Tag Archives: renee van nett

In Memoriam: Renee Van Nett

As I got to know Renee Van Nett, I learned the important thing was to listen. She didn’t need my advice, nor to hear my convoluted backstory, at least not unless she wanted to. I was there to learn from her. She had seen things that I never would, had opinions formed in ways that my life would never allow me to do, and through that journey she had become a force.

Renee was a fiercely independent woman. She hid her past pain and suffering from the world, even as she was open and welcoming to others who had endured struggles. Few knew how much she had already been through, how she’d learned to live a life on borrowed time. She never wanted her story to be about her, and always built it around what she stood for, and the often unseen people she sought to lift up.

She accepted political advice but did things her way regardless, her campaign operations lean efforts that relied on a few key allies and her own force of will. A narrow defeat in her first run for office did nothing to dissuade her, and she twice won a Duluth City Council seat over opposition that wasn’t afraid to take serious swings at her. She governed from the heart, building fierce loyalties that led her on one quixotic final campaign to primary a sitting state senator. Her moves unnerved some when she dared to stray from the progressive orthodoxy that some white Duluth liberals apparently expected out of a Native woman, and at times exasperated even those of us who considered her an ally, too. But we knew that this was what made Renee such a genuine politician, such a person who could take a complex collection of facts before her and form an unflinching belief that only made sense from where she was. She was no one’s pawn, nor was anyone Renee’s pawn. She moved through the world with an authenticity of self whose rarity belies the term’s use.

As I came to know Renee, I took that authenticity as a model for how to move through the world, a lesson all the more compelling when it came from a woman who ventured into realms that were far from what she’d known. It was exemplary. I am a better person for having known her, and I trust that her daughters will know they always have supports who are there for them; may they learn to channel their mother’s strength in their own endeavors.

Renee’s death came far too suddenly, a far too abruptly for a life still bursting with potential. But the vagaries of time and life have no heed for such untapped wells, and it is up to the rest of us to find something in what has been lost and turn it into a beginning once again. Her passing is another reminder to never waste one more precious moment.

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Halfhearted Election Reflection 2021

Duluth had some municipal elections this week, and while I mostly lurked in the shadows this cycle, I feel compelled to offer up my usual closing thoughts. When compared to the national-level barometers in some sates and weighty ballot measures down south in Minneapolis, Duluth seemed decidedly sleepy this cycle. The two school board races for three open seats were predictable from the moment the filing deadline passed, with the only opposition to the labor/DFL bloc coming from two very familiar faces. Against that backdrop Loren Martell actually had a passable performance, pulling in over 4,000 votes, but the race was never really in doubt.

The District Two council race was a bloodbath. Mike Mayou, who fell short in the at-large race two years ago, had little trouble cleaning up against a fairly invisible campaign from Dave Zbaracki. Mayou won big everywhere, and now assumes the mantel of the retiring Joel Sipress, who has been the voice of the council’s leftward wing for the better part of a decade.

In District Four, on the other hand, things got a bit more interesting, as incumbent Renee Van Nett scraped out a win against Howie Hanson, whom she had herself unseated four years ago. Hanson’s campaign was consistent in its messaging, if nothing else, seeking to paint Van Nett as a tax-raising rubber-stamper of mayor Emily Larson’s agenda. This is an odd characterization of Van Nett, who is one of the more heterodox and interesting people in local politics, but Howie is, well, Howie, and his message had some resonance in the city’s most conservative district. (Remember when the guy first ran some years ago as a lockstep ally of Don Ness?) As was the case four years ago, Hanson carried the day in the Piedmont and Duluth Heights precincts, while Van Nett ran away with the three in Lincoln Park, which gave her enough of a margin.

The most interesting race (and the only one worthy of mapping) was the competition for the two open at-large seats, which became a three-way race when one of the people who advanced from the primary, Tim Meyer, withdrew from the race. (He still got over 1,000 votes. Not a bad showing, really.) Here, things broke as one might expect in a three-way race: the center-left figure nearest the center of Duluth politics, Terese Tomanek, coasted to victory. Like many winning coalitions in citywide politics, the east side was her base of support. Azrin Awal, meanwhile, was fueled by a strong personal story and DFL institutional power in a DFL city. She ran comfortably into the second seat despite winning only a handful of precincts around UMD and on the lower East Hillside, in neighborhoods often dominated by younger voters. Further to the right, Joe Macor seemed to try to run with the Derek Medved playbook, but he is not the singular figure Medved was two years ago when he ran up unprecedented margins in west side precincts. He still won much of the west side, but finished in a firm third place, and is now 0-for-2 in local elections. We’ll see if the Duluth right finds a new standard-bearer after this inability to break through.

2021 at-large race. Blue: Terese Tomanek; Red: Joe Macor; Green: Azrin Awal

This map is, somehow, nearly a carbon copy of the one from two years ago. Tomanek won pretty much every precinct that Arik Forsman won in 2019, plus the two that Noah Hobbs carried. All of the seats that Awal won were won by Mayou in his losing campaign two years ago. And Macor’s map pretty much maps on to Medved’s. The exceptions: Tomanek won two additional precincts, including 29 in the Denfeld area (won by Medved in 2019) and 15 on the upper hillside (won by Mayou), while Macor won one (23 in the upper Heights) that Forsman won in 2021. But yet, despite basically the same map, the actual results are very different, with the rightward-leaning figure dropping from first to a somewhat distant third, the center-left figure rising from second to first, and the leftward figure going from fourth to second. It goes to show what a unicorn Medved was, and also how a race with only two left-ish candidates (instead of the three in 2019) is pretty much a foregone conclusion.

Functionally, I’m not sure this changes things dramatically. Replacing the retiring Zack Filopovich with Awal does move things leftward; her successful and money-flush campaign showed how the DFL has gravitated that way, which is a statewide and national trend, and will certainly be a factor in coming elections. On the flip side, the firmly progressive bloc of the council no longer has Sipress as its commanding presence, and it will be interesting to see how the newcomers, Mayou and Awal, position themselves vis-a-vis figures like Mayor Larson or even councilor Janet Kennedy, who are no one’s real idea of moderates but also not exactly in lockstep with progressive movement politics, either. The center of the council is blurrier than it has been in recent years, which opens up some interesting potential arrangements and makes being able to whip the votes a valuable skill. The mayor herself also has a looming decision on a run at a potential third term, and we also await the results of a redistricting process, which is unlikely to bring major change but could alter some things at the margins. There will be no shortage of intrigue in the coming years.

Duluth Election Dissection 2017

Another year at the polls has come and gone. Now, as is my wont, I’ll play Monday morning (Wednesday evening?) quarterback for the campaigns. Sadly, I no longer have easy GIS access (unless I have any volunteer GIS slaves out there?), so I won’t have pretty maps like I did two years ago, and will spare my readers the Microsoft Paint maps I made four years ago. You’ll just have to make do with some descriptions of the precinct-by-precinct results.

It was a fairly predictable night in city council politics, as is generally the case. The school board, meanwhile, saw a more dramatic change in direction. Voter turnout was low, even for a non-mayoral off year election. Rates ranged from about 40 percent on the east side to less than 20 percent in a handful of downtown and west side precincts, for a city-wide total of 27.9 percent.

Council Stability Continues

In the at-large city council races, the two incumbents, Zack Filipovich and Barb Russ, carried the day. The end results mirrored the primary. Filipovich’s ground game and ability to lock up labor support separated him from the pack, and he ran comfortably ahead of the field. Russ was the candidate among the four least likely to inspire strong emotions; while the other three all had their ardent supporters and vocal critics, everyone seemed more or less fine with Barb Russ, and that was enough to edge her past the two challengers, Janet Kennedy and Rich Updegrove. The end result was a vote for continuity, and for two incumbents who may not inspire the activist base of the Duluth left, but are certainly acceptable to most of them and know the ins and outs of local politics.

Kennedy had a core committed supporters, and while there were some strong symbolic acts associated with it, as in her trek from one end of the city to the other, that attention was largely limited to a core of high information voters, and I never got the sense that she generated attention beyond that outside of a couple of core neighborhoods. (For example, I received multiple leaflets from every other candidate on my ballot, but never saw a thing from the Kennedy campaign.) Updegrove generated some strong early momentum, but in the end his campaign didn’t seem to move past generic talking points associated with the leftward wing of the Democratic Party, and while that platform will do reasonably well in Duluth, it isn’t at a point where it will win, either. For me, at least, this was a noticeable juxtaposition with the likes of Russ, who was deep in the weeds on housing policy specific to Duluth. Following the lead of her ally Filipovich, she did the necessary retail politics to pull out the election.

In the Second District, Joel Sipress cruised to re-election over political newcomer Ryan Sistad. It’s possible for a 23-year-old to run a successful campaign—see Filipovich’s effort four years ago—but Sistad didn’t have anywhere near that level of polish. While Sipress’s politics may not be all that different from those of an Updegrove, he has a keen knowledge of how to play the political game, focusing on neighborhood issues and emphasizing his service to a district in a way that other staunch members of the left do not. They have something to learn from him, though the caliber of one’s opponents also makes a difference.

Finally, in the Fourth District, Renee Van Nett eked out a win over incumbent Howie Hanson. As the most suburban district in the city, the Fourth is fertile ground for the fiscally conservative platform Hanson ran on; frankly, I think anyone else running on Hanson’s issues in this district probably would have won. But Hanson is a recent adopter of many of these issues, and anyone who has watched him in action knew that he (to put it politely) wasn’t always the smoothest ambassador for his positions. Van Nett brings some newfound diversity to the Council (two out of its nine members are now at least part Native American), and with her emphasis on building consensus and cooperation instead of hard policy stands, she’s one of the more blank slates to enter the council in recent years.

The geography of the votes was also fairly predictable. Filipovich won most of the precincts, while Kennedy collected a handful downtown and on the hillsides, plus Irving out west. Upedgrove led on the UMD campus, which is often an outlier, while Russ didn’t win one. Filipovich and Russ, whose vote totals tended to move in concert, did their best on the east and west ends of the city, and also cleaned up in Piedmont and Duluth Heights, where they likely benefited from not having anyone to their right and were likely considered the least bad options by Duluth’s more conservative neighborhoods. Kennedy’s strength of support was in the center of the city, though she also did passably well on the west side. Updegrove, in contrast, was at his best on the east side but ran poorly on the west side, which was probably his undoing.

In the Second District, Sipress cleaned up pretty much everywhere, with Kenwood being the only precinct in which he was (slightly) under 60 percent. Predictably, Howie Hanson did his best work in Duluth Heights and Piedmont in the Fourth District, while Van Nett owned Lincoln Park. She rolled up her margins in those lower-income precincts down the hill, and stayed competitive enough in Piedmont and the Heights to take down Hanson.

In the end, the results here are pretty clear. While this election removed one of the two semi-conservative councilors in Howie Hanson (if one could even call him that), it also rejected a move further left in the at-large races, in effect staying the course. There was perhaps a slight leftward drift given Van Nett’s breakthrough and the failure of the conservatives to get a candidate to the final four in the at-large race, but there are enough asterisks with Hanson that I don’t think the end result signals any sort of sea change in Duluth politics.

The Great School Board Slaughter of 2017

There’s no real way to spin this one: the 2017 school board elections were a decisive mandate for the DFL-backed candidates, the current district administration, and the present direction of the Board.

The slaughter was most extreme in the two district races. In the First District, Rosie Loeffler-Kemp, the incumbent perhaps most strongly aligned with the district administration, had no trouble dispatching of Kurt Kuehn. But even more eye-opening was Jill Lofald’s demolition of two-term incumbent Art Johnston in the Fourth District. Johnston has withstood intense opposition before, but this time he suffered a 15-point loss. Things were somewhat tighter in the at-large race, but Sally Trnka and Josh Gorham still comfortably outpaced incumbent Harry Welty and newcomer Dana Krivogorsky.

Heading into Election Day, I wasn’t sure if running as a unified ticket with Welty and Johnston, who have their supporters but also their share of baggage, would help or hurt Krivogorsky and Kuehn. In 20/20 hindsight, it’s hard not to see it as a mistake, as Krivogorsky’s careful attention to finance charts seemed to get lost in her association with the other campaigns. Ten years after the Red Plan became reality, beating that same old drum has exhausted Duluth voters. Longtime readers will know I think Johnston and Welty have raised important points over the years, but the rhetoric here has become so repetitive and so personal that I can see how even many who are not thrilled with the nonstop positivity of the DFL candidates would sour on the same old act. Johnston seemed tired, Welty’s blog posts degenerated into a lot more snipping at opponents, and Loren Martell’s columns in the Reader lately might have come out of a Loren Martell Column Generator. Casting protest votes that never achieve anything concrete gets old after a while, and I’ve long maintained that when the focus is more on the candidates themselves than the causes they represent, it’s probably a sign that their time has come and gone. This district needs newer, more constructive critics of the board’s recent direction.

This victory may prove short-lived for the new, completely post-Red Plan school board. Budgetary issues loom large, and unsold buildings still sit vacant. ISD 709 can’t afford many more cuts. The pessimistic case would say that these new, ever-so-positive board members are naively barreling into a future they are ill-equipped to handle. The optimistic case holds that removing the old Red Plan warriors may be a healthy thing: instead of assuming the same old battle lines, perhaps we can now have more open and honest debates on the issues in front of the board. It’s possible to be critical without being abrasive, as Alanna Oswald has shown us, and some clearer air could do everyone some good. Perchance to dream.

The precinct results still reveal some measure of the old east-west divide in Duluth school politics: the combined total for Trnka and Gorham cleared 60 percent in nearly every east side precinct, while the totals were much closer on the west. Still, Welty and Krivogorsky only combined for the majority in three precincts in the city: the two in Duluth Heights and in Irving, which is traditionally the most anti-Red Plan in the city proper. Normanna and North Star Townships, which they also carried, are similarly on the far fringe of that issue. Factoring in Johnston’s defeat, the east-west divide was actually less pronounced in 2017 than it has been in recent years: Lofald’s win was so thorough that Johnston was only within ten percentage points of her in Irving. Meanwhile, in the First District, Loeffler-Kemp swept the deck in the Duluth precincts in the First District, and Kuehn was fairly competitive only in the low-vote townships and Rice Lake.

Street Tax Success

Duluth voters voiced their support for a sales tax dedicated to street repairs by a margin of over three to one. This was the clear message I expected them to send, but by an even more decisive margin than I might have guessed. No one much likes it, but we have to take our pills, and frustration with potholes seems to unite Duluthians regardless of their political leanings. Another tax increase isn’t the easiest thing to swallow, particularly for voters on fixed incomes—I can only hope that the other shoe doesn’t drop when it comes to a future school board levy—but with a clear need and overwhelming popular support, mayor Emily Larson has the vote of endorsement she needs to move this through the state legislature.

Side Notes

I’ll end with a special shoutout to Jono Cowgill, the new District Four representative on the Minneapolis Parks Board. The MURP Class of 2016 is doing big things. Who’s next?

Duluth Primary Election Results, 2015

The results are in! I offer my decidedly un-expert opinion on all of them below. Here are my previous comments on the field.

In each race, the top two candidates advance to the general election. I list percentages followed by actual vote total.

Mayor

Emily Larson 67.32 (5,456)

Chuck Horton 18.57 (1,505)

Howie Hanson 9.03 (732)

James Mattson 2.18 (177)

John Socha 1.37 (111)

John Howard Evans .63 (51)

Thomas Cooper .56 (45)

Robert Schieve .33 (27)

We’ll start with the most predictable of all the races, where Emily Larson steamrolled a field with a lot of bodies but very little in the way of actual competition. Anyone who might have been a remote threat to her stood aside, and for all the people involved, there has been very little in the way of genuine debate or serious alternative visions for the future of Duluth. Don Ness’s heir apparent should sail on to another victory in November.

Her opponent in the general election is Chuck Horton, whom I considered the most interesting of the bunch. He’s a bit scattershot and perhaps a little paranoid, but he speaks strongly on issues that others don’t, and is a fairly accurate spokesman for a small but significant slice of the Duluth electorate. Howie Hanson, the only other household name here, came in a distant third. Vague and sporadically directed bluster, it turns out, is not a solid campaign strategy. No one else had much of a prayer of making a name for himself.

City Council District 5

Jay Fosle (I) 56.08 (945)

Janet Kennedy 39.82 (671)

Allan Beaulier 2.61 (44)

Derrick Ellis 1.48 (25)

There are six Council seats up for grabs in the election this fall, but only one required a primary, and I’d suspect it’s also the only one with a realistic chance of shaking up the Council’s political composition. With tonight’s results, however, even that may be a long shot. Incumbent Jay Fosle, the often cantankerous west side conservative, put up a very solid primary showing. He has a well-honed feel for that populist vein that Horton nursed into a spot in the mayoral general election, and his district is in the part of the city most receptive to that message. He’s a very genuine representative of west side political sentiment, and is now in line for a third term. Janet Kennedy has the potential to be a strong opponent, but her campaign will need to pick up considerable ground to overcome a 16-point gap. The other two people in this primary put up negligible vote totals, so she can’t just poach their supporters; instead, she’ll have to turn out the vote and probably convince a few Fosle supporters. It will be an uphill battle.

School Board At-Large

Renee Van Nett 44.70 (3,351)

Alanna Oswald 32.51 (2,437)

Jim Unden 22.79 (1,708)

All three candidates for this open seat had respectable showings here, with Renee Van Nett, the candidate endorsed by the establishment, as the current frontrunner. Still, it’s not impossible to see a path to victory for Alanna Oswald, and if she can pick up the Unden votes and turn out more people in November, it could be a very tight race. This election, which I’ve discussed here, could well swing the composition of the school board.

School Board District 2

David Kirby 56.85 (1,044)

Charles Obije 25.90 (461)

Jane Hammerstrom Hoffman 15.45 (275)

Kirby, another establishment-endorsed candidate, doubled up the opposition in this district, and looks fairly safe to win a seat on the Board. This is the district in the city most likely to support public education at any cost, and was always going to be the most difficult of the three races for anyone outside of the Board majority’s consensus to make any headway. Objie now faces long odds here.

Big picture school board notes: I’d break down the six remaining candidates (including the two in District 3, Nora Sandstad and Loren Martell) into three categories. I see one, Martell, as a likely ally for the current minority of Harry Welty and Art Johnston. Two, Van Nett and Kirby, seem to have little interest in talking to Welty or Johnston and are thus likely allies for the current majority. Three—Sandstad, Oswald, and Obije—are trying to stake out the middle ground. If the primary results hold in the general election, the current majority will retain at least four seats, and we can expect more of the same, albeit with maybe a little less margin for error: the majority imposes its will while the minority makes a lot of angry noise. This strikes me as the most likely outcome, and not a terribly desirable one for anyone who wants to see any change in the tenor of the board.

Things get more interesting if either Obije or Oswald—more likely Oswald—can turn around the primary results. An Oswald win would give the minority a path to electoral victory, albeit far from a guaranteed one, and might force the board members into genuine debate and recognition that they can’t simply fall back on their past positions if they want to get anything done. Yes, there’s a risk that this could encourage yet more infighting, but given the track record of the past few years, I’d be willing to take that chance. On to November.

How Duluth Defines ‘Divisive’

Harry Welty is upset. This in itself is not really news, but this time around, it’s for a new reason. The candidate he favors in the at-large race for an open seat on the ISD 709 School Board, Alanna Oswald, was the subject of a withering dismissal in the Duluth News-Tribune’s primary election endorsements. Oswald’s involvement with the district “can leave voters concerned about adding another member to the School Board concerned with exploiting problems rather than solving them and with being divisive rather than cooperative.”

I always read Harry with a grain of salt, so I watched the video of Oswald’s interview with the DNT to see if it was an accurate assessment. If this is the editorial board’s idea of divisiveness, I shudder to think of what would happen if its members were ever to actually meet a divisive person. I wouldn’t say we agree on everything, but she seems like an eminently reasonable west side lifer with admirable commitment to achieving results in education. Her take on Art Johnston—guy with an obnoxious tone with whom she sometimes disagrees, yet sometimes has good ideas that the rest of the Board ignores because they come from Art Johnston—couldn’t be more accurate. It’s the least divisive, most balanced view you’ll hear about Johnston from anyone in the world of ISD 709 (in public, anyway).

Otherwise, she paints herself as an advocate for parents. I hang out with hockey parents, so I can understand being leery of empowering parents who might then start hounding teachers unreasonably, claiming they ‘bully’ their children for having standards or holding them accountable for failings that are much closer to home. However, I doubt Oswald has any of my favorite east side helicopter parents in mind when she talks about giving parents a voice. She’s talking about teaching parents who don’t know the landscape or the language of education the skills to become engaged in their children’s school lives. This should be something that everyone in this race agrees is worthwhile. Beyond that, we’re left with some real, but hardly confrontational, demands for accountability from the Board and administration. Reasonable debate has apparently become a sin.

With comments like the ones about Oswald, the DNT board will only perpetuate the ongoing travesty that is the ISD 709 Board: a group that mistakes imposed conformity for consensus, and fails to find nuance in the views of its political rivals. By tossing someone like Oswald under the bus, the editorial board gives Welty and Johnston all the ammunition they need to keep blasting away and rallying the base. That minority isn’t going away, and voters need to elect candidates who neither define themselves with or against that duo. Oswald isn’t necessarily perfectly neutral either—she obviously some ties to Welty—but if that was a concern for the editorial board, it should have probed a bit more to find out. Guilty until proven innocent, apparently. I fear Oswald’s loose ties to Welty, whose recent silly spat with DNT editorial editor Chuck Frederick probably left him in their doghouse, may cost her the election.

None of this is to cast any aspersions on the candidate the DNT did endorse, Renee Van Nett. Like Oswald, she’s a longtime community activist, and she has an extensive resume working with groups that often struggle in ISD 709. She says all of the right things about the Red Plan being in the past and wanting to move on from that mess. But achieving such neutrality in the current Board would be an incredible feat, and I have my doubts that someone with the clear endorsement of many sitting members of the majority will be able to pull it off.

Whether she likes it or not, Van Nett now has all the endorsements; she is now an appendage of the DFL-backed Duluth political machine. Duluth’s machine is a surreptitious one that doesn’t always know it is a machine, but it is one nonetheless, and it can be a vicious gatekeeper. And lest this sound like an anti-establishment screed, I’m not much of a radical; I can see myself playing the game and operating somewhere within some city’s political machinery someday. But at least I won’t have any illusions about it.

For now, however, it’s hard to believe that an insider can do anything to change the tenor of the ISD 709 Board, which is something that has to happen before anyone can implement any of the noble plans for rescuing the district’s enrollment that candidates of all stripes propose. I submitted my absentee ballot application today. In at least one race, I know who I’m voting for.