The Minnesota mayor who once held a 24-hour town hall steps away from the job

ST. CLOUD – When Dave Kleis walked into Joanne Benson’s office at St. Cloud State University 35 years ago, he was a spritely mid-20-year-old with big dreams and an infectious eagerness.

He asked Benson, who was active in the Republican party and would later become lieutenant governor, if she would help him run for mayor.

Benson, 81, laughed as she recalled her response to Kleis, who has now spent three decades in public office: “I said, ‘Well, it might be a tough race. You’re very young.’

“It was like the kid next door coming and saying, ‘I want to be the governor,’ ” she said.

But Benson helped him anyway.

“He just came with such an openness, [saying] ‘I would like to serve,’ ” she said. “You don’t find a whole lot of people who want to do it for the right reasons, and I felt that was Dave.”

Kleis grew up in Litchfield, a small community about 45 miles southwest of St. Cloud, and joined the U.S. Air Force after high school. After serving in Japan and Washington, D.C., Kleis returned to Minnesota and studied political science and history at SCSU.

“I kind of got a political bug in me and decided, why not?” Kleis said of why he ran for the open seat in the nonpartisan mayor’s race at 25. “So I did. And I learned a lot.”

But he lost, “miserably,” he says, noting he placed eighth out of seven candidates. He earned about 100 votes, but even a candidate who previously dropped out of the race garnered more votes than him.

“But he did the work,” Benson said of Kleis’ campaign, “and he did it right, and he did it in such a way that he could run again and win.”

And that he did — several times. When Benson was elected as Gov. Arne Carlson’s running mate in 1994, she encouraged Kleis to run in a special election for the state Senate seat she was vacating. He did and then served 10 years in the Minnesota Senate. He was first elected mayor of St. Cloud in 2005 and re-elected while running unopposed in 2008, 2012 and 2016, and he handily defeated a challenger in 2020. In April, he announced he wouldn’t run for re-election.

“He’s been the city’s longest-serving mayor so he must be doing something right,” said mayor-elect Jake Anderson, who served on the city’s planning commission and City Council while Kleis was in office. “He’s obviously left a significant impact on the community, from expanding parks — adding the 100th park this year — to managing multiple challenges throughout the years, whether it was the Great Recession, whether it was COVID, and all those things in between.”

During his college years, Kleis was active with the local Republican party. But even then, he prioritized building relationships and finding solutions over hyper-partisan politics, said Doug Altrichter, a fellow veteran who met Kleis at SCSU in the mid-1980s.

“Dave is a total extrovert. He loves people,” said Altrichter, who now leads the Air Force’s Congressional Correspondence Division. “And he was a leader. He was older than everybody else, except for me, and he had all these younger college Republicans organized.”

Though Kleis, now 60, served as a Republican in the Senate, he had a reputation for working well with both sides of the aisle. That ability also helped tremendously during his mayoral years, where he was able to successfully lobby state and federal politicians to fund local projects such as the city’s groundbreaking clean-energy efforts, which include the city’s production of three times as much energy as it uses, as well as working to become the first municipal plant in the world to make green hydrogen.

“One of the things I think is unfortunate is local-level politics becoming more and more partisan, and it shouldn’t be,” Kleis said. “There’s no Republican way to plow a street. There’s no Democratic way to plow a street or fill a pothole.”

His career has been lauded by folks from both parties, too. Last summer, Republican U.S. Rep. Tom Emmer recognized Kleis on the floor of the House, and Democratic U.S. Sen. Amy Klobuchar called to congratulate Kleis during his retirement party in early December.

When asked if he would still run as a Republican today in an increasingly polarized America, Kleis wouldn’t say; he simply reiterated that as the mayor, he represents the city and all its residents: “If you’re going to serve your community at a local capacity, you need to be nonpartisan.”

Kleis has also earned the reputation of being exceptionally accessible, or “ever-present” as he calls it.

He’s held more than 1,000 town hall meetings, including a marathon 24-hour town hall in February. He’s posted more than 1,000 weekly video updates and even met constituents on a “mobile town hall” bus that puttered around town until the transmission went out. His philosophy is that it’s important to meet people where they are and hear about issues before they boil over.

Kleis also hosts “dinners with strangers” at his home, where he serves chili and ice cream cake to residents he hasn’t yet met. That’s how he met Emmanuel Oppong, a psychotherapist who became the city’s community engagement director. And nine times out of 10, Oppong said, Kleis will go if invited to a community gathering, campus event or even a birthday party, regardless of whether he already knows the person.

“The mayor is everywhere. Everyone knows the mayor,” Oppong said with a laugh, noting he stopped introducing Kleis at events after a few months on the job. “I would go on stage and say, ‘Hey, if you don’t know the mayor, raise your hand.’ And there would be no hands raised.”

Oppong also helped Kleis diversify the city’s nonelected boards to better reflect the community, which has grown increasingly diverse during Kleis’ tenure: From 2010 to 2020, the percentage of residents who consider themselves Hispanic or nonwhite doubled to 32%, according to U.S. Census data.

“When I took over, a big makeup of our boards and commissions was retired white males,” Oppong said. “We were intentional about collaborating with our community partners [to] create a pipeline to make sure that we have boards that represented the community.”

Those closest to the mayor say his legacy is reflected in the relationships he built. Those connections are what Kleis says he’s most proud of, too.

“Where St. Cloud really needed him was in race relations,” said Jeff Goerger, a longtime City Council member. “When we had the influx of refugees, he went out and met with leaders from that community. He really worked hard to tamp down some of the racist commentary that was going on.”

Goerger said those bonds helped the city ride out situations that “were on the verge of turning ugly,” including a 2016 stabbing at Crossroads Center mall and rumors of police misconduct in 2020.

In September 2016, a 20-year-old Somali man stabbed multiple people at the mall before being shot and killed by an off-duty police officer. That same evening, Kleis held a news conference and spent hours calling community leaders. The next morning, members of the East African community joined him at a news conference to denounce the violence and try to thwart any possible rise in anti-immigrant or anti-Muslim sentiment in response to the attack. The following day, the community gathered for a unity rally that drew hundreds to SCSU, where the attacker was a student.

The community was tested again in June 2020, just weeks after George Floyd was murdered by Minneapolis police, when rumors of police violence sparked civil unrest on the south side of St. Cloud. Protesters set a dumpster on fire and looted a liquor store.

“A person put up a social media post saying one of our police officers executed two young Black men,” Kleis said. “That was completely wrong, completely false and made up, but that was all over social media.”

Kleis immediately reached out to leaders involved in the city’s longstanding community policing agreement, who helped quell any potential riots and get out the truth, which was that an officer got shot in the hand while chasing an assailant. Tensions quickly simmered.

“We didn’t have what happened in all those other cities because of the relationships we built and the trust we had built,” Kleis said.

Kleis built a reputation for providing stability through trying times, but he also had a penchant for fun: He could also be seen every December wearing lederhosen and drinking mulled wine at the city’s annual Weihnachtsmarkt holiday market.

He also has a love for time capsules likely unrivaled by any modern politician. When asked recently how many time capsules Kleis has dedicated during his tenure, he couldn’t remember. After counting by finger multiple times, he settled on eight, including one celebrating the city’s sesquicentennial, one commemorating the COVID-19 pandemic, and one at City Hall.

And as a globetrotter himself who has visited 133 countries, Kleis reinvigorated St. Cloud’s sister-city relationships with Spalt, Germany, and Saint-Cloud, France, during his years in office.

Over the past two decades, Kleis has traveled often — but for short jaunts in which he had to keep his phone close. But after he is officially out of office come Jan. 13, Kleis will be able to take the trips he’s been waiting on for years: an expedition to Antarctica and a monthslong trip to Germany.

He’ll continue to run the driver’s training business he’s owned for more than three decades, and he has already committed to serve on a state campaign finance board. He also plans to continue to promote his latest passion project: revitalizing the city’s downtown.

“He’ll be fine in retirement. He’ll find good things to do, and I’ll still be his mentor,” Benson said with a chuckle. “Maybe that’s how I can help: I’ll show him how to retire.”