Community and city council encouragement spur a sense of public service in Frazee mayor

By Robert Williams

Editor

Mike Sharp was quite comfortable helping run the City of Frazee from his city council seat, but the resignation of former Mayor Mark Flemmer, 18 months into his four-year term, created an opportunity to take over mayoral duties, something that was never planned.

Sharp was also the city’s Vice Mayor at the time that Flemmer stepped down and he had little argument against the process of being the replacement.

“Being Vice Mayor, the logical sequence was to become interim mayor, but that was really at the vote of the council and they voted to make me interim mayor,” he said. “At that time I was willing to do it. It was never on my agenda or my radar to ever be Mayor of Frazee.”

Sharp had the support of his fellow council members and over time found he also had a lot of support in the community.

“When I took the interim position, the other council members individually approached me saying we’d like you to run and I had several neighbors who wanted me to run,” said Sharp. “That’s really the reason I decided to throw my hat in the ring to run for the mayor position. It’s not something I necessarily wanted to do myself. Other folks encouraged me to do it and I’m willing to do it out of a sense of public service.”

Sharp is originally from Sebeka, where he graduated high school in 1997. He earned his Bachelor’s degree after attending University of Minnesota-Crookston and transferring to the Twin Cities campus. He continued his education, earning a Masters Degree in Natural Resource Management at North Dakota State University in 2004.

Sharp pursued an emphasis in soil and water technology, which led him to his current role at the Minnesota Pollution Control Agency (MPCA) as a Water Quality Specialist.

“I’m out doing water quality monitoring during the summer months and during the winter, behind the desk writing reports,” said Sharp. “Originally, when I went to school up in Crookston I wanted to go into Forestry. After taking some classes up there I realized this was more of an interest and I switched to that direction.”

After finishing at NDSU, he returned to his former position in southern Minnesota and began applying for jobs with the state and found that job in the MPCA’s Detroit Lakes office.

“This was the area where we wanted to be; we wanted to be close to family when we started having kids,” he said. “We were looking at Detroit Lakes and the Brainerd areas, specifically. The job opened up and I was offered it.”

For the first six to seven years of his current career with the MPCA, now in his 17th year, was spent working with large feedlots in northwestern Minnesota.

Government and civics were something Sharp had an interest in since childhood.

“My interest started back in high school,” he said. 

Sharp was part of the American Legion’s Boys State program, a week-long experience of learning about Minnesota government at the local, county and state levels by “doing.” It is a week of intensive study and involvement. The participants organize and participate in the various levels and branches of government in addition to participating in athletics, music, writing for the newspaper or holding leadership positions across all levels of the program.

“It kind of struck a chord with me; this is something I might want to do eventually,” said Sharp. “Fast forward into my 20’s and 30’s, I was busy just starting my career and raising a family and eventually, now is the time to step forward and try to get involved. That was kind of the reason.”

Frazee provided that first opportunity in 2016 and Sharp was the top vote-getter with 370 votes (40 percent), along with Flemmer taking the second open seat with 283 votes for the city council.

Sharp has been a vocal advocate of cleaning up the town by way of ordinance enforcement, something the current city council has also emphasized regularly as a change that needs to happen.

“It’s an area where we’ve got to do a better job; there’s an opportunity to do a better job and I think that’s what the residents want,” he said. 

Sharp cited the 2019 Frazee Comprehensive Plan for the next 15 years where ordinance enforcement is the direction the city wants to go.

The results of resident polling provided the following review on blight and maintenance in the plan: Vacant and blighted housing and rental properties play a role in the image of the community, and respondents support efforts to enhance and revitalize neighborhoods. Programs directed toward elderly homeowners, people in need, renters, and property owners to help upkeep their property should be developed. Numerous mentions of overall city maintenance and code enforcement were brought up in the survey and directly relate to this general topic.

“We want folks to clean up their lawns and take care of some of these dilapidated buildings,” Sharp said. “It’s a pretty simple concept, but the whole implementation and enforcement thing is more complex than most folks realize. I feel, as a city, we need to put forth that effort on the enforcement side.”

The current council, which now includes Andrew Daggett who filled Sharp’s seat, continues to push to improve the look of the city in both the residential and commercial areas.

Daggett was the first to bring up improving the look of the city and holding both city officials and residents accountable to make Frazee look better as a whole during the League of Women Voters candidate forum prior to the election.

“I would like attractive entrances and an attractive downtown and I would like people to be able to drive around the entire city and be proud of it and want to live here,” Daggett said.

That notion seems to fit completely with the pursuit of Sharp and the council, something that has been improving over time, but still has a ways to go.

“Enforcement in the past was sort of sporadic; we’d enforce it and let up a little bit and things would regress,” Sharp said. “We’ve got to maintain that momentum in my mind.”

Improving the look of Frazee is something that all candidates have heard about from residents, especially Sharp while holding the Interim Mayor title until the election.

“I hear it a lot and I think it’s important for visitors driving through the community to see a community where people take pride in their properties and businesses,” said Sharp. “If you’re a new resident to town, image is everything.”

In a world where digital image is also everything, Sharp is unique for someone his age in that he carries no digital footprint. Any searches will find other Mike Sharp’s, but the mayor’s contributions are reports from his work with the MPCA and nothing else.

“That’s intentional; I’ve got no time for it,” Sharp said.

Sharp’s can-do attitude balanced with a laid back personality allowed him to examine what he believed Frazee needed for nearly six years on city council prior to taking over as mayor.

“The first four years it was looking at issues that need to be addressed and at the time there were some folks that had been on the council a number of years,” he said. “They were pretty receptive to looking at some different things.”

Sharp pushed for updating the comprehensive plan to get a pulse on what residents wanted.

“You have to understand what residents want and you can’t make assumptions,” he said.

Sharp and his family have lived in Frazee for 17 years, so he has seen a transformation.

“It was a town, in my mind, that was headed in the wrong direction in many ways; we were losing businesses and property upkeep wasn’t what it should have been,” Sharp said.

An incident occurred that put the jump into Sharp’s desire to be a part of the solution.

“What kind of spurred me into jumping into the world of politics was I had a couple young kids and the neighbor had a couple of pitbulls that were running in my yard constantly,” he said. “It wasn’t even safe for my kids to play in their own yard and I just had enough.”

That still resonates today as Sharp was swift to take action this past summer when a dangerous dog attacked a neighbor while she was out in her flower garden.

“It affects me personally, because I’ve been through what she went through and what she is feeling like,” he said. “She wants to feel safe in her yard and safe to bring her grandkids over and spend time with her.”

This summer’s situation settled itself when the dog owner was jailed on other crimes and the dogs left town when he did, but Sharp has continued to work on an update to the dangerous dog ordinance in committee with plans to bring that update to council in 2025.

Sharp is also taking over mayoral duties during a big uptick in downtown business, thanks to the risk and efforts of those new business owners and Economic Development Consultant Karen Pifher.

“They’re stepping forward and willing to take a chance on Frazee,” Sharp said. “There are a lot of things that I think have contributed to this recent boom in town. Karen gets a lot of credit and there are a lot of other folks too that have stepped forward. The momentum with Wannigan Park has been positive in bringing folks to town,”

The flexibility of the Frazee Community Development Corporation (FCDC), the main motivators behind bringing a regional park to Frazee, has been key to what is becoming a bigger attraction as it heads into the meat of Phase I planning scheduled until 2026. Some elements in this phase include a portion of the seasonal and short term campgrounds, canoe/kayak river access/boat launches and primitive camping, trailheads, hard and natural surface trails, and picnic shelters and areas.

FCDC’s ability to fund itself through grants, utilizing the city as a financial holder of those funds, while not costing Frazee any money has also been huge for continued expansion in the park and the town.

“That is the key right now,” said Sharp. “With our tax levy where it is and we’re trying to do so many things as a city, we just don’t have the room in our tax levy to take on the development of a park. They’ve stepped forward and donated a lot of their time and money into the development of the park and it’s absolutely key.”

Sharp’s presiding over the council has seen an improvement in meeting efficiency, something he credits to the work council members and city staff are doing in committees.

“If you’re going to have an efficient city council that’s where you have to do your work—at the committee level,” he said. “That’s how I want to approach things going forward.”

One does not have to be elected to be on one of the city’s committees and the city is always looking for more contributors. If interested, simply visit the city office or talk to Sharp or a councilmember to see how you can help Frazee into the future.