Duluth Mayor Roger Reinert focused largely on the key issues he campaigned on during his first State of the City address Thursday night — including adding housing and reviving the city’s downtown. But he also managed to break some news during his more than an hour-long speech at Denfeld High School.

Reinert pledged not to raise property taxes next year. He announced a massive new housing development called Incline Village, which could eventually add up to 1,300 housing units at the site of the former Duluth Central High School, will break ground in June.

And he also revealed that the city has successfully funded its retiree health care obligation, an issue that threatened to bankrupt the city early in former Mayor Don Ness’s tenure in 2009.

Reinert said that will free up $4.5 million annually in the city’s budget beginning next year. He proposed using those funds to build a new combined maintenance facility to replace four existing facilities that are all in need of repair.

Reinert said when he asked city staff what was the one thing that would most move the needle to improve the delivery of core city services, he said the overwhelming response was to build a new maintenance facility.

Reinert acknowledged the move would be as “boring as it gets,” but he argued that “boring is smart, it’s dependable, and it’s steady.”

Reinert, who easily defeated two-term incumbent Mayor Emily Larson in November, focused largely on the five main themes he hammered on during his campaign: increasing housing across all income levels, growing the city’s commercial tax base, repairing and replacing streets, improving the city’s downtown and making property taxes more affordable.

The biggest challenge to adding more housing, Reinert said, is upfront infrastructure costs such as utilities and sidewalks.

“As one builder told me, ‘I can’t get a home to market in Duluth for under $400,000, because I’ve got $100,000 into that home before I even start building it,’” Reinert said.

He proposed exploring bonding to help pay for those upfront costs, to “get them off the developers’ books,” and then have the city get repaid when lots sell.

“It allows us to use public dollars to pay for public infrastructure and to get housing and homes to market at a more affordable price,” Reinert said.

The mayor also said he planned to explore bonding to help pay for street repair, an idea he floated during his campaign. Reinert said that would allow the city to spend more money on maintaining streets and less on rebuilding them.

“It could help us overcome this hill of diminishing returns. But current interest rates make this challenging,” Reinert said, adding he expects to move in that direction when interest rates are more favorable.

In downtown Duluth, Reinert said he has prioritized adding more police patrols to streets and skywalks, and said the city is developing a public awareness campaign to address panhandling.

But he said adding more housing downtown is a core focus, something also pursued by former Mayor Larson. Before the pandemic, about 18,000 people regularly worked in downtown Duluth. City officials estimate only about half of those employees have returned.

Last week, workers broke ground on an apartment high-rise near the new Essentia hospital. Reinert also envisions a new multi-story public building with housing, retail and a new library at the site of the current public library.

“In Minneapolis, their fastest-growing neighborhood is downtown,” Reinert said. “Imagine if that were true in downtown Duluth? More presence, more energy, more restaurants, more retail and more eyes on things.”

Reinert closed by offering a goal of growing Duluth’s population to more than 90,000 people by the year 2030. The city’s population has stubbornly hovered around 86,000 for decades, even as surrounding cities and other regional centers around the state have grown.

It echoes a similar goal forwarded by former Mayor Ness at the start of his second term, to grow Duluth’s population to 90,000 by 2020. That goal proved elusive — in large part, experts say, because of the city’s ongoing housing shortage.

“We’re missing a growth mentality,” Reinert argued. “We must grow. If you’re not growing, you’re stagnant. And if you’re stagnant, you’re declining.”

Collected from Minnesota Public Radio News. View original source here.