PRIORITIES

Every single business, employer, and worker matters, and we need a robust, diverse workforce, as well as a thriving business community, for an inclusive and resilient economy that grows with our changing needs.

Building a Better Duluth means:

  • Making Duluth the first-choice location for business growth, expansion, investment, and start-up in Minnesota

  • Renewing the heart of our city—our downtown—starting with implementing the 27 recommendations of my Downtown Task Force, addressing safety issues, transforming empty office space to fully occupied housing units, and aggressively removing blight and redeveloping areas along First Street

  • An improved and accountable city permitting and economic development partnership with a focus on bringing opportunities across the whole city

  • Expanding access to affordable childcare so parents can confidently enter the workforce

  • Building on our progress on housing to ensure workers have housing options they can afford

  • Prioritizing and promoting, with our economic development partners, key sites for mixed use, industrial and housing development

Everyone has a right to a safe and affordable place to call their home, and businesses need appropriate housing for workers in order to grow.

Building a Better Duluth means:

  • Utilizing the newly launched Housing Trust Fund to accelerate affordable housing and activating sites that can scale for housing density to make in-fill easier and ensure families of all incomes, across all neighborhoods, have the confidence and stability of a home

  • Exploring with HRA and DEDA options for raising additional revenues targeted toward affordable housing

  • Improving permit, plan review, land use and public processes to expand housing efficiently in partnership with the community and developers

  • Expanding and improving our successful ReBuild Duluth program that incentivizes affordable housing on hard-to-build lots

  • Working with community partners like Stepping on Up to create housing options for the unhoused

  • Identifying incentives, low-interest loans, and energy efficiency improvements and tie them with requirements to keep already existing affordable housing (NOAH) affordable.

Feeling safe and secure is core to a thriving and prosperous community, and it will take an entire community effort to succeed.

Building a Better Duluth means:

  • Expanding our innovative, best practice, effective public safety initiatives, including the Downtown Clean and Safe team, Crisis Response Team, the SURT (addressing substance abuse issues) and CORE (addressing mental health issues)

  • Expanding the housing, health care, workforce, and other supports needed for those who need extra help to succeed

  • Fully implementing the Downtown Taskforce recommendations on public safety

  • Providing the staffing, training, and gear workers need to be successful while on patrol, fighting fires, or plowing snow

  • Recruiting and retaining the best people by investing in good wages and a supportive work environment

  • Continuing to challenge policies and systems that have historically held people back from trusting public safety

Streets, water, steam, sewer, stormwater, and internet are systems we need to work for us every day for us to thrive as a community.

Building a Better Duluth means:

  • Continuing to accelerate our street repair program and secure additional funding to get Duluth onto a 25-year sustainable street repair and replacement schedule

  • Making sure all of Duluth’s drinking water pipes are lead-free

  • Achieving our commitment to broadband equity so every single resident and business in our community has access to fast, reliable, and affordable internet

  • Ensuring we build our stormwater, sewer, and energy grid systems for resilience and redundancy

  • Coordinating roadwork and below-ground utility improvements across city, state, and county departments to maximize efficiency and reduce costs.

Duluth isn’t just a place where people live, it’s a unique community where people choose to build a life.

Building a Better Duluth means:

  • Investing in and expanding the impact of our libraries—open hours, access to community, health and workforce services, and being a welcoming community place to gather

  • Restoring Duluth’s neighborhood parks and community athletic facilities city-wide by leveraging the $36 million we secured this legislative session

  • Securing reliable funding to maintain our existing parks and keep them clean and safe

  • Ensuring there are park activities for both kids and adults of all ages and levels of income

  • Providing tangible ways through parks, libraries, and other public spaces for people across all incomes and all neighborhoods to feel seen, heard, and valued in all of their fullness

Repeated climate-impacted weather events have buffeted our community and remind us of the very real costs of the changing climate to our infrastructure, environment, economy, industry, health, and safety.

Building a Better Duluth means:

  • Enlisting a whole-of-city approach to eliminate climate damaging pollution and achieve net-zero emissions by 2050

  • Leveraging the scaffolding and systems we’ve built the past seven years to secure state and federal support for climate resiliency and energy transition

  • Building a thriving, clean-energy economy which benefits both business and workers