The Duluth City Council convened on Monday, August 11, 2025, at 6:00 PM for a personnel committee meeting to interview finalists for the vacant District 2 council seat, followed by a regular council meeting. After interviewing Craig Birch, Deborah De Luca, and Janet Nelson, the council unanimously appointed De Luca to serve the remainder of former Councilor Mayou's term. The council also approved the consent agenda, passed a daycare zoning ordinance on second reading, and left the Transportation Commission ordinance on the table.
Say that once more. I'm excited, but I'm also not here. So I don't know if they have to pull on the useful. They will, yeah. It sounds like this is where we are in the community. That's what it knows about the important thing. So it's so it's working. It's many just wait till the sponsor. So I'd always go in with something like this. I'm curious to see if that's the practice. Um my name is uh counselor Azreen Owl. I serve at large, and I will be I am uh serving as the personnel committee chair. Uh during this personnel committee meeting, we will be interviewing for the second district city council vacancy. Uh we have three candidates that we will be inter uh interviewing who have advanced to the final round. We have Craig Birch, Deborah De Luca, and Janet Nelson. We will be interviewing them in alphabetical order as they are listed. And we will begin with Craig Birch. I go first. Um we have kind of internally decided we were gonna go alphabetical. Um so that's the only reason. I apologize if there is a difference. In the roll call, I should have checked in with all of you. So as yes. And just as a reminder of why we're here, the Duluth City Council. The mission of the July City Council is to develop effective public policy rooted in citizen involvement that results in an excellent municipal services and creates a thriving community prepared for the challenges, prepared for the challenges of the future. Thank you so much, Mr. Birsch, for coming and interviewing with us. You can call me Craig. Thank you, Craig, for coming and interviewing with us. So how this is gonna run is we I will set the timer for 20 minutes. We'll do some rounds of questioning. I do have uh my first questions. I'll turn it over to the council. Counselors ask one question, and then I will be keeping track of how much uh the time each counselor um the dialogue essentially between the counselor and yourself. Each counselor will have a uh about um five minutes per candidate. Um so I'll keep track of that time and I'll also keep track of your time too. So a couple of uh couple of uh things that we're keeping track of. My first question um just to start it off. Um after the first set of uh questions rounds, there were some uh concerns still from constituents really trying to understand the difference between a district counselor and an at-large counselor. What do you see as as the important difference or roles of a district counselor versus an at-large counselor? I would view the district counselor as being maybe a little bit more close to the constituents, maybe the the one that's taking the neighborhood issue. I think the at-large counselors are dealing with every citizen in the city, so I think they get more constituent concerns thrown at them. I think it's maybe the difference between a United States Senator and a Congress person, uh, where there's a little bit more of a local focus for someone who's in the U.S. Congress or representative versus someone who's a senator who has a whole state, maybe not so much in a state like Rhode Island, but certainly in a state like California, there's a big difference there. So I I would view it in that parallel sense. Okay, thank you, Greg. Um counselors, I'll open it up for the first round of questions. I'll wait for your buttons to come in. Vice President nephew. Uh thank you, uh Chair Owl.