Tuesday’s city council meeting began with tension as former clerk-treasurer Nancy Sanford gave public input on her resignation.
Sanford spoke throughout her allotted four minute comment period, then received council approval to speak for an additional four minutes yielded by her husband.
Sanford said her resignation came voluntarily and not due to Facebook gossip.
“I was not asked to resign, I was not fired. There is no incidence of me being written up for non-performance or performance issues. Let’s get that clear right away,” Sanford said. “The reason I resigned is because any normal person working in a toxic and bullying work environment would resign.”
Sanford alleged that Mayor Andrea Zupancich had repeatedly talked with Sanford’s staff in order to seek out issues with her performance.
“It came to a point where it was more than my mental health could handle,” Sanford said. “There were councilors aware of what was going on, and there were councilors that suggested to the parties that were bullying and harassing to knock it off and let me get my job done, but they wouldn’t knock it off.”
“The workload was intense, and I was working very, very hard. I left the city in a better position than when I came here. There were a lot of improvements,” Sanford said. “If Sara and Kirsten carry forward the things that we were in the process of doing, that will really create much better transparency, better reporting and a better outcome.”
The council did not respond to Sanford’s public input.
The city has already received seven applications for the open city administrative assistant position previously held by clerk-treasurer Kirsten Traut. The council approved council member Duane Lossing’s motion to bump the application deadline up from July 30 to July 16.
City administrators will also revise the position’s job description, which was written in 2006 and contains outdated information.
Council member Jim Lassi suggested that language referring to the finance officer position, which no longer exists, should be substituted for deputy clerk-treasurer, and references to a city administrator should be substituted for clerk-treasurer.
Lassi also suggested that three years of experience in city administration should become a preferred, rather than required, qualification.
Further amendments may also be established, pending further review from Traut prior to the next council meeting.
Lossing said Traut raised the bar on the job to provide greater support for the clerk-treasurer and deputy clerk-treasurer. Lossing suggested the job description be updated to continue to provide that support.
Traut preliminarily suggested adding specifications about facilitating annual record retention.
The council tabled a discussion on whether or not to hire an interim clerk-treasurer from the League of Minnesota Cities (LMC). This will give Traut and deputy clerk-treasurer Sara Powell more time to determine their needs.
Powell recommended the city should seek customized training for Traut rather than general assistance from an interim clerk-treasurer. She urged the city to put their time and effort into filling the administrative assistant position rather than hiring an interim.
“I feel like a lot of the stuff (the interim clerks) say they will do and have to offer are things we have covered and have been covering for four years,” Powell said.
Powell suggested one-on-one, hour-long training sessions from specialists at LMC who could provide the opportunity for Traut to learn specific skills. Powell said these sessions might run $100 for an hour.
“I’ve always been a little bit skeptical of getting an interim clerk up here. We have to train the interim clerk to learn the job up here, and then they would train our clerk and so on,” Lassi said. “It just seems we train them, then they train us, and it doesn’t make sense to me.”
The Ron Castellano Ice Arena will soon discontinue rear parking near the football field due to slippery ice conditions and facility maintenance issues with dirt tracked in from the gravel lot.
“If you weren’t dealing with the Zamboni and ice and skates, it probably wouldn’t be a big deal, but it does bring a lot of extra dirt in the building,” Lossing said.
The recreation department will discuss arena scheduling and usage for the upcoming season at their July 14 meeting.
“It’s (been) my understanding since I took the job that we want to increase the arena usage,” said recreation department director Caitlin Stern.
Stern said coordination challenges arose in a previous season between user groups, particularly Ely Hockey and the Babbitt Figure Skating Club.
“Ely’s rink was in trouble, so they had to come use our rink. We had the opportunity to increase usage and it went really poorly. It was really hard to combine two arena schedules together,” Stern said. “What we’re trying to do is make sure we can increase usage and increase flexibility of the user groups.”
Stern said that reports came in that Ely Hockey did not feel welcome at the arena.
“That’s not the message we ever want to send to anybody that wants to use our arena,” Stern said.
Both user groups have been invited to the next recreation board meeting, where Stern hopes to smooth out any issues before bringing details on winter scheduling to the council.
In other business, the council:
• Decreased the police committee structure from seven members to five, due to challenges meeting quorum requirements.
• Cancelled the Green Mining land purchase agreement in order to make the lots available to the public.
• Appointed 19 election judges for the 2026 primary and general elections, including eight new judges.
• For city campground bookings longer than a week, the council approved an alteration to campground regulations allowing the campground host to override the two-night reservation rule requiring campers to book both Friday and Saturday nights.
