Ely City Council candidates spar at forum

ELY- A crowd of just over sixty turned out at the Vermilion campus’s fine arts theater Sept. 24, to hear from four of the five candidates for the Ely City Council at a forum sponsored by the American Association of University Women and the Ely Rotary Club.
Ely City Council incumbents Paul Kess and Jerome Debeltz were joined by political newcomers Frederica Musgrave and Emily Roose. Candidate and former police chief John Lahtonen did not attend. The candidates are running for three open seats as the terms for both Kess and Debeltz expire at the end of the year. City council member Ryan Callen’s term is also expiring at the end of the year and he isn’t seeking re-election.
The forum was moderated by Lacey Squier, Anna Heil, and Joe Weise. As Weise explained at the beginning of the event, the forum had eight rounds of questions. Each candidate had 90 seconds to answer a different question every round. At the end of a round, the candidates were given 30 seconds to address any of the four questions from that round. In total, the candidates fielded a total of 48 unique questions during the forum.
The candidates
Jerome Debeltz, now retired, has served on the city council for 31 years and he highlighted his volunteer experience and the importance of giving back to the community where he lives. “If you can’t help other people, you really aren’t doing your job.”
Paul Kess sat on the city council for ten years during the 1990s, returning in 2014 after a long hiatus. Kess currently sits on the city’s budget committee and his knowledge of how the city is funded was apparent during the forum. He is retired after teaching at Minnesota North College when it was still Vermilion Community College.
Frederica Musgrave began following Ely’s city politics closely after observing “disturbing behaviors at a planning and zoning meeting,” and opted to get involved in pushing for changes. “I had been door knocking, and people have constantly relayed to me that city hall and the city council are a good old boys club that needs to be changed,” she said. Musgrave, who often describes herself as a former teacher, retired to Ely after working in a variety of fields both in the U.S. and Germany.
Emily Roose, the only candidate under forty, is currently the chair of the Ely Planning and Zoning Commission and a member of the city’s projects committee. Roose moved to her “forever home” in Ely in 2021 and joined planning and zoning shortly afterward. She is currently the chair of the commission and spoke of the changes she has made to make commission meetings more productive. By training, Roose is an accountant, but she currently works as a small business advisor and loan officer at the Entrepreneur Fund. “I want to use my business acumen to build an inclusive and welcoming city government responsive to hearing all voices.”
Themes of the forum
Even though the candidates fielded 48 unique questions, several themes emerged during the forum. The issue of affordable housing came up repeatedly and extended to include short-term rentals and Ely’s blighted properties.
Kess said housing may be Ely’s most important issue. “Filling jobs depends on affordable housing,” he said.
Debeltz attempted to explain the city’s monetary obstacles to building more housing, pointing out that it failed this year to secure state funding for its 37-unit housing project.
“The state gave all its funding to projects in the south of the state,” Debeltz said, adding that he would like to see more senior housing in the city.
Roose stated that in order for Ely to be “open and inviting, Ely needs to have housing for employees.”
Musgrave remarked that she had questions about how the city handled its housing and that “we’re too slow in this city” in dealing with the issue. Kess, Debeltz, and Roose all pushed back on that statement, noting that big projects like housing move at the glacial “speed of government.”
Debeltz was asked if he would raise taxes to address the city’s issues, and he used the questions to circle back toward housing. “We’ve got to have more housing for people to move here, so there’s more people on the tax rolls so we can lower taxes.” He then pointed out that it was imperative to keep a lid on city spending and to aggressively seek out grants, local government aid, and state and federal subsidies as ways to keep taxes down, especially in a community like Ely where the population has a larger proportion of retired people on fixed incomes.
None of the candidates addressed the underlying barrier to funding new public housing in Ely and the rest of the country, namely filling in the funding gap between the cost of building and what financial institutions will lend.
Short-term rentals
All four candidates weighed in on the issue of short-term rentals, which were euphemistically labeled as “Airbnbs.”
Kess made his strongest statements of the evening regarding short-term rentals. “I opposed the expansion of Airbnbs for the simple reason that it takes housing away from people who’d like to live here … I wouldn’t want an Airbnb next to me. I have grandchildren who come, and having people come and go every night is an issue, not only for noise but for security.”
Kess described his efforts, which the Timberjay verified after the forum, that he was “instrumental in limiting the number of Airbnb licenses in the city when we first regulated them.” He also advocated for the city to lower the number of Airbnb licenses in residential zoning from 36 to 25, which it did. Kess also wanted to limit the number of short-term rentals in commercial zoning while acknowledging that businesses, like some outfitters, have historically provided short-term housing for customers.
Roose did not display the same rancor toward Airbnbs as Kess but noted “We need to be stricter with Airbnb licenses in residential (neighborhoods) and to impose a moratorium for commercial zoning.”’
Blight
Musgrave used housing issues to segue to Ely’s blighted properties. “We have so many unoccupied houses … I think the city just needs to tell us how many unoccupied houses (are in Ely) and do some kind of incentive to have those people finally sell off the house or fix them up … The city needs to step up and deal with the blighted housing before developing all these housing complexes.”
Roose rebutted, stating, “There is a process to resolve those blighted properties, and that does take a long time. But another thing the city can do is to (set aside money) in our budgeting process to tackle some of these. It is quite expensive to resolve a blighted property, but if we start to budget for this, we can start to tackle it.”
Debeltz circled back to avoiding new taxes and pursuing other funding sources like grants and other government aid. He cited the city’s successful efforts in obtaining grants from the Iron Range Resources and Rehabilitation Board for mitigating blighted properties.
Small Business
Musgrave was asked what the city council could do to support small businesses. “Ask them … Ely’s government should be serving their needs, and should be asking them directly,” she responded. She also stated that Ely should be doing more to help its small businesses rather than aiding larger developers.
“I don’t believe we don’t help small business,” Debeltz rebutted, citing Ely’s commercial rehabilitation loan program for local businesses. Kess weighed in, pointing to Ely’s economic development authority’s “active small business program, which he called “the envy of the Iron Range.”
Roose saw addressing the trio of housing, child care, and jobs as crucial to building small businesses and economic health. She acknowledged that Ely currently had an arts- and tourism-based economy, but that the city had “room for other industry.”