2013 Achievement Award Winner: Bayfield Mayor Larry MacDonald

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At least four days each week, Larry MacDonald enjoys being mayor of Bayfield, Wisconsin, that’s for sure.

How do we know? Because Larry – after winning nine two-year terms – still wants to be mayor.

“I’m up in April; as of this point, I’m running again. I’ve told people that as long as I like the job four days a week and I’m still healthy, I’m still running. If I’m down to liking it three days, I’ll gracefully bow out.

“For now, sometimes I love it seven days a week.”

Apparently a voting majority of the city’s 487 residents love Larry back.

His resumé reports: “Elected Mayor of Bayfield in 1994, 1996, 1998, 2000, 2002, (Tried to retire in 2004), 2006, 2008, 2010 & 2012.”

In 2006, the last time he had an opponent, he won 2 to 1.

Larry and Julie MacDonald came to Bayfield in 1989 to start the Cooper Hill House Bed and Breakfast inn. Not long after that, Larry threw his hat into the mayoral ring. A gregarious, generous fellow, Larry thought he could help strengthen the small city’s assets and help with some of its needs.

Larry is a hands-on mayor. He volunteers three hours each morning to help first-graders with reading and math. He’s front and center at community events, often sporting his trademark top hat and tuxedo. He’s been an ambassador for the city, traveling statewide, nationally and internationally. He’s led his city to honors and recognition for its commitment to sustainable practices.

“To do the job right, you really have to immerse yourself in it.”

Larry has immersed himself right into Lake Superior for a task he took on his first year as mayor and that still is a favorite accomplishment. The new mayor declared that the dilapidated, seasonal lakeside pavilion – a 1920s-era dance hall bought by the city in the 1930s – could be expanded and renovated within six months at a cost of $50,000 and with no effect on local taxpayers. True naiveté, the seasoned mayor says today. The project took $250,000, three years … but no added tax thanks to extensive fundraising, which brings up that immersion.

After he announced the project, Larry read in the local newspaper that the mayor would walk the plank of the local schooner Zeeto if $500 could be raised for it. This was indeed news to Larry; no one had asked him. He called the editor to say she had an error in her newspaper: The story should have said the mayor would walk the plank for $2,500. A series of plunges netted $10,000, and one happily drenched mayor who still says, “When people tell me to go jump in the lake, I say, ‘I already have.’”

Today the pavilion is a year-round gathering place for meetings to events, weddings to funerals.

Another major success under Mayor MacDonald is less concrete, but has earned Bayfield admiration from tourist towns everywhere. The city seems to be achieving the delicate balance of economic security, resident well-being and environmental health.

Bayfield attracts scores of visitors without sacrificing the community’s authentic (and quirky) culture or becoming a jumble of national fast-food places and big-box stores.

Larry could take some credit for steering the city into that balance, but, typical of him, he has a list of others to credit.

Ground work was laid before he took office, Larry says. “It started 30, 35 years ago when the city did its first comprehensive plan. Hardly anybody did it back then.”

The vision was to make the most of the city’s Lake Superior location, to bolster waterfront-related tourism and to preserve the character of the town. A “very strict and well-done sign ordinance – no billboards, little neon,” says Larry. The city invested in amenities, like the Apostle Islands Marina, now a boon with boaters and boat-loving visitors.

Larry also credits the current city staff and city council, which rarely meets longer than 30 to 40 minutes thanks to a couple dozen committees with volunteers who hammer out business before it reaches the council.

“It is very important to note that a very large portion of the success of Bayfield is due to a dedicated city staff and an engaged group of residents and businesses,” says the mayor.

Larry, though, deserves his share of credit for that successful balance. “I’m firmly convinced that the Native American philosophy of looking over the seven generations ahead, and then making a decision, is the right one.”

One funny thing about being mayor of Bayfield when you’re Larry McDonald: You frequently must leave your city. “If I’ve learned one thing in 18 years as mayor, it’s that Madison is a long way from Bayfield.” Larry has made the 51⁄2-hour, nonstop drive to the state capital so many times that he boasts logging a quarter-million miles on his 101⁄2-year-old car.

Larry represents Bayfield’s and Lake Superior’s interests on the Wisconsin Local Government Institute, Wisconsin Sea Grant Advisory Council, League of Wisconsin Municipalities Lobby Team, as chairman of Wisconsin Coastal Management Council and on the Alliance for Great Lakes. As mayor, he accepted for his city a Peter Wege International Annual Award for the Best Sustainable Practices for a Great Lakes Community in 2010 and the Wisconsin Governor’s Tourism Conference award for Best Sustainable Community in 2011.

And that’s to name a very few.

In 2010 Larry was asked by the U.S. government to attend the first European Green Conference in Stockholm, Sweden. The other nine U.S. representatives were from big cities. Whenever Larry said he came from a town of 500, he was asked, “You mean 500,000, right?”

Larry does city business out of his home office. “There is not a mayor’s office yet; they’ve been very successful at not having it.” He doesn’t invite constituents home. If you need to meet him, he’s more likely to suggest Maggie’s restaurant.

There’s much that Larry loves about his adopted home. “Ninety-eight percent of the town’s business is located in the downtown. We don’t have a strip-mall approach. We still have a grocery and a hardware.”

There are newly fixed roads, turn-of-the-century streetlights being put up and new brickwork paving. The city has what Larry jokingly counts as another reasonable balance – “five liquor licenses and five churches.”

Larry loves the local do-it-yourself attitude, demonstrated when a new couple moved to town. Soon the Bayfield population sign “487” sported a “+2.” “Somebody added to the sign,” says Larry, “which I thought was very fun and very Bayfield.”

“Very fun and very Bayfield” – an apt label, it turns out, for the mayor himself.