The Duluth City Council met on Monday, June 9, 2025, at 6:00 PM in the Council Chamber. The meeting included a pre-meeting Committee of the Whole presentation from EPA employees, approval of a consent agenda, discussion and tabling of a Tax Increment Financing (TIF) policy resolution, and passage of several ordinances. All nine council members were present.
Good evening. We will begin our present. Good evening. We will begin our presentation in two minutes. We're going to start with the committee of the whole, and we will begin with Nicole Nicantello. Did I pronounce that right? Yes. Thank you. Thank you for being here. Thank you. Council members. Good evening. My name is Nicole Cantello, and I am president of the American Federation of Government Employees, Local Seven O four, speaking out on behalf of one thousand Environmental Protection Agency employees in the Great Lakes. Fifteen hundred ORD scientists have been forced into distressing decisions, offer deals to resign, or voluntarily retire amid threats of mass layoffs and the closure of EPA's research labs across the country. The loss of this scientific expertise jeopardizes ongoing research that safeguards the loose drinking water, fisheries, and outdoor industries. Without ORD scientists, our community will lose its human health and environmental protections and have no way to address emerging contaminants like PFAS, microplastics, and endocrine disruptors. EPA has provided these scientists a cruel and confusing path forward. Employees were urged to apply for new roles at the agency, but there are many fewer positions and scientists who have applied for them, pointing to mass layoffs and an uncertain future for the Duluth Lab. Now our top environmental scientists stand in uncertain limbo, watching their scientific work unravel, no longer able to protect us from dangerous environmental contaminants. I would like next like to introduce Carly Lone. Thank you. Thanks, Nick, and thanks to the council for having us come and speak to you today. My name is Dr. Carly Lalone. I was born in Duluth. I was raised in the area. I did my education, my undergrad degrees come from the University of Minnesota Duluth, where I played softball. And I went away to graduate school only to return back to Duluth. But before I went off to graduate school, I had a very special experience. I was able to join the Duluth Lab, the Office of Research and Development, as a undergraduate researcher, and get my first experience to be able to be in a research laboratory under internationally recognized scientists. I knew at that time that this was a very unique place in that you walk down the halls and you get to interact with the best of the best in their open door policies to be able to share their science and their knowledge. So when I went away to grad school, I came back to Duluth as a postdoc to again continue my research career in the Duluth lab. So now representing AFGE, I've had a 15-year career at EPA in Duluth. And like I mentioned, we have uh internationally recognized scientists, and the reason that we're so successful in that laboratory is because of its location, for one. It wasn't put there by accident. It was you know put there in the 60s and became the EPA lab in the 70s. And the resource that we have right here, the Great Lakes, uh Lake Superior, is actually very useful to our toxicology work. So we can utilize that freshwater resource to run experiments. So we mentioned toxicology, we focus on ecotoxicology, which means that we're looking at impacts of chemicals on the environment, both human health and species that could be impacted by chemicals that get into our environment. And so we do testing in our laboratory historically. We've had a number of guideline tests that are used with aquatic organisms, not just nationally but internationally. And so we are a world-recognized leader in ecotoxicology. We have been since the beginning of our lab, so it's a very unique place in Duluth that we have this research laboratory just on the shore of Lake Superior that the world looks to for a variety of different impacts in ecotoxicology. So what we do at the lab relative to toxicology is thinking about how we can make approaches for understanding chemical toxicity more efficient and more uh reduced resources as well as reduce animal use in toxicity testing so that our regulatory arm of the agency can take that information and uh utilize it to you know make regulatory decisions. And so we develop what are now termed new approach methods that reduce animal use and make more efficient methods, so they're termed high throughput approaches as well as computational approaches. That's actually where my work resides. But also we have a vast area of research in freshwater ecology, and Tom is going to talk more about that, but I'm just going to mention to you some of the key things that we've done around the Duluth area and thinking about protecting the Great Lakes and our resources here. So we have groups within our lab that focus on invasive species. We have groups in our lab that focus on harmful algal blooms. Within the Duluth lab, there's also those that do near shore research out of a research vessel.