Meet Mayor Dan Roe
Looking back and looking ahead at what's next for Roseville
Mayor Dan Roe is in the middle of his fourth term as mayor, with under two years to go before the next election. The Roseville Reader sat down with Roe to learn what excites him about this role and his vision for Roseville.
Roe has been serving the City of Roseville for two decades, starting as a member of the Twin Lakes Stakeholder Panel advisory group in 2004 and a member of the Roseville Planning Commission in 2005. He was elected to city council in 2007 and mayor in 2010. Roe has been mayor of Roseville ever since.
“Every time I look back at it, it keeps getting longer,” Roe said.
Roe says he was drawn to the problem solving nature of the role and has always been interested in government.
“When I was a teenager, I liked watching CSPAN more than MTV,” Roe said with a chuckle.
In Roseville, the role of mayor is a part time position. The mayor is not directing the activities of city staff or spending all day at city hall. Roe works full time at Dynamic Air Inc. in Vadnais Heights., where he’s been since 1990. He started out as a project engineer and then moved into sales for the majority of his career. Roe earned a degree in mechanical engineering from the University of Michigan.
“The thing that appealed to me is the problem solving aspect of it as an engineer. Once I got out of school I was much less interested in doing equations and doing the same thing over and over again,” Roe said. Now he sells capital equipment to industrial companies.
“They let me do the mayor thing on the side without much hassle,” Roe said.
In Roseville the mayor is the chair of city council meetings, but they don’t have veto power and their vote counts the same as the other councilmembers. When the city council makes a decision, it’s by the votes of each person on the council who seek to represent the residents of Roseville.
“Hopefully we collaborate to the point that we all feel pretty good about it,” Roe said. “The toughest votes are certainly the 3 – 2 votes. We don’t have many of those. They tend to happen on the most controversial issues.”
One of the ways the mayor and councilmembers are guided in their decision-making is through the seven city commissions, comprised of volunteers who apply for the role and are appointed by the council. These commissions serve as advisors to the city council and city staff, and play a major role in shaping the decisions and vision for the city.
Just like the city council, there’s no one person running the show on the city commissions either, Roe said. The majority of commission members need to be convinced before they pursue anything.
(As an aside, there are currently openings on several city commissions and applications are due by February 7 at 4:30 PM. Learn more here.)
A vision for Roseville’s future
With two years left in his term, Roe is looking forward to seeing some major projects through. Namely, finishing the strategic plan and getting the new Maintenance Facility well underway.
In 2006 the city went through an extensive community vision process, involving lots of meetings and a steering committee to provide guidance on all sorts of topics from transportation to the environment, to public safety, to diversity and inclusion, and more. This vision process became the basis for the city council’s decision making, Roe said. The final report called Imagine Roseville 2025 was rolled out at the beginning of his term as a city councilmember. (View a pdf of the report here.)
“It was used to hold our feet to the fire on things,” Roe said.
In September 2022 the city initiated a process to update the community aspirations called Envision Roseville. This included engagement with over 1,000 residents at live events and over 2,400 responses from surveys and other virtual tools.
“What we’ve always wanted to do, at least philosophically, is to have an actual strategic plan that guides our decision making,” Roe said. The city began developing this strategic plan in 2024 as an effort between staff, leadership, city council, and an external consultant, Roe said. The strategic plan is building on the foundation of the Envision Roseville project.
An update on the strategic planning process will be presented tonight, at the Jan. 27 city council meeting. The strategic plan will be finalized this year and will inform the 2026 budgeting process.
As for the new Maintenance Facility, the city council—in collaboration with city staff—is in the midst of figuring out next steps for finalizing the design plan, taking steps to implement the sales tax, and gathering a citizen stakeholder group. They also need to decide what to do about funding a new License & Passport Center, since the sales tax option fell through. A solution for the city’s dance studio and park storage space that was supposed to accompany the license center building needs to be worked out too. At the Jan. 13, 2025 meeting the city council discussed these matters, including weighing options for the location of the license center and whether to build something new, rent, or repurpose an existing public works building.
There’s also community engagement and feedback to work through in the process.
“It’s hard to understand that there are decisions left to make,” Roe said. “A part of the process is working with people to work through their own thought processes and reactions to things.”
He’s also looking forward to seeing the proposal for a new staffing model from the fire department to meet the increasing number of emergency calls the department is navigating. In 2024, there were 235 instances of emergency calls when the fire department’s resources were unavailable or provided an inappropriate/modified response, according to Fire Chief David Brosnahan’s Jan. 27 Request for Council Action.
Looking back, one of the areas Roe is most proud of is how the city has been able to maintain a strong business sector and high quality of life for the community. Roe hopes Roseville will continue to be a “really well kept secret” where people want to live, enjoy the parks, and start businesses.
“The thing we’ve always been trying to do is to make sure we don’t fall into the path that a lot of first ring suburbs around the country can have, where investment goes out. Where you can’t maintain a good base of business,” Roe said. “I think we’ve done a really good job of that and I hope we can maintain that forever.”
The next mayoral election is in 2026. Roe says it’s too early to say whether or not he’ll be running again. In the meantime, you can find him at City Hall as the chair of city council meetings and at community events, working with other elected and community leaders to solve problems for the City of Roseville.
