A hometown newspaper with a local office, local owners & lots of local news
A hometown newspaper with a local office, local owners & lots of local news
Sorted by date Results 276 - 300 of 307
I have always had an eye on the old sheds sitting in the meadow at North Cloquet Road and Midway Road. They are so photogenic in different lights each day. So, with the camera in the car and tooling around after the Fourth of July parade in Cloquet, I came across two turkey vultures perched on the shed closest to the road. Perfect opportunity. They caught my eye because one had just alit onto the peak, tucking its wide wings to its side. It looked like the two were just having a conversation,...
The full boards from the Carlton and Wrenshall school districts will meet July 9 to discuss the possibilities of consolidation. The public meeting begins at 7 p.m. at South Terrace Elementary School in Carlton. There will be no public comment opportunities as the board leaders and superintendents worked out an agenda that will grant all 12 board members a chance to talk about their vision of a combined district. Carlton chairwoman Larae Lehto announced the meeting details at her board’s regular June meeting on Monday. The schools will create g...
Despite making $143,000 in cuts, the Carlton school board faces an approval Monday of a 2020 budget that shows the district $580,809 in the red when comparing expenditures versus revenue. At a discussion meeting Monday, business manager Renee Eiffler said the budget for next year is still comprised of a “lot of unknowns. We deal with what we know.” School districts in Minnesota are required to submit a yearly budget by July 1. Eiffler and superintendent Gwen Carmen said there will undoubtedly be amendments to the budget expected to be app...
The Carlton school district is flirting with the possibilities of consolidation with Cloquet as discussion with Wrenshall has ebbed and flowed over the past few years. At the school board meeting Monday, there was some back-and-forth about how Carlton superintendent Gwen Carmen is approaching Cloquet. School board members Ann Gustafson and Jennifer Chmielewski said they thought the board agreed last month that it was going to devise a letter to send to Cloquet. Instead, they heard this week that Carmen met with Cloquet superintendent Mike...
After years of study and infrastructure planning, the Big Lake Area Sanitary District is having trouble getting over the final hurdle in cleaning up a lake that is surrounded by failing residential sewer systems. The district has been trying to get the Fond du Lac Reservation’s Reservation Business Committee to sign on to a joint powers agreement that would start the flow of money and construction for a sewage collection plant with hookups around the lake. Earlier this year, the district board held emergency meetings in order to meet d...
There is some celebrating going on at Cold One Liquor in Cloquet this weekend. It's billed as a "new ownership grand opening" but the faces at the 15-year-old store will be familiar. Dean and Alison Crotteau are part of the Stowell family that has run a plethora of enterprises in Cloquet since the early 1960s, most notably grocery stores and the movie theater adjacent to the liquor store at 906 Highway 33. Alison is Gary Stowell's niece. He and his wife, Candi, sold the liquor store to the...
The Wrenshall school board on Monday night passed a resolution to not renew a contract for a probationary elementary school teacher. The move was discussed the week earlier at the committee of the whole meeting as a way to erase a $43,313 deficit in the planned budget for next year. “I don’t like it,” board member Janaki Fisher-Merritt said at the time, “but it isn’t devastating to class size.” The cut means that a class of 30 students will have one teacher instead of two this year, which elicited groans from some in the audience at the meet...
A historical sports co-operative between schools in Carlton and Wrenshall could be approved as early as Monday by district school boards. Football coaches and activities directors from both schools made presentations to the public in Carlton and the Wrenshall board Wednesday night on the prospect of the two schools teaming up in football. The idea comes on the heels of a partnership in cross- country last fall that was deemed successful. “I’m 100-percent for this,” said Wrenshall football and activities director Jeremy Zywicki as he addre...
The largest classroom at Cloquet schools is poised to receive some expert help from the state, and all the Cloquet School Board needed to do is give the classroom a name. This week, the board approved designating the 15 acres of woods, fields and water around Cloquet Middle School as the “Cloquet School Forest and Outdoor Classroom.” The official name means the district can enter the forest into the Minnesota Department of Natural Resources school forest program. “It doesn’t cost money,” said earth science teacher Matt Winbigler when describin...
Two recent resolutions in Minnesota Tax Court are part of a trickle that is expected to lead to a flood for taxpayers in Carlton County and in a swath of counties to the northwest. In early March, the tax court in St. Paul’s Ramsey County affirmed adjustments in how much two pipeline operators paid in taxes due in 2018 in 13 counties. The rulings mean Carlton County will need to pay back nearly $200,000 in property taxes. That amount is small compared to the total amount in paybacks expected when larger cases are settled, namely in overtaxed ye...
Sometimes, it's the most obvious thing that can be neglected. In the past two years, the Wrenshall school district has offered up two referendums to make improvements at its K-12 school. Part of that effort involved public forums where residents could ask questions and espouse their views on the proposed projects and how the cost would impact tax bills. Both times, the effort came up empty as voters said no. Last week, with a third referendum coming in May, district officials and project...
Gramma Polo's Bottle Shoppe has been a family-owned business for 73 years. Come May 1, that will change. Polo's has been purchased by neighbor Kwik Trip, which will run its third liquor operation in Minnesota. Tom Romundstad owns the liquor store with his wife, Jodi Polo. He said it's time to retire, seven years after the couple took over the Scanlon-based business from Charlotte Polo, who retired at the age of 90. "It's one of the oldest family-owned liquor stores in the state," Romundstad...
Two Carlton County women are facing seven felony drug counts after a traffic stop in southwestern Minnesota earlier this month revealed the pair was traveling with 50 pounds of marijuana and marijuana wax used in vaping, police reported. Asia Ann Gobel, 18, of Moose Lake and Tanisha Rae Martineau, 20, of Cloquet will face charges in district court in Cottonwood County in early April on second-degree drug charges. According to a Windom police officer, a car Gobel was driving had only its daytime running lights on while it was snowing in the...
Among the din of the pits in Pioneer Hall in Duluth, adjacent to the DECC Arena where robots were going head to head before a raucous crowd, the SubZero robotics team from Esko was quietly and systematically fine-tuning its machine for another run on the floor. Whatever they did, it worked. Esko won its next face-off and then the playoff title to qualify for the FIRST Robotics world championship in April in Detroit. The win at the Duluth regional last weekend also means the team will likely qual...
One of the oldest traditions in the history of Minnesota carries on Tuesday in the annual township meetings. The township system of government was established as part of the Northwest Ordinance of 1787, which included the northeast portion of today's Minnesota as a territory. Areas of land were divided into 36-square-mile units called congressional townships. Today, the term "township" refers to organized but unincorporated areas of the state usually governed by a three-person board of...
The Wrenshall school district will offer the third building bond proposal in two years to voters in May. While some might think of the past two failed attempts to raise taxes as a warning from residents, school board members have looked at the votes as lessons. “We’ve had more time to dig into it,” said board chairman Matthew Laveau. “I think it’s a good, thoughtful plan.” The district will have a vote May 14 asking for building bonds totaling $14.4 million. In April of 2017, voters soundly rejected a $12.5 million proposal. Nearly three-fourt...
It's a wonder what Ruthie Breuer might get up to with two good legs. She was infectious enough Monday morning, despite wearing a walking boot on her left leg, to get nearly a dozen toddlers jamming to music. Breuer was leading the last of demonstration classes for a new music program at Cloquet Memorial Hospital called "Music Together." It's designed for babies and those older up to age 5. A 10-week schedule of classes begins in early April. "I'm just a guide," Breuer told parents and their...
Pine Knot NewsA bad economy may have meant good timing for people in the far southern Minnesota city of Albert Lea. In the depths of the economic downturn that began in 2008, city leaders decided to take on a project to make its residents healthier. "Why not do something that we can control," said Ellen Kehr. "It was better than just sitting around worrying about the economy." What the city took on has been measured as a head-turning success. It's called the Blue Zones Project and a similar effo...
The exchange of letters in the past six months between the school boards in Carlton and Wrenshall — to find common ground in consolidation talks — reached an icy end this week. Carlton Superintendent Gwen Carman says her district is moving on. Wrenshall Superintendent Kim Belcastro said her district is holding firm that any consolidation must include a school in Wrenshall. The district has often suggested keeping the elementary school in Carlton and retrofitting the Wrenshall school for the upper grades. During a special meeting scheduled for...
"Extreme" would be the proper term for the 2019 side of winter so far. More than 20 inches of snow in the first two weeks of February came on the heels of a polar plunge of minus-20s temperatures at the end of January. Meteorologist William Leatham at the National Weather Service in Duluth said the total snowfall there, 26.5 inches, is a record for the first two weeks of February. The former mark was 24.6 inches in 1939. Snow totals across Carlton County vary, but mirror the official...
Carlton school board member Jennifer Chmielewski captured the recent grim discussion about the district’s budget next year. “What are you going to say?” Her plain question was directed at Superintendent Gwen Carman, who is burdened with the task of telling staff in the district that she needs to find a way to make cuts expected to reach past $100,000. “The facts,” Carman said. There was a pause in the discussion Monday night as everything set in. The district isn’t running into the red. But it is $483,000 short of where it needs to be to meet...
Talk of consolidation between the Carlton and Wrenshall school districts has been going on for nearly 60 years, starting with a study done in 1960. The debate on whether to join forces or not outlasted the Cold War, and “cold” would be an apt way to describe the current negotiations between the two tiny districts. In September, before the November general election that had expansion and improvement levy questions on the ballot in Wrenshall, Carlton reached out. A Sept. 18 letter from Carlton school board chairwoman Julianne Emerson asked the...
They came in droves to Zion Lutheran Church in Cloquet. On this Wednesday in mid-September 1947, shops and factories closed, children eschewed school. There, at the church, flowers - some paid for by those children using coins from their piggy banks - were placed near the departed Victor Swenson. They came from the reservation. They came from the far-flung rural areas in Carlton County and Duluth. "The man who was Santa Claus" was dead, and the thousands of people whose lives he had touched...
Eleven people will be out of jobs this holiday season as the Goodwill store in Cloquet will close Dec. 22 after more than 30 years of operation here. "Economically they just couldn't do it anymore," store manager Sue Bauer said this week. She has been at the store for 13 years and, like many of the employees there, is looking for a new job. Goodwill Industries in Duluth said Cloquet workers have been offered positions at its other stores in the region. Bauer said most of them have...
Supporters of the Cloquet Public Library are anxiously awaiting an early Christmas present this month. Library director Beth Sorenson said she expects to hear from the Minnesota Department of education any day now about the status of a request for a $1 million grant that would go toward a $2.3 million expansion of the 31-year-old library on 14th Street. The city of Cloquet supported the application for the grant in October. The city would be responsible for $1 million of the expansion, which...
