News & Articles

In mid-June of 2015, the Duluth Economic Development Authority (DEDA) unveiled a new website. Previously, DEDA occupied a page on the city’s website similar in style and appearance to the pages for other city departments. The new site (dulutheda.org) is more colorful, more visually dynamic, more commercial in appearance...and much less transparent.
On the old DEDA page, a series of lists contained six years’ worth of agendas, six years of meeting minutes, DEDA packet items (including various contracts) going back three years , and audio recordings of meetings from as far back as 2010. On the new website, all of that information has vanished. There are three agendas posted, starting with April 22, 2015; three meetings’ worth of minutes; and four packet items. The site contains no audio recordings at all.
Nor will it, apparently. At the DEDA meeting of May 27, 2015, a couple of weeks prior to the big roll-out, Director of Business Development Chris Eng explained to DEDA commissioners that the new website would be unable to support audio recordings. “The recordings will not be supported by the new platform,” he said.
Some commissioners were concerned about the loss of transparency. Commissioner Emily Larson said that meeting recordings were a great informational resource. President Nancy Norr suggested to Eng that the meetings be recorded and stored on the city’s hard drive for a year, so that citizens who wanted to hear them could request them.
This whole discussion seemed beside the point to me. Despite their concerns, commissioners seemed to be totally accepting of Eng’s statement that audio couldn’t be supported on the website.  I am no technical wizard, but I thought that posting audio to websites was easy.
I went home and looked up the contract. I had to go all the way back to March 26, 2014, when the DEDA board approved resolution 14D-08, the agreement with California-based Vision Internet to build a new website. Vision Internet specialized in “creating unique, robust websites for local government agencies.” The cost to the city for Vision Internet’s services included $36,635 to build the website plus $32,632 to host and maintain the site for four years—a total of $69,267.
According to the contract, Vision Internet was supposed to have finished the website by December 31, 2014, unless the executive director granted them an extension. They were already five months past that deadline. I also noticed that “Audio and Video Embedding” was included in the contract.
I found the recording for the DEDA meeting of March 26, 2014. I pulled it up and hit Play.
“What sold us on this particular web [provider],” Mr. Eng was saying, “was their content management system, where they can make it easy for us, as staff, to add videos and amend the content, to put newsletters on there, and calendars, social media events, on the website. And none of the other firms that we interviewed had that type of a system.”
So staffers were able to “add videos and amend the content,” but they couldn’t put up audio recordings? What sort of wacky, one-of-a-kind website was this?
Seeking answers, I emailed a copy of the contract to Scott Vezina, an account manager at a local website development firm. I asked Vezina if there was any good reason why the DEDA website wouldn’t be able to support audio. Based on what he saw in the contract, Vezina opined, “In my opinion, if they said they should be able to do audio, they should be able to do audio. It’s a pretty simple thing.”
I called up Executive Director Chris Eng. I asked him why the website had taken fifteen months to build. He didn’t really know. “We’re working with them to not only develop the website, but train our staff on ongoing maintenance and upkeep as well, so it just…through the process, it took a little longer than we expected.”
I asked Eng if he had granted Vision Internet an extension to go past their December 31 deadline, as the contract required. Talk of a deadline seemed new to him. “No, we did not,” he said apologetically.
I told Eng that audio and video embedding were included in the contract. He seemed surprised. “I can check on that, but they told us they didn’t have the capability, or the platform, to do it. If they do, we’d certainly use it.”
If it were me, and a contractor were unable to carry out such a simple aspect of a contract, I would be inclined to ask for a refund—about $20,000 sounded right. But Mr. Eng gave no indication that he was thinking of doing such a thing.
Even if audio recordings do appear on DEDA’s new website, they will not bring back the years of records that have already disappeared. As a reporter, I depend on easily-accessible public records to research my stories. The disappearance of such records can lead to news stories of poorer quality, which shortchanges the public. Worse, members of the public themselves, who may not know how to search for legislation or how to properly request information from DEDA, are effectively unable to ever access it.
Many of the facts and quotations I have included in this article came from DEDA’s old web archive. Today, doing the same research would be noticeably more difficult. Obtaining the contract with Vision Internet would require making a special request to DEDA—but first you would have to search through the minutes month by month until you found the meeting where the Vision Internet contract was approved. And where would you be able to find those minutes? Nowhere; not online, anyway. They (and the audio recordings) have been consigned to the great nothingness where abandoned web pages go to die.
Using the archives, we have determined that a website contractor took an extremely long time to complete its work, and that DEDA was not very diligent in insisting that the contractor live up to their obligations. Without the archives, these findings would not have been possible.
If all of this curtain-pulling and shade-drawing had some discernible rationale beyond simple bureaucratic secrecy, it might be more understandable.

Maintenance facility maintenance fund
Regular readers will be aware that I want the city to set aside dedicated maintenance funds for every project before the project can be built. I also know that the chance of such a thing ever happening is close to zero. Nevertheless, there are bright spots here and there in the city’s generally grim maintenance picture.
At DEDA’s May 26 meeting, before Mr. Eng talked about expunging the archives, he talked about the old Northwest Airlines Maintenance base. The base, a 187,000-square-foot building near the airport, was abandoned by Northwest in 2005 amid a Chapter Eleven bankruptcy filing. The city spent years trying to find a new occupant for the building; they finally landed the aircraft maintenance company AAR in 2012.
AAR is leasing the building from the city; the city remains responsible for long-term upkeep. Mr. Eng told DEDA commissioners that he had begun setting aside money in a special account for the purpose of fixing the maintenance base’s roof in ten to fifteen years, “so that when we do have to replace it, it won’t be such a big-ticket item.”
DEDA President Norr took Eng’s policy a step further and asked that a special line be added to the budget identifying the reserve account. “I think it’s good discipline for the commission to not think of that as discretionary,” she said.
This is the kind of forward thinking that I would like to see happen with every project. The interesting thing to watch now is whether that account will be allowed to grow as intended and fix the maintenance facility’s roof, or whether it will be emptied for other purposes.

Courtland Park?
On May 12, 2015, city planning staff presented the Lincoln Park Small Area Plan to the Planning Commission. One item that caught my attention was the possible construction of a new entrance to Courtland Street off of West Michigan Street. Courtland, which runs by the Western Lake Superior Sanitary District sewer plant and composting yard on the harbor side of the freeway, can only be accessed from 27th Avenue West today. Under the new proposal, which would be undertaken in conjunction with federal work being planned for the Can of Worms interchange tangle, a new entrance would be built under the freeway to Courtland Street near the Can of Worms.
One surprising feature of this area of Courtland Street, given its proximity to the freeway, the railroad yards and the sanitation plant, is its natural character. It seems like there are always things squawking in the trees and flopping around in the grass when I walk by. Once, when I was driving by on the freeway, I looked down and saw two bucks sparring.
 City planner John Judd mentioned the natural connection in his remarks to the commission. “If you’ve ever driven a little bit past that [WLSSD] facility and gone down to the little cove down here, you’ve noted how intensive the wildlife is down there, and how picturesque it is, so close to the core of the Lincoln Park business district.”
With Courtland Street opened up, the green area along the shore could be used for “wildlife observation or a park,” suggested Judd. Such a park would really be at the intersecting heart of everything—truck routes, car routes, rail routes, water routes, bird migration routes. If you didn’t mind the sound of freeway traffic and rail cars mixing in with the twitters of birds, it might be a very nice place to eat your brown-bag lunch.