Duluth City Council president barred from coffee shop after confronting employee

DULUTH – City Council President Terese Tomanek is banned from Duluth Coffee Co., its owner said, after she confronted an employee while ordering.

Employee Brandon Parker, a former council candidate who suspended his campaign last month, said Tomanek approached him at the counter last week and told him she was disturbed by something he had written online related to a citizen-led right-to-repair ballot measure involving rental rights, which the council rejected. It will still go before voters in November.

Parker said Thursday that in frustration, he had facetiously used two inappropriate words — listing an off-color sample petition name and address — to criticize the city’s efforts to derail the right-to-repair ballot measure, after councilors approved their own version. She took him to task for it, he said, shocking customers as she “lectured” him on tone and civility, he said.

“There’s a power dynamic at play, with an elected official approaching a constituent in that manner, in a work setting,” Parker said. “It was humiliating and inappropriate and to me it comes off as an intimidation tactic.”

Parker frequently attends council meetings and has been vocal online about city business.

Tomanek, a former chaplain, has been a city councilor since 2020. She said in a text message Thursday that she called Parker twice after the exchange. Duluth Coffee Co. owner Eric Faust gave her Parker’s phone number with Parker’s permission, she said. She left a phone message for him apologizing for “bringing up an issue at his workplace,” she wrote.

In a later text message, she wrote that before she left the shop, “we had amicably agreed to have coffee together next week to discuss our mutual concerns regarding civility.”

“Hearing about this was both startling and disappointing,” Faust said in the email. “For the past 12 years I have cultivated a coffee shop downtown where people meet to discuss ideas, share stories and build community. Having a city councilor approach one of my staff while working in front of his peers and patrons is inappropriate and unacceptable.”

Faust wrote that he is aware of Parker’s civic engagement and neither condemns or condones it since it is conducted on his own time.

“I’ve informed my staff that you [Tomanek] are no longer allowed in my establishment,” Faust wrote. “I expect better from the leadership of our city.”