Cloquet's talented finance director will retire

It’s official. Nancy Klassen, longtime finance director for the city of Cloquet, is retiring. And she will be missed by city administrators.

“I already tried to tell her no. That didn’t work,” city administrator Tim Peterson joked with council members during Tuesday’s unusually short meeting, which lasted all of 23 minutes.

Klassen, who wins accounting awards like clockwork for her work for the city of Cloquet and the Cloquet Area Fire District, said her last day will be Sept. 30. The personnel committee will conduct interviews and the city hopes to have Klassen work with her replacement for several weeks before she officially retires.

Following a public hearing that garnered zero public comments Tuesday, the council approved the refinancing of up to $10 million in bonds originally sold to finance the construction of the Evergreen Senior Living complex in Cloquet in 2001. It is the third time the Housing Alternatives Development Company Cloquet LLC, which owns Evergreen, has refinanced the bonds.

“We’re trying to take advantage of the current low interest rates,” said Paul Abzug, president of HADC Cloquet.

The city sells the bonds, but the money simply passes through the city to the company, Peterson explained. The city is not “on the hook” to repay the bonds.

Also Tuesday:

• Rob Schilling was appointed to the Western Lake Superior Sanitary District Board. Schilling replaces Archie Chelseth, who resigned after three terms, and joins Dave Manderfeld and Loren Lilly as Cloquet representatives to the WLSSD Board. Schilling is environmental manager at Sappi.

• The council approved adding Juneteenth to the city’s list of holidays for staff, following the designation of June 19 as a federal holiday to commemorate the end of slavery in the United States. Full-time city staff get 13 holidays, many of them federal, but also including a personal floating holiday and the day after Thanksgiving and Christmas Eve.