Former Duluth lawmaker Mike Jaros dies at 82, ending era

Mike Jaros, the Bosnia-born Duluth lawmaker who spent 11,690 days in the Minnesota House, died at 82, closing a political career that stretched from the early 1970s into the 2000s and still echoes in St. Louis County politics.

Jaros represented District 7B and portions of Duluth from 1973 to 1981, then again from 1985 to 2008. He first won office as part of the nonpartisan-Democratic-Farmer-Labor caucus and later served as a Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party member, becoming one of the region’s most durable public figures across changing political eras in St. Paul and on the North Shore.

His life story matched the immigrant arc that has long shaped Duluth. Born April 12, 1944, in Germany, Jaros lived in Yugoslavia from 1945 to 1960 before immigrating to Duluth from Bosnia at 16. He graduated from Duluth Cathedral High School, attended Salvatorian Seminary, the College of St. Scholastica and the University of Minnesota Duluth, and earned a bachelor’s degree in foreign languages, Spanish, Russian and Latin, from the University of Minnesota. He was a teacher when first elected.

That background gave Jaros a perspective that mattered in a city built by arrivals. He was part of a generation of local leaders whose careers reflected Duluth’s working-class neighborhoods, immigrant families and cross-cultural civic life, and his long tenure made him a familiar figure to voters who saw the same questions come back session after session: taxes, investment and how state resources reached northeastern Minnesota.

Jaros’s final House years were marked by committee work that still speaks to current fights over public dollars. He chaired the Minnesota Heritage Finance Division in 2007-08 and served on Taxes, Commerce and Financial Institutions, Tourism and Capital Investment. Those assignments put him at the center of debates over how Minnesota funds its priorities, from cultural and heritage spending to the tax burdens carried by households and businesses in Duluth and St. Louis County.

He remained visible after leaving the House. In 2016, Jaros announced that he would run for the St. Louis County Board’s 3rd District seat, a reminder that his name still carried weight in county politics long after his legislative service ended.

Jaros is survived by his wife, Annette Nordine Jaros, and three children, Bonita, also known as Bonnie or Bani, Adam and Patrick. His death marks the passing of a lawmaker whose immigrant roots, long House service and later county ambitions helped define an era of Duluth politics that current officials still inherit.