Gilbertson and partner Jason Ennen established The ClubHouse, an indoor golf lounge in south Moorhead, in 2021.

Moorhead City Council
Nancy Edmonds Hanson

Getting To Know the Council: This is the second in a series of Extra profiles on members of the Moorhead City Council.
Matt Gilbertson has no trouble at all remembering the day, even the hour, when he first filed as a candidate for the Moorhead City Council: “I was driving to City Hall to register when the planes hit the World Trade Center.”
Then 30, the Moorhead native, in just the second year of his newly established chiropractic practice, was facing Morrie Kelsven in his first run to represent Moorhead’s north-side Ward 1. “I was just a couple years out of school. My wife Kim and I had one kid, with the second on the way. A couple of us younger guys wanted to bring some youth in there,” he remembers. “But I was the new kid on the block. I lost by 300 votes. In those days, if you didn’t have [north Moorhead businessman] Jerry Keogh’s endorsement, it was an uphill battle.”
Now, fast-forward two decades later. It’s 2020. Gilbertson, by now the father of three nearly grown children, is a partner in the well-established (and recently renamed) Downtown Chiropractic Clinic. He’s at his children’s Moorhead High lacrosse practice when fellow team dad Johnathan Judd, who happens to be the mayor, suggests he consider running again to represent Ward 1, this time for the council seat last held by Sara Watson Curry.
“I thought it over,” Gilbertson remembers. “We’d just dropped our eldest daughter off at college in San Diego, and the other kids were in high school, and I’d been thinking, ‘I have 20 years left – what do I want to do with it?’” he confides. He took Judd’ up on his suggestion. Once again, he filed for the Ward 1 being vacated by Sara Watson Curry.
No national crises dogged his drive downtown this time, but it was interesting, nevertheless. A total of not one, not two, but five candidates filed for the open seat. On Nov. 3, Gilbertson won fully one-third of the ward’s 4,000-some votes, defeating three candidates who each received about 20% and a fourth with 6%.
“I was probably a little more politically motivated back in 2001,” he reflects. Now, he says, he is especially attentive to the apolitical nature of serving the city. “I’m trying to be the voice of the majority,” he explains. “They want the weeds sprayed, the snow removed, the potholes fixed.
“I don’t have a personal agenda. I vote for what the majority of residents want and need.” He concedes that tends to be on the “no” side of some issues.
Gilbertson took office after the council had approved its pre-development agreement with Roers Development, an ongoing project that has involved acquisition of both the investor-owned and condominium-style commercial properties in the 1970s-era shopping center. Progress in that plan has affected him personally. As a partner in Downtown Chiropractic – the business in which he invested in 2019 – he and partner Dr. Matt Lau are among the mall businesses that are seeking new quarters. They are in the planning stages, he says, “of building something in a relevant area” – details, he says, to come rather soon.
Gilbertson is a lifelong Moorheader. The Moorhead High School graduate of 1989 cites two special memories from his junior year. He was on the Spud football team that won the state title in 1987, “but I broke my leg in the first game of the play-offs,” he reports. The following spring, he asked Kim Tobolt to the prom. It was their first date. The couple married after they each completed their professional degrees, he in chiropractic, she in optometry.
They’ve raised three children in their home town. Ashlyn, their eldest, soon graduates from Bethel University in San Diego as a physician’s assistant. Tate is completing his studies in economics and mathematics at the University of Minnesota, and Ava is a senior at MHS. All three will graduate in 2024.
Matt operated his own chiropractic office on Main Avenue for several years before joining Storlie Pladson Chiropractic Clinic in 2008.
In the meantime, though, family obligations changed his course. After the death of his brother-in-law Scott Tobolt in a farm accident, Gilbertson helped part-time at Tobolt Seed, the family’s operation. By 2010, he says, “three kids and two jobs wasn’t cutting it.” He left the chiropractic field to work full-time with the seed plant for the next seven years.
But his original profession called him back. He worked for Family HealthCare in the Clay County Family Service Center for a year before buying out Dr. Jeff Pladson in Pladson-Lau Chiropractic Clinic in 2019. Early the next year, he and partner Dr. Matt Lau changed the name of their clinic on the east side of the Center Mall to Downtown Chiropractic: “We were tired of changing the name,” he quips.
Of his introduction to the city council in January 2021, Gilbertson says, “I went in not knowing what to expect.” Surprisingly, he says, “it runs relatively smoothly. The city works. The electricity flows. The water runs when you turn on the tap. The garbage gets picked up right on schedule, and the police and fire departments come when you call them.”
He adds, “Economic development is harder than I thought it would be.” He blames Minnesota’s stricter regulations and higher taxes for some of that challenge. “We have better streets and better services, but it does come at a cost,” he acknowledges. Nevertheless, he points to steady progress in industrial development, including the sale of four to six lots this year in the MCCARA Industrial Park, which continues to offer a range of shovel-ready building sites – among them, a 300-acre lot that’s said to be the largest such property in the country.
“I vote for what the majority of our residents want and need,” Gilbertson says of his approach to city issues.
“And before you ask – I plan to run again in 2024. The only way you truly know if you’re doing well is if the voters elect you back into office.”