Howie is a longtime Minnesota journalist, independent columnist and author covering sports, power and civic life. His daily column is sponsored by Lyric Kitchen . Bar of Duluth.
Duluth has never been a city that needed to be sold to itself. It knows what it is — a working city on a big lake, built by people who tend to value substance over show, outcomes over explanation, and leaders who don’t feel the need to narrate every step along the way. There is a rhythm here, a kind of civic muscle memory, that rewards those who simply do the work and move on.
Which is why the current tone coming out of City Hall has begun to feel, to some, just a little out of step. Because somewhere along the line, governing has started to look like marketing.
Scroll through the city’s social channels and you’ll find it — a near-daily cadence of polished, direct-to-camera videos featuring Mayor Roger Reinert, delivering updates on city initiatives with a consistency and tone that is hard to ignore. The framing is clean. The delivery is confident. The message is unmistakable.
Look what we’re doing. Look what we’ve accomplished. Look what’s coming next. Individually, there is nothing wrong with any of that. Cities should communicate. Residents deserve to know what their government is doing. But frequency has a way of changing meaning. And in Duluth right now, the frequency is becoming the message.
Leadership in this town has never been earned through repetition. It has been earned through results — decisions that hold up, projects that land, problems that get solved without the need for a daily update explaining why they matter.
That’s why the steady stream of video messaging has started to raise quiet questions in places that don’t usually rush to judgment.
How much time is being spent producing this content? How many city resources are tied up scripting, filming, editing and distributing it? And perhaps more to the point — what does it say about a governing style when the communication becomes this constant?
There is a line, and it’s not always easy to see in real time, where public information begins to take on the tone of promotion. Duluth is not a city that responds particularly well to that shift.
There is, increasingly, a sense among some observers that the messaging has taken on a performative quality — a steady, upbeat cadence that, over time, starts to feel less like informing and more like selling. Not in a malicious way. Not even necessarily in a conscious way. But in a way that becomes hard to ignore.
After a while, the pattern settles in. The same setup. The same delivery. The same presence, day after day. And what was intended as connection begins to blur into something else — something that, in its saturation, can feel closer to a pitch than a public service. An overextended one. Almost like a showroom floor that never quite closes.
That doesn’t erase the work being done. Reinert is not an unserious leader. He understands systems, process and the machinery of government. He is engaged, disciplined, and by most accounts fully invested in the job.
But Duluth has always measured its leaders a little differently. Not by how often they appear. By whether the work stands on its own when they don’t. That’s where the contrast inside City Hall becomes instructive.
Council President Lynn Marie Nephew continues to operate in the quieter space of procedural authority — setting agendas, managing the flow of meetings, determining what moves forward and what doesn’t. It is not visible work, but it is decisive.
Councilor Arik Forsman has emerged as one of the more strategic voices on the board — careful, measured, often thinking a few steps ahead of the moment rather than reacting to it. And then there are the steady middle voices, the ones who rarely seek attention but often determine outcomes.
Terese Tomanek lives there. She is not producing content. She is not shaping a brand. She is doing the slower, less visible work of listening, connecting, and creating the kind of trust that allows decisions to move through a divided room.
In a nine-member council, that matters more than any speech or video ever will. Because Duluth does not run on performance. It runs on alignment.
The mayor can set direction. The communications can frame the message. The videos can tell the story. But unless the council aligns — unless the middle is steady and willing — very little actually happens. That part cannot be packaged. It cannot be edited. And it cannot be repeated into existence.
Which is why the current approach carries a subtle, but very real, risk. Not a political risk in the campaign sense. A credibility risk.
Former Mayor Emily Larson once labeled Reinert “risky” during a campaign that now feels distant. At the time, it was a line meant to define a candidacy. Now, it reads a little differently.
Because the risk isn’t boldness. It’s overexposure. It’s the possibility that a steady stream of self-referential messaging begins to wear thin in a city that prefers its leadership grounded and, above all, authentic. It’s the chance that what is meant to build confidence begins, instead, to invite skepticism.
Duluth does not need to be convinced it is moving forward. It needs to feel it. And the leaders who have carried the most influence here — the ones whose reputations hold over time — have understood something simple and enduring: If the work is real, you don’t have to sell it. You just have to do it.
