Meet St. Cloud’s new mayor, a ‘Jeopardy’ junkie known for his smarts, collaboration

ST. CLOUD – Jake Anderson never used to mind winter weather.

But that was before he was elected mayor of a central Minnesota town that’s responsible for maintaining hundreds of miles of roads, as well as oodles of narrow alleyways and city-owned parking lots spanning 40 square miles.

“Now that I’m moving into this role, I’m really anti-snow. You just see it falling and it’s like ‘ka-ching, ka-ching,’” he said with a chuckle last week, before getting serious again: “I was nervous when it was raining and then it got cold. I was like, ‘Oh, this is how you get potholes!’”

The 45-year-old Anderson is not new to city government: He served on the city’s planning commission for a decade and St. Cloud City Council for two years before being elected to the top spot in November. But he’s now stepping into a role that longtime Mayor Dave Kleis spent two decades perfecting.

“He will do a wonderful job in this role,” Kleis said Monday before administering the oath of office to Anderson in a packed council chamber. “He has a tremendous love for this community — he’s been here since he was 8 years old.”

Anderson was born in Virginia, Minn., and moved to St. Cloud in the late 1980s. He graduated from Tech High School and then earned a degree in information systems from St. Cloud State. His wife, Rachel, works at St. Cloud Hospital and is attending graduate school for nursing, and they have a dog, Ruby. For the past 15 years, Anderson has worked as an IT project manager at Stearns County — a job he intends to keep while serving as mayor.

“He’s a great collaborator. People want to work with him,” said Bill Davison, a retired purchasing director for Stearns County. “And he’s very sharp. … The guy’s got a memory like nobody else.”

Chad Martini, property services director for Stearns County, met Anderson two decades ago while working at GeoComm, a St. Cloud-based company that provides geographic information systems services. When Martini moved to a county job, he rallied for Anderson to join him.

“He’s got talent. I wanted to selfishly bring it with wherever I was,” he said, calling Anderson a “go-to” person for many of his colleagues. “His breadth of knowledge and experience with people and process at the county is something people seek out.”

Still, Anderson is never condescending or unapproachable, Martini said.

“He draws people to him,” Martini said. “Sometimes it’s hard to go places with Jake because Jake is always going to meet new friends. If he goes to the House of Pizza to watch a football game, chances are whoever is sitting around him is going to get brought into Jake’s conversation.”

Anderson is a self-proclaimed nerd who likes history and video games. He says his high school days were full of “drinking Mountain Dews and playing quad-screen games.” And he’s kind of a klutz at 6 feet, 8 inches tall, he said.

“I tried out for basketball my freshman year. I was the tallest kid in the grade — and I got cut,” he said with a laugh.

Now he plays bar trivia once or twice a week and tries to catch “Jeopardy” on TV. He also fills his time watching documentaries or listening to podcasts.

His aptitude for taking in — and retaining — knowledge makes him a great trivia partner, but also a good decisionmaker and conversationalist, said Hanna Lord, senior manager at GeoComm.

“He doesn’t just react on a whim,” she said. “He’s really thoughtful.”

Like his predecessor, Anderson also ran for St. Cloud mayor as a bright-eyed college student. Kleis had an unsuccessful mayoral campaign in 1989, and Anderson in 2001.

“Of course, I thought of myself as this visionary leader, blah, blah, blah,” Anderson said, noting he had plans to run for governor after serving as mayor. “I had laid out this goal that I wanted to be president by 2020.”

But as a college student who worked at Circuit City, he had little time to knock on doors and meet constituents. Instead, he relied on yard signs.

“I lost. It was a terrible strategy,” he said. But Anderson wasn’t discouraged. In 2007 and 2012, he ran for seats on the City Council, both times losing to well-known incumbents. Anderson was appointed to the city’s planning commission in 2009. And after going 0-for-3 in elected races, he figured he was content to serve on that board but never run for office again.

That was until he learned City Council Ward 3 incumbent Paul Brandmire, who was criticized for his comments about refugee resettlement and for comparing a mask mandate during COVID-19 to yellow stars in Nazi Germany, didn’t have a challenger in the 2022 election. Anderson ultimately beat Brandmire by about 12 percentage points.

Then, when Kleis announced last spring that he wasn’t going to run again, a handful of community leaders pestered Anderson to run. They included Patti Gartland, former director of Greater St. Cloud Development Corp., former Capital One Vice President Brian Myres and St. Cloud School Board Member Zach Dorholt.

In August, he earned the highest vote count of six candidates in the primary, and then beat out fellow City Council member Mike Conway in November. Since then, he’s met with city staff and other central Minnesota leaders, and attended training for new mayors at Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government.

His first big task will be hiring a new city administrator, the person who handles the day-to-day leadership at the city. In early January, St. Cloud City Administrator Matt Staehling announced plans to move to the same role in Duluth.

Other goals include implementing a customer service survey of folks who interact with city departments, as well as efforts to revitalize downtown, address homelessness and tackle the housing shortage. He also wants to develop a plan to improve the city’s aesthetics and its parks system — areas he feels have been underfunded.

Over his tenure, Kleis has touted the city’s lower-than-the-state-average taxes and the budget cuts made during the Great Recession. Kleis has said when adjusted for inflation, the city’s current budget is $6 million less than it was during his first year as mayor.

“To say you’re spending $6 million less than you were — yeah, I can look around and tell you you’re spending $6 million less,” Anderson said of what he described as the city’s overall lackluster appearance.

While Anderson wants to continue prioritizing keeping taxes low, the city will see new budget demands as the voter-approved fire station on the south side is built and staffed in the coming years.

“There are probably some tough decisions that need to be made over the next couple years here,” he said. “Some of those may prove to be more politically unpopular. If, at some point, taxes go up at all, I could see people pushing back on that.”

Anderson plans to be accessible to constituents through town hall meetings and other events, but doesn’t plan to host any “dinners with strangers” at his home or 24-hour town halls as his predecessor was known to do. And he isn’t certain he’ll run again in 2028. He’s simply eager to get his feet wet, knowing Kleis has left big shoes to fill.

“I’m very much just ready to start and hopefully not disappoint.”