The Duluth City Council convened on Monday, February 10, 2025, at 7:00 PM. The meeting began with a Committee of the Whole presentation on the Spirit Mountain lift replacement, followed by the regular session which included roll call, approval of minutes, reports, public comments, consent agenda approval, debate on standing rule changes, and first reading of an ordinance. Key actions included authorizing a new ski lift at Spirit Mountain, amending meeting start times, and hearing public testimony on LGBTQ+ engagement and the Pledge of Allegiance.
Good evening. We will begin our committee of the whole presentation on the Spirit Mountain lift replacement. Miss Glumack, would you come up and uh start your presentation, please, Director? Yes, thank you. President Tomonic and Council members, thank you for the opportunity to make this presentation. My name is Ann Glumack. I'm the executive director at Spirit Mountain, and with me today is Michelle Dressel, who is the chair of the Spirit Mountain Board of Directors, as well as Ryan Abel, who is our general manager. So I get to operate my own clicker. Thank you, Mr. Young. Um, what I'm going to be talking about today is first giving you a context and some background for how this project is before you tonight, because not all council members were here when this started. And then I will spend some more time on the lift proposal before you. It was part of the bonding bill, and the bonding bill didn't pass that year. So moving into 2023, the Walls administration told proposers that had been in the bonding bill, if you want, you can increase your request to address the fact that inflation is nibbling away at your buying power. So the city decided to pursue $13 million in capital investment in this facility, and the legislature agreed, appropriating $13 million, 13 million of which has to be matched locally. And last fall, you passed a number of resolutions that will allow the city to issue bonds for the local match, the $13 million. The city will pay half of that back with tourism tax proceeds, and Spirit Mountain will pay the remaining half. You'll recall that the Spirit Mountain Task Force report had an economic model that said based on 2018 revenues. Spirit contributed at that time 22.4 million dollars into the local economy annually. Our budgets have gone up since then, so we know that has increased. So that was the task force report. The lift was part of that report. But I don't want to start on that right now. I want to talk a little bit about what else has happened at Spirit so it's put into context. The task force had a number of recommendations, as I said, and one of them was Spirit Mountain reduce your debt. We had a 1.2 million dollar line of credit that had been outstanding and owed to the city since 2014. We repaid that thanks to a resolution that the council supported. We had we owed $365,000 on a groomer that we purchased in 2019 and hadn't made any payments on. We have repaid that. The task force said you guys have to strengthen your leadership. And Spirit, as you know, is owned by the city. So our leadership is really the city and the board and the upper management. And the task force found that sometimes they didn't work well together. And so we have made strides at making that stronger and more consistent leadership. It's an ongoing effort, it's not a one-and-done type of thing. But I think we've made a lot of progress on that because we all speak with the same voice. We're moving forward together. They told us Spirit, you need to engage more with your community. And again, not a one and done, but we have. I give tons of presentations. We are working with our partners to do things with the Duluth Cross Country Ski Club or Team Deleuze or the COGS, the mountain biking club, as well as informal groups, welcoming new users to Spirit and allowing them to use our facilities safely. And I'll point to the people who like to go up the hill on their skis and come down. They call it skinning. We're one of two resorts in the state that allows that because we worked with our user group to figure out a safe way that they could do that. They said increase your revenue generation. That's an ongoing challenge for us, but we've made great strides. We have done far better in the last three years in terms of our net operating profit than we had in the prior three. They said, Spirit, your guest experience is lacking. So we have worked very hard on having our staff be better trained, our expectations higher, making them more visible so that they can't interact with our guests, as well as things like improving your food service. I recall a colleague saying, you know, you can't get much worse.