Duluth

Recent headlines out of Duluth haven’t been pretty — except when they’ve been over pictures of the Tiffany window that the city may auction off to get out of a $6.5 million budget hole. City officials’ efforts to sell off another public asset — parkland along picturesque Park Point — puts Duluth in the same league as one of the Twin Cities metro area’s tiniest towns: little Lilydale, Minn.

They don’t call it the Lakewalk for nothing. Duluth residents told their city council last night they want an extension of the city’s walking/running/biking trail to actually follow the shore of Lake Superior. Earlier, a city planner proposed an alternative that would have detoured the path behind the Beacon Point condos, whose residents feel a [...]

In the news again: A controversial transmission line project that will carry electricity into Minnesota from a new coal-burning power plant beyond our border. I’m not talking about Big Stone II, but rather Arrowhead-Weston, a 220-mile, 800-megawatt transmission line connecting Duluth with Wausau, Wis. Project managers flipped the switch on Tuesday, powering up the line [...]

More on Spring: A followup to the story about Duluth meteorologist Karl Spring calling Al Gore a “left wing nut”: Public radio’s KUWS has posted the audio from the October 12 conversation [mp3] on the show Final Edition. In it, Spring also calls the American vice presidency “a job no one wants to have,” says [...]

Duluth meteorologist calls Gore a “left-wing nut.” As a scientist, you might think Karl Spring would have an informed opinion on Al Gore’s work on climate change. He’s got opinions, but they don’t come from watching the Nobel Peace Prize winner’s film “An Inconvenient Truth.” In a discussion about global warming on Wisconsin Public Radio’s [...]

Sister Helen Prejean of Dead Man Walking fame was uninvited as keynote speaker of a Diocese of Duluth education dinner in October because she was a signatory in an ad calling for the removal of George W. Bush, but not for reasons you’d think.