Emily Larson cruises to victory in the mayoral race. Elissa Hansen, Noah Hobbs, Gary Anderson and Em Westerlund are new city councilors. Alanna Oswald, David Kirby and Nora Sandstad join the school board.
With all 34 precincts reporting …
Duluth Mayor
Emily Larson – 15,352 | 72%
Chuck Horton – 5,862 | 27%
Write in – 125 | 1%
A study released on Monday suggests the nonprofit arts and culture sector in Duluth generates over $36 million annually in total economic activity. Arts & Economic Prosperity in the City of Duluth, MN is a follow up to the statewide study Creative Minnesota: The Impact and Health of the Nonprofit Arts and Culture Sector. Highlights are above, fine print is below, and the full text of both studies are linked in the sentence previous to this one.
Last week Duluth Parents for Healthy Playgrounds presented the results of a test conducted by St. Paul-based Legend Technical Services on a sample of rubber mulch from the playground at Lester Park Elementary School. The test found 12 chemicals listed by the Minnesota Department of Health as “chemicals of high concern,” but the chemicals were at levels not considered hazardous.
From the report’s executive summary:
Our test does not account for possible interactions or “synergistic” effects of the 12 “chemicals of high concern,” nor for carbon nanotubes. Given the variety of chemicals different tire manufacturers use, and the variability of the tire brands in Rubberific mulch, the eight grams from Lester Park Elementary that were tested may account for only a few of the estimated 12,000 tires in the whole playground.
Link to the full report: Scrap Tire Mulch on Duluth Public Schools’ Playgrounds (PDF)
The journalism program at the University of Minnesota Duluth is looking for a part-time project manager to assist in coordinating the “One River, Many Stories” media collaboration project.
Funded through a Knight Foundation Fund grant from the Duluth Superior Area Community Foundation, the project will test ways media collaboration can inspire innovation and nurture engagement among professional journalists, educators and citizen storytellers in the Duluth-Superior community. In April 2016, the media in northern Minnesota and northwest Wisconsin will give special attention to one topic: The St. Louis River. Newspapers, television and radio stations, local bloggers, photographers, videographers, university, college and high school journalism programs, and citizen storytellers will produce news articles, documentaries, podcasts and other media about the historic St. Louis River corridor.
A new 4-mile section of the North Country National Scenic Trail, located 17 miles southwest of Superior, opens Saturday, bringing the trail another step closer to connecting to Minnesota’s Superior Hiking Trail.
The new segment crosses the University of Wisconsin-Superior’s MacQuarrie Wetlands in western Douglas County and features scenic overlooks of the Nemadji River Valley and the basin of Glacial Lake Duluth. It also crosses a section of Douglas County Forest and Wisconsin DNR lands.
Ken Greshowak sent PDD this photo shot near Brighton Beach on Sept. 27.
From the Sept. 16 issue of Labor World:
Without opposition a motion was made, seconded, and carried to ban Don Ness from the Duluth Labor Temple’s Wellstone Hall for life.
The latest Duluth dateline in The Onion newspaper reports “It impossible to tell what sounds will freak out cat.” Apparently, “there seemed to be no clear pattern to the animal’s responses,” according to local pet owner Wendy Vogl. “I can slam the front door and he’ll just sit there licking himself, but then he’ll hear thunder and run out of the room immediately.”
College Ranker has sorted the nation’s college towns based on how “things like community, neighborhoods, schools” and other aspects create a place that is “attractive in retaining students who graduate from local colleges.” Duluth came in at #22. For some reason, UMD is the only one of the handful of colleges in the area that receives a mention in the text.
Courtland Powe, owner of the Duluth ice cream truck and cruisin’ kitchen called the King of Creams, has announced a restaurant of the same name will open in the Central Hillside at 502 E. Fourth St. this Saturday, March 14. The storefront had previously served as a Quiznos sandwich shop, and is better known as one of Duluth’s four former Jim’s Hamburgers locations. The new fast-casual restaurant will feature a menu that includes cheese-steak sandwiches, burgers, deep-fried pickles, malts and hand-scooped ice cream. Grand opening events will be held March 14 and 15, with all menu items at half price. Regular hours will be 10:30 a.m. to 7 p.m., seven days a week.
Tycoons Alehouse is in PreservationNation’s online competition to determine America’s favorite historic watering hole. The Historic Bars Tournament has tapped 32 historic drinkeries to compete against one another in an NCAA Tournament-style, single-elimination format. Each week the blog will serve another round of pairings where readers will vote for their favorite inns and alehouses. When the matchups run dry on April 3, only one bar will claim the top shelf. Voting for each round will last one week and close every Friday morning at 7 a.m. Once each round is complete, the bracket will be updated with vote counts and winners.
The Duluth News Tribune reported on Monday that Sumlee Beede is moving her Sala Thai restaurant from Woodland Avenue to Downtown Duluth. “Beede is buying the two-story brick building at 114 W. First St. where she started in the restaurant business in 1999,” the story notes. “That year, she opened Thai Krathong, which developed a loyal following for its authentic Thai food. After she sold the business, it moved to Canal Park and closed in 2013.” The move would displace the Giant Panda restaurant, and could result in legal action to execute the eviction. According to the DNT, a court hearing on the matter is scheduled for next week. Sala Thai is Duluth’s only Thai restaurant. Beede plans to close the Woodland location on March 26 and open the downtown location in April.
The March 9 issue of New Yorker includes a lengthy article titled “Break-in at Y-12,” which tells the story (with much digression) of Duluth’s Gregory Boertje-Obed and his role in the July 2012 break-in at the Y-12 nuclear weapons facility in Oak Ridge, Tenn.
Boertje-Obed, along with fellow Catholic Worker Movement activists Megan Gillespie Rice and former Duluthian Michael Walli, cut fences to enter the facility and spray-painted messages, poured blood and ceremonially chipped away at the foundation of a building that houses one of the largest stores of bomb-grade uranium in the world.
Duluth had another dateline in the Onion last week:
Long-silent Facebook friend comes out of woodwork with post asking about insulating windows
The March issue of Details magazine ranks American-made gins in an article titled “The American Gin Renaissance.” Duluth’s Vikre Distillery took fourth place for its Boreal Cedar Gin.
4. Vikre Distillery Boreal Cedar Gin
Duluth, Minnesota
The Gin: Smoky, thanks to red cedar.
Fun Fact: “I developed the Cedar specifically to make my perfect Negroni,” says cofounder Emily Vikre.
The Appeal: For fermentation and proofing, Vikre uses purified Lake Superior water, which is soft and devoid of (taste-altering) minerals. $30
There’s an online version of the article with the more click-baitish title, “10 American-made gins that are too damn good to pass up.”
Another recent honor: Vikre’s Ovrevann Aquavit won a bronze medal in the DSS category at the American Craft Spirits Association’s Distillers Convention & Vender Trade Show in mid-February. (Through exhaustive research — you know, like ten minutes worth — PDD is now able to update this report to clarify that DSS stands for Distilled Spirits, Specialty.)
The Duluth Transit Authority has been awarded a $6.3-million grant to purchase six electric buses and a fast-charge station. Duluth was considered an excellent test location for the development of electric vehicle technology because of its challenging cold weather and steep terrain.
The grant comes from the Federal Transit Administration‘s Low or No Emission Vehicle Deployment Program; the buses and charging station will come from Proterra, a South Carolina company that designs and manufactures zero-emission electric transit vehicles and systems.
The DTA was one of 10 grant applicants that will receive funding. A $1.1-million local share will bring the total project cost to $7.5 million.
The buses and charging station are expected to be available in 2016 and will be integrated into the DTA’s new Multimodal Transportation Center, which is under construction at Michigan Street and Third Avenue West and scheduled to open before the end of 2015.
In other transit news …
