News & Articles

n looking back on nearly a year of City Beat columns, I am surprised to notice that I have written almost nothing about the Great Lakes Aquarium. At one time, the aquarium was my specialty. I wrote about it a lot, in the Reader and in my own magazine and on my blog. I went to board meetings and city council meetings while the aquarium bailouts were going on. When Ripley’s was hired to run the aquarium, I was there. Later, when Ripley’s left, I was still there.  While the various lawsuits were winding their way through the courts, likewise. I wrote thousands of words about the aquarium over several years, and then, in 2009, I stopped. I needed to do something else. I stopped going to board meetings, and I forgot about the aquarium for some time.
But it’s nice, after a break, to come back to a familiar place. The aquarium is still down there on the waterfront, still chugging away. A small core of dedicated long-time employees, led by Director Jack LaVoy and Assistant Director Jay Walker, keeps the place operational. They do an excellent job with what they have to work with. The aquarium has seen great improvement, both operationally and in employee morale, during LaVoy’s eight years as director. Walker has come up through the aquarium’s ranks, and he is extremely knowledgeable about the nuts and bolts of the building itself.
The aquarium’s main problem, which has nothing to do with its management team, is that it is too big for the market; without annual city subsidies, the aquarium would not survive.
I have told this story many times, but not recently. The Great Lakes Aquarium cost the city an initial $11.7 million to build, most of which was supposed to quickly be recouped via ticket sales. In reality, the aquarium was never able to make a single bond payment, not even during its opening year. The city paid off the bonds, all of them. The last of those bonds was retired in 2012.
In addition to paying off the bonds, the city has always assisted the aquarium with operational costs. For 2015, the city has allocated the aquarium $360,000 from the tourism tax fund. Since 2005, in total, the city has given the aquarium $2,680,800 in no-strings-attached operational support from the tourism tax fund.
In addition, the city has made a number of one-time gifts to the aquarium for various things over the years. In 2001, the city paid $286,000 to cover construction cost overruns. In 2010, the city paid $19,500 for a new escalator. In 2012, the city paid $129,000 to cover the aquarium’s old utility bills. And so on. From 2001 to 2015, the city paid an additional $994,741 to the aquarium in one-time grants of various amounts.
Finally, in 2002, the city gave the aquarium a $250,000 line of credit to help with cash-flow issues. In 2005, the city raised the line of credit to $400,000. Today, that $400,000 line of credit is maxed out.

The total amount invested in the aquarium thus far by the city is:
Bonding                 $11,700,000
Operational support, 2001-2015     2,680,800
One-time expenses, 2001-2015        994,741
Line of credit                400,000
TOTAL                    $15,775,541

It’s nice—really nice—that the bonds are paid off; but the cautionary part is that the aquarium is 15 years old, nearing the age when major capital repairs will be necessary, and money to fund such repairs is in short supply.
Imagine if, when we paid off the bonds in 2012, we had continued setting aside the same amount of money each year for capital maintenance. Today the aquarium would have a small, but growing, cushion. However, we did not do that. When the bonds were paid off, the tourism taxes funding them were allowed to sunset. They were gone for a year and a half, and then Mayor Ness brought them back, this time to fund projects in the St. Louis River Corridor.
But the aquarium is still sitting there, still needing money.
Each time the city builds new, it is deciding not to maintain something old.

Fake sinking of Uncle Harvey’s
I usually try to avoid making fun of TV news, because it’s too easy, but sometimes just passing along the facts is enough. Consider this story of journalistic intrigue:
On February 18, 2015, photos posted on the website Perfect Duluth Day showed that a century-old cement pillar just off-shore from Canal Park had disappeared. The pillar had been located near a larger walled ruin known as Uncle Harvey’s Mausoleum, which teenagers used as a diving platform during the summer and whole families got stranded on in the spring.
Not surprisingly, the mystery of when the pillar fell consumed Duluthians with excitement. Two newspapers and several TV stations threw resources into covering the story. A call went out for time-stamped photographs of the site. The police got in on the action with security camera footage. Eventually it was determined that the pillar had fallen sometime between 4:40 and 5:30 p.m. on February 7, 2015.
So, hooray. Mystery solved.
But the story wasn’t over yet. On March 9, a new photograph appeared on Perfect Duluth Day showing most of Uncle Harvey’s Mausoleum underwater, with only one small corner of the structure sticking above the ice. “Uncle Harvey’s Mausoleum sinking,” stated the headline.
I believed it. Everybody believed it, at first. The picture looked real enough, and the story was plausible enough, that there was no reason to suspect a hoax. Down at Fox 21, the newsroom mobilized. A camera crew was dispatched to Canal Park to shoot footage of the sinking mausoleum, and staff writers got cracking on a script for the nine o’clock newscast.
There was only one problem: Uncle Harvey’s wasn’t sinking. The picture was a Photoshop job, as some of the comments on the original post soon made clear. It was a joke.
Fox 21 aired the segment anyway. “It looks like Uncle Harvey’s Mausoleum won’t make for a very good jumping off spot for swimmers this summer,” said anchor Diane Alexander, while footage of Uncle Harvey’s Mausoleum, not sunken at all, played on the screen. “Lake Superior is slowly taking the historic piece under water.”
At the end of the segment, Alexander chatted for a few moments with Fox 21’s Chief Meteorologist Travis Patterson. “I’m not sure if it has to do with the ice or anything like that, but it just keeps going further and further under Lake Superior,” she said.
“Yes,” replied Patterson. “You get the periods of really cold weather when it freezes, and then thawing weather, so it expands and freezes, contracts and expands…” He continued with an explanation of how the freeze/thaw cycle might be causing Uncle Harvey’s to sink.
That was 15 days ago. The fake story is still on Fox 21’s website.
Behold your TV news.