Warroad welcomes its first new mayor in 30 years

WARROAD, MINN. — Bob Marvin wasn’t quite ready to step down as mayor after 30 years, but he never imagined serving this long when he first took office in 1995.

Only three times in Marvin’s tenure did he face a challenger. In November, Marvin, the third generation of the Marvin Windows and Doors family, lost to a longtime Marvin employee, Tom Goldsmith, who was sworn in Jan. 5. Goldsmith is the first new mayor for this city of nearly 2,000 people on Lake of the Woods in three decades.

It was an eight-vote margin: Goldsmith earned 407 votes, Marvin 399.

“It’s exciting,” said longtime city administrator Kathy Lovelace. “Bob was very forward thinking too, you know, I suppose being from the family he’s from and all that they’ve done. But I think just having new life ... is never a bad thing.”

Marvin leaves a debt-free city to Goldsmith and helped tee up a massive lakeshore regional park project coming on the heels of a new art center, housing development, child care center and college campus branch with a first-of-its-kind mechatronics program. All these have been developed within recent years. And all of it backed by Marvin — the mayor, and company that doled out $17 million in year-end bonuses over the holidays, part of a long-standing profit-sharing tradition.

Goldsmith has been with the company for 37 years. He decided to run for mayor because he thought “it was inevitable that there was going to be change.”

“I’d rather be part of creating change than just letting something happen,” Goldsmith said, adding that he had people asking him to run and he previously served a few years on the council and 17 years with the fire department, half of that as chief.

He’s prioritizing more housing and the new park that will take millions of dollars and years to complete. The first phase kicks off with a new $4 million marina anticipated to open later this year.

“There’s a lot of things that have been happening, and I’m not even 100 percent sure of what all the future things are in the next few years,” Goldsmith said.

The transfer of power wasn’t what Bob Marvin had in mind yet, but it turned out to be well-timed because his health declined soon after the election. He spent seven weeks in the Roseau hospital with complications from an ulcer and attended his last City Council meeting as mayor virtually. He’s now at Warroad’s senior living center, jobless for the first time since he started working at the manufacturing plant as a teenager.

“I imagine I’ll be twiddling my thumbs,” Marvin, 67, said from the patient bed with his dog Uffda cuddled up next to him and his wife, Loralee, nearby.

For about as long as he was Warroad’s mayor, Marvin has been living with multiple sclerosis. The progressive disease led to his retirement at 52 as VP of transportation for his family’s business that serves as the heartbeat of this community and its biggest employer. Warroad is called Hockeytown U.S.A., but the company is just as much the city’s lifeblood.

Marvin continued serving as mayor as a wheelchair user the past decade. A Minnesota Wild hockey blanket covers his chair. He bought into the team when it formed and he still owns a small percentage.

In retirement, Marvin will remain passionate about the Wild, Warroad and vintage cars. He still owns the Shed, a 24,000-square-foot showroom housing his collection of 96 classic and muscle cars that is open to the public for free. He said people come from as far away as New Zealand and Sweden to see it.

“He saw it as another way to bring people to Warroad,” Loralee Marvin said, “and it’s amazing how many people it does bring to Warroad.”

Marvin said he’s going to “sit back and enjoy the community that I grew up in.” And a community that he helped build.

“As mayor, when you’re working on various projects, and when they come to life or come into fruition, it gives you a little satisfaction seeing that,” Marvin said.

He’s had his hand in many projects over the last 30 years. Like remodeling the municipal liquor store, permitting a new hotel in town. His family helped finance the senior living center, too.

“As a family, we all kicked in and I thought, geez, senior living center. Why would I need that? And here I am,” he said.

It’s unclear who is Minnesota’s longest-serving mayor, but last year the mayor of Independence retired after 45 years. Marvin said he probably had a few more terms left in him. But he welcomed Goldsmith to the race.

“He’s a good employee within the company,” Marvin said of Goldsmith. “So you get to know people that way and see their strengths and weaknesses that way. But I think he’ll do all right.”

Goldsmith, 60, serves as senior director of sales and marketing for Infinity from Marvin, a fiberglass window and door line he co-founded. Infinity recently partnered with Costco to sell the line in 160 warehouses across the country. It’s expanding to more than 200 warehouses next year.

Goldsmith gets emotional when he talks of how positive the partnership has been with Costco.

“I think Marvin believes really strongly in having a healthy community, and that needs to be supported by the city. But unless a small community has some type of benefactor … it’s really hard for a small town to keep, well, growing for sure.”

He said Warroad is a vibrant, thriving community offering more than just hockey and windows. And he’s appreciative of all his predecessor has done.

“We’re a community that has a lot of respect for Bob, what he did and what he does,” he said. “And I don’t think we stumbled at all as a city.”