The City of Duluth’s Parks Maintenance Division will place clean, discarded wood chips for public use and pick up in bulk at the U-shaped driveway by Tony Emanuel Field at Woodland Park beginning Saturday.
The wood chips, which are an urban forestry byproduct and are untreated, are available on a first-come, first-served basis to anyone wishing to use them. If the pile depletes, parks maintenance staff will continue to refill them until the spring.
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.
Whether residents ultimately agree with every proposal or not, the broader framework behind One Park One Vote deserves to be taken seriously because it attempts to connect housing, sustainability, environmental protection and economic development into one larger civic conversation.
In many ways, Minnesota Power became one of the hidden structural pillars underneath modern Duluth’s entire existence. Because in northern Minnesota, power literally meant power. Industrial power. Political power. Economic leverage. Regional influence. Stability. Survival.
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.
