The Don Ness Story

by Paul Lundgren

At age 34, Don Ness is still considered by some to be a boy wonder – surprisingly young to be the leader of Minnesota’s fourth-largest city. “I run into people on a regular basis who used to be a babysitter and changed my diapers,” Duluth’s new mayor says with a smile, embracing with modesty a typecast he must be growing weary of. Climbing the couch next to him is his daughter, Eleanor, about to interrupt and ask him to read her a story. His son, James, is upstairs sleeping. Ness is clearly on the other end of the diaper changes these days.

Add it up: He’s been married for almost four years and has two children. He served on the City Council for eight years. He’s not even the youngest mayor in recent history. John Fedo was 29 when he took offi ce in 1980. So, why does Ness get the rap as a babe in the woods? Perhaps the fact that Fedo had a noon shadow and a full beard by five o’clock, while Ness couldn’t grow peach fuzz if he spent a four year term trying, could have something to do with it. “I haven’t resorted to growing a cheesy moustache yet,” Ness said. “But I’m hoping for more grey hair. I’m trying to encourage it.”

Baby face aside, there’s also his work organizing groups of young professionals and punks alike that ties him to the younger generation. In 2000 he founded the Bridge Syndicate, an organization for 20- and 30-somethings looking to increase cultural opportunities in Duluth and Superior. He served as the Homegrown Music Festival’s director in 2006 and 2007, leading a group that turned the event into a nonprofi t. The festival’s founder, Scott Lunt, credits Ness with saving it from collapse. Even in the midst of what was considered a wide open mayor’s race last summer, Ness could be found bobbing his head in a crowd of hipsters and ne’er-do-wells at the now-shuttered Red Lion Bar, one of Duluth’s most notorious dives. While Ness has remained in some ways forever young, he has of course faced the full gamut of Duluth political issues as a City Councilor. Perhaps the least sexy example is his role in creating the Retiree Health Care Task Force, which so far has provided the blueprint toward solving Duluth’s unfunded city-employee health care liability — no small task for a boy wonder.

After a decade in politics, Ness’ new role as mayor should fi nally allow him to be defi ned by his ideas and accomplishments, rather that his youth. Ironically, though, he spent his formative years feeling old.
THE CHURCH ELDER Don Ness is the eldest of Donald and Mary Ness’ four boys. (“Don” is short for Donald—he’s the third generation Donald, but everyone calls him either Don or Donny.) His younger brothers are Jamie, Patrick and Nathan. Their father was pastor of Community Christian Fellowship, a non-denominational church in Duluth’s Lakeside neighborhood. “So much of my childhood surrounded the church,” Ness says. “There was always church meetings and different church related things going on. It was a young church, with 50 to 100 kids, and I was the oldest kid. So, in my family and in my church, I was always the oldest.” Ness said having a pastor for a father helped him develop the speaking skills to be a politician. “My dad is a very talented presenter,” he said. “He explains ideas in an interesting and entertaining way.”

Ness’ fondest early memories are of family picnics at Hartley Field, a 660-acre park about one mile north of the University of Minnesota Duluth campus. “My parents would pack the four boys into their station wagon and when we got there we’d climb to the top of the hill,” where the family would take in the park’s impressive overlook, he said. Ness recalls the family’s fi rst house was a two-room shack in a nearby township, with no running water and a pot-bellied wood stove as the source of heat. The Ness’ would quickly move to better accommodations in Duluth’s West End, then East Hillside, and eventually Central Hillside. At Central High School, Ness played on the football and track teams and was co-captain of the basketball team, which fi nished third in the state tournament the year he graduated, 1992.

When Don was a senior at Central his brother Patrick, then in eighth grade, was already recognizing the eldest Ness would do well in politics. “I told my friends that Donny was going to be the governor,” Patrick recalls. “Our family lines up very well with typical birth-order characteristics. Donny is the prototypical fi rst born – the leader, rule-oriented, takes on a lot of responsibility, kind of serious. I don’t know of a time that he didn’t display all of those things.” Don chose to stay in his hometown and attend college at the University of Minnesota Duluth, where his mother had been taking classes since he was in junior high. Mary was working at a battered-women’s shelter at the time, and slowly making progress toward her degree. They ended up graduating together in 1997.

“She was on the twelve-year plan; I was on the fi ve-year plan,” Ness says. Mary has since earned her master’s degree in social work and is employed by St. Louis County in initial intervention. She also teaches at UMD. Ness’ degree is in business administration. He was working toward a master’s degree at the College of St. Scholastica, but put it on hold in 2007 to run for mayor. He said he hopes to someday complete his master’s and challenge himself in the private sector.

ODD JOBS AND A LONG, STRANGE TRIP During college, Ness worked at several convenience stores, starting with the midnight shift at Pike Lake Amoco when he was 18. He said the overnights messed up his sleeping schedule and caused him to miss some classes, but he enjoys recalling the occasional drama the job provided. One moment he remembers well is the night he fi lled in for someone at the Lakehead Travel Plaza on 40th Ave. W. near Interstate 35. A taxi cab pulled in at 2 a.m., and the driver entered the store. He told Ness the passenger in the back of the cab said he had a gun and wanted a ride to Carlton. “The cab driver wanted me to call the police, but his cab was parked right next to the cashier station window where the guy could see me make the call,” Ness remembers. “I ended up calling the police and saying there was a situation. Within five minutes the parking lot was full of squad cars. They pulled the guy out, and it turned out he didn’t have a gun. He was just a drunk guy shooting his mouth off.”

It was during his college years that Ness went on his only vacation. He jumped into his 1986 Mercury Lynx and drove for six days, stopping in different communities. He looped around the West Coast through Denver, and into New Mexico, then drove back to Duluth up Interstate 35 from Dallas. Since then he’s gone on numerous business trips and often visits his in-laws in southern Minnesota, but says that road trip in college remains his only real vacation. There was, however, another memorable experience away from home prior to that. “My freshman year (at UMD) I was a basketball specialist for rich kids in Long Island. It was like a reverse Northern Exposure.” Ness said his few experiences away from home made him appreciate Duluth all the more, and he has no travel aspirations. He said he wants to further “understand the mechanics and dynamics” of how Duluth works rather than “compare it to other places on a surface level.” While at UMD, Ness served as student body president and later as chair of the university-wide student senate. After college, he began his real-world political career, taking a job as campaign manager for Congressman James Oberstar. Two years later, at the age of 25, he was elected to the Duluth City Council. He continued to work for Oberstar until early 2007, when he became director of programming and policy for the A.H. Zeppa Family Foundation, a Duluth-based charitable organization.

THE LOVE OF HIS LIFE It was through politics that Ness met his wife. Laura Scheu came to Duluth in 2002 to work on Senator Paul Wellstone’s reelection campaign. “Right away, I thought she was beautiful, smart and insightful, but we were both in relationships at the time,” Ness said. “I sort of put out of my mind any romantic possibility, and we became friends.” Eleven days before the election, Wellstone died in a plane crash near Eveleth. “We went through the extreme trauma of fi nding out about the Senator’s plane crash, then that whirlwind 10-day campaign,” Ness said, referring to replacement candidate Walter Mondale’s loss to Norm Coleman. “I think that took our friendship to a different level.”

But the friendship didn’t turn to romance until after Laura left Duluth. She moved to St. Cloud to rejoin her longstanding boyfriend, but quickly realized it wasn’t what she wanted. “It was the greatest fork in the road I’d ever come to,” she said. She spent the winter with her parents in Houston County, the southeastern-most corner of the state. Over the next fi ve months, Don and Laura got to know each other through late night e-mails. “Getting to know each other in that fashion was one of the strongest foundations that I can imagine for starting a romance,” Laura said.

In the spring of 2003, Don convinced Laura to move to Duluth, and soon she was rearranging his bachelor pad at Chester Terrace. They were married a year later. “Everything since then has been built on those months writing back and forth,” Don said. “She is without a doubt the best thing that has ever happened to me.” Laura is an active volunteer with the League of Women Voters, Junior League of Duluth and Safe Haven Women’s Shelter. She also enjoys sewing and knitting. “I fi nd satisfaction in little thrifty projects,” she said. “And I like to daydream of creative endeavors.” Roger Reinert, a friend of Don’s and a former colleague on the city council, said the mayor’s love for his wife is like something out of a fairy tale. “The connection that those two have is pretty neat to see,” Reinert said. “It’s a part of his life that I think is inspiring to people who only know them really well and see how loving and supportive they are to each other.”

Ness said he first considered running for mayor after his 2003 campaign for reelection to the City Council. “We did very well in that campaign all across the city,” he said. “I kept seeing potential for the city, and had new ideas to make it better. When Mayor Bergson fi rst said he wasn’t running, I couldn’t commit because Laura was pregnant. We wanted to make an assessment. We spent a lot of time talking before we decided we were comfortable with the balance of work and family.” And the rest, as the cliché goes, is history. Ness defeated Charlie Bell with 52 percent of the vote, and on January 7 became Duluth’s 40th mayor.

THE REFLECTIVE FLOSSER Laura says one of the things that impresses her about her husband is his mental focus. “He’s a deep, process-oriented thinker,” she said. Deep, but perhaps a little odd, too. She points out that when they lived just a few blocks from the Lakewalk, Don would often take dental floss with him down to Leif Erikson Park, where he’d sit on a bench looking out at the lake, thinking and flossing. “It was quiet reflection time,” Don says of the experience. “Just me and my floss.” Laura said since they bought a house in the Central Hillside their favorite dates together have been walking to Chester Bowl Park and following the hiking trail there to the Burrito Union, where they are “great fans of the beer.”
They also enjoy watching films through their Netflix subscription, particularly documentaries and independent comedies. Don said it’s difficult finding time to read anything other than memos and reports, but for pleasure he reads mostly magazines or nonfiction books about history and public policy theory. He also said he enjoyed reading Siddhartha, Herman Hesse’s 1922 novel that Don said helped teach him to “keep an even keel approach to life and not react to crazy things that distract people from accomplishing things.”

Reinert said that philosophy can be seen in Ness’ ability to work well with a variety of people. “What you see of him in the community in terms of being able to bring people together and get everybody on the same page, you see in other parts of his life, like playing softball,” Reinert said. Ness played softball for about a dozen years, mostly for a team sponsored by Butch Seeley Excavating. He said he quit because he was spending too many nights away from his family with graduate classes and council meetings. “Don and I played together for about three years,” Reinert said. “In softball, there are people who are over the top and throwing bats and people on the other end of the spectrum who don’t care if they strike out every time they go up. Don’s right there in the middle, bringing peace and harmony to the whole effort. It was always fun to play with him because he was always well centered.”

Ness has also enjoyed playing pickup basketball at the Duluth Area Family YMCA over the years during lunch. “I started when I was 15,” he said “There has always been an interesting collection of guys there, usually age 18-70. It’s funny, when I see those guys in the community I realize I have no idea what their last names are or what they do.”

THE FUTURE Reinert said Ness has spent a lot of time getting ready to be mayor, but it still won’t be an easy job. “Don has a pretty consistent work style in terms of being a bigpicture vision guy and being able to get others excited about seeing that vision come true,” Reinert said. “His challenge as mayor is going to be that he’s not a details guy. He really likes the big-picture policy side of stuff. He’s going to have to really work hard on the staff side of things to make sure he finds the people to make that vision a reality.” Laura said she’s been impressed so far with how unflappable and even-tempered her husband is under pressure.

She’s worried about the long hours he’ll be putting in, but most of all she’s eager to watch him in action. “I’m curious how he’ll settle into his role and excited about what we’ll get to see Donny do,” she said. Throughout Ness’ political career he’s been accused of positioning himself to run for Congress when Oberstar retires. He continues to deny it. “I’ve expended a tremendous amount of energy saying I’m not interested in running for Congress,” Ness says, explaining that life in Washington D.C. and having to campaign every two years would put too great a strain on his family. “The political culture in Washington is very partisan,” he added. “That doesn’t suit my approach. I’m an idea person. I like to fi nd compromise. Everything in Washington is macro and clumsy. It’s politics with a sledgehammer. I prefer politics with a scalpel.”