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West Theatre Lives To See Another Day
Built in 1937, Duluth’s West Theatre is the type of Art Deco-style movie house every town should have, with neon lights and a prominent marquee that juts out over the sidewalk. But the theater's fate has been up in the air since July, when the West temporarily closed. To avoid foreclosure and a six-month court-ordered shutdown, owner Bob Boone needed to cough up $394,000.
Boone took to social media, hoping to raise funds from the community. “We have had over 650 people chip in, in small and large amounts… smallest is 20, and the largest is 50,000,” he told Maggie Franzen for Northern News on Tuesday. As Wednesday's deadline loomed, he remained $64,000 short.
Yet it appears Boone has saved his theater, for now at least, limboing under the gavel with minutes to spare.
“Forty minutes before the auction was to commence, [mortgage co-signer, Carla] Blumberg’s lawyer informed Boone that he was $30,000 short of the required reinstatement amount,” the Duluth Monitor writes via a dramatic Facebook post that includes courthouse video. “Boone made a call to a friend and was able to secure the money, but he had to travel to the bank to pick up the cashier’s check. He returned to the sheriff’s office, check in hand, with about 15 minutes to spare.”
Xcel Energy Is Bad at Billing
Following a severe spike in consumer complaints, the Minnesota Public Utilities Commission’s consumer affairs division launched an investigation into Xcel Energy’s billing errors. What it found isn't good.
Minnesota Reformer’s Brian Martucci has some wild stories of bad bills from the monopolistic utility: a small business that’s owed months of credits for its solar-producing efforts, a Roseville municipal property that was charged $15K after not receiving any bills for eight months, and the City of St. Louis Park receiving power bills for a building for months after it was demolished.
And then there are the homeowner billing errors, which soared over the last three years. “Residential electric invoices canceled due to billing issues rose more than 50% from 2023 to 2026, according to Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison,” Martucci writes.
“There is no indication that Xcel plans to reduce the number of billing errors to pre-2023 levels; instead, Xcel appears to view 2023 error levels as an acceptable goal, even though evidence suggests 2023 itself marked a then-historic high,” Ellison writes to the PUC. Ellison suspects that Xcel is still underreporting errors, “leaving open the possibility that the actual number of affected customers in all months is greater than reported.”
Data Crunching Two Years of U of M Payroll
Last week the University of Minnesota announced it would be cutting $225 million from its $5.44 billion budget over the next two years. While it’s unclear what that will look like, on Wednesday the Star Tribune published a thorough piece of data journalism that analyzes the U of M's payroll from 2017 and 2025 (gift link).
Reporters Erin Adler, Yuqing Liu, C.J. Sinner, and MaryJo Webster found that the school’s biggest shift in employees was in administration, a category that includes a dean, an outreach specialist, and community relation departments. Turns out those "administrative bloat" accusations are true.
“About 2,000 people worked ‘academic administrative’ jobs last year, making it a small group overall, but its numbers increased by nearly a third since 2017,” they write, noting that athletics and academic professionals came in second and third, respectively.
The story also examines how hiring fewer tenure-track professors and increasing athletic budgets to keep up with the competition, along with ever-changing administrative needs, have impacted overall staff numbers and pay.
We Still Love the New(ish) Choo Choo
I’m talking about Amtrak’s Borealis line, which will take you from St. Paul to Chicago in around seven hours—suck it, Illinois Tollway! The railway hit a major milestone this week, announcing that over half a million riders have made the trip since its debut in 2024. (Hey, at least two of those riders were to Racket writers!) Amtrak also says it will add another passenger car to accommodate demand.
