Woot woot! Mayor Swanson promoted Swanson businesses 50 times on Facebook

Good evening Mr. Ramos,

I am humbly awaiting an interesting article. It seems your continuous return to the well is beginning to dry up. At this point, your reporting has become petty speculation and rumor. What will you do when the well is completely dry? Continue to attack Duluth politics at a pace of 5 articles per year? At this point, you may want to thank the Swanson family for visits to your pedantic diatribes. Your reporting is tedious and meaningless, filled with wasted effort to attain nothing but click bait. Good luck in your future endeavors. Hopefully they are more fruitful than the Duluth Moniturd.

I have zero problem with your reporting. Mayor Swanson is a complete sham and for some reason everyone goes along with his ideas–sorry, I mean visions, LOL. Go ahead and ask him, but you probably won’t have to, as he is quick to point that out, over and over and over. Hate to break it to you, Mayor, but when you have to keep beating the visionary drum, odds are you are not the genius visionary your mind makes you out to be. In fact, a modern-day snake-oil salesman is much more fitting.

I cannot wait for Two Harbors to be freed from the tremendous amount of misinformation, lies, back room deals and the like.

The mayor stated: “I have been getting a lot of curiosity questions from folks wondering what I am doing with Garage Starts here in Two Harbors.” The author comments: “The mayor failed to mention that he owned Garage Starts.”

Huh. “What I am doing with,” etc., implies that it is his.

When you advertise for a city, you try to include highlights of what the city has to offer. If that is yours, then so be it. But that is not an issue, in my mind.

In contrast, a deep dive in the DNT (or Monitor) archives won’t find any articles discussing the conflict of interest in Duluth Mayor Emily Larson’s husband’s architecture firm being given the Steve O’Neil Apartment building project while she sat on the Duluth City Council – nor was any noise made about her employer CHUM being given the management contract to the project.

Fair enough. I can’t speak for the DNT, but one reason you won’t find a story on it in the Monitor is that I didn’t find enough evidence to support a story. As far as I was able to determine, Councilor Larson abstained on every vote pertaining to the Steve O’Neill Apartment project. Legally, that’s all that’s required to insulate somebody from a conflict-of-interest charge.

This is not an unusual situation in Duluth, or in any city. Members of the Planning Commission bring forward their own projects to the Planning Commission, then abstain from voting. Ditto with DEDA members. Ditto with city councilors. I’m not sure if they’re required to disclose what the conflict is when they abstain, but in almost all cases, they do offer a brief explanation of the conflict. I don’t necessarily agree with that process, but it’s legal.

As for the CHUM management contract, I seem to recall that Mayor Larson wasn’t employed by CHUM at the time the contract was awarded. Somebody was really on my case about it back then (maybe it was you), so I looked into it. One can certainly make the ethical case that, whether Larson was employed by CHUM or not, they were all her buddies, but, again, that’s not illegal.

In my humble opinion, Mayor Swanson’s behavior is several degrees beyond what one might term “standard” or “institutional” conflicts. He is by far the most concerning public official I’ve ever reported on, in terms of conflicts of interest, and I keep uncovering new stories, so I keep reporting. Now that he’s suing me for defamation, I have an added incentive.

In many ways, it’s a relief to focus on something other than Duluth, which I’ve covered for more than 20 years. I am well aware that there’s a cozy little group of power brokers in Duluth who have cozy little business relationships with one another. I hate it. And I don’t soft-pedal it. There’s a project like that underway right now, across Grand Avenue from Spirit Mountain, which is being built by a small group of the mayor’s good buddies—and which the mayor took very controversial actions to support, in 2018.

I covered that story for the Reader. You can read that two-part expose here. Anybody who considers me a Larson apologist is misinformed.