Among many items on the Duluth City Council’s agenda for it’s April 14 meeting was approving a budget for Spirit Mountain’s 2025-2026 Fiscal year.

Prior to the meeting, a presentation was given to the council on the budget by Spirit Mountain’s executive director Ann Glumac, who broke down the numbers. The 2024-2025 year concludes at the end of April, and while the numbers aren’t official just yet, Glumac says she can say for sure that there will be an operating profit – a successful year, especially following the 2023-2024 “winter that wasn’t.”

“We had a loss for our last fiscal year of about $92,000,” Glumac said during her presentation, “And that might not sound like a good thing, but I will tell you that every one of my members on my team, every single employee sacrificed so that we could have that number that small and that we could manage that downturn and that operating loss through our cash reserves.”

To protect against lean years, Glumac says that she and her team err on the side of caution when putting together their budget, by making sure expenses are covered by “reasonably attainable” revenues.

“What that looks like in real life is; I hear from my team what their operations plans are, and they put that together in a budget. This year they submitted it, and it was more money than I thought we could generate. And so we had to revise our operating plans.”

Looking towards the near future, Spirit Mountain is planning to start their new chairlift project soon, as well as its Chalet renovation project.

During it’s meeting, the council approved the $7.9 million budget for Spirit Mountain, along with the rest of the items on it’s consent agenda.