Minneapolis Mayor R.T. Rybak is whizzing through his final days at City Hall with the same intensity of his last crowd surf at First Avenue, where he headlined an "Un-Augural" bash to mark the end of his 12 years in office.
He's dialing developers for the $400 million Downtown East project, arranging meetings and farewells, and negotiating with his wife about which oversized mayoral mementos piled up in his third-floor office she can indulge in their south Minneapolis home.
And after Mayor-elect Betsy Hodges is sworn in Jan. 2, Rybak says he'll walk just a few blocks over to start his next job — heading an educational organization — with no break.
"I've literally never worked as hard as I have in the last couple of weeks," he said in a brief interview before his stage dive Wednesday night. "... I'm basically not really going to change the tempo I'm working at [after leaving], which is probably good for me. If I went away onto some island and sat in the sun for a few weeks, I'd probably kill myself."
Instead, his vacation will come from not immediately worrying about how the snowplows are working when the next blizzard strikes.
Minneapolis government is set up to give the mayor less power than the City Council, but Rybak seized the position in 2002 with gusto, carefully crafting City Hall's public image and asserting his vision. He sought to build consensus and hash out any disputes behind closed doors. And outside of government offices, he championed Nice Ride bikes, food trucks, composed unabashedly corny Twitter poetry and made it his business to show up as many places as he could.
One of Rybak's most visible legacies will be the planned transformation of land owned by the Star Tribune in Downtown East from a drab string of parking lots into a complex of Wells Fargo office space, apartments, shops, a parking ramp and a nearly two-block public park in the shadow of the new Minnesota Vikings stadium.
The largest development deal in recent Minneapolis history won approval from the City Council on Dec. 13 — just under the wire for Rybak, who spearheaded the project. But he's using his final days in office to try to recruit developers to buy the air rights over the parking ramp.