This meeting of the Duluth City Council began at 5:15 PM with a Committee of the Whole session on tourism marketing, followed by a Finance Committee meeting at 6:00 PM, and then the regular agenda session at 6:45 PM. The central topics included the selection of Madden Media as the city's new tourism marketing agency, a presentation from Visit Duluth on its transition back to a Destination Marketing Organization (DMO) model, and the review of numerous resolutions and ordinances, including the 2025 budget, the Blatnik Bridge project, and a water infrastructure surcharge.
Yeah, I mean, I'm gonna do it. Good evening, everyone. We'll go ahead and get started. It is 5 15. Tonight we start out with a committee of the whole talking about our tourism marketing. So I'd like to invite up three individuals. First, Tom Warner, we know him as the executive director of the Duluth Airport, and also the chair of this selection committee. He'll be walking us through the RFP selection process. And then also followed by Madden's CEO Dan Janes and Nick Cusick, the destination strategist for Madden, they'll also join to talk more about their organization. So we'll start by welcoming Tom Warner. Good evening. Good evening. Thank you. I'll just start with a quick summary of the RFP process. As you know, uh this was a request for proposal process. Uh we selected a uh team, actually, city administration selected a team uh from not only uh city staff but also uh volunteers through uh throughout the uh the community. So we had a evaluation team of six. Basically, our mandate uh was to have a fair and impartial process, and I'm happy to report that that's exactly uh what we did. Uh the evaluation process, again, an overview consisted of a written proposal interviewer. We uh uh was received uh submitted proposals. Uh they were evaluated, and that uh was also followed by a presentation and interview uh process as a second round of scoring for the top scores. The uh written proposals uh were evaluated uh based on a scoring criteria uh and a um uh a numeric scoring system that was weighted. Uh and then those uh scores were then uh tallied and decision made about how many uh firms to actually interview. Uh the natural cutoff uh and and uh you know, in terms of uh the scores, uh uh certain firms in terms of those scores uh differentiated themselves, and we ended up uh interviewing and and receiving presentations from five firms for the second round. Uh that round was also uh uh scored numerically on a weighted uh basis uh as well, both for the uh written, or I'm sorry, the uh presentation portion where they were given uh each the same topic to present on, uh as well as the interview portion where there were seven uh predetermined uh questions that we had for the five uh firms. Uh they received those questions ahead of time, so they had plenty of time to uh repair uh prepare those responses. And uh that was then evaluated at that time, and again, uh those numerical scores were then uh tabulated and resulted in the uh committee's recommendation. So I'm happy to uh talk in in greater detail about uh some of this, but uh that's the overview of the process. Thank you, Mr. Werner. We'll go ahead and open it up to council questions. Who has the first question on the RFP process? Seeing no questions at this point, uh, we'll go ahead and we'll welcome up uh Dan Janes and Nick Cusick from Madden. Thank you, Mr. Werner. Good evening, uh counsel, chair. Uh nice to be able to spend some time with you all and get to introduce you a little bit to Madden. Uh first wanted to say a big thank you to the city staff, the selection counts committee, and the folks that are out there, the professionalism that they've had and the process that they've had has been fantastic, and you know, very much appreciated what what has happened and has gone through throughout the this process here. For those of you uh uh that haven't had a chance to I don't know how much the proposals got uh shared or anything, but a little bit about us from Madden is that uh we're at we have about 200 folks and uh in the agency, and we do just destination marketing. And when we think about destination marketing, we think about what that means for travel and tourism and workforce attraction and economic development as being the core things that we focus on. And it's a very unique part of how we think about advertising, how we think about marketing to those audiences, and get as a helped us to build a differentiator of what we provide to our clients as an agency in that space. As we think about this, it has to go down. We we do this because it comes down to how we think about uh our foundational philosophy of what community destination marketing is, and that's really about how do you build collective impact for communities. When we think about building collective impact for communities, it it's two different parts, and if you can think of uh an infinity diagram, if you will. But the other side of it is how do we communicate to business stakeholders and other partners? And that's about having a good place to have a business, having strong innovation, having a strong education background, and then having the ability to attract new businesses to a community. And what we've seen is because of destination marketing helps to build new businesses and growth in a community, because the number one priority that most new businesses have is can I get the workforce for my business to move there? And as we think about that, we think about tourism and destination marketing as lead generation for the future of communities and what that means for travel and what it went for the future residents as well as the future businesses that sit there. And across our agency, about 15% of our staff have come from a destination marketing organization. People like Nick, who just who just came from Cook County and has been with St.