson’s proposals, expressed no such qualms with regard to the Thom Storm Chalet. “For folks who don’t know Thom,” said Sipress, “I mean, it’s hard to find words, but I think the way to put it [is] if Chester Bowl had a soul, and if that soul took human form, it would be Thom. That’s the role he’s played there, so this is just a wonderful thing.”
I emailed Mayor Ness to ask about the different proposals. He replied:
“The difference was that [the Thom Storm] proposal went directly to the park commission who wasn’t aware of the policy—had it come across my desk, I would have pointed them to the newly established policy. From my perspective, the Thom Storm renaming should also go through this process and be formally approved by the city council prior to the naming becoming official. I will make sure that that proposal also goes through the process.”
Which is nice, but anyone who goes to Chester Park today might be forgiven for thinking that the Thom Storm proposal is already official. A large wooden sign over the door says “THOM STORM CHALET.”
Moreover, the mayor was standing right there applauding when the new sign was unveiled on June 16. Whether the proposal came across his desk or not, he should have had some inkling that something was being named for someone. But only today, three months after the fact, and only after I pointed it out, did he say he wanted the proposal to go through the official process.
Every rationale and explanation that is being thrown at Councilor Hanson’s proposal today should, by rights, have been applied to the Thom Storm proposal in June. So what is the difference between the two instances? Only the people involved. Thom Storm is not running for mayor against Emily Larson—Hanson is. Larson, as it happens, is Mayor Ness’s candidate of choice. If Hanson is unable to accomplish something as simple as naming softball fields after someone—and the newly strict process ensures that the naming will not take place until after the primary election—might that hurt Hanson’s prospects with the voters?
“Hopefully,” somebody in the Duluth city administration is probably thinking.