News & Articles

One downside to publishing hard-hitting cover stories all the time is that smaller items are left to languish on my desktop. Today, I would like to celebrate the dog days of summer by saying a few words about smaller things.

A naysayer’s guide to the Citizen Survey

The National Citizen Survey recently came out with its 2015 results for Duluth. The survey, which the city has commissioned each year since 2009, measures how citizens feel about different aspects of the city. In a number of categories, such as “Overall quality of life,” “Overall appearance,” and “Cleanliness,” Duluthians have shown steadily increasing levels of satisfaction. This year, Mayor Don Ness proudly announced that, “Seventy-five percent of Duluth residents believe Duluth’s overall reputation has improved in the last ten years.”
The mayor himself received a 91 percent positive rating, and the city council got 72 percent. Public satisfaction with police, fire and ambulance services was similarly high.
So that’s nice. As we look at other lines in the report, however—and we paid for it, so we should look at the whole thing—the rosy picture is tempered a bit.
Items that received a positive rating of less than 50 percent in 2015 include economic development (49%); treating all residents fairly (49%); vibrant downtown/commercial area (45%); value of services for taxes paid (44%); openness and acceptance (44%); cost of living (42%); employment opportunities (41%); public parking (37%); housing options (36%); affordable quality housing (30%); code enforcement (25%); and, bottoming out the list like a ’76 Nova in a Devonshire Street pothole, street repair (9%).
In general, I think it is safe to say that Duluth scores high in matters of image and public safety, but not so high in matters of day-to-day existence.
One question the survey did not ask was how citizens feel about being intentionally misled by Mayor Ness with regard to the library.

Georgia Pacific sale pending

The Georgia Pacific hardboard manufacturing plant on Duluth’s waterfront has been closed since 2012, when the company shuttered the facility and laid off 141 employees. The site is approximately six acres in size, with a 200,000-square-foot main factory building and a number of smaller structures around it. I recently received a tip that the property had been sold.
When I called Georgia Pacific’s headquarters in Atlanta, company spokesman Eric Abercrombie told me, “We have had a number of conversations with interested parties over the past several years, and we’ve been working diligently with the economic development authority, Port Authority and the city of Duluth to identify a potential buyer for the property. Just recently, we’re happy to have entered into an agreement for the sale of the property with a local businessman.”
As the sale is not yet final, however, Abercrombie declined to give me any specifics, saying only that an announcement would be made to all media when the sale was complete. I did manage to worm out of him the statement that the potential buyer is not the city of Duluth. The city owns a parcel to the east of the Georgia Pacific site. I sense big developments in the offing.

DEDA recordkeeping

In my July 9 column, I complained that the Duluth Economic Development Authority (DEDA) had moved to a new website and destroyed online access to six years’ worth of records in the process. To make matters worse, the new website supposedly didn’t support audio recordings of meetings, the way the old one had. I pointed out that the contract with Vision Internet, the company that built the site, called for audio and video capability.
Within a few days of my article appearing, audio recordings miraculously appeared on the new DEDA site. And at their July 22 meeting, DEDA commissioners adopted the Minnesota General Records Retention Schedule for Cities, a lengthy document that details how long different types of public records should be preserved. The city formally adopted the Retention Schedule in 2012, but DEDA has never had its own policy. Now they do.


Director Eng leaving

Also at the July 22 DEDA meeting, Director of Business Development Chris Eng told commissioners that he would be leaving Duluth in August to take a job as a vice-president with Northland Securities, a Minneapolis brokerage firm. While a search is conducted for Mr. Eng’s replacement, Chief Administrative Officer Dave Montgomery will serve as interim director of DEDA, just in case developers need anything rubber-stamped.

Emerald ash borer

Duluth has always had to deal with tourists, but now we are facing the imminent arrival of another invasive pest: the emerald ash borer beetle. Emerald ash borers were first discovered in Michigan in 2002; they are believed to have hitchhiked to the United States in packing material from Asia. Since then, their population has exploded, wiping out ash trees across several states and Canadian provinces. Two years ago, the beetle was identified across the harbor in Superior.
On May 11, 2015, Mark Abrahamson, an entomologist with the Minnesota Department of Agriculture (MDA), addressed the Duluth city council on the subject of the emerald ash borer. According to Mr. Abrahamson, the beetle first arrived in Minnesota in 2009, in the southern part of the state. He expected to see it in Duluth at any time. “If it’s not here already, it will be soon,” he said.
For the past two years, Abrahamson has been sampling ash trees in Duluth, looking for signs of the pest. One of the sampling sites is on Park Point, which Abrahamson said is “a really obvious place for emerald ash borer to show up in Duluth, because it’s right across the water. It’s about as close as you can get to infested areas in Superior. And the good news is, after two years of work we still haven’t been able to document any emerald ash borers.”
When emerald ash borers infest a tree, Abrahamson said, there are three possible outcomes: (1) the tree dies from the infestation; (2) the tree dies when people cut it down as a control measure; or (3) a regimen of insecticide treatment saves the tree. Superior is mostly cutting down their ash trees, though some citizens have “adopted” trees by agreeing to pay for the insecticide treatment.
Abrahamson also discussed another management strategy that has been implemented in some places: biological control. The U.S. Department of Agriculture has been studying a type of wasp native to Asia that parasitizes and kills emerald ash borers; in 2011, the MDA released wasp larvae in southern Minnesota. Early reports indicated that the wasps were reproducing and dispersing on their own.
The problem with biological control agents is that they can become problems in their own right. The world is full of horror stories—weasels brought to New Zealand to control rabbits ended up wiping out native bird populations, cane toads introduced to Australia to control beetles destroyed everything.
 In the case of the parasitic wasp, Abrahamson seemed confident that it wouldn’t create a bigger problem. “USDA has done a lot of work to identify this species, do research on them to be certain that they’re not going to have any unintended side effects here in North America. The main concern would be that they wouldn’t be specific enough to emerald ash borer to be suitable as something to use against it. The good news is that they are very specific to emerald ash borer. There really are no bad effects that we expect from using them here in North America.”
However, Abrahamson cautioned against viewing the wasps as a magic cure-all for the problem. “We’re optimistic, but it may end up that they don’t make that big a difference in the long run….The hope is that this is something that contributes to lessening the population growth of the insect, and thereby makes other forms of management more effective.”
For now, emerald ash borers have not been identified in Duluth. When one looks across the harbor toward Superior, though, one can sense all those beady eyes watching.

Library report from 2006 backs up Reader

In my last cover story, I exposed a number of false claims about the condition and energy use of the Duluth Public Library made by the MSR consultants in their recent report.  Chief among these was the claim that the library loses $75,000 each year to energy flying out of the building envelope. I showed that most of this cost was actually due to water usage by the library’s outdated “pump-and-dump” cooling system, which uses millions of gallons of water to cool the building annually. Any modern system would eliminate the water cost—and the $75,000 waste—almost completely.
I have now found out that the city already knew this. In 2006, the city hired Johnson Controls to conduct an audit of city facilities and make recommendations to increase their efficiency. Many of the recommendations contained in that report were instituted during the following years: water meter infrastructure upgrades, street lighting efficiency improvements, steam plant efficiency improvements (which didn’t turn out to be all that efficient, but that’s another story), automatic meter reading technology, and more. One facility that the city ignored, however, was the Duluth Public Library.
In a Power Point presentation given to city officials in 2006, Johnson Controls identified a number of ways to improve the library’s efficiency—replacing variable air volume boxes, adding variable speed drives, fixing broken dampers, replacing old air compressors and so on. They also stated that by replacing the pump-and-dump cooling system with an air-cooled chiller, the library’s water cost could be cut by 94 percent.
As far as I know, none of the recommended improvements were ever made; instead, the city let the library continue as it was. Nor was the Johnson Controls report mentioned when MSR was hired to undertake their more recent survey of the facility. Considering the many practical cost-saving measures contained in the report, this seems an odd omission. We are left with the inescapable conclusion that either (1) MSR and the city didn’t know the Johnson Controls report existed, which would indicate an astonishing level of ignorance among the city’s top managers; or (2) the report was intentionally kept out of sight.
Neither of these two possibilities is especially comforting.

Local media busy with other things

Although my stories on the Duluth Public Library have exposed governmental waste, official deception, and all-around bad behavior on the part of the city administration, other media outlets in town do not seem interested in covering the issue. Thinking they might have missed it, I emailed links to all the local TV stations and the Duluth News Tribune after my last article was published. So far, there has been no coverage. In mainstream Duluth, the library story does not exist.
To be fair, they may be busy with other things. Stories that the Duluth News Tribune has deemed more important than City Hall intentionally misleading citizens about a $40 million project include “Bass are a blast”; “Specialty toy store coming to Miller Hill Mall”; and “New Hermantown coffee house has global vibe.” So you can see that their investigative resources may be over-extended.
As for the TV stations, Fox21 recently aired a hard-hitting piece called “Ice cream shops as popular as ever,” along with another gutsy story entitled “The dos and don’ts of ear health.”  Channel 6 faced controversy head-on with “Chester Bowl adds Fun Slope” and “Bicycle ride around the world stops in Duluth.”And WDIO Channel 10/13 jumped into the fight with “Miracle Treat Day at Dairy Queen,” a story about local Dairy Queens donating $1 to the Gillette Children’s Hospital for every Blizzard sold.  “It really is a great excuse to go get a Blizzard,“ enthused WDIO reporter Maarja Anderson. “I’m a big fan of Blizzards. Is it all sizes?”
“Yes,” said Becky Holst, spokesperson for Gillette. “Any size, any flavor. You can concoct your own flavor and they’ll make it up for you.”
“Oh, wonderful!” said Anderson.