Interview with Don Ness, Mayor of Duluth

Also, the diversity of entertainment venues is greatly lacking in downtown Colorado Springs. Mayor Bach has proposed ideas to attract entertainment anchors to the city’s core. What have you developed to supplement the growth and attraction of downtown Duluth?

Ness: We’re trying to create an arts and culture hub in our downtown. Probably like you guys with Denver, all the major acts go down to Minneapolis, so we kind of have to create our own thing. We’ve focused on not building a big concert venue that seats 15,000, but let’s encourage the local venues to have a music stage and encourage the local bars to hire local musicians and pay them $100 a night, and that helps facilitate more artists that want to live in Duluth and can at least supplement their income by playing music and encouraging folks to go out and watch a local play or support the local arts organization.

The one thing that the city is doing on a larger scale is taking our last remaining historical theater and doing a major renovation and having that 750-person theater in our core Downtown. It took a lot of criticism [to make this happen], but [people] weren’t trying to create this nitch for the city of Duluth. What are the values that we’re trying to project? Natural beauty, outdoor recreation, a strong arts and culture theme, and supporting the local arts is part of that ethos that we’re trying to create.

And from my understanding, in Colorado Springs, it’s tough because you have a sort of transient community. Folks are coming from all over the country and all over town, and developing an appreciation for local arts and local musicians takes time and commitment from the local businesses to really invest in these experiences. So, when you’re bringing folks from the outside, either students or military, they are going to gravitate to what is comfortable and familiar. They know Applebee’s. They know the major acts that are coming through, and they think, “Oh, I know that,” so that’s what they go with as opposed to “I’m going to take a chance and go to this club to see a local band. Or I’m going to take a chance and go see a local theater performance.”

They may not have the confidence that it’s going to be professional quality, but it’s part of that building community, and I don’t think that there’s a magic formula to say here’s what it takes to build this DIY sort of arts theme other than realizing that you have the local talent and the pieces are there. You just need to foster it slowly and build it up. But the nice thing is, if you throw a few bucks at a grassroots arts theme, it can go a long way. You don’t need to spend a million dollars. $10,000 spread across a number of small arts organizations can create a lot of positive energy.

Yordy: You also mentioned the high popularity of areas that are closest to the seaports. Colorado Springs is planning to build a farmers market in the Downtown area, something which is already popular in this community. Does downtown Duluth have something similar, and if so, how successful is it?

Ness: There are some long standing farmers markets in the neighborhood. The university does one during the summer months that’s very successful. We haven’t figured out a location and approach that has been able to scale it up to a larger event, so there’s a fair number of farmers markets in Duluth. Probably different neighborhoods, probably six or seven during the summer months. A pretty good network of food shares and farm shares in the region, but we don’t have a destination farmers market that a lot of communities have. It’d be nice if we did.

Yordy: Something that I noticed was similarly popular between our two cities is the breweries. It’s a big thing out here, and it’s a great thing to be able to go into a local restaurant and get a local draft from one of the local breweries. As the Craft Beer Capital of Minnesota, Duluth seems to convey a similar passion about local brews. How have you helped to incorporate your breweries into the local culture and infrastructure?