City of Duluth labor deals collide with 1% growth, squeezing the 2027 budget
All seven city employee labor agreements were approved after Mayor Roger Reinert took office in January 2024.
Howie
My latest book: Minnesota 2050
Minnesota will not stumble into the future by accident. The forces shaping the state’s next 25 years are already visible— demographics that no longer replenish evenly, an economy increasingly anchored by health care, housing that determines who can work where, climate pressure that moves people quietly, and institutions built
Duluth searches for budget ‘bloat,’ but labor costs dominate projected shortfall
The city cannot eliminate a multimillion-dollar structural deficit without confronting employee costs, service levels or taxes. That is where the money is — and where the difficult decisions will be.
Howie: The Monsters have unfinished business
Willie Howard, the former NFL linebacker recently named the Monsters’ senior consultant, understands that the AF1 carries responsibilities beyond winning. Most of its players are still chasing something. They need film, exposure and an opportunity to demonstrate that they can play professionally.
The newspaper that started it all
More than five decades later, I am still chasing the same goal I had as a 15-year-old sports reporter in Cloquet. Earn the reader's trust. Everything else is just ink.
The AI detector economy is chasing the wrong story
Each innovation sparked debate. Each was accused, at one time or another, of making journalism less authentic. Yet journalism endured because the profession was never about the equipment. It was about the work.
Howie: Downtown Duluth's next chapter will be built with trust.
The first step is honesty. Residents already know homelessness, addiction and mental illness exist. They also know downtown remains home to exceptional restaurants, successful small businesses, major employers, recognized attractions, a spectacular Lake Superior shoreline and people who work there.
Don Ness and the reinvention of Duluth
Ness convinced Duluth to stop speaking about itself like a city waiting for the next economic funeral and start speaking about itself like a place with a future worth competing for nationally. Not perfectly. Not without backlash. Not without legitimate criticism. But undeniably.
Duluth's civic theatre at 6 and 10 p.m.
Unfortunately, the new currency of leadership is visibility. You’re judged not by budgets balanced or streets repaired, but by how many times your face appears on a feed. The ribbon-cutting is no longer the celebration of work done; it is the work.
Howie: Duluth needs summer more than ever
Duluth residents simply need this summer emotionally. They need concerts at Bayfront and families along the Lakewalk. They need baseball games, festivals and tourists asking directions. They need reminders that life cannot become an endless cycle of bills, politics, inflation, anxiety and survival.
Howie: Bayfront still may be Duluth’s best idea
Bayfront remains one of the few places where the city still functions the way a healthy city is supposed to function: as a shared public space where people continue gathering together because they genuinely want to be there. Every summer, Duluth remembers that again.
Howie: Jim Oberstar understood Washington better than anyone
Oberstar approached Congress differently. He understood it as machinery requiring relationships, technical credibility, negotiation and committee leverage rather than ideological performance.
Howie: The hardest truth after George Floyd
History will remember George Floyd’s murder for many reasons. Protest. Rage. Reform. Politics. Division. Reckoning. But the enduring question may be simpler. Did America merely react to what it saw? Or did it finally learn to tell itself the truth?
Howie: What Glen Taylor understood about newspapers that Wall Street didn’t
The question is no longer whether newspapers are dying. The real question now is which institutions survive the transition from industrial-age newspapers into modern digital civic platforms. And whether Minnesota’s largest news organization fully understands what it must become next.
Howie: John Fedo turned Duluth toward the lake
Modern Duluth continues wrestling with the same tensions Mayor Fedo governed through decades ago. Tourism success created new economic pressures. Summer weekends increasingly made portions of Canal Park feel disconnected from the working-class identity that shaped Duluth for generations.
Howie: Trump’s China strategy is not diplomacy. It’s negotiation.
America still holds enormous leverage over China precisely because the American consumer economy remains the most important marketplace on Earth. That is why this board concept could matter.