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Duluth will host one of international hockey’s most significant age-group tournaments next spring, and Mayor Roger Reinert sees the event as something larger than 29 hockey games at AMSOIL Arena.
For Reinert, the 2027 IIHF Under-18 Men’s World Championship is another piece of evidence that Duluth has become a community capable of attracting and successfully staging major events — while generating visitor spending during a part of the calendar when hotels, restaurants and other tourism businesses can use it most.
The championship is scheduled for April 21-May 2, bringing 10 national teams to Duluth. All 29 games will be played at AMSOIL Arena, with the Duluth Entertainment Convention Center serving as the tournament’s practice facility. The tournament annually features many of the best NHL draft-eligible players in the world.
Reinert, speaking privately and on the record following Thursday morning’s championship kickoff event at the DECC, was emphatic about what the tournament means.
“You look at the turnout that Duluth had to support the regional round last year, which really led to Duluth being the home of this championship round this year,” Reinert said. “And then for Duluthians to think of the fact that we're going to have 10 international teams that will come to play gold medal, young men's hockey, think of the players, the coaches, the families, as well as the spectators that are going to be in our community.”
That is an important piece of the story. This is not simply another hockey tournament dropped into an already hockey-heavy Duluth calendar. It is an international championship, bringing national teams, families, scouts, officials, media and fans into the community for nearly two weeks.
“So it really does two things,” Reinert said. “Number one, highlights what a hockey town we are, highlights what an event town we are, but then also is just great for our tourism economy and what otherwise tends to be a soft part of the season.”
The tournament did not arrive simply because Duluth has a nice arena and likes hockey. Reinert credited Visit Duluth and the community’s broader hospitality infrastructure — hotels, restaurants, the DECC and businesses that repeatedly have demonstrated they can handle large events.
“The great news is this isn't a big lift from the city,” Reinert said. “It's a classic example of the city being helpful in a facilitator, but not the doer. This really was a credit to Visit Duluth, to our individual hospitality, the restaurants, the hotels, the convention center, all of those components that go into making a tourism economy work and seeing major events like Grandma's 50th go off without a hitch.”
Then Reinert made an important point about economic development that can get lost when communities chase the next big project: competence is itself a sales pitch.
“I always say people know when something doesn't work, but they don't always know when something was perfect,” he said. “And others do see that. And then they saw how well Duluth did with that regional round last year. They saw the seats full and people buying tickets and they're like, ‘That's a place we want to do more.’”
That brings us from hockey to City Hall, because Reinert is entering another important stretch of his first term.
His recent 2027 budget presentation again focused heavily on property taxes, basic municipal services and the structural gap between how quickly city expenses are increasing and how quickly revenues are growing.
Reinert has recommended a 2.65% increase in the city portion of Duluth’s 2027 property tax levy, below the trailing inflation rate and slightly below the 2.7% city proposal for 2026. The administration says that would produce an average annual increase of 1.77% during Reinert’s term. The broader maximum levy figure is 3.61%, reflecting inflation and 0.96% growth in Duluth’s tax base.
Reinert said the public response has been predictable.
“It's kind of classic,” he said. “You get the two ends of the spectrum. One is not enough, even though we've now got a three-year rolling average below inflation. And then the left side is we want more.”
But Reinert believes much of the community falls somewhere between those positions.
“The vast majority, and that is the tough part of doing this work, the vast majority, the silent broad middle knows that we're working really hard to try and keep taxes affordable,” he said. “And you know this, affordability matters. If your taxes go to a point where you can't pay them, you'll lose your home. And so we know that for many Duluthians, taxes are a real issue and we're working really hard to try and keep that rate within what they can pay.”
The harder question is how Duluth keeps doing it.
Reinert readily acknowledges that portions of the current budget solution involve one-time money and that the city still faces a structural financial problem. His administration says compensation and benefit expenses are rising about 6% annually while revenues are growing roughly 1.5%, the kind of imbalance that cannot permanently be solved by moving money among accounts.
His answer is increasingly centered on changing how city government operates.
“To be clear, some of it is one-time money, so we're closing that gap,” Reinert said. “But I'm very committed and I was really clear to the City Council with this. Number one, we've done line-by-line budget reviews so that we've dialed in these line items, not to what departments would like, but what they've actually done with a five-year look back.”
The second step, he said, has been identifying money previously set aside for purposes the administration no longer considers priorities, including $2 million earmarked for municipal broadband.
“We've got great competition now in the marketplace,” Reinert said. “That's not something the city needs to do. We need to fix streets and we need to plow streets. That's city business.”
The larger change, Reinert said, comes next.
“Number three, and that's where we're going to be next year, is how do we redesign service delivery, not reduce service, but redesign delivery for 2028 instead of 1988,” he said. “It's going to be a big challenge, but I'm excited for it. And that's how we will find financial stability year over year moving forward.”
That same philosophy is behind the combined maintenance campus the city is developing in western Duluth.
Reinert described the project as less of a new municipal complex than a consolidation and rehabilitation effort involving existing buildings along with acquisition of another facility. The goal is to eliminate several of the city’s poorest buildings, provide indoor vehicle storage and consolidate maintenance operations.
“It takes three of those offline,” Reinert said of what he called the city’s seven worst buildings. “It gives our maintenance crews a safe place to work, a good place to work. It gives our vehicles inside storage. It gives them an inside place to do that work. And it actually combines our maintenance responsibilities in one place. So we save money over the long haul by just being more efficient.”
And eventually the conversation arrived at the question that will hang over Duluth politics during the coming months: Is Roger Reinert running for another term?
Reinert did not announce a reelection campaign Thursday. He said he has not made that decision and expects to address his political future after the holidays.
“I haven't even really had a chance to think about it,” Reinert said. “I mean, we're in the middle of all the budget stuff. The one time a year that I take time off and really try to hear my own thoughts is over the holidays. So the community can expect something in early January, but I'm having fun tackling these big issues, tough as they are, but that is the meaningful work of being mayor.”
Reinert took office in January 2024 after defeating incumbent Mayor Emily Larson in the 2023 election. His administration has organized much of its work around five priorities: housing at all income levels, expansion of the commercial tax base, streets and utilities, downtown revitalization and keeping city property taxes affordable.
Asked whether there remains enough unfinished business to justify another four years, Reinert pointed particularly to downtown, which he described as the most difficult of those priorities.
“We clearly have more work to do,” he said. “I mean, when you look at the five priorities, we've made progress on a lot of them. Downtown's been by far the most challenging, but in all of them we have more to do.”
Then came perhaps his most revealing comment about how he views the question of continuity at City Hall.
“I think one of the things that I've seen now three years in, there's a benefit when you have consistent leadership over a period of time,” Reinert said. “When you swing back and forth every four years, you just don't see the progress that a community our size needs. And the challenges facing Duluth are big and they're structural. So there's definitely benefit to continuing to move in the same direction.”
He immediately added the qualifier that ultimately matters.
“But if I decide, that's up for the voters to decide.”
So Duluth will apparently get its answer in January.
For now, Reinert has a city budget to finish, a maintenance system to reorganize, streets to plow, a downtown still searching for traction — and, come April, 10 national hockey teams arriving at AMSOIL Arena with a world championship on the line.
There are worse things for a mayor to have on his calendar.
