In Duluth, where Lake Superior meets the grit of hard work, they say the lift bridge needs $19 million in repairs, the water plant will cost $41 million to fix, and the city’s union workers — who plow the streets and patch the potholes — were
ahead of the new year.
If you listen closely, you can hear the hum of tired infrastructure trying to hold it all together, like an old man groaning as he ties his boots for another day’s work.
More Lift Than Bridge: The Aerial Lift Bridge, that iconic old beast of bolts and cables, needs more than a little TLC. It needs about $19 million worth of work, to be exact. The bridge, built before the Great Depression, is as much a symbol of Duluth as Paul Bunyan is of Bemidji, Minnesota. When the present structure was new, it lifted up and down with the quiet confidence of a gymnast in peak form. Today, it creaks and groans like most centenarians would.
Some are
to pay for the repairs — $5 a car, $1 a pedestrian — but there’s grumbling about that, too. Imagine charging a buck to walk across the bridge with your kids and a dog on a hot July day. Imagine tourists forking over a small ransom for the privilege of leaving Park Point before they boil in their sunburned cars. The complaints would flow like rainwater down the hillside, but the repairs must be done. Duluth can’t survive without its bridge.
Water, Water Everywhere (and $41 Million to Drink): At the same time, the city’s water system, a marvel of mid-20th century engineering, needs $41 million in repairs to meet state and federal standards. Corrosion, staffing shortages, and aging pumps have worn the system thin. The regulators are circling, demanding fixes, while city officials whisper about surcharges that will soon appear on monthly water bills. You won’t notice them at first — just a few bucks here and there — but eventually those little surcharges will add up.
The city assures us the water is still the finest in the state —
— but the pipes that deliver it are older than your grandpa’s pocketknife. No matter how clean the water is, it won’t get to your faucet if the system rusts out.
The Nonprofit Paradox: And here’s the thing, folks. A good chunk of Duluth’s properties are owned by nonprofits — colleges, hospitals, churches, and other places that do good work but don’t pay a cent in property taxes. What does that mean? It means they’re not contributing to the very city services they rely on. The street repairs, the plows clearing snow after a blizzard, the police and firefighters keeping us all safe: those costs all fall on the rest of us. It’s a peculiar kind of paradox, where a property can take up space on a street, draw services from the city, and yet contribute nothing back into the pot.
So when you hear about bridges falling apart and water systems on their last legs, know this: Duluth’s tax base isn’t keeping up with rising expenses. The math doesn’t add up, and unless something changes, the streets will grow potholes big enough to swallow a Buick, and the snowplows might sit idle when the first blizzard blows through.
Which brings us to The Grievance That Could Have Been Avoided: Oh, the grievance. A single grievance arbitration, over words said and unsaid at the East Toolhouse, stretched out like a bad winter. It’s the sort of thing that could’ve been avoided with a dose of common sense and a strong cup of coffee. Instead, it spiraled into investigations, hearings, and arbitration rulings.
Can you imagine what that cost the city in time, productivity, and taxpayer dollars? Lawyers were called, statements were taken, and someone somewhere had to type up all 26 pages of the arbitration decision, one keystroke at a time. While the snowplows idled and the potholes deepened, Duluth burned through hours and dollars it couldn’t afford.
If Duluth is going to survive, it’s going to need its own DOGE, a Director of Good Enough — someone with the wisdom to say, “That bridge repair doesn’t need to be perfect, it just needs to work,” and someone who can step into a room and say, “Let’s fix this grievance now before it costs us more to argue than it does to solve.” The Director of Good Enough won’t get their name on a plaque or have parades thrown in their honor, but they’ll save the city millions in time, money, and frustration.
For now, Duluth carries on. The bridge still rises, the water still flows, and the workers still show up, coffee in hand, to keep the city running. There’s grumbling, sure; there always is when a town has this much to fix. But there’s hope, too. This is Duluth, after all, a city that has seen more winters than it cares to count and has survived every single one.
Somewhere, a kid is dreaming of a new Little League season. Somewhere, a union steward is negotiating with crossed arms and tired eyes. And somewhere in Canal Park, a tourist is snapping a picture of the lift bridge, blissfully unaware of the toll it might one day carry.
Because that’s Duluth: beautiful, stubborn, and a little creaky, but still holding together.
If only just.
John Grandson of Hill City, South Dakota, grew up in Lakewood Township and writes short stories in his retirement. He wrote this exclusively for the News Tribune.