City Manager Dan Mahli and his family — from left, Patrick, Katherine, Daniel Jr., Dan, Elizabeth and Kimberly.
Nancy Edmonds Hanson
Moorhead’s new city manager has 100,000 Christmas lights in his garage, Next: figuring out what to do with them.
“Fargo’s Downtown Community Partnership is changing their décor this year, and they asked me, ‘Want our lights?’ I said, ‘Sure,’” Dan Mahli says. “So I paid for them out of my own pocket. Everyone seemed to think it was a good idea at the time … except my wife Kim.”
Now one of his first ad hoc challenges since being offered his new job is a personal one: How to turn boxes and boxes of bulbs into what he imagines as a “winter wonderland” – a sort of holiday gift to the city with whom he’s fallen in love. He envisions a glittering tunnel along the river, with strands adorning a chicken-wire tunnel fashioned out of the 10-foot garden hoops that just arrived.
“It could be so beautiful to walk along the river trail on a frosty winter night,” he muses. And adds, “I just hope the lights still work.”
That’s Dan Mahli in a nutshell – a dreamer, an optimist and a man who’s willing to give fresh ideas a try. When he emerged the leading candidate in the Moorhead City Council’s search for to fill the empty spot at the top of City Hall’s organizational chart, he was greeted with the applause of hundreds of past and present colleagues, residents and friends who have watched the 1991 Fargo South High graduate dig in to find solutions to challenges facing, first, the city of Fargo, for whom he worked as a planner for almost 20 years, and now the city on the right side of the Red River.
“This is Moorhead’s time,” the enthusiastic 47-year-old concedes. “But you can feel the strength in Moorhead’s bones. Its strength is its diversity and resilience. Moorhead is used to having to scrap. It has a habit of of facing adversity and finding a way to thrive.”
There will be no lag as Dan slips into his new role. Hired in 2017 as assistant city manager, he says he is already “up to speed,” thanks to spending the past nearly five months as the acting occupant of that position. He took on the interim role after former manager Chris Volkers, also hired in 2017, left to assume a similar position in a Twin Cities suburb.
Dan was offered the job last Wednesday after interviews with him and the second finalist, Michael Cramer of North Carolina. The opening had drawn 49 applicants, most from within the region.
“It’s absolutely a dream come true,” he says. “Over the last six months, I’ve never paid too much attention to the ‘acting’ part. If something needs doing, I want to just do it.” He cites one of the lasting lessons learned from his 82-year-old mother Ellen – “If you’re willing to keep your foot on the gas pedal, count me in.”
Local Roots
Dan has considered this community home since his family moved here in 1980, when he was in elementary school. His late father Maurice was an administrator of St. Ansgar and St. John’s Hospitals; mother Ellen was one of the first critical care nurses in North Dakota. He had no clear career dreams as he was growing up beyond wanting to play the violin. “I actually started out with a music scholarship to Moorhead State University,” he says. But he ended up as a pre-law student at North Dakota State University, majoring in political science as a classmate of future mayor Johnathan Judd.
As he prepared to apply to law school, he says, that didn’t feel right. “I was talking to then-mayor Morrie Lanning and Moorhead city manager Jim Antonen in 1997 and told them that the only question I couldn’t answer was ‘Why do you want to be a lawyer?’” he reminisces. “Jim said, ‘If you want to work in a city manager’s office, you can be an intern, and we’ll get you into the city planning program at MSU.” He jumped on the opportunity, graduating in 1997 with a master’s degree in public and human services administration. Replacing him as Antonen’s intern was another future city manager, Mike Redlinger.
Dan worked briefly for U.S. Sen. Byron Dorgan and, later, as director of the Park Rapids Chamber of Commerce. In 2000, he went to work as a city planner in Fargo. “It was an exciting time. There were four of us who joined at the same time,” he recalls. They worked on a variety of endeavors that laid groundwork for the city’s current success – saving neighborhood schools, starting the downtown revival project, creating the human rights commission. One of Dan’s more portentous tasks was hiring a new member of the team five or six years ago. He was Derrick LaPoint, who became director of Downtown Moorhead Inc. shortly after Dan came over to Moorhead and now works with the city’s economic development program.
He cites examples of Moorhead leaders’ ability to face problems like those many municipalities grapple with in during the pandemic. Take the city’s 2021 budget: “We’ve been able to hold the line. We’ll see a minimal levy increase of 0.45%,” he notes, “while many other northern Minnesota cities are looking at increases of 10%, 12%, even 15%.” He attributes that to department heads who have held back on hiring while not resorting to layoffs and who have agreed that “if you’d don’t need it, don’t ask for it.” At the same time, departments have held steady on fees for city services. “We have the council solidly behind us,” he says.
The new manager’s vision of the city’s future is bright. He counts some of the ways: Moorhead projects received more than 5% of the recently passed state bonding bill, something he attributes to strong relationships built over the years between city leaders, local and state staff, and legislators. He notes, too, the announcement that Moorhead Public Service will be purchasing power from 100% carbon-free sources (hydroelectric, solar and wind) beginning Jan. 1 – one of the earliest across the nation to reach that goal.
Continuing to build the city’s commercial tax base is high on his wish list. “We need parity between residential and commercial/industrial taxpayers,” he says. “Residents pay way too much of the load. It has to be more balanced.” Redevelopment of aging, often-empty 1970s strip malls offers one avenue toward that goal, like the $32 million mixed-use development of housing (including affordable units) and commercial spaces on the site of the original Sunmart store at Eighth Street and 30th Avenue South.
While Dan serves in the public sector, his wife Kim – daughter of Moorhead business owners Dusty and Becky DePree – runs American Diversity Solutions, the family printing and promotions company they bought from her parents. The couple have four children: 13-year-old twins Elizabeth and Patrick, 12-year-old Katherine, and 8-year-old Daniel, who for obscure reasons prefers to be called “the Fireblaster.”
His biggest challenge, and the city’s, in the days ahead, he says, will be peoples very human tendency to protect their turf. “The scarcity mindset is what could get us,” he suggests. “It’s just wrong when we’re in the middle of such abundance. “We need to boil it down to the nuts and bolts. What can we all care about together. Then let’s lead with those strengths.”