Snow job: How Duluth was sold on Spirit Mountain

Throwing more money into a sinking hole will not solve anything. It’s time this property is sold to a private party.

If the City Council approves this money, it should be agreed that it will be the last money that will be given to this project.

Back in the Seventies, they made a 2 percent city tax to fund the ski hill that was to be removed when the hill was paid for. My dad said they will never remove the tax! How much is it now? My Dad was a wise man!

When is the city going to wake up and sell the place? The city has never been able to run anything.

Sometimes you have to spend a dollar to make three. This is budget dust in the big picture folks.

And the Council wants to close 9 holes at Lester Park because between both courses, it lost $100K??? Spirit Mtn is a financial black hole as is the Aquarium but the Council doesn’t want to talk about that….. poor leadership at its best!

Close… Close… Close…

In 1861, Congress implemented a temporary income tax to help pay for the Civil War.

Ha! Ha! Temporary!

The City of Duluth is spending millions each year on running golf courses and a ski hill. Yet I still have potholes in my street and garbage in my alley.

If you can watch the “press conference” and view Ms. Ream telling her pitch, I love the subtle tossing of sand-in-everyone-in-Duluth’s-faces how they are all wearing custom embroidered Spirit Mountain logo jackets so they really look like a winning team. This town, all show and no go. Pathetic.

Thank you for this article. It’s informative. But it doesn’t cover the whole accounting picture. Spirit Mountain claims it attracts more visitors to the city who then spend money at tourist-oriented businesses (OMC, Hoops, etc), which then increases sales tax revenue for the city. If that’s true, providing subsidies to Spirit Mountain could make budget sense (while also giving indirect subsidies to some local business owners). Has any investigation looked into this claim?

Thank you. It is intuitive to say that when visitors come to Duluth to participate in events at Spirit Mountain, they spend money at local hotels and restaurants, which generates tourism tax. To my knowledge, no data exists to pinpoint the exact amount of tourism tax that is generated that way, but yes: Proponents of Spirit Mountain identify that as a primary reason for subsidizing Spirit Mountain.

My concern, after following Spirit Mountain closely for a decade, is that there seems to be no upper limit to what the city will contribute. As the graph shows, city contributions have increased steeply in that time, and the trend seems to be that they will continue to increase—and no one has ever seriously questioned this. Every Spirit Mountain bailout request is rubber-stamped through the Council by overwhelming majorities. Last night’s 8-1 vote in favor of the $235,000 was entirely typical.

There will be more bailout requests, and probably sooner rather than later. So my question is: Are we always going to approve them, no matter the amount, indefinitely? Because that is the kind of open-ended promise that leads people to make poor business decisions, such as spending capital maintenance money to build an alpine coaster. If the city is always standing by with a safety net, Spirit Mountain is free to expand without consequence. That is the message we are sending.

Renee and one or two others also got 5% of sales from the coaster added to their salary. I worked at SMRA and that was the program for managers. If you came up with an idea to make money, you got 5%. That program ended in 2014, I think.

Also, when building that new chalet, Renee ran out of money for kitchen equipment and I was told to buy that equipment from companies, even if there was no money. The money came from the revenue from the ski hill, NOT the bond money which ran dry. I bought over 20K in equipment.

I would lose my job after Renee grabbed an employee and that employee came to me to have Renee written up. Renee fired me, because I told Renee and she fired me to keep this undercover. I was able to collect unemployment and was happy to get away from THAT Woman. She was a tool.

I lived a half mile from Spirit on Skyline for most of its 48 years. Public land responsibility never entered into the conversation. Wrong end of town. Demo landfills, removing 100 year old forest and ledge rock all on public recreation land. What they have done to the land is criminal. Also not knowing that during the golf course debate they had a original land and water conservation agreement with the US Forest Service. Councilor Gilbert informed them during the golf course attempt. There is so much more John Ramos. But you have the general idea.

Reading this 3 years later and nothing has changed!!
The black hole continues and the option that volunteer board came up with was to invest 28 million into SM.
Fifteen years ago (ish) Donny and council approved almost 300 thousand for a company to evaluate the city and there conclusion, number 1 on the list, was, DO NOT rely on tourism as your main source of income!!

Almost 1.5 million into a boat, makes 200 thousand a year!
About 300 thousand a year for the fish tank!
The Zoo received (a few years back) 2 million from the city and matched 2 million from the state!
Then we have Spirit Mountain!! The past few years have been 700 thousand-ish!
If the city was a business, it would be bankrupt!!
Lease out this “attraction” to outside companies and possibly break even!!

Can’t wait for the bullet train to swoop in and cost the Minnesota taxpayers APPROXIMATELY 6 million a year!!!

“How Duluth Was Sold…” goes back much earlier than this report covers.

There was one idea behind all of these projects:

A) Dividing the Chamber of Commerce by creating the Visitors and Convention Bureau;
B) Implementing the hotel and restaurant tax;
C) Building the Arena-Auditorium, Spirit Mountain, Great Lakes Aquarium, DECC and Amsoil Arena;
D) Deeding the old Sears store to the tribe for use as a casino; and
E) Converting the historic Depot to a museum and public art space.

The overarching idea being “sold” was a series of projects to help Duluth become a financially successful year-around tourism and convention destination. Which is what happened. During the 1960s and 1970s, none of the projects listed were easy goals to sell, but they all were successfully sold to the majority of citizens and government leaders. Some of the projects have been more successful than others, but the overall goal was achieved, and the community became transformed into a desirable year-around visitor destination.

What prevents Spirit Mountain from being sold now is a bunch of convoluted underlying legal stuff which was necessary to create the facility, and which apparently is impossibly difficult to unwind. Otherwise, my guess is it would have been attractive to private equity and sold off decades ago.