TOWER—The newly-seated city council here left several contentious topics on the table Monday night, but managed to make it through a shortened agenda in a meeting that alternated between temperate and testy.

The council, after some discussion, voted 3-2 against holding a closed session to consider an unspecified complaint against an unidentified employee. City Clerk-Treasurer Linda Keith had included the closed session on the agenda, but new mayor Orlyn Kringstad asked if Keith had the approval of at least two members of the council to add the item.

Kringstad said he had not been given any information by the city clerk regarding the issue, despite requests for information. “For the councilors to do the job, they need to be well informed. I want to be sure that all of the councilors are well informed before they come to the meeting,” he said. Kringstad twice asked whether the subject of the complaint was a city employee and whether the individual had been notified of the complaint. “Asked and answered,” said Keith, who indicated it was an employee but did not indicate whether the individual had been notified.

Council member Kevin Fitton said he had been handling the issue for “about a week” and would only discuss the details in closed session.

In fact, it appears that Fitton’s attempt to close the meeting under the circumstances were contrary to state law, which requires that individuals against whom a public body is considering charges or allegations be informed of the meeting and subject matter in advance and be allowed to request it be held in public.

After it became clear that no other council member had asked to add the closed meeting to the agenda, Councilor Brooke Anderson offered to support the call, but council member Steve Abrahamson said the process appeared highly irregular based on his past experience as long-time mayor of the city. He also questioned Fitton and Keith on their claim that they were acting on advice of the city attorney, especially since they had no documentation of their conversation. “I would always get every opinion in writing,” Abrahamson said. “Otherwise, it’s hearsay.”

The previous council faced a similar issue late last year when it now appears Keith misled the council about a conversation she claimed to have had with attorney Chris Virta, who she said had told her that a tax abatement plan for the town home project was illegal because state law limited interest rates to the prime rate, plus two percent. The Timberjay has since confirmed that Minnesota law puts no such limit on interest rates on city indebtedness and Keith has since tried to modify her original claims.

When Kringstad called the question on Monday night, Anderson and Fitton voted for the closed session, while Abrahamson, Kringstad, and new council member Rachel Beldo voted no. Councilors tentatively discussed setting a special meeting for Jan. 17, but no formal date was set as of press time. The city council will actually hold two special meetings, both in closed session, to hear the unspecified complaint discussed by Fitton as well as a second complaint that has been made against Keith.

The council then voted to postpone addressing several other topics from the agenda, including the city’s annual reorganization, city administrative guidelines, city website and technical support issues, and a city hall access policy— an item requested by Kringstad in response to Keith’s decision to deny Kringstad a key to city hall. Kringstad had campaigned, in part, on his intent to maintain office hours and be available for members of the public to meet at other times in his office, but Keith is seeking to restrict his access.

According to Abrahamson, he had keys to city hall during his entire tenure as mayor, as did at least some members of the council.

In other business, Timberjay publisher Marshall Helmberger, under public input, responded to a vitriolic attack against him by Keith at the city’s Dec. 19 council meeting. Keith, at the time, accused Helmberger of falsely stating in a private email to Fitton that a set of TEDA loan guidelines that Keith had provided to the city council in recent packets was not the version approved by TEDA in 2017, when Helmberger was chair of the group. TEDA adopted guidelines as part of a $125,000 grant from the IRRRB to provide funds to Tower Harbor Shores and Tower Vision 2025, which were working to build town homes at the harbor at the city’s request.

At issue was the final provision in the guidelines presented by Keith, which called for disbursing the loan funding based on 50 percent of paid invoices submitted by the project developers. It was a provision that Keith had pushed TEDA to adopt, but the TEDA board had resisted. Helmberger presented the council with his original email to Fitton and supporting documentation, including minutes, a monthly TEDA report from the time and a copy of the Hibbing EDA guidelines, upon which the original TEDA guidelines were based, and which did not include the 50-percent disbursement policy that Keith had sought.

Keith, in her angry presentation last month, called Helmberger “a bitter old newspaper reporter” even though his concerns on the issue were never reported in the newspaper prior to her outburst. Keith dramatically presented nearly a dozen “exhibits” which she said proved that TEDA had approved the policy. She also claimed that the provision in question had been adopted by several other communities in Minnesota, but that claim proved to be false on review of loan guidelines from the communities she cited, none of which included the disbursement policy she claimed they did. Helmberger provided copies of those guidelines to the council on Monday.

Helmberger noted the IRRRB officials had indicated they supported 100-percent payout on invoices presented by the town home developers and challenged Keith’s claims. Keith had also claimed back in December that the developers had failed to provide additional invoices that were necessary to close out the grant from the IRRRB, but IRRRB officials confirmed to the Timberjay that the grant was fully paid to the city and closed out in August of 2017. Grant coordinator Chris Ismil noted last month in a Timberjay interview that the grant could not have been paid in full without all the required paperwork in place.

Councilor Fitton responded immediately to Helmberger’s input, accusing him of acting unprofessionally for “shouting” at a council member following an unspecified meeting and for calling him on his personal cell phone to ask questions about city matters. “I’m not your puppet on the council,” Fitton said.

Fitton also took issue with Timberjay editor Jodi Summit for trying to set up a meeting to discuss potentially defamatory comments made by Ambulance Director Steve Altenburg against the Timberjay, which Fitton claimed he was looking into.

He said he told Summit, who is board chair at the Vermilion Country School, where Fitton serves as administrator and instructor, that he would file a complaint if Summit ever raised city business or asked questions about city matters again. “It puts me in an impossible position because I have to say ‘no’ to my boss now about questions regarding things going on at the city.”

Fitton had expressed no such concerns, however, when he voted to appoint two of his direct subordinates from Vermilion Country School to the city’s planning and zoning commission, a commission that includes Fitton, raising questions about the ability of those two members, Morgen Carlon and Jolene Herberg, to vote independently of Fitton on the five-member board.

Fitton continued on for several minutes, questioning whether the TEDA grant was actually closed out because the IRRRB’s website still listed it as “active”. Helmberger said it would hardly be unusual for a state website to not be updated in a timely manner and told him to call the IRRRB for himself. He then offered to talk to Fitton about it after the meeting in an effort to get the council back on track.

Kringstad, at that point, cut Fitton off and suggested that discussions on the question would best be addressed outside of a council meeting. “I would like to see these things get resolved because we have so many things we need to do to productively grow the city,” he said.

But the issue wasn’t settled as Tony Sikora, of Soudan, interjected his own views on the matter, attacking Mayor Kringstad for his connection with the loan. “You ask how we can resolve this thing?” he said angrily. “It’d be real easy. Get your checkbook out and write the city of Tower a $125,000 check. This issue won’t go away until every dime of that money is paid back.”

Sikora claimed that the loan has been in default for half a year, and that the city council had granted interest-only payments on the loan only through June of 2018.

Kringstad reacted calmly to Sikora’s accusations, explaining that repayment of the loan was always supposed to coincide with the start of construction on the town home project, since that’s when the project would be able to access its bank financing, which will be based on signed purchase agreements. Kringstad said he is no longer involved in the project but understood that repayment of principal from the loan would commence once the project is underway.

Sikora had earlier taken issue with another comment by Kringstad, which indicated that Sikora was representing the Tower News. Sikora said he didn’t work for the newspaper but only submitted letters [to the editor] or correspondence to the paper, which the publisher chooses to portray as actual news coverage. Sikora has made similar claims in the past when criticized for inaccurate or opinionated statements in his various “letters,” implying that he doesn’t have the same obligation as an actual reporter to maintain a level of objectivity.

In other public input, Richard Hanson informed the council that a visioning session for a Blandin broadband initiative for Tower would be held at the former American Legion building on Main Street on Feb. 13. He said the group spearheading the work is planning to apply for a $70,000 grant to develop a broadband project in Tower and is looking for public input or ideas on the topic.

Most other business before the council was routine. In other action, the council:

 Accepted a letter from the Department of Health showing test results for haloacetic acids and trihalomethane were within current standards.

 Approved two pay estimates for Lenci Enterprises for work on the new TEDA industrial building. They were for $203,300 for building work and $7,600 for site work.

 Approved a pay estimate from TNT Aggregate totaling $86,757 for work on the Lake Vermilion Cultural Center. The city is serving as fiscal agent for the project and is expending grant funds obtained by the center.

Approved a motion to rescind automatic mutual aid with Breitung and Greenwood townships. The local fire departments will still be automatically paged for structure fires and will be available for mutual aid whenever necessary.

 Approved a resolution to transfer city land in the industrial park where the new industrial building is being constructed to TEDA, which will own and manage the site.

 Approved a pay estimate of $17,730 from Neo Electrical Solutions for ongoing work at the city airport.

 Granted approval for the city to expend $1,000 to advance a transfer of a small piece of land owned by Vermilion Housing to the Cemetery Association. Keith told the council that a small storage building long owned and used by the association is actually on property owned by Vermilion Housing, which has offered to sell the land in question for $2,000.

 Granted Keith authorization to have a parcel of city land examined by SEH for possible use as a disc golf course. A company, Prodigy Disc, has proposed the creation of a disc golf course at a cost of $17,729 for 18 holes and $9,472 for nine holes.

 Accepted the low bid from the Tower News for the city’s official newspaper for 2019.

 Accepted several resignations from the city’s ambulance service, including Bob Dale, Jesse Gornick, Brylie Landfried, Kim Mattila, and Andrea Suikhonen. Dale also submitted his resignation from the city’s fire department.