City Commission - workshop

well good morning everyone and welcome to day two of our budget workshops we have another full morning with a lot of information coming our way so appreciate the leadership team for setting aside the morning to walk us through a number of things so i don't know if senior staff have anything to say before i turn it over to the board of health or to public health ms thompson

I just want to remind everybody, if you're following along on this page, this is where the budget binder is posted on our website. And then we have different departments we talk about general general fund expenses today on break at around 1050.

Thank you very much. That will turn over to Jennifer with public health.

Good morning, commissioners. Quick department overview. There is more in your narrative in the packages, but our divisions go across eight. We added winter warming as its own division, so it has an allocated budget line for that as we've been delegated to do that task the last several winters. Environmental health is one of our divisions as well. They do a plethora of things in inspections with animal boarding facilities, aquatic facilities, body arts, FDA food regulation facilities. Lodging facilities, massage therapy, establishments, nuisance complaints, mobile home parks, on-site sewage treatment systems, pet store facilities, food and truck inspections, and tanning facilities. And that's what our environmental health folks are out doing. And all of the pools. That's the aquatics. Public Health Emergency Preparedness and Response. It's a regional, so this covers six of our counties in the southeast region of North Dakota. It is a 24-7 public health emergency coordination for those six counties. They support vulnerable populations and continuity of essential services. Public Health Emergency Preparedness and Response Program is 100% federally funded, so there's no general fund to this division. The WIC Nutrition Program for Women, Infant, and Children. is a program that supports nutrition, healthy foods, and referrals to other community programs. The WIC clients include women who are pregnant or have recently had a child. Infants and children up to five years of age are served. Other caregivers, such as fathers, step-parents, grandparents, and foster parents may also apply for for benefits with children under the age of five in the household. Health promotion is one of our divisions, using substance use prevention, obesity prevention, tobacco prevention, cancer prevention, mental health education, Women's Way is a Women's Way cancer prevention. Food systems and access to healthy food are the areas this division focuses on. Nursing and clinical services, family planning is part of this, STI and STD treatment. pre-exposure prophylactics, immunizations, outreach services, adult health home visiting, maternal child home visiting, Ryan White, school nursing, disease control, foot care clinics, fit and strong, and oral health fall into this category. Employee health, which we talked about yesterday briefly, and I'll provide more information today at the request of Commissioner Peterson, provides newly hired staff at the City of Fargo with appropriate medical evaluations to fulfill their roles in the police, fire, public works, and all other city departments as necessary. Several departments require annual evaluations thereafter as well, per national guidelines. The Harm Reduction Division has the Gladys Rae Shelter, Withdrawal Management Unit, Syringe Services Program, Mobile Outreach Program, Homeless Engagement Response Team, Winter Warming Initiative, and the Resource and Recovery Center. And then there's our administration, which covers communications, grants management, and reporting in fiscal and program management, oversight of strategic planning, and community health programs. emerging issues for the coming year that were identified in our strategic plan that was completed in 2025 with our healthcare partners throughout the metro. Our strategic plan includes community awareness and engagement, our workplace culture, public health advocacy, and policy and cross-divisional collaboration. Community health assessment and improvement plan that we also did in 2025 with our health care neighbors is to increase access to healthy food and inspire health and wellness initiatives. We want to work on our immunization rates as trend issues are having a decreased immunization rate. mental health concerns throughout the community with anxiety and depression, the abundance of illicit drugs available in the community and overdose deaths, housing, obesity rates with youth initiatives. Thank you, Susan. STI and STD. Apparently I can't use the clicker. So those are our emerging issues as well. And do I trust this stuff? Our organizational chart was changed in 2025 with the resignation of our clinic director. At that time, we merged to have our nursing and our clinical services become nursing and clinical services, and the same director who was over nursing now oversees both. There's been a wonderful blending of our staff sharing between the two divisions and learning from each other and a little bit of switching with some of the chronic diseases falling into other categories. So it's been a great experience so far. It was a challenge to start, but they are off and running right now. With that, we also created a health promotion director to really focus on the initiatives within that program and having its own dedicated director to do so. So it just shifted slightly. Overall, Fargo-Cass Public Health has a $15,523,910 budget. This is the breakdown of where that funding comes from. And 40% of it is coming from our general fund. Fees and insurance is 13% of our composition. Local finances is 8%. Cass County is at 9%. State aid is 6%. State funding from other grant cycles is 11%. And federal grants are 13%. This is an incorrect number. I'm not sure exactly what's in the slide for you guys, but with the COLA and the steps figured into the budget, this number for the bottom right-hand corner should be $15,523,910. And that is the difference between what our budget came in at, which actually would have realized a $400,000 benefit to the general fund actually this year with a $200 our $200,000 reduction in operation, and also a $200,000 increase in our revenues. But adding the steps and COLA into the anticipated COLA into this mix makes it a $500,000 increase for Fargo Cast Public Health.

That is reflected in the book and online.

Thank you. This is the actuals from 23 to 27's projection. In 2024 was the first year I came in to do the budget. We've continually decreased the ask of the City of Fargo General Fund and have made some significant reductions over the past two years. This year, we're not looking to make significant reductions at this point until you guys tell us differently. But right now, we're coming in at a budget that we feel good with and without having to make a lot of changes. These are the percentages and breakdowns. Our finance director, the public health director of finance, has looked back from her records, being here since 1997, has stated that the general fund is always hovering around 40-ish percent, 40 to 43 percent since 1997, which is a great record to have. This is where we are at currently, again, going from 23 to 27's projection, with some fluctuations right around that 40-ish percent. We are currently... doing good on budget this year and probably will still come in under the budgeted amount. We had forecasted a decrease in budget for the general fund or for the City of Fargo for 2027.

I just step in for one second. Absolutely. This is the comment that I made yesterday about we don't allocate revenues to departments. This is one that will be very beneficial when we start doing that. Because if you look at this, it looks like the health department costs the city $15 million. But when you look here, has county state aid grants and self-paid. That's all revenue that's coming into the general fund. It just doesn't get credited to health. So that net six million is really what it costs. So when we update our software, that will be very helpful for you.

I would like that. Thank you, Susan. We continue to look at ways to increase revenue by providing different service lines. When we meet with Cass County later this week to do the budget with Cass County, we're anticipating to ask for a 3% increase on our budget. We had discussed this with them last year. We came in with a budget number that was greater than 3%, and with the caps, they asked us to stay at that 3%. We did that. We are doing that with 12 now monthly payments to FargoCast Public Health for services rendered versus getting reimbursed for services delivered. That way it's just a consistent, they know the number that we're coming in with, and it's been preferred by both parties. State aid has been relatively consistent, and our grants are, We continue to look for more grants. They have fluctuated a little bit since 2025. So with decreased grant opportunities or having rapid turnarounds and different criterion, we're continuing to look for grant cycles that we can apply to. Fee for services are increasing, and our fees for services for our environmental health is an anticipated increase for 2027 as well. We introduced a base fee for 2025's budget That's going to experience an increase and also an increase in all of the inspection and services fees that environmental health is doing throughout the communities. This is the breakdown by division. So how each division is funded. Emergency preparedness, as mentioned earlier, is 100% funded by federal. Women and infant children is 62% federal. 11% Cass County is paying for a provider in that division. And then our city general fund is paying for 27%. When there are leftover funds within the WIC at the state level, we do ask for any extra funds that are available that other WIC departments have not been able to utilize. We have had maybe up to $100,000 or more being given to Fargo Cass Public Health for that. Nursing and Clinical Services is at $6,466,000 for their services. And then again, the breakout there is Federal, Cass County. It's a little bit of everybody on that one. Health Promotion, we came in actually with an 8% profit to General Fund. 17% is with Federal. 88% is state-funded with grants, and then we have 3% for fees for services. That is going to be any of the compliance checks that we're doing for alcohol or for tobacco or our victim impact panel that we have fees associated to. Environmental health, 19% at the top for city and city general fund. And we have fees for services there as well. That's, again, going out to do all the septics and all the inspections, things like that. 3% state aid is coming into there. And that 3% for state aid is also given because we have... money coming in for the southeast region. So some of that money is given to the Environmental Health Department to be able to go out to those other counties to do that work. And then 22% is going to be Cass County. Employee health is 100% on my side, general fund. And that you gave I gave you other numbers as asked for in yesterday's meeting for employee health. And then we have administration, which includes myself, always within the administrative suites, Melissa, our PIO, and it's in the administration department as well.

You skipped harm reduction.

I'm sorry. I did. Harm reduction at $3,768,116. 28% of that is paid for by state, 5% by state aid, and 67% by city general fund. then employee health, and then admin, and then winter warming. That's currently at $14,000. That was with just operations. There hasn't been salaries allocated to that as of just yet, I don't think. Actually, they are on this sheet. So for winter warming, which would be the whole season of winter warming, I think, would be $236,539. Very good. And then human capital requests and adjustments. These are temp seasonal funding. I don't know if I talked about, am I covering all of these ones? Okay, very good. Yeah, just the reallocations. It's a net neutral as far as the funding and changing them all to different accounts. and to have overtime that's anticipated to be part of the budgeted cycle for these staff members. And then a reclassification market adjustment was asked for.

That one's not me.

Okay. Oh, very good.

Thank you. And then whatever questions you may have.

Mr. Strand.

Thank you, Mayor. Jen, a few different balcony item views, but help us if you would understand the big picture with the Recovery and Resource Center, where we're at, where we're going, where we need to go, and what you need us all to do to help us get through the goalposts.

Sure. start easy, right? So we are not completely funded for the move and rent as we had anticipated hoping to be with some promises that were made in our initial funding. The Mayor had gone out, Brenda Dyerig and I had gone out. There was other people who assisted with general fundraising. There were some initial conversations. There were stated promises of funding to come and some of those folks haven't been able to come through maybe this year yet. Some are anticipating being able to do so in 2028 to finish up their promise to the funding. So we're not at our point yet of funding. I know that the FM Area Foundation is continuing with the account and people being able to make donations to that account. The fit-up is done. We're in the facility. We had our ribbon cutting and so we continue to operate out of that facility. We've had increased partners come into the facility as a result of being in a bigger and newer space, feeling safer. So our funding for that, the lease and fit-out is not yet completed.

Good work to your team, by the way. You're doing really major work there. Help me understand, Jen, the relationship with the federal government and programs and funding and what the dynamics are there. Are they changing much? Are we at risk with losing support with them? Where's that lie generally?

There's some shift in language for some of the grants, not all of the grants. Grants are coming out with really fast turnarounds right now. We get maybe a month notice and they're needing to be back in. So language right now, streets program was a grant I was going to work on. The language is not for housing first, for example. They want treatment first. We had partners that were willing to work on that and push forward with it. So some of the languages are going to be not inclusive of some of the harm reduction work that we have done, but it would still align with like sober housing and other programs. So some of the current administration programs How they're rolling out doesn't necessarily fit everything that we've done. There's been restrictions or reductions in dollars that are available that used to be available. The Rural Health Transformation Grant is one of those that is coming through and allocated from the federal government to our state. The money that came from that, it's taking a long time to get that money. We are not able to use that in the city of Fargo proper, and that was decided by our local legislation, so not by the federal government.

My last question, Jen, is there are some things that public health does that it's just not real palatable to the general public necessarily. We don't understand addiction. We don't understand harm reduction necessarily. We don't understand the implications exposures to hepatitis C and to HIV and things like that. Why do we do it? Why do we go down the path of harm reduction knowing that there's a public sentiment that says, well, why are you enabling addicts? That kind of a mindset, yet you still do it and we all do it across the country. Why?

It decreases expenses later on. So when we are able to use a clean needle to help somebody who already has an addiction, they are able to not have to or not contract a... hepatitis C or HIV, a lifetime savings if you get treated for hepatitis C, I think is $47,000 in the lower end. I've spoken with both of our larger healthcare networks, their understanding of that. They know that this is a population that would be challenging and expensive to treat should those diseases come into play and needing to have larger treatment later on. So it's important that we do the prevention side of it. You know, I can go back to the fact that if we didn't have an abundance of illicit drug use, we wouldn't need to have a syringe services program. That would be lovely to not have to have a service, right? But there is a drug use issue. And so what we are doing is a prevention effort. It's been wildly successful since 2018. We have had a decreased trend line consistently year over year until 2024, moving into 2025. And so we'll continue to work on those particular things. Currently, we see 41% less people that are our syringe services program because they don't feel safe coming because of the negative publicity that has been given. With that, we've seen an increase in hepatitis C in our community for the first time, and this is something that we want to continue to work with our public on in assuring that the people, when they come there, can be safe and receive care that they need and that we can continue to do our best efforts to decrease disease in the community.

That's all I have, Mayor.

Commissioner Peterson.

Mr. Mayor, thank you for being here. So my childish side has to take over sometimes, right? So if you're asking a 3% increase from our friends from Cass County, and I'm sure there's a line item that makes this actually yield this total, but my yield is $1,287,500. So you should ask Cass County for $2,000 more and tell them I asked for that. So if that's a 3%, if that's what they asked for, that's their number, not ours, right? Kind of funny for $1,500 anyway. One thing on your capital requests, what I heard you say was, and maybe this is a question for our accounting team, the top couple negatives are just a housekeeping issue, correct? It's just balancing where the accounts go, so it's not truly a negative? Again, not being critical, just trying to figure out what's going on.

Personnel, yes.

Okay, perfect.

Moving from the part-time to the overtime.

Okay, thank you. Mr. Mayor, can I just go through a couple real quick that I think are prudent? Yep. Okay. Other one, so I noticed you, health is labeled as bioterrorism, which is pretty funny, I think. But within the six county, I know. I highlighted it, it just made me giggle.

We still do do that, by the way. We go to the U.S. Post Office and work with them on anthrax and other things. Our emergency preparedness does this work.

With us being sort of the hub of the six counties, can you walk me through the funding? That's one of my questions, real quick. And then I can't find it. There's a Ryan White as an expense. I thought that Ryan White was a grant.

Ryan White is a pass-through. And so we do receive money from the...

It's the feds, right?

Feds, yep. So that would come through and it's actually just a pass-through. So we have one RN that oversees that program. When people come in to meet with her, they are able to receive the money from Ryan White. So it comes into us, but it goes right back out to our clients.

So I'm seeing this as an accounting because it's a pass-through.

Yes.

Awesome. And then we have a line item for $60,000 for pharmacy and drugs. I realize that probably is what it is, but can you walk me through the pharmacy and drugs expense, please? Yes. Walk me through the funding of, if we're partners with six counties, how that's done. And then my final question will be, I need you to walk me through the sheet we just got today regarding our internal health, just so everyone's aware of. for what's transpiring. Thank you much, Mr. Mayor.

Do you happen to have this sheet in your book that has the divisions by line item? Yes, I couldn't read that. Okay, let's do that then. So when we go across to line item number six, I don't have the page number.

Page 167.

Thank you. So when you look at pharmacy on line number 62, and you see our overall budget for that is $348,000. And I can, say that again? And so we don't use any of that in admin. But then we have $12,000 that come over into harm reduction. We have $325,000 of that that come into the nursing and clinical services. That is going to look like things, all of our immunization shots that we order are going to come into that line item. Anything that we need for our clinic is going to come into that line item. For family planning, services are going to come into there as well. Our healthcare It is. And then health promotion, we use our nicotine replacement therapy, and that is paid for by the state. But you'll see it hit the overall budget. So you see the big number, even though we have grants that cover immunizations and we have grants that cover health promotions, NRT, and we have some grants for even the syringe services program, the things that will go into there. So you see it as our budget item, but we get other monies to pay for that. So that's not necessarily general fund expense. So the six counties, the southeast region that we cover services for, we have state aid that comes to us. It's $80,000 biannually. So $40,000 we get to do septic services, noose and complaints. If there's homes that need to, like you see here, that come into city commission that are needing to be removed or taking care of their abandoned, their whatever, plate, then we go into those counties. Sometimes we go into their city commissions and we talk to them about those particular issues. The state gives us money to go out and do those services. And so we keep that money. We delegate that out by population to each of those six counties. And then when we get fees and services for those currently, we give those back to the counties and keep the work going because that allows us to do more work than just the $40,000 annually. Additionally, we get money from state aid to the southeast region. For work that we've done, we decided to pool our money this last time, and we did the purchase of Credible Mind for the Southeast region, which is a mental health platform for the community, and it's free for everybody.

Mr. Mayor, may I ask? That funding has been cut in the last couple sessions, correct?

The state aid that we used to get for the county specifically is now competitive, not automatic.

Okay, thank you. And then the last thing I have, then general commentary, but the last thing I have, can you walk us through this? Sure.

So you asked for the numbers for employee health yesterday. This is a citywide program, not just between HR and myself, but it is housed at FargoCast Public Health. We have a LPN that is currently in there providing Basically all of the guests, when they come in, getting their vitals and such and getting ready for the provider and making the scheduling. So when I was hired two years ago, I ended up going through Employee Health, Ock Health on 19th Avenue because there wasn't a provider there, and then I asked questions. I asked a lot of questions when I first came. Why doesn't everybody just go there? And then so I asked for an assessment of what the cost was of this program two years ago, and we were able to accommodate that with the help of HR this past year. And so what you see in front of you has already been shared with Fire, Police, and Public Works, and City Admin. And so verify this with Michael last night that these are the current numbers. At 2025, we're looking at a cost for the employee health program at roughly $500,000. 2026, with the increase in fees to the nurse practitioner there and the increased expectation of total billed hours, And the actuals for annuals for our fire and police, and we're just using those as solid numbers with the anticipation with the work that has been done with Essentia and Sanford as comparisons. You will see those numbers over there. So if you look at with agreement that is continuing services as is at public health building with an employee from Essentia at our site. The same thing is marched out then with Sanford at our site. And then without an agreement, if you look on the bottom two sections there, that is without an agreement, that would be us going to AHRQ Health at Essentia or at Sanford, and then you see those numbers.

Thank you. Mr. Mayor, Commissioners, I think it's time to look at this again a little more closely. I think the numbers, to somewhat degree, speak for themselves, but I think we need to have an open dialogue regarding what's in the best interest of both staff as well as our taxpayers. So thank you for providing this. I think it's educational. I don't see as an action item today, right? But I think, please, if we may, let's have this dialogue going forward regarding our budget. And then a couple points of general commentary. I think to Commissioner Strand's question, I think we need to do a better job of explaining the cost of doing nothing, right? So why are we doing the things we're doing? Because in the end, I think it's cheaper. I don't think we're doing enough of these things, but nor do I think we can afford to do what we need to do. So looking at my senator, mayor, I think it's time to approach our friends in Bismarck As a regional health provider, we're simply not FargoCast Public Health. We are the health care for certainly the metro area, if not more. Maybe our friends in Moorhead might disagree with me a little bit, but I think a lot of folks come to Fargo because we have the services. And I think a lot of folks come to the Fargo-Moorhead metro area because we have the services. Those folks come from all over the state, all over the region. And I think we need to do a better job of telling our story in Bismarck and advocating for help. I don't think we get the aid from our friends in the legislature and our governor's office that we deserve. And I don't think it's a heavy ask. I realize it's a difficult ask, telling the story itself. But that's why I say the first thing we have to do is explain the cost of doing nothing. And then we carry that to our friends in Bismarck saying, this is the bill. Should we take no action? This is the middling ground that we're at right now. We're not doing the job we should. We should be partners in this. I believe, no doubt, we should be partners in this somehow. But the fact that we are funding this to the degree that we are is not necessarily fair to our neighbors and friends in Fargo. I think it's a good thing that we're doing these things. We have to do these things. But we are not the provider to be doing them. And if we are, we need supplemental funding to help account for the massive bill. And it doesn't seem like a lot in an overall budget of $150 million. But the fact that Fargo taxpayers are, I'm just gonna, Fargo's funding this. And I don't think it's fair to the citizens of Fargo. I do think it's the right thing to do to some degree or another. I think, frankly, we should be doing more, which is the housing first, the mental health, the full gamut of things that the federal government, the state government should be doing for us and that used to be done for us. I think it's time to go to Bismarck and tell our story more clearly and concisely and ask for more help. And with your help and your team's help in telling that story, because I can't do it. I can't tell your full story like your team can. Telling our story and saying, pleading, frankly, pleading for help, that's how we get the mission accomplished, I think. So, Mr. Mayor, my tirade is over. Thank you so much.

If I may, Commissioner, CHO has been asking for increased state aid the last two times, and we have not received it. It was moving from $8 to $10 million. There's 28 health care administrators like myself that go there, and as CHO, we lobby for additional state aid funds.

commissioner peterson thank you mr mayor and i think again i don't know that we tell our story well enough i'm not trying to be critical i'm just saying what with my 12 years of of legislative advocacy there's a lot of people who don't understand a lot of things this is an incredibly complex and dynamic it's very political it can be very personal it has all the boxes checked so meddling this thing down or whittling it down to a point where one of the stories I told on Bismarck is the ambulance so we had the downtown quality of life committee that Commissioner Strand and I served on when I was a county commissioner if you remember and one of the stories I think I talked about this at your office and we got together before I took office and It was the story of our homeless friends calling 911 for ambulance rides to South Fargo. It's those stories, and this is the thing that happens, and all of you know this, but we have friends who figured the system out, and instead of calling for a cab or waiting for the bus, they call 911, ambulance shows up, they take them to South Fargo, they walk out of the ER. That story resonated when I said that in Bismarck. If we have more of those stories, even the friends who don't have friends with chemical dependency problems or mental health issues, they say, that's insane, that can't happen. That happens all the time. And the reality of that is, the fiscal note is attached to your health insurance, Mr. Legislator. That's the story that resonates with them because it's easily understandable, it's digestible, and they can process, holy crap, this is the cost of doing nothing. Yeah, you paid for a $3,800 cab ride to South Fargo. And that happens all the time. So it's those stories, I think. And again, I'm not saying you can walk in there next session, or the mayor and I can walk in there next session, or the commission here can walk in next session and get $20 million. But I'm saying we need to start that dialogue of the very digestible, very understandable stories that over time, as our legislature switches, we've got term limits. We're going to have new faces within four years. Those new faces hopefully will then say, oh, I've heard you talk about this for 10 years. I think it's time we do something. So again, Mr. Mayor, sorry.

Thank you. With that, we'll move on to Public Works. And Mr. Dow.

Good morning, Commissioners, Mayor. John, you're always a tough act to follow, so I'll do the best I can to talk about sewers, streets, and dirt.

Which we work with.

Oh, assault as well. So we're going to take it back a little bit from all the complex stuff that Jen just talked about. But, you know, Public Works is a very diverse department. And our department overview is pretty complex, but we're really what our main business is is serving the public and our customers. We're the customer service business. That's what we do. And so our people are our businesses, our organizations, and our residents are most important people as we serve them out there. One telling fact is we don't brag enough about this, but we answered 5,100 calls for service last year in some shape or form, whether it started with a service call, something we met with them and found a solution that maybe didn't quite work for them, but it worked for us to get the result that we both desired. So as we go through this, we actually have six different departments within Public Works. It's kind of different than all the other departments. Most are one department, one budget. I know finance is kind of in the same boat as I am in public works, but we have six of us. It's a simple breakdown, but then I kind of provided an overview because we have three new elected folks here. And so knowing the complexity of how it works and how we deal with storm sewer, we deal with water, we deal with sanitary sewer, we deal with vehicles and PD and fire and engineering, and how that all melds together is something that sometimes takes two years, three years for the elected folks to understand. And so I kind of took it back to the basic level and started with the street department and laid it out on what we do here. You know, really it's about maintaining roads. Sometimes people think that's all we do, but there's a lot of things that go into play where our days change every day. One of the basic things that happened this summer with our heat, as you see around town, is working through engineering with a lot of our explosions of our concrete and our blowouts. And that is a game changer for how we work our season. So things like that that come up, we're really in the emergency service business as well because we're reacting every day to the changes that take place in our community. A lot of it is, you know, snow and ice. That's what you hear about. Snow and ice, snow and ice, snow and ice. We've been blessed for the last three years with very nice winters. I will say winter's on snow side, not so much on ice side. So there's been some things you'll see in our budget that have continued to spend because we had to continue to perform our service in the ice control business, which is a very expensive business as we get into this a little further. And then I will touch back again that we work with our wastewater folks, our water folks, and our storm sewer team over here in engineering because we maintain their systems. We maintain everything in the infrastructure underground out there. So you do have the wastewater treatment plant under the utility, but as you'll find out as we go on, that our team in public works in the street department is actually cleaning the sewers, televising, and doing all the day-to-day maintenance with them. And with the storm sewers, we're also maintaining Rob, are we about 80 storm lift stations? We get a new one every day, it seems like, but we have storm lift stations. So our general maintenance and observation of all our storm lift stations, that is performed by our 58 employees within just the street department, along with the cleaning of the storm sewer systems. on top of everything else we do. And obviously there is the street department as we're the responders when we have our rainfalls, our flood events, our snow events, that we're the responders. We're the ones working side by side with our engineering team, with our emergency services and so forth. So as moving on, the big one is Central Garage. That really touches everybody in our organization as an overview. And I get excited about Central Garage because we have 670 pieces of rolling equipment out there floating around. That is a very large number of equipment from fire trucks, squad cars, engineering inspection vehicles, right down to plows and everything else, 670. That's a rolling stock of $35 million out there on the street every day. And it is something that has to be balanced and managed very closely and cleverly because Fire trucks have to run. There is no, you know, they get a call, oh, it didn't start. They have to respond. Engineering, they need to be out there doing their work early in the morning when the contractors start. And so those vehicles are mission critical every day and they have to be performing. And so as we go through, again, huge list of what we do there. There's one thing that we do. in public works and through central garages, we bid fuel. And I love to bid fuel. And nobody ever talks about it. And Susan loves it when it's good. But we do something that It's hard to find in any other city is we pre-bid our fuel. And we started doing this 16 years ago. It's something I stumbled across right away when I became a department head and the director is a very large city in Chicago was doing this. And so we mimicked it. And we have purchased our fuel. We're always, right now we're purchased through the end of the year. And I'm happy to say that our diesel, we're locked at $2.50 a gallon. Now, if you look at the pumps right now, That is not something you're seeing out there. And you're not seeing other communities doing this. Unlead, we're right about 210. So you don't see that. And so that's huge savings behind the scenes. And so this is, like I said, this is my one, not one moment, but big moment to sit here out and talk about some of these things we do in Central Garage. Our next is mains and hydrants. That is one thing we're dealing with this morning. We have a very large 18-inch water main break on 13th Avenue. And these are our responders, and these are our people every day, night and day, that go out there and find a way to get it done and turn that water back on so people can shower, so people can cook for their kids and everything like that. But there's more that goes on there. We also do the locating for all our water infrastructure. We do all the construction inspection after engineering is done. We do the final walkthrough to accept that. And then, again, we are working day in, day out with every resident out there to make sure they have what they need for a service something we acquired under public works umbrella two years ago was water meters and if you haven't been aware of it we've done a very large water meter replacement project that will be my one and only water main water meter replacement project to exchange 30 000 meters in a city is painful and get into everybody's house i'm happy to say we're about 86 done we have about two thousand customers that we need to work with to get into their houses but we're getting there and and we're down to overall with some of the other issues we're dealing with with connectivity and and how we're getting radio signals and stuff like that we have about a total of four thousand left in two years so that's that's our residents did a wonderful job of letting us into twenty six thousand residents in two years so i can't thank our residents enough on that uh... but we have a great team there that handles Every call when someone is dealing with a water issue. Forestry. Some people don't know forestry is underneath public works. That's another one. I've learned more about trees in 16 years than I ever thought I would know. I'm not a tree person, but I've become a tree person. And trees are valuable to our community. Our community loves trees. And when you start harming trees, especially in North Fargo, we hear about it. But we do have something that's going to be budget affecting, and we're going to probably be asking, or I shouldn't say probably, we are asking for an increase in our utility fee this year. And Brenda will go over more of that tomorrow. But it's very important because first we have Dutch elm disease, which we've been fighting for many, many years. But now we have emerald ash borer. And emerald ash borer is a game changer. It's not year one. It's not year two. It's not year three. It's year four. All the ash trees will be dead. How do you deal with that at one time? We have been diversifying for the last 15 years in the city. We used to be all 45% ash trees, very popular tree in the 80s, and we've been diversifying. We're down to 20%. We really want to be at 15%. We have about 60,000 boulevard trees that we maintain and take care of every year within the city of Fargo. it really comes down to we want to get that number whittled down to more of that 10,000 ash trees that we can deal with. So that is one of the things you'll hear more about, that we're looking at a utility rate increase. Because forestry, as a revenue source, runs really lean. And we've had to make changes. One thing you've seen across our community is our brush program, curbside brush program. We used to do it every week. That costs $200,000. every year if we do it every week. We were able to reduce those costs down by going to just with the recycling rates, and we didn't have to do a rate increase. So it was either rate increase or cut the services. At that time, the commission decided to cut the services. And then our final one is vector control. And vector control is confusing because vector control in the city of Fargo is a department of one. vector control is actually conducted and done with our county partners and our we have the vet best vector control group in the nation literally without a doubt i will say it over and over we are very lucky to have the people we have at cass county because they are the best and so they make us have a very good program and get by with a department of one So there's the six departments. I kind of did a little different, too, for my org chart. It's an operational org chart because public works is also different than a lot of departments because we're very skinny on management. I have four division heads and myself. The rest are all either supervisors and down worker bees. I've always focused on boots on the ground because that's where I can get the most done. If I have to do more, if my division heads have to do more, that's okay, because we'll take on more. But we need to have our people out there in the public, and if we're going to add staff, that's where they need to be. So again, I can provide you the org chart if you're interested. 119 employees over the whole scope of public works, but it's very boring because it gets into operators, operators, operators, and not so much divisions. It's something that's very simple. Emerging issues. This is something that... has been a struggle, operational strain and workforce challenges. When we have a bad winter, HR can testify, and we overwork our staff because we have to to get our stuff done and keep on course. We usually have a fallout of about 10% of our 56 employees in the street department, 58 with two supervisors. But we'll lose 10% immediately after a winter because they've realized this life isn't for them. so that's been a challenge and then getting people back in one thing we did is we changed and we do not we still hire people with commercial drivers license but we also have a training program in-house and we found that we get a lot more applicants if we have that training program and offer people positions that they thought they'd never be able to achieve because it needs a cdl and so that's what we've done and it's been very successful in our staffing the other big operational strain on our workforce challenges is technicians. These fleets are getting harder and harder to maintain and work on. Fire trucks are getting more complex. Vehicles are getting more complex. We've worked with Wahpeton Science Schools. We've worked with all the tech schools. And they are not producing more technicians. It's something that is a way of the past. For some reason, what Wahpeton Science told us is they are having the same amount of graduates that they had in 1975 come out now. Number hasn't grown, but look at all the vehicles and everything on the road. So that is one of the things that we've worked hard with our HR team to try and seek out and find the best applicants. What we found is word of mouth is our best. Friends of technicians that work for us that like working for us, they seem to find our best technicians. One thing since COVID, rising costs. Ice control materials have gone up 34% over the last five years. That is difficult when you're trying to manage a growing city on top of added cost every year. This year, you just approved your first commission meeting. Our salt contract, there was a 3% increase. That was right off the top, 3%. And we run a pretty progressive, aggressive bid One thing we learned over the years is if we guarantee we'll take the product, our prices go down. And we need the product on hand. So we guarantee that we will take 4,000 tons of salt every year. Because we know we're going to use that. That's 80% of our consumption. So we know we are going to use that every year. And that seller can then guarantee that they will sell it to us, plus it's a guaranteed purchase from us, for them. So it's a good thing. Equipment maintenance cost, diesel emissions. I think you guys hear this over and over. If you take your vehicle in to have a technician look at it, it's more and more money. We've seen our escalating costs on our heavy equipment, when we do have to outsource, up 60% over the last five years. 60%. Those are costs that we're dealing with and trying to maintain our same budgets, and how do we do that? And then our supply chains. We're getting back to a more reliable supply chain, and we are able to not require as many parts on hand. But COVID was difficult because we saw build-out of trucks would take two years to build a plow truck. Kind of covered a little bit on fleet and maintenance as we were going through it. Again, $35 million in assets out there. That's a lot. And when we're looking at a sustainable replacement plan, which our replacement plan on all our large equipment is 15 years, which is too long. We should be changing it out, depending on the use and the equipment, somewhere between 8 and 12, based on our life cycle maintenance. However, previous commissions told us it was a 15-year cycle. And so that's what we built backwards. Also, the city of Fargo, as it's currently going, our replacement plan will not cover the cost of a 10-year cycle. And that's a problem, because we should be spending about $2.3 to $3 million a year, and our replacement cycle is, what we're spending is about 1.7. So we are falling behind. And that's a problem that's going to snowball on us, and we're trying to figure it out. When you look at a fire truck, it's one of those things. A ladder truck is $2 million. When our replacement budget's 1.7, how do we afford that? Plus squad cars, engineering vehicles, health department vehicles. How do we squeeze it all into the same bucket? And we have a plan, and we're able to do it on that 15-year plan, but it's difficult, and we're giving things up that need to be replaced. And then our urban forestry, again, we talked about our emerald ash borer, our utility rate increase. We're looking at raising it to a $7 a month rather than a 598, and we're going to need those resources to handle this in the future. And rather than wait until we're behind the eight ball, we'd really like to get that utility rate in place so we can deal with it now. Now, our city forester just retired, Scott Ludo. He'd been with us. you know, a long time. He did a lot of good things with diversification and I owe him a lot of compliments because he set us up in a pretty good position. But we're not where we need to be now that it's here. Other comments? The big focus for our budget this year...

Missed that one.

Okay. is really about staffing. We have pulled every rabbit out of the hat with our public works department. Over the last eight years, and I say 10 here, I went back 10, but really it's eight, we've only added eight employees over the last 10 years. And that has been difficult for us to manage the growth. And what we've done is we've used our equipment knowledge to change and restructure our tools to make it so that we are using less equipment on our road to do the same amount of work. And that's how we've been able to manage that. But we're at the end of the rope there on that because we went from using plow trucks to using motor graders. Two plow trucks, one motor grader. And that's how we've done that. But... I will throw this neat little graph, and I've shared this with Susan, and it's something I started tracking, and how much we've grown since 2017. And really it's something that, yes, it's not today's maintenance as far as it has to have it today, because those lots don't fill overnight. But when you look at it, since 17, we've actually added over 2,000 residential lots and 672 acres to the city of Fargo. I read just residential, but then you start looking and say commercial. We've added 142 commercial lots and over almost 1,200 acres. to our city. Those are real numbers. And so as we look at that, what has changed, it's the square miles. And we're not doing as good a job as we used to. And that's just the honest fact of it. We cannot keep covering the same with the same amount of staff. And so you'll see in my budget this year, I have a big request for four staff members. Really, we should have 11, but I'm a realist. I know the budget can't support 11. I'm not going to ask if it can't happen. And so four will be a patch to get us to the next level. But I will be back next year. And I will be back next year until we can get to that place. Now we get down to the really good stuff. And I love budgets. You had Mark Williams yesterday from planning. He spent three years with me as the basically assistant public works director. And we developed a budget plan together that we've been using kind of the same philosophy. And it's one of those things, I'm just a numbers guy, and if you've got an Excel spreadsheet, that's the best thing in the world. Because I run my personal budget off it, to every dollar, to every penny, and I run our budgets like that for any vehicle replacement. or are operational for public works. Our cap requests are big. You'll see a vehicle replacement capital request in there, and Brenda and I have already whittled that down, excuse me, based on priorities that are a must. You know, some of the things we do is we run our squad cars three years, and we don't like to see them over 100,000 miles. And the reason is because we're going to be on transmission number two at that point. And we're going to be looking at having to do an engine replacement. So those are a must. We never idle back on replacing squad cars because they need to respond. Fire is the same way. We always make it work for fire. Their trucks need to run. Their replacements have to happen. Because if we get behind in our schedule, because with the fire chiefs of the past and Gary, we've put a really good pretty much 30-year replacement plan together and how it lays out and how to fund it. And same with PD and same with street department, same with forestry. And I can go on and on and go through. And we don't talk about it. These guys know it because they want to see it, and they want to see how they fall into it. But it's one of those things we've backed it in, and so we're trying to make it work with the dollars we have. And that's what we'll do. That's what we have to do. But there's things that we're falling behind on, and it's going to become a problem. As we go through this, My eyesight isn't as good as it used to be. I saw you looking at those small numbers, Jen, and I could not believe you could read it. But the other thing is we've asked for a new technician in Central Garage for our ES side, emergency services side. We have not added a technician for 18 years. And we've been able to manage it either by outsourcing, doing stuff. We came up with a philosophy that we will do what we do Every day, what we're good at. And things that we do once a year, that needs to go to a vendor. Simple things like outsourcing some of our oil changes. We find that we can do it cheaper by outsourcing some of those things rather than having a $38 technician, which is actually a $78 technician with insurance and pension. We find that we can do it cheaper by outsourcing some of that stuff. And that's what we've had to do is find a mixture of outsourcing that works for us. But as you can see in there, we've went through and added up our vehicle replacement, hoping for that 1.7, 1.8 mark, which is where we kind of fall every year. And what else is on here? Public works summary, and I did watch the meetings yesterday and I caught up on a couple questions, so I'm gonna cover those right away. And something has been labeled other miscellaneous in here and miscellaneous. And in other miscellaneous is actually our rental account. So public works actually rents a building as well. We have the old Bergstaff building that's a kitty corner from us. And that's something that we've been renting. This is the 11th year. We were supposed to purchase it last year. It did not work in the funding plan to make the purchase on the building. We had an option to purchase it. So we reworked the lease. The owner is very good to work with, the Burgsteth team, and a slight rental increase for the next five years with another option to purchase at that point or another slight rental increase for another five years with the option to purchase. So that's what you see in that miscellaneous. That is our rent for our Burgseth building that we absolutely need. It's 40,000 square feet of storage facility to house not only flood protection equipment and our flood walls and everything like that, but the street department equipment, the mains and hydrants equipment, because we are in the same facility from 1968. And we continue to be in that same facility, so that was built in 1968, because we maintain that facility. And one thing we have is we have technicians and fleet people that maintain vehicles. So we maintain our building the same way we maintain our fleet. We do the oil changes, we do the things that need to be fixed on our building when they need to be fixed. We do not put off maintenance on those buildings. So when you look at this and see that other maintenance, I thought I'd just cover that right away, That's what that is. And then it's our rental equipment. Because we've reached a point in some of our fleet that it makes more sense to some of this bigger equipment when you're looking at a motor grader, it's 400,000. Sometimes it makes more sense to do a seasonal rent on some of this stuff. Because owning, operating, and having it, and then storing it does not make sense. So we've got a fine line where we own and then we rent. And so that's what you see going on here in our other miscellaneous. The miscellaneous account is actually what we had been paying for the night enforcement downtown. That is something we'd been paying for the parking night enforcement out of Public Works, because we are the benefactor of it for when we haul snow, when we sweep downtown, stuff like that. So we had been paying for that out of our account. And so I believe working with Mark, that's gonna disappear out of our account as a budget adjustment as the year goes on. Forestry. Like I said, the revenue is tight in forestry. One of the things we've done to make our revenue work there is we've extended our fleet and replacement cycles. We do have a 15-year replacement cycle. But some of our equipment, like log loaders, stuff like that, we turned it over and looked more at hours and hours of operation on the life cycle maintenance costs. And so it makes more sense to hang on to that equipment a little longer. You will see that we do... have a transfer out in this, and this is one that goes to the general fund, and that is something that we've been struggling with when we raise our utility rate. Then, of course, our transfer goes up, and so it kinda has worked against us. Again, we're able to make it work where we're at now and not have to cut any services, but it's something that we're gonna need additional funding, and we have been Susan, we have been running really close to a deficit for the last couple years, and if something comes up, there really isn't a savings account there. Vector is fairly simple. Dollar on your utility bill, we haven't changed that. Dennis put that in place back probably 19, 95 or 6, and we've left it alone. And we have been able to handle that and keep that the same, working with our partnership with Cass County. Again, can't compliment that team enough in how you don't change the expenses year after year, and you hold the same line. And the service has gotten better and better and better. So, No changes there, it's pretty static budget that stays the same year after year. And today I kept it high level and our budget is very complex because there is about 50 line items but I am here to answer any questions. Some of this stuff might need additional meetings to sit down and drill down for

some of our team here but i'm always available whenever to come and do that mr strand thank you ben i know you're going to get this question because you always do when there's somebody new at the table what's your traditional answer to snow gates everybody wants snow gates increase increased timing of snow removal and you're going to get hit with this and you have a pat answer but you might as well ask for it

So the answer to that is it's going to cost more. Anything we do, we can do it. We're more than happy to do it, but it's going to cost more. So one of the things we did about 10 years is we did a study on it. Because our neighbor to the south, Sioux Falls, implemented mandatory snow gates. And so they were able to provide us operational numbers on how to do that. So basically what the trigger is with the snow gate is you have to pull a wing off. your main equipment. And so then instead of being able to plow a 28 foot wide width, you can plow a 14 foot wide width. So you have to double your machinery. And when you double your machinery, right now we use 17 motor graders. Sioux Falls uses 38 plus 20 contractors. So they're using 58 motor graders. And so there you can see right off the bat of what is gonna happen. And when you add that, you add additional equipment, staff, Then maintenance costs, because maintenance is really the unseen thing that's going on that you don't hear a lot about. And oil changes are expensive. And then fuel. So when you're looking at motor graders, in a 12-hour shift, they can run through about 80, 90 gallons of diesel when they're pushing hard. And so when you're running that kind of fuel through 17 versus 58, Your costs are going to go from what we do now for a $3 million a year budget on basic snow services and stuff like that. You're probably going to see a $12 million a year. So again, and functionally with our smaller lots that we're doing, they don't work. Because the snow has to go someplace. Once the snow is four feet high, it has to go someplace. And where is it going to go? It's going to go around the gate and back in the driveways. And so the first person on the block is probably gonna get some relief. The second, maybe a little bit, but by the time you get down the block and there's so much snow built up on that blade, it's gotta go out someplace. It goes right around the gate and into the driveway. So if we can't provide the service at 100%, we shouldn't be providing the service at all.

Mr. Peterson.

Or do they have to be

allocated towards? Because if they have to be spent, clearly this is next year's budget. Next year's budget doesn't start until January. So I think you understand my question. So what are we doing with that 24G bond?

So the 24G bond, we brought a motion to commission last month to reallocate. So I was indicating on here any 27 requests that had gotten funded by that, just so you knew that it was funded. Doesn't mean we're gonna wait and do the item in 27. It'll get started right now.

Okay.

They need to be, they need to be, ideally they should be spent within two years. If not, I need to work on yield restricting the bond funds. so we don't get in trouble with the IRS. I'm asking. So we're trying to get them spent as quickly as possible, but then I'll start working with our investment to make sure that we're yield restricting those excess funds.

Okay, outstanding. Thank you. So, yes, I'd like to also talk to you about vehicle lists and walk me through what your timeline is. If a 15-year program, sometimes we have to have difficult conversations as a commission, right? And that means impacting what our potential taxpayers' impact may be, their role. if it's my word defensible if it's defensible we can go back to the people and say this is why we're doing it and this comes down to my next question which i also learned about which is what you discussed before your leases i understand the commission in previous years you said did not want to occupy i would love to revisit that myself don't need to bring it before all of us i don't think um i need you to walk me through the math of lease versus buy uh This is one of my little pride points. There is a time when you lease. There's a time when you purchase. If I look at this lease number 151 at 30,000 square feet, that math to me doesn't work. We're getting a heck of a deal if that's the math. And maybe that's the case, which is why we're leasing. But I'd love you to walk me through that individually sometime so I can see what you presented the previous commission as to why they chose to lease. And I'm sure you had a reason for that. But that's an educational piece for me. And I can add to that real quick.

So the owner didn't want to sell it in the first 10 years. And so we were bound by a lease because the building is directly adjacent to our facility. So it works very well. And they did give us a great deal because it's actually 40,000 square feet. Okay. So it's actually a better deal even than that. And then the other thing is...

So I went to school with these guys, too, so that's kind of where I'm... I didn't say that out loud, but I kind of did. So that's the other thing I want to bring into the fray here.

The other thing is we were kind of backed into the corner because it didn't fit within our budget to purchase. We would have loved to purchase, but it didn't fit within the funding.

But budgets can change if math works, right? It may be hard for a year, but if we have a long-term vision and can explain to our taxpayers why we're doing this... Most taxpayers will say, I don't really like spending this, but if I can tell you I'm going to save $5 million, they'll shrug their shoulders, say, yuck, and then we'll fund the project. Absolutely. That's the defense report. You're going to spend $10 million or $5 million, which would you like to spend? Absolutely. Well, I want to spend $5 million. There you go. Yes, so if you could make time for me, I would be grateful. I'm available 24-7. As am I. Thank you, Mr. Mayor.

Ben, I think it's important for the public to know a conversation you and I had before election and I've talked with some other department leaders about and at the risk of being an elder millennial and talking about kids these days, but the younger generation of our workforce and understanding your 24-7 operation, we have a number of those operations and kind of the challenges of the priority of work-life balance and what that means and how we can Are we able to retain staff, and what are the challenges you guys are running into as it relates to that, especially when we think about winter weather?

Yeah, summer we have a great environment. 7 to 3.30, we run the night crew, but 7 to 3.30, and we've worked with HR and gotten some supplemental pay for our night shifts, and that has made it more palatable. But when you come to that winter, the public expects. commerce expects. We have to perform. And so we put that back on our staff. And our staff is resilient and incredible, and they do things without sleep, and they make it happen. But it wears on them, and it wears on missing Christmases and birthdays and everything that goes along with that. And so at the end of the day, some of them just decide that this work-life balance in the wintertime And I say during a heavy winter because we had two in a row. You know, a staff of 56 operators, we're short 15 at one shot. And that's hard to even perform service when you count those numbers down. And so, again, if we can keep them the five-year mark, they're usually with us and stick with us because they get used to it and it gets into their system. But that first two years is really a shock. So again, we haven't had a winter for three years. I say that we've had a winter, but 20 inches of snow is not a winter. And so when we look at it and we go down that road, I'm fearful of our next real winter because we do have a lot of young staff that are incredible and they're smart and they're learning fast. However, how it affects their personal life, it's really changed since my generation, your generation, everybody's generation, the new changes. They're not so interested in overtime and you'll probably hear the same in police and fire. And it's something that we're struggling with. And we've been able to stay lean and mean, but that's something that's probably going to have to change because we need to cover those hours of operation.

Thank you. Another question I have is, you know, I think as we talk about our growing community and it's our neighboring cities experience it as well. You know, we're a metro, and a lot of the conversation of, you know, we're going to be a bigger city, and I think we have to be okay with that because that's just what's happening. And so how do we plan for that? So the conversation about when we talk about the growth plan, what does that mean for public works, I think is important for us to acknowledge. And hopefully we'll be able to get some of those positions funded for you. My question more is about, you know, I think when we talk about regionalization or how do we blur those lines of political subdivisions, a lot of the conversation generally is focused on public safety. But now as I hear you talk about these things again, all our roads run into each other with our neighbors. Have there been conversations or other opportunities to look at how do we regionalize some of these services, specifically, again, around maybe winter weather events or other things?

So when it comes to winter, it becomes difficult because none of us are really staffed for what we need, what our needs are. We do go through the regional with engineering when we're doing arterials. And the decision's made right there, who's going to do what, and we work cooperatively together on that. You know, it's difficult to say that we could go over and trade services with the city of West Fargo in some shape or form when it's not West Fargo paying our salaries. And we're bound here to provide the services to the city of Fargo, and that's what we want to do. Now, in a time of need when there's a crisis, say, for instance, we have a building burned down, absolutely. We work closely together. If we're paving tomorrow and our paver breaks down, I know I can call Paul over at Public Works and he'll have his paver there the next day to help us out to get through that day. The reason that is, somewhat, is because Paul, the Public Works Director over at Moorhead, was my assistant director for three years. Matt Anvik over in West Fargo was my assistant director for three years at Public Works. So we have very good relations and are on speed dial, so there's a lot of things that we work together with behind the scenes. One thing a lot of people, regionalization, is the oils we use in some of our patching equipment, it has a shelf life of a month. You have to use it with a month. The City of Fargo can't use all the oil for our spray injection machine in a month. However, if we buy the silo and put the tank in, and we bring tanker loads in at 6,000 gallons at a time, now we can support West Fargo and they can buy it from us, and Moorhead can, and Cass County can, and a lot of, Manoma County can come here and buy it from us. So we become the regional distributor of this oil because the actual distributor won't sell it in the small 500 gallon quantities. And so we do stuff like that behind the scenes to help ourselves out, but we also make a few bucks on it too. Not a lot, but stuff like that is going on behind the scenes. Great, appreciate that. Thank you.

All right, with that, we'll move on to our 1010 agenda item with engineering.

Good morning. Maybe just do some brief introductions because I do have a number of people at the table who feel engineering's maybe overrepresented, but there's a reason for that. Again, myself, Tom Nockmas, I'm the city engineer. To my right is Nathan Boerboom. He's the assistant city engineer and Rob Pacey, the utility engineer. Both kind of oversee our storm sewer utility and will speak to that item. And then also on the other side of the table over here, Jeremy Gordon, he's a division engineer and he oversees our streetlight and traffic control device utility, which you might just hear called streetlight utility. So just to provide a brief overview of what we do, engineering, as simply as I can put it, we're responsible for the planning, funding, design, and delivery of the city's infrastructure within the public right-of-way. And so that includes things like roadways, bridges, utilities, including sanitary, water, and storm sewer, flood protection, sidewalks and shared use paths, traffic signals, street lights, signing, and pavement markings. We also, as I mentioned, oversee two utilities, the storm sewer utility and the street light and traffic control device system utility. And those will be discussed separately. The numbers you see here, so all in all, between general fund and utility funded, we have 65 full-time positions within engineering. The numbers you see here are slightly different than what you see in your packets for the position control. Part of the reason is engineering and traffic engineering are merged into this number. And then both utilities fund half of a position, the division engineer position, that is authorized through the general fund. So I think there's probably a lot that happens within engineering that people might not think of. I think you think of engineering and you think of the construction products that we do. While that is a very large role, there's a lot of other things that we do as well. So I just want to speak to some of the divisions that we have in our organization and what their roles are. So first, the planning and development division, they're working a lot with our planning department. That's Nathan that leads that division, working with the planning department on new plots that are being submitted. His group is also overseeing site plan reviews, land acquisition. We have drafters that draft our projects. He oversees that group. And then likewise, as I mentioned, the storm sewer utility. Nathan is still very involved in the FM Diversion Project and is essentially the city's liaison for that project still. Next, traffic engineering. Jeremy is the division engineer of that, doing a lot of traffic studies. His group is working with private road closures, so whether that's a short-term event or something like that. Federal-laid projects, so working with Federal Highway and North Dakota DOT. Also oversees over-dimensional permitting, so over-width or overweight trucks that are coming through our city. And then, like I mentioned, the streetlight utility. Next is engineering services. So we have surveyors that both provide some services for our residents, you know, rear yard surveys for drainage complaints, sidewalk driveway surveys, but then also doing preliminary surveying and construction surveying for our construction projects. Also managing right-of-way management. And so that could be encroachment agreements, Contractors wanting to stage within the public right-of-way for private development, things like that. Also oversee utility locating. And with that right-of-way management, utility locating also overseeing private utilities that are working within the public right-of-way. So Xcel Energy, CenturyLink, things like that. And then also the sidewalk program. You heard a little bit about that at the commission meeting last night. Next, design and construction. That really is what it sounds like. So that's a group that's going to design, administer, and inspect the projects that we do. Most of the projects that are done within the public right-of-way here in the city of Fargo are designed by our engineering department, are inspected and overseen by our engineering department. So with that, they're responsible for meeting our public bidding requirements, overseeing our construction specifications, making sure those stay up to industry standards and any federal or state requirements that we have. And then in some instances, we are hiring outside consultants to help us either in the design or construction management. And so they're typically overseeing those consultants as well. And then finally, the special assessments group, they're calculating and spreading special assessment, complying with our infrastructure funding policy and also state statutes. They also provide GIS support for us internally. Although IS has GIS under them, there's a lot of more granular work that takes place within our department. And then they also work with finance on annual infrastructure reporting. So I just want to highlight what it is that we all have for assets. And this one won't be entirely encompassing. But for our pavement network, sorry, that yellow alley is really difficult to read on the screen. But total, just over 10 million square yards of pavement. Now what's that mean? That's pretty hard to visualize. If you converted that into lane miles, it's over 1,400 lane miles. You could cross the state of North Dakota four times east to west on 1,400 lane miles. So there's a lot of pavement that we are responsible for the planning and preservation of, right, working with public works and departments like that on, you know, what is a maintenance project versus what is an improvement project and how we manage all that. We also have a lot of other things. There are a number of bridges that we are fully responsible for. There are also bridges that we have a shared responsibility. That shared responsibility could be with the City of Moorhead, could be with the North Dakota DOT, could be Cass or Clay County. Sanitary mains, 430 miles, many manholes, many lift stations. Likewise with water mains, over 500 miles of water mains and a lot of hydrants and valves and things like that that go along with that. And then storm sewer and traffic and street lights, Jeremy and Rob will cover those. So when I kind of break down our current or emerging issues, I kind of broke them down into a number of different kind of categories. So starting with funding and infrastructure, simply as I can put it is construction costs continue to outpace our revenue growth. Construction costs have historically, as we've tracked them over the last probably 10 to 20 years, and this matches a lot of national research as well, is around 7% annually. Our networks have grown by typically 1% to 2% annually. When you compound that on to each other, our system is growing and the costs are growing to maintain it. When you're looking at probably a 7% to 10% cost increase when you factor in that network growth, revenues aren't going to keep pace. And so no different than what Ben talked about or other departments have talked about, we have to continue to be more creative in how we try to balance the work that we should be doing with the revenues that exist. And so again, our systems, our infrastructure continues to increase in age. We still have roadways and underground utilities that were installed in the late 1800s and early 1900s. And so as you can imagine, those things are reaching or have already reached the end of their life. And so we have to figure out how we either preserve or in those situations likely replace those. And again, we're balancing that aging infrastructure with the new infrastructure that is being installed to support additional growth. And so that brings us to the growth and development. Again, we continue to grow. We continue to see redevelopment and infill. All of those have an impact on our infrastructure systems and have to have engineering input in that. I would say just generally, and I think I speak to this again, projects are just becoming more difficult. So whether that's projects within the public right-of-way or on the private side, they're just becoming more complex. And so there's greater coordination with developers on plats or amenities plans or development agreements to support those new growth areas. And again, that demand, we've been kind of getting into some weird kind of fringe areas of development, especially on the north side. that have historically not had master plans associated with them. And so there's been a lot of planning to figure out how we're going to support those areas near term and long term as we grow into them. Then utilities and right-of-way, this is a good problem, but there's been a significant increase in private utility work within the public right-of-way. And so that's both new utilities coming in, like fiber optic networks. We currently have agreements with two fiber optic utility providers. One is currently working on a build-out that will touch every parcel here in town. We've been approached by three others that all have interest in installing networks within our public right-of-way as well. Utility providers like Excel are also making significant investments into their utility systems. Most of those utilities fall within our public right-of-way or in our utility easements. So again, we're working to find routes for them to install those either new systems or upgraded systems. And what we're trying to do is protect our utilities, protect other utility companies' utilities, protect our pavement, be sure that our public assets are not being negatively impacted by those private investments. Then project delivery and communication. The public continues to want additional communication, timely communication throughout our projects, both in project development and construction. You heard me provide an update last night, refer to Fargo Streets a couple times in that presentation. Again, we're trying to drive the public there to provide the most timely, transparent communication we can. And we're happy to do so, but it's a time commitment to do that, and a role that a lot of our project managers haven't had to historically really manage. So that's been a change. And then, like I said, projects just continue to become increasingly more complex. It feels like we are regularly on corridors with very limited right-of-way, a lot of private utilities, a lot of public utilities, very deep utilities. Again, replacing infrastructure that is possibly over 100 years old. And it's balancing that price point that we're going to get from a contractor by balancing the need for them to be in a work zone and be productive and not be so impactful to the public. And so again, that can be a delicate balance. I just want to talk briefly about our annual engineering department capital improvement plan. I think this was mentioned a little bit yesterday during the budget workshop, but it follows a different schedule. While our engineering department budget is important, this engineering CIP becomes a much larger dollar value item that we manage each year. And so again, it includes capital improvement projects within the public right-of-way, The intent is to present that to the Finance Committee on October 12th of this year, and then we would likely seek approval from City Commission late October or early November this year. What that request will include is 2027 construction projects and then certain 2028 projects. The reason why we make that request for certain 2028 projects is it allows us to work on that design over this winter and have those projects shelf ready so we can bid them at the right time. late 2027, early 28. I know this is a 27 budget, but again, I just want to talk a little bit about what was approved for the 26 CIP, just so you can have an idea of what the request ends up being later this year. So we break out a number of different categories within our CIP. what I'd call locally funded program projects. You know, we're really making the decision of where these funds are going, trying to preserve and improve our infrastructure. And so there are core neighborhood projects, pavement preservation, storm sewer utility sidewalk, and some miscellaneous projects, and then also federal aid projects. So some of those are directly selected by us. Some are selected through or prioritized through MetroCOG Policy Board. And some are selected by the North Dakota DOT and we become partners on those projects. We also have some special funding. I'm sure you've all heard about it at this point. Federal, or sorry, Prairie Dog and Flex Funds. The funding for that has changed a little bit over the last couple sessions, but still remains a very important revenue source for us to be able to continue to try to maintain our existing infrastructure. We also have flood control projects and then new development alley projects. Just so you can get a sense of the scale of that CAP, what was approved for 2026 is a total of $115 million capital improvement plan. That does not include any new development or alley paving projects. Alley paving projects are 100% special assessed. New development projects are typically 100% special assessed. When those come in, they go through a process of being considered by our Public Works Project Evaluation Committee, or PUPEC. and forwarded on to the City Commission for addition into the CIP. Share the funding breakdown of that 115 million, you can see that there's really no fund that really dominates that funding source. It's pretty evenly spread across a number of different sources. Again, the outside funding like federal funds and prairie dog funds coming from the state are really important. You can see, again, that summary. There were no personnel requests. Capital requests were limited to survey equipment, which is a replacement equipment of GPS rover that's aging out of service. And then a summary of our general fund expenses, and I can answer any questions related to that if there are any.

Any questions at this point?

With that, I'll turn it over to Rob Pacey and have him speak to the storm sewer utility.

When do I push? OK. Good morning, everybody. My name is Rob. I'm the storm sewer utility engineer. give you a little brief update of what we do in the storm sewer utility. So the storm sewer utility provides the planning, regulatory, oversight, and overall management of the city's stormwater management program. Core responsibilities, we do long-term capital improvement projects and utility financial planning, manage repairs and replacement to existing storm sewer infrastructure, including lift stations and ponds. We oversee the city's municipal separate storm sewer system MS4 for short. We have earlier this spring, we did our public outreach as part of that permit, which includes some billboards around town that you might see campaigning for the only rain down the drain since all the stormwater that goes down the pipes does not get treated, goes right to the river. Let's see, we review private site development plans to ensure the compliance with the stormwater regulations, which include quantity and quality. We do master planning for future growth areas. The one that we have going on right now is in the southeast quadrant of the town, kind of in the Drain 53 area, south of 64th Avenue and east of I-29, and coordinate floodplain management, including mitigation projects and permitting. Sorry, first time running this. So this slide just kind of gives an overview of what all the storm sewer system comprises. We have 535 miles of storm sewer piping, 14,000 inlets, 10,375 manholes, 83 lift stations, The picture right here, that's the lift station we have on 42nd Street and Drain 27. It's got two pumps, controls, and some flood control gates. So we have 83 of those around town. 40 storm sewer gate wells, which would be essentially this, minus all the controls and pumps. 64 city-owned ponds, 30 miles of earthen levees, and 2.5 miles of concrete floodwalls. So on the bottom there, I have a lift station. Fun fact, the lift station we have that's just to the southeast of the YMCA on 4th Street and 2nd Street South, it has four pumps in there. Each pump can pump 25,000 gallons per minute, which is a pretty big volume. And that can fill an Olympic-sized swimming pool in less than seven minutes. That was the slide that was supposed to be second. That's OK. So the storm sewer utility consists of six and a half full-time equivalent employees. Nathan's position is 50% storm sewer utility funded, 50% from the general fund. Me, the storm sewer utility engineer. We have one civil engineer, too, who primarily does site plans, construction projects, and floodplain. Two civil engineer ones, one who does construction projects and site plan reviews, and the other one primarily construction projects. And then the tech three and tech one, they both work on our stormwater management compliance program. So current and emerging issues, of course, you know, everything is costing more. There's rising construction costs and infrastructure replacement costs. Aging infrastructure and increasing emergency repair needs, that picture in the lower part, that is next to that water main break that Ben is working on this morning. It's on 13th Avenue, east of Carl Ben Eielson. And the city received a notification that there was a slow-draining inlet in that area, so the street department went out. They jetted the line, and they found out their jetter was getting stuck, so they cameraed it. and the pipe is almost becoming not a pipe. So we're out there right now fixing it. We have an open contract for fixing storm sewer areas around town. So we've changed order this onto the contract, and they were working on removing the pavement yesterday and today, and they showed up, and then there was a water main break that kind of flooded their site. So one of the things we have to deal with. Addressing capacity constraints within the undersized storm sewer system. The top picture is 32nd Avenue at 15th Street, so just northeast of that Hornbacher's on 32nd Avenue. There was an existing 60-inch pipe going out to the river. And as you can see on a heavy rainstorm, that intersection flooded. So as part of that 32nd Avenue reconstruction project, they also installed a 78 inch pipe to the river. And as part of that project, we reconstructed the lift station at the east end of the 32nd Avenue. And that has three pumps that have 15,000 GPM capacity. So another pretty big lift station. Would you increase regulatory and permit requirements for our construction projects? The growing complexity and volume of site plans submittals, site plans, you know, development is crazy in town. And I know our guys are getting swamped with site plans and contractors that want to get in and start building their buildings. So the demand is there for additional staff time for them to stay on top of their duties that they're doing for the city, but also to review site plans and keep that private development side rolling. And then master planning for future growth areas, particularly east of I-29, as I mentioned previously. Current and emerging issues for the floodplain, public outreach regarding the upcoming FEMA 100-year floodplain remapping. So when the diversion project is finished, we're expecting A new flood map that's going to be hopefully in effect in 2030. There's future development standards following that remapping. Inspection and maintenance of completed flood control projects, which I mentioned before. There's 30 miles of earthen levee and two and a half miles of flood wall that our staff inspects every foot of that every year in the fall. It takes about a month. So that's a significant part of staff time that is out there looking for cracks and flood walls and issues with levees and all that stuff. And then coordination with FEMA and the Metro Flood Diversion Authority. The primary storm sewer utility expenditures, first one is staff, of course. Second one, storm sewer and lift station repairs. We usually do one lift station repair project per year and one miscellaneous area repairs as we Find sinkholes that appear on pipes or issues with lift stations. We put together a project to keep everything operational. On cleaning and maintenance, the various capital improvement projects, emergency repairs like the one on 13th Avenue that popped up out of nowhere. And luckily we had an open contract and we can take care of that versus going out and having to solicit bids. We have a contractor that we... work with very well. So they were able to add that onto their contract. Rising lift station electricity costs and all the stuff that Ben mentioned before, lift station maintenance that their staff does, cleaning, street sweeping, pipe cleaning, jetting, and then miscellaneous sand lit repairs. And then the storm sewer utility does maintain revenue adequacy model, which is continually reviewed against anticipated expenditures versus the revenue. With that, our other topics, based on the ongoing review of the anticipated revenues and expenditures, we are asking for a 12.5% rate increase. That equates to an additional dollar per month for a residential home. Current rate is $8 a month. It's proposed to go to $9 a month. And the last rate increase was in January 2025. And that's all I have for my presentation.

»» Any questions for Storm Sewer? I think a question I have is something that I learned over the last couple months, and if you'd mind speaking to it. One of the additional expenses Fargo has compared to other cities in the state or region is our lift stations. Can you just kind of talk about the comparison, how that adds additional cost to our community based on our geography?

For sure, yeah. Every other city that's got some grade, they don't have to pump a lot of stuff that falls within there. within their jurisdiction. And with Fargo being so flat, everything that goes to the river, if the river is high, everything's got to get pumped into their, either into the drain system or to the river. So a lot of other cities that have great topography probably don't have as many lift stations as we do, but

as flat as we are that's kind of our curse maybe just add to that too i know we talked about this two years ago when we had proposed the the last rate increase that um we looked at some pier cities as well city of sioux falls has one storm lift station right we have 83. the other change too is with our flat terrain it actually requires our storm sewer pipes to be larger as well and so again that's an added expense to the system by having larger pipes than what a pier might have.

And I think, again, something I've learned through the ongoing conversation specifically with the finance team for probably the public to know, but even us as a commission if we don't know, when we have conversations about some utility fees and those changing is there's a number of property owners in our community that don't pay property taxes but they would be paying then utility fees as part of that so it's a way for them to help cover their costs associated with whether it's water storm water streets and so forth commissioner peterson mr mayor thank you uh so this is probably more of an accounting education for myself than anything else

I'm seeing transfers out, and I'm trying to chase these dollars through this budget, and I'm not even going to try to tell you that I'm following where all the dollars are going, right? But we go to, like, the transfer out where we go to capital fund, and that makes sense to me. SRF loan, zero this year, but then transfer 1.7 to the general fund. And again, I'm guessing this is an accounting issue that I'm not

That is actually a revenue that goes into the general fund. And so when you look at the general fund revenues at the bottom, one of the big components is transfers in. It's transfers in from the utilities.

Okay, so I am following that. Then my question is, if we're going to be increasing fees, and I'm probably oversimplifying a very complex scenario, the intent of that would be if we already net X and we're transferring that into our general fund for an expenditure, and now we want more, to also transfer that in? Is this for additional CapEx over time? Why are we transferring one? And I'm oversimplifying it again. We perform an activity for X dollars. It's a premium. We're generating a positive income. Are we using this dollar to fund other things citywide? Or is this something that's being transferred to the general fund that will eventually migrate its way back into the services that our taxpayers are paying for?

It's helping fund the general fund in general, not anything specific.

So I am following what's happening.

You're following what's happening.

Okay. We should talk about that. I'm fine with dollars coming into a group or organization or division, funding that division. That makes sense to me. But then taking those dollars, asking for an additional dollar fee to then fund other things, I think we need to have a holistic conversation of how We're doing that. So not to say you don't need them. I think you probably do need them. And that's where I was actually going with this in the end. I think you probably do need more CapEx. not just because of the pictures you showed us, because of the data that our engineers are presenting us. So that, to me, is the dialogue. Anyway, thank you, Mr. Mayor.

And just maybe a point of clarification, and correct me if I'm wrong, if you're looking at a dollar in and thinking it's a dollar out, that would be inaccurate. It would be a dollar in, 80% would stay. We can only take up to 20% of that dollar to transfer the general fund per state law. Is that correct?

Right, and it's just a math computation. Right. they're figuring out the rates that they need and then we're taking 20% into the general fund. We're not increasing the rates to generate more for the general fund, it's just a function of how that works.

Okay, continue on.

I think we'll turn it over to Jeremy to talk about the street light utility.

Good morning, Jeremy Gordon, Traffic Transportation Engineer. Mayor Beauchesne, Commissioners Gullickson and Peterson, nice to be speaking to you for the first time. Not every day you have a first time to make a first impression. So welcome to City Hall, Commissioner Turnburg Strand, good to see you again. There's a reason why there's three engineers on that end of the room and one on this side. These traffic folks are cut from a different cloth. So, great presentation so far today. I feel like I went to the Church of Public Works with the preacher, Ben Dow, and it's great information. It was great taking all that in. So I am responsible for the streetlight and traffic control utility. So if you only remember one thing I say is this utility is more than just streetlights. It's four things. It's streetlights, traffic signals, payment markings, and signing. So we have 12 and a half people, 10 of them are maintenance folks that are housed at public safety building and two of them, two and a half of them are here at city hall. So we operate and maintain the street lighting system, We operate and maintain the traffic signal system, including the school speed zone flashers, the speed feedback signs, our traffic surveillance cameras. We time all the traffic signals within Fargo, including the DOT interactions at the off-ramps, the interchanges. And one thing you really don't see is we also operate and maintain our city-owned fiber optic network that ties in all of our buildings with the schools, with the different government agencies. So we also maintain roadside safety devices, guard rail, crash attenuators, the snow, road closure gates, and protective fencing in places. You also don't really see the BNSF quiet zone that is downtown. It is hard to remember. I first started here 22 years ago and those trains would come through town and it would be loud and it would echo. So we pay through our agreements, negotiations with them, we pay upwards of $100,000 for them to maintain their system so they don't have to blow their horns. Like I mentioned, we maintain and replace payment markings and traffic signs. And then we coordinate with contractors to fix our stuff, design and construction, observe our own projects. And then we are always evaluating emerging technologies, basically with traffic signals, and then what's happening within our signal cabinets. So there are some wooden utility poles in the alleys and on some streets still left, so we coordinate with Xcel Energy and Cass County on those lights. Just a brief overview of the utility. 16,000 streetlights, plus or minus. We do have it down to each through our GIS, but I thought I'd round it here for you. 16,000 streetlights, that's a lot of lights. 160 traffic signals, that does not include 20 that the state has. We have 10 hawk beacons, the wig-wag lights for pedestrians near schools. We have over 20,000 traffic signs. That doesn't even include the street name green signs. These are just the regulatory and warning. We have 425 street light power feed points. And we have plenty of underground fiber and electrical lines. So if you think about our payment markings, over the years people have contacted us less and less over the phone, and now they email us. Payment marking complaints have arisen in the last couple of years that, hey, they're not there. They don't exist. So new projects are pretty easy. They just get installed, but then you have to remember to replace them. So on a concrete road, it's tape material. It's not a sprayed liquid. Those are usually good for 10 to 12 years. And then on epoxy, where we do spray it, those are good for three to four years. And we also replace our regulatory stops and yield signs and all the warning signs on a 10-year life cycle. so on the right is just a snapshot of our traffic signal software each one of those colored dots represents a signal that we have so we do know live what's going on out there with our system so our fleet just a quick info on our fleet we've got three bucket trucks that go up to 50 feet change out the street lights one beefed-up line utility truck, a sign truck, one utility dump truck, five service pickups, and a cool little Bobcat Toolcat utility vehicle. So just in general, if I were to poll you folks what you think a traffic signal would cost, I don't think anybody would say a million dollars. So new traffic signals, they've really increased in cost over the last five years. I don't think the diversion helped us for labor and material. And the data center is hiring every electrician within a 200-mile radius. So getting electrical contractors is difficult. So three-quarters of a million to a million dollars per intersection. Our annual payment marking contract, I could spend all kinds of money on that, but usually one to $2 million a year for just replacing the payment markings that are out there. Basically on a new construction project, the street light, each street light probably costs $10,000. And then we're buying a new bucket lift truck this year. Worked with Ben and his folks. I think it came in at $248,000 for one truck. So this is the maintenance wing. I think this shows 10 folks that are out at public safety. We have our operations manager and an assistant. Then you have three traffic folks that are doing the signs and lights and signals. And then we used to have three electricians. Now we're down to one. We do have some job openings if anybody's interested. So our emerging issues is, you know, as we all have smartphones and this technology continues to improve, the traffic signal vendors and industry likes to push new advancements. improved vehicle detection, connected vehicle infrastructure, and the use of AI to optimize signal timings. So if you think about your vehicles, every brand new vehicle has, whether it's General Motors or Ford or Audi, they all are tracking their own vehicles. So these companies are smart enough to realize that, hey, this information is pretty valuable, so they're selling it to traffic vendors. And the traffic vendors are saying, hey, guys, you can operate your signals a little bit more efficiently based on time of day. So that's That's just hitting us now. I'm sure the vendors will get better and better over the years, but it's just hitting us now. LED technology for streetlights and signals, that's a very important thing to energy efficiency. One of this... but nobody's really said it so far, but anything you put out there that we own that's a part of our infrastructure is going to get hit by a vehicle. Either the first day or 10 days down the road or 25 days, it's all, something's always going to get hit. So we, whether it's our streetlights or our signs, they get hit at a remarkable rate in the winter for sure. Over 1,000 signs get knocked over. Over 100 streetlights get hit each year. And usually half of them, most of the signs are drive-offs. Don't ever get a police report. Half the streetlights, because the vehicle is disabled, they stay and get a police report and insurance helps with that coverage. But 50% of them, we are holding the bill to fix it. So that cost to replace that stuff has increased. It used to be $2,500, and then it was $3,000. Now it's $5,000 per streetlight that gets knocked down. Here's our budget, the current year budget. You can just see, really the important thing is the pie chart on the right. We have transfers out to the general fund and we have transfers out to our engineering CIP to fund our portion of the projects for either new construction or street reconstruction or rehab. Capital all the way over to vehicles and then fixing our stuff. And you can see the salaries and energy. Energy, we spend about a million dollars a year in energy. Yep. So the other topics, this is our existing rate structure. It's pretty basic. We started this in 2009. It raised a million dollars and it went to two salaries and the electricity. So we tied it to the water main. So if you have a water service, this is what you're going to get charged. So if you're a commercial business, The current rate's $32 a month. If you're multifamily, you're $9 a unit. And single family is $7 per house. In the mobile home parks, we have some of those. Those folks are charged the MR rate. So if you look at the lower left, you can see our... Revenues per class, so a commercial, $600,000. You can see the rates. So $3.5 million a year, basically, in 22, 23. And then 24, we doubled the rates. And we're up to about 7, 7.2, 7.3 right now. And then on the right is today we don't separate commercial. If you're Jiffy Lube and you have a small site in town, you pay $32 a month. If you're Walmart or Target and you might have only one water service, you pay the same amount. So we've identified that, and we really want to change how that works. So we had a revenue adequacy model completed recently. And they're proposing five tiers of commercial based on lot size. So if you look at the right-hand side, the lion's share is still less than an acre. So there's 3,200 accounts for the commercial. 1,800 of those would be less than an acre, and then so on and so forth. We broke it into one to three, three to five and a half, five and a half to nine, and then over nine. If you think of the over nine, that's big boxes, healthcare, industrial uses, car dealerships, hotels, et cetera, school sites. So as part of the model, as we age and things need to be replaced, it's just an upward progression of the need that we have. So this year, we need right around $10 million, and it just increases from there based on a lot of this is tied to our street reconstruction projects. So if a downtown project requires three or four new signals, that really increases our utility share for that project. So you can see the revenue distribution. Currently, commercial only brings in 17% of what we need, or 17% of our total. Multifamily is about 50%, and then single family and mobile home are about a third. So we really look at the commercial customers, and we would really like to turn up their share. So we've identified that we need to restructure the commercial class. There along our commercial corridors, our arterial corridors, if you think of 45th Street, 13th Avenue, University Drive, they received the greatest benefit from this utility. And we'd really like to create a five-tier system for them based on size. So what we're proposing is the base tier would be commercial one. That would be $65 a month. And then when you go from tiers two to five, it's averaging the size of the lot and multiplying it by that base customer. So it would go from $65, $108, to $254, and then onward and upward. So this slide does contain an error. The residential components, we would not be looking to raise the rates. But the commercials, tiers one through five, we would. I think we would generate an additional $3 million for the utility. So the pie chart on the right, you'd basically be a third single family, a third multifamily, and a third commercial, which really would be desirable. And then I think this is the last slide, but we want to adjust the commercial, we want to implement the tiers, and then think about giving the public institution folks a reduction on that increased rate. We have no personnel requests. We actually have three openings for positions. And for the capital, it would be the maintenance of our siding and striping, and then miscellaneous street lighting projects, traffic signal projects, and then replacing another vehicle. And this must be the last slide. Good.

Any questions? Commissioner Ternberg, excuse me.

Jeremy, did you mention how much those rate adjustments will bring in? It just seems so much more fair and reasonable, what you're proposing.

Yeah, so the residential will remain flat, and the commercial will bring in an additional $3 million. So it would be up to $4 million. So today they bring in $1 million. We would generate $3 to make it $4 out of the commercial.

Any other questions? Commissioner Peterson.

Thank you, Mr. Mayor. Yeah, so chasing those dollars, I appreciate you said in the last slide or second to last, you said those residential rates aren't changing. Obviously, we're generating a net difference of, as you just said, a million. That's sort of what I was tracking here, too. We jumped from 7.8 to 11. General fund transfer increases about $800,000. Where are the other spots that you need us to invest? I didn't run through your budget and chase those dollars down. Obviously, we have comparisons. But my end point here is I think rebalancing makes a mountain of sense. I'm struggling with the overall net result. I don't want to be punitive. Frankly, I almost want to reduce the residential rates in lieu of transferring more money to the general fund. But educate me as to why we need to increase fees to our friends and then not reduce to our residential users. So we have more money. What's the point of more money other than just having more money?

Yeah, if you look at this graphic, the dark blue would be related to our engineering capital improvement plan annually. And that really goes out from this year out to four years. So you can see this year the dark blue is pretty narrow, but next year it's going to double, maybe even triple. That's based on replacing traffic signals on projects and streetlights. So that's variable per year, but it's going to increase when we get to the downtown area.

Mr. Mayor, if I may. So the intent would be to catch up on things we've been lacking on, not just to transfer more money to the general fund.

Oh, correct. Maybe just to add to that, too. So, again, the exercise we've been through is this utility has never had a revenue adequacy model. And so what we went through is taking a look at lifecycle replacement costs and and life cycles of the assets within this utility. So street light signs, pavement markings, signals, all those types of things. And then like Jeremy said, we have a four to five year capital improvement plan where we know which projects specifically we're going into, and we know those approximate costs of those assets that the utility should be paying for. One of the things that we had is that, and you've seen this utility increase over the years, part of the issue is sales tax used to subsidize this utility very heavily. this utility was not paying its share of engineering capital improvement projects. Sales tax was funding those things. And so again, the utility was intended to pay for these things, and it's been our position and through this process to establish where the utility would need to be to be funding its share of those projects.

Thank you for the clarification. Again, my main concern, my overall look was, oh, we're raising fees because we can. And that's not the case at all. What we're doing is we're raising fees to catch up on additional capital investments that we should have made over previous decades. Yes? Yes, absolutely. Thank you very much. Thank you, Mr. Mayor.

New also is that capital striping line item as well at 1.2. That's a new item. It's for you to do on that green next one.

yeah i could spend uh all the money you want to give me for striping i could spend it i guarantee it so maybe one thing to add to that i mean that actually so the the payment markings actually used to be a general fund funded item um five or six years ago i think it was about half a million dollars that was funded out of the general fund there again the thought is that the utility should be paying a chair that was pulled out of the general fund um at that time and and There was not a rate increase to this utility at that point, so sales tax had picked it up for a couple years, and again, we're trying to get the utility to the point where it's paying for what it should be paying for.

And Tom, then, you referenced now twice the sales tax was carrying more of a burden. Now we're going to potentially have the fee carry its fair share. So does that mean that the sales tax would be reallocated, or is it just complementing and getting things caught up with the sales tax and this fee?

I think the way I'll answer that is, as I mentioned earlier, as our cost of construction inflation has increased, as our network has increased, the burden on the sales tax is increased. And so what we've done is, out of necessity, I would say sales tax used to subsidize both the storm sewer utility and also the street light utility. Again, we're trying to get those to fund their share so that sales tax can go to the streets where it was intended to go to. Because otherwise we were overspending versus what we're generating revenue from that sales tax. Thank you.

I just want to hit one thing that Tom just stated. is that sales tax was always meant for streets. But we have been removing it out of streets and paying for traffic and storm sewer. And so that just reduced the amount of money that could go towards the reconstruction of the streets.

All right, with that, we'll take our scheduled 10 minute break. Let's plan to be back here at 1112. And we'll be hearing from the library at that time. Thank you.

So,

All right, returning from our break, we'll hear from Mr. Dirks from the library.

Yes, good morning. Yes, the Fargo Public Library. We have three locations, and obviously the main library across the way, the Northport branch up on North Broadway, which is a rental within that strip mall, and the Dr. James Carlson Library down on 32nd Avenue. You can see the list there of all the fun stuff that the library provides. 46.85 FTE and all those services. One that I want to point out to the mayor and commissioners is at the bottom there you see outreach services. Essentially that is two and one half FTEs plus a bunch of volunteers that all year round um go and provide library materials outside of the library to retirement communities and congregate homes and this kind of thing and we wouldn't be able to do that without the volunteers that we have and i just want to acknowledge that um and that's you know we utilize volunteers in terms of that we also utilize volunteers in terms of getting our million-plus items that get checked out on an annual basis back on the shelves. So we're really a community organization. Key initiatives, you see the renovation of the Dr. James Carlson Library. We are essentially doing that with unrestricted donations, endowment, principal monies, and And our friends group is a separate 501c3 looking to raise money for that project. So we are working to make sure our locations are maintained with our resources. Right now, working with facilities in terms of repurposing the vacant coffee space there at Main into a mother's nursing room, a little laundry and storage. That's been vacant since 2021. I think all square inch of the buildings should be utilized. And further discussions as we get into this is community survey. We're looking to do that in 2027 with monies identified in the 2027 budget to get that done. Org chart kind of took a page from Ben Dow. I kind of simplified it, but you can see like the major divisions and things and folks that what we do. Current and emerging challenges, issues, The most existential problem that we experience at the public library, and it's not unique to the Fargo Public Library, it's urban libraries across the United States, is the impacts of homelessness, mental illness, drug addiction, alcoholism, all those things that exist in the street find their way in. And what that leads to is, obviously, you see the calls there. and what that impact on our environment, our service environment, our staff, library patrons. We've seen a number of situations of just physical violence within the library, physical violence adjacent to the library, verbal altercations obviously, consumption of drugs and or alcohol, people under the influence of drugs and alcohol becoming unconscious, theft, assaults, domestic abuse, those kinds of things. And the challenge, especially for the library, is that we're held to a much higher standard in terms of the environment that we're supposed to provide. And a lot of the feedback that I get for public when they see these things, they say, why aren't you doing anything about it? I received an anonymous letter saying, if I didn't, as the director, can't solve this, then I need to resign. We're, you know, the staff, we obviously, constant staff training. I think the staff do a tremendous job. We essentially have one contract security guard and myself. dealing with these things on a regular basis. And we get tremendous support from PD in regards to this. But often when that happens, the situation has already escalated. The fight has already happened. All that. The impact on the environment has already taken place. At the same time, other things is understaffing. We are probably one of the most understaffed departments in the city. We have not had any increase in full-time staff since 2021. Due to that, we eliminated Sunday hours as of 2025. Prior to that, at our staffing level, we had people working seven days a week. And that's not sustainable. So we reduced that. Growing demands, the other thing is growing demand of digital collections. That's a widely popular, e-books, e-audiobooks, and you know, the key thing for libraries, we want to maintain our relevance of our service model, and that's absolutely key to that. The big difference is our dear friends in the publishing business didn't want to go the way of the music business. A paper copy of a title for us is around $14, $15. An e-digital or e-audiobook of that same title would be around $48 to $52. And in terms of e-content, we get it for two years or 20 checkouts and then it goes away. So then if we wanted to have that back, we'd have to pay the additional money to get that. So that's the structures that we have to function in terms of our budget. And again, the demand for that has grown exponentially. What we had to do in terms of budget cuts in looking at our service model for 26 is prior to 26, we basically said, if you had a Fargo library card, you could use Libby is the name of the app that you can access all the e-content as of 26 we said because of the budget cuts and costs it's we reduced that to only city of fargo residents and that was something new for us um you know and in 2026 are also our materials budget you can see it there was reduced um to meet the requested cut to our budget um And as all the other departments have talked about, it's in terms of growth and rising expectations. It's the same experience we have. And we're not unique in that as a department. Everyone has expressed that. Having said that, in terms of other comments, is knowing that we've had all these changes to our service model, And knowing that resources and budgets going forward will continue to be lean, it's absolutely, you know, we did a strategic plan, but basically we went through almost to the end in 2020. After that, we wanted to get our facilities master plan up to date that was previously from 2024. So right now we have a pretty old strategic plan that we're dealing with. I think with all the changes to our service model, I think in lean budgets, I think it's absolutely essential that we do a very good community survey to find out what the community expects of the Fargo Public Library and services so we can align whatever resources we have toward those needs and desires. So kind of looking at that, and you can see that in my operating increase of $15,000 to get that done, do that community survey, and then develop a strategic plan from there. Looking at staffing, heard our discussion about just safety and environment. I am requesting that we fund a library safety specialist, again, with the idea that we get a more proactive approach to these issues. as opposed to reactive. Obviously it's only one FTE, but I think qualitatively we'll get a better response from the money we spent on contract security if they know they have some eyes that are gonna be coaching them. All the time, certainly a great asset to staff where the staff can focus on library stuff. This individual can focus on following up incident reports, situations as they arise, working with PD, first responders, other agencies to be that contact. And again, get to know the individuals in the population to a degree. that they can get on a first-name basis and have more rapport, that we don't de-escalate situations. If you know them, you can say, hey, Dan, you're in a bad way today. You can't be here. You know that. We talked about it. Can you just go for today? OK. So maybe we're not calling PD so much. The other request, that really reflects all kind of the evolution of the organization and responsibilities. A big one. is the reclassification of our Library Associate 1s to a Library Associate 2. And we basically have retail hours of days, nights, Saturdays. And just to cover those hours, we have a lot of part-time folks, and LA 1s do a lot of work in that. But of course, when the public walks in, they just think everybody's a librarian. And you've got to know what the organization is and answer questions or send them in the right direction. So they may, based on the chart of positions, they're down near the bottom. But what we ask them to do is rather significant. And I think it would be good to get it closer to their compensation reflecting the kind of responsibilities that they have. Looking at operating, yes, other miscellaneous, that represents the rent for the Northport branch. Other services, a big chunk of that is contract security. And also in there is the $15,000 for the survey for 2027. If anybody has any questions.

Commissioner Turnberg? Anything?

No, we'll still have the contracted security that we currently have in addition to the specialist. Will that be... a sworn officer or a former officer, anything?

Well, you know, again, we haven't, it won't necessarily be an officer. I think it will, you know, we've developed a job description along the lines of the same kind of position per the Duluth Public Library. Now, certainly, a retired officer would certainly be a godsend for us in terms of that position. So I look forward, I mean, if funded, I certainly look forward to that process of hiring. Yes, thank you.

That's exactly what I was, just as we've had many retired officers work here in the lobby. So thank you, Tim.

Commissioner Peterson?

Mr. Mayor, thank you. So looking through this, I had thought that, I didn't realize you were Contracting out security services. I thought within that line item similar to courts. It was PD being reimbursed So I have a principled belief in this I believe in specialization If you need security services, I know just the guy that could figure it out for you Also, if you need additional security services based on this I also know a guy That might be able to help you out Commissioner when you say that I mean we've I

You know, I met with Colin Nosky. He's the facility safety specialist. And we worked out, and with Brenda, to put together a safety plan. And one of the options was looking at the opportunities of police officers' availability. And I know PD has a lot of challenges in terms of staffing. And I think that's where that conversation ended. In other words, they didn't have the manpower to be on site the way the library safety specialists will be on site. Because these situations, they can go zero to 60. And you don't know when they're going to happen. You'll have a group of folks. Everything will be fine. 15 seconds later, one's on top of the other one, not going to hit them in the face. So we work closely with PD. on a continual basis.

I think we're having two conversations.

OK.

I'm saying if you can prove to me you need somebody, I'm saying we assign an officer to you. I'm not saying you rely on them showing up as a response. I'm saying if you think it is that bad, and that's what I'm hearing you say, we assign through our experts. We let experts be experts. We assign through PD. crew to take care of you. And that's inclusive of the contracted services as well. I believe there's a place for that, but I also believe, again, in specialization. If the city is allocating $100 and whatever thousand dollars towards contracted services, I think we need to adjust the police budget and ask them to accomplish the mission for us. Outsourcing, I'm in a place for it. And much like our school resource officers, our SROs, those folks then supplement, in theory, if something else transpires outside the library. So I think there's, again, believing what you're saying. I think my position, commissioners and mayor, would be if we're contracting services, we need to fund the police more. And if we need additional personnel assigned specifically to the spot, we also need to fund the police more. So that's my belief on that. Thank you. Commissioner Turmberg?

No, anyone can see the videos. I've watched them over with Tim, and the fights are terrible and quite violent, and you never know when they're going to hit. But I can assure you, also spending much time with Chief Stefanowicz, we do not have police officers to handle what Mr. Dirks is looking for. We really need to up our police budget, and he does need help, especially at the main station.

Other questions? Thank you, Tim. Thank you. All right. We'll move on to our 1130 item, our public safety conversation. We'll start with discussion on the public sales tax, public safety sales tax, and then go into operational conversations.

Good morning, everyone. Before we talk about Police and Fire, I wanted to give just a little bit overview of the Public Safety Sales Tax. We mentioned it briefly when we were talking about the general fund revenues. I said I would provide a little more information. So since this is a fairly new development. So a little background. The Public Safety Sales Tax, it's a 20-year, one-quarter cent tax. It was approved in November of 2024. It's pretty broad. pretty specific, but kind of general. It's for public safety, personnel, equipment, and facilities. That's basically all it said. So the tax is effective April 1st of 2025. We first received our tax revenue in June of 25, and that corresponds with the public safety plan that was approved by commission in May of 2025. And what we did at the time was do A balanced 10-year look ahead. I'll spend a little more time on that. In general, the priorities for both departments were slightly different. Fire, and I think the impetus of the whole thing, Fire was looking for a new pay plan, and they also are looking for facilities money, particularly a training facility. We did accomplish the start of that with a land purchase last month. Police instead was looking for additional officers and technology. So just as background, I put the PowerPoint from the May meeting. I have a couple slides in here, but if you want to look at the whole thing, it's in your packet. So I don't expect you to be able to look at that or read this. I just wanted to be able to reference it because I do have the entire sheet as a pullout in your packet. So finance, admin, and HR worked with the chiefs to come up with a balanced plan. $8.5 million is a lot of money per year, but it's really not a lot of money when you look at the needs that were expressed. So our plan was that any staffing plan or pay plan we knew was gonna have long-lived implications. So the goal here was to assure that the new tax covered the incremental costs of the new staff and a pay plan along with facilities and equipment and really not overspend the tax funding. There is not at this time general fund capacity to absorb these expenses. So another key item is we were transparent then and we're transparent now. There's no off-ramping for this tax. At some point, 12 or so beyond, there's gonna need to be serious conversations about how we continue to fund this beyond 20 years. Right now, the goal at this point is just to not overspend. So these slides, this slide and then the next slide, I have put the full printout in your binder so you can look at this. And I'd be happy to walk through this with each of you, especially maybe the liaison commissioners. The first slide was a slide by year. And the second slide is the personnel plan by year. And then this is kind of a cleaner rendition that was put together by a graphic designer for comms. But really, this is showing the implications of a pay plan, staff additions, support for ongoing operational expenses. support for capital expenses, technology, and facilities over the next four years. And really what I was trying to do at the very bottom line is underspend in the first year, knowing that those ongoing costs of the new people in the new pay plan would catch up in the later years so that over the course of 10 years we weren't expending what we hoped to receive through the sales tax, and we estimated a 2% growth rate on that. So the first couple years, this is what was included with the fire. They received a new pay plan. new firefighters for a downtown response team, learning upgrades, a study for their fire facility, and then we set aside some cash for their fire training facility. In 26, we had a new firefighter, data analyst, and some reclassifications. And then police received a new pay plan, additional staff, And then the technology that they talked about 10 years ago when they first got the body cameras, we spent ARPA money on that. So it was a cash out. I mentioned that that kept me up at night thinking of how we were going to pay for that extra million dollars a year that it's going to cost once that original contract expired and we had to re-up that. So I made sure that that was included in this public safety sales tax plan. They also received additional officers in 26. So for 27, we're using that same original plan, but continue to assume the 2% increase in sales tax. And then in working with the two chiefs, we modified the original plan for 27. Fire originally had proposed to add an assistant emergency manager, Gary made the decision that he would prefer those funds to be set aside for the training facility. So we had additional monies for any potential debt service when we were looking at building that. And then for police, we looked at the 2027 budget included six months for the body worn or 12 months. Really, that contract didn't come due until July, so there was some extra monies that wasn't spent in 26. Travis preferred to reallocate any money for some barricades he was gonna purchase to officers. And then he had a support specialist position that was established for 26. He would prefer to use that for officers. So that allowed capacity for two officers. paid out of the public safety sales tax, and then if you recall, we're proposing four officers, so two would come out of the general fund. So then just in case those of you that are kind of trying to tie out the math here, so the sales tax revenue comes into Fund 226, which is a special revenue fund, and we will talk about that tomorrow. And then we transfer money out of there to cover those expenses for 27. We have the fire set aside. The general fund is all the personnel related issues and the technology issues. And then 475 is allocation towards capital. And we talked about the cost of the fire trucks and the police cars and all of that when we talked with Ben's proposal. So that's a lot of information on the public safety sales tax, but it's giving you a little bit of a background before we move into the actual department. So does anyone have any specific questions right now?

Mr. Turberg. Thank you, Susan. Have we had a reset now that we have two new chiefs? Do we need to do that with the safety sales tax and see how what, I don't know if their priorities are in alignment with what this was set up as with the prior chiefs? You know, the firefighters went out, did all the door-to-door, door-knocking, got the safety sales tax passed. Do we need to figure out how to pay for all this without the tax? Do we need to reset priorities? I know it seems like boots on the ground is the common theme. Thank you.

Well, I think that was the reason we set up that 10-year plan in the first place is when we we're bringing on a new pay plan and we're bringing on new people, there are long-lived implications. And the general fund can't support that right now. So we wanted to make sure that that was built into the anticipated proceeds from that tax. We can certainly talk about how you want to offload some of that, but it's like the little squeeze ball. I mean, if we're going to give more money to one department, we need to find a place to take it out of and That'll have to be a conversation that we have. As I said, I did sit down with both Gary and Travis to talk about what was budgeted for 27. And those were the reallocation items. You know, Gary preferred to set aside more money for his training facility. Travis did some reallocating so that he could get extra officers.

I think that's my point is just their priorities and their what they want to accomplish with the money compared to the people who were in the position prior. Maybe things have shifted. And it sounds like it has. We did talk about that.

To the capacity that we can afford it, yes, that was the plan.

Other questions about the Public Safety Sales Tax? Hearing none, we'll go on to Chief Lorenz with the Fire Department.

Mayor and City Commission, I thank you for this opportunity to be in front of you today. I thought I would start with just a little department overview, especially with our three new members. So, this depicts a slide of the facilities that the Fire Department provides all the services we provide to our citizens and our visitors. We operate primarily out of eight fire stations that are located in the spaces shown on the map. Prior to, or excuse me, post-1989, when Fire Station 2 was built, located down south on 25th Street and 31st Avenue, we've added three facilities. In 2005, Station 6 was opened with the public safety building up in the industrial park. In 2010, we opened Fire Station 7, located on Village Lane and 40th Avenue South. And then in October of 2024, Station 8 was opened. So approximately about every 15 years with the current growth of the city is where we've been adding fire stations. What determines at what point do we add a fire station? That's a bit of a moving target, but to summarize, it boils down to risk and demand for service. We look at the growth in the area, what type of risks are going in there, at what rate are they going in there, and then we look at the calls for service that are also developing in those areas. And when we start to see a significant trajectory of both, it's that trigger point that we need to better start planning. It takes time to put a fire station into service. You have to acquire the property to put a fire station in service. You have to start adding the staff to staff that fire station. So it's a significant time, cost, and financial commitment by the city. So we want to make sure that we're doing all of those things correctly. I'm just going to open my one program here. The department is broken down into basically four functions. Administratively, the chief oversees the department, and we're divided into three distinct divisions that are overseen by three division chiefs. And in addition, the city's emergency management currently operates under the fire department. That emergency management function is partially funded with state dollars. There are two positions in the state for cities that are actually funded with partial state dollars, one being Fargo, the other is Bismarck. The others are all county emergency managers for the 53 counties in the state. So we have one of those positions is partially funded with state fundings for the city of Fargo, and it operates currently under the fire department. So in the slide above you, two of the other divisions that we talk about is our support services division, which one of the big functions of that division is training. Currently, our fire station four, which is one of our priorities we're going to talk about, is where a lot of our training happens. And over the years, we've modified that station numerous times to fit a growing station. And we've just outgrown it, and its services have just become to the point of we need to plan to replace them. So right now, the building on the left of the screen is the building that Ben referred to earlier that the city leases, the former Bergson building. And Ben has been kind enough to let us operate our training out of that facility. We're currently doing joint fire academies for new firefighters with Moorhead and West Fargo. And that is happening out of that location for their classroom settings. It's certainly not a permanent solution. where a lot of the, you can see is up above in the storage location that we're doing things that the building wasn't designed for, but we're getting by at the moment. Our other division, our community risk reduction division, and we'll talk about all the personnel in that division shortly, but that functions out of two locations. The fire marshal operates out of our station one, located downtown on NP Avenue, and the deputy fire marshals are currently operating out of the public safety building out at fire station six and that building. Our community risk reduction, you know, it's not our most recognizable component of a fire department is all of our stations and all of our apparatus. But this is kind of the division that's equally important. They're the ones that make sure all of our facilities are designed and built to the most current codes. They're the ones that are into these facilities after the construction to make sure that they're safe and that we're serving those citizens looking for those places to remove emergencies rather than respond to them. This is an org chart kind of summarizing what we're describing. We've got our operations division, which falls under one of our division chiefs. On the left of the screen, these are positions. They're not necessarily people. You can take that, the battalion one and battalion two times three. Our operation division operates with three shifts. Two battalion chiefs oversee each shift. They work a 24-hour schedule. We have 129 personnel assigned to that division that operate out of the eight fire stations. Every unit, with the exception of the 851 unit downtown, operates with, well, they have a captain as well, but every other unit operates with a minimum of a company officer. That's the captain, the driver, and then our firefighter position. We have 43 people assigned to each shift. And our minimum staffing is 34 people per shift. When we get to that or below, we maintain overtime to staff those units. The reason that that difference is that covers vacation, that covers sick leave, that covers long-term FMLA leave, that covers people out of military leave, is where those spots play in. Our personnel really are the core of the department. We could have all the facilities and trucks that we want, but without the people to staff them, they wouldn't do any good. So we put a lot of effort into maintaining our workforce. As I mentioned before, we do our training out of the Burgseth building currently. We're averaging two recruit academies a year, each one being 18 weeks long. And so that's what our training division oversees as well. Simultaneously, when we're doing new recruit academies, we also have training for our incumbent personnel. Each person is required approximately 250 hours of training per year. That's in EMS, that's in fire suppression, that's in all of our other specialties. The department is one of four regional response teams for the state of North Dakota for hazardous materials and technical rescue, and that is incorporated into those hours. The funding for those teams is basically federal funds that are funneled down through the DES, Department of Emergency Service, at the state level down to our local level. That funding maintains equipment and the resources we have mostly. I've been having numerous conversations for years at the state level with Department of Emergency Service that the funding we need to maintain those teams is not where it needs to be. That's another long conversation. We maintain the stuff that we have now. It's the big capital items. It's response vehicles and those types of things that the state doesn't have a big plan for. But we continue to work with the state and Department of Service to make sure that we're maintaining those teams the best we can. They do provide funding for our training. We apply every year for that grant. And some of the training is local. Others, we send people down to Anniston. We send them to TEEX, to different places to help maintain, which is in Texas, to maintain that training. Current issues, as we talked earlier, our training is one of the priority we've identified for our capital needs with the public safety sales tax. Some of the images you see here are our training ground located out at Station 4 on 2701 First Avenue North. That is a 1.03 acre site. It encompasses Station 4 and the two facilities that you see, the tower and the burn building. This was all built in 1966, the Freddie Safke Trading Center, which is a former Fargo Fire Chief. It is beyond its useful life. That burn facility has had thousands of fires into it. We've rebuilt it a couple different times. You'll see the exoskeleton structure there with the solid concrete and the block in between has been rebuilt. It's at the point now where the engineers that we've used to certify that facility no longer will certify it as safe. We've taken proactive measures on the inside to protect the rooms. We've narrowed it down to one room that we're actually using as little as we can, but it's definitely on the end of its life. Station 4 located at that location. We've just expanded past what the station can provide. Particularly one item that I want to draw attention to is the restrooms. We have a diverse workforce now, and it was never built for that. So to help accommodate the one bathroom that's in the station, we actually put a toilet into a slip-high room. in the slop room just so we had an extra location. As far as isolating our contaminants, meaning our PPE from the living areas, you can see the picture here shows that we're using our station laundry and the same one we're putting our bunker gear and cleaning of that stuff and all of the contaminants that are coming back. The original kind of gear room has been converted into a workout room years ago and it's just the plumbing and electrical and mechanic not so much the electrical but the plumbing and the mechanical is a lot of the the services are under the concrete and it's becoming more and more difficult to maintain so those are certainly our priorities uh recently here as susan mentioned we purchased this piece of property in the lower left uh former lavelle lumber slash park site um Some of the items that are in that picture, like the storage racks, that's where they store lumber, aren't there anymore. That's just an aerial Google image. It's a seven-acre site. One thing, it's not real clear on that site, but coming in from the south and east is an active rail spur. One significant benefit to this location, and I worked with Ben Dow with Public Works here, was to kind of partner with Public Works as well. Our goal is to bring rail cars in and train on from a fire response perspective on that spur. But Ben is working on a solution to help bring salt and other aggregates in that the city uses annually and thinks that there's a substantial cost savings we can implement with that. I don't want to speak for Ben directly, but a ballpark estimate is up to $200,000 a year that we could save in those materials. So it really is going to be a great partnership there. Recently here we've put out an RFP as part of the 2025 and the public safety sales tax There was a facilities master planning and so we're looking for a firm architectural or engineering to come up with conceptual site layouts and cost estimates not detailed planning for one what this site could look like with the training facilities and two for the remodel slash rebuild potentially of station four along with the demolition of that burn building and tower Pictures are one thing, but anybody that would like to see those facilities, please contact me. I'd be more than happy to take you out to all of those locations and show you why and what that plan in place is. As we talked about some of the issues with the emerging issues, And I'd like to take a step back. A couple items I forgot to mention was one thing with the general funds with public safety and the struggles that you guys are facing as well as these 3% property tax caps. It's difficult to manage the growth with the costs of increase that have happened over the last few years particularly. As Ben mentioned, maintaining our fleet is a huge priority for me. We have a large number of very expensive vehicles as well as accessory vehicles that have to be maintained. I can tell you, excuse me, since COVID, we have not fully recovered from COVID. The costs of what equipment has done post-COVID is kind of astounding, actually. In 2020 I purchased a fire truck for four hundred fifty four thousand dollars five years later that cost was 1.1 million and not only it went from about a 300-day delivery to two years Ladder trucks now most companies are predicting four years to build one So what does that mean in our budgeting cycle? we have to order one assuming we're going to replace it and three to four years down the road. The manufacturing we're doing now, they're predicting a two-year build time, which is better than most, but that is not showing any signs of relief. Another emerging issue that's causing a significant issue for us is this Forever Chemicals PFOS and our personal protective equipment. To outfit one firefighter with bunker gear, helmets, and all the things we need, it's crowding $6,000. We hire a new firefighter and then invest a lot of time and money, and then if they happen to leave and he happened to be 5'4", and the next one was 6'10", we can't just repurpose that gear. So we're in that constant chasing of that. We're constantly looking for outside financial resources. We did just recently apply for an assistance to firefighter grant to replace one set of PPE for all of our firefighters. Our goal is to have two sets for everybody. You come back, cancer is very prevalent in our business now, and so we do everything we can to mitigate that. And one of those is getting everybody into two sets of PPE. And so when they come back from a call, by the time it gets laundered and dried, they have their backup set. We use NFPA standards as a guideline for determining a lot of these things, and they're recommending seven years on replacement. We're beyond that. Our backup sets are generally that 10-year mark. But to keep up with that and the cost and the delivery time, it's several months to get the stuff. We have to get people measured. So it's a chasing game all the time to make sure people are in adequate PPE. Some other other emergency issues that we're constantly watching is our increase for calls of service in 2025 we did approximately fourteen thousand five hundred calls we're always working with the triple RDC Red River regional dispatch and Making sure we're sending the right resources to the right calls medical calls make up about seven approximately and plus or minus a couple percent each year of our call volume. And we're working with Samford Ambulance, the medical direction, and our other responding agencies in the area to make sure that we're sending as efficiently as we can. You know, the 911 calls aren't always 911 calls. And so navigating that system and adjusting our resources to the best that we can is a priority. We're constantly chasing those types of calls too. Mental health is a big issue, as the health department mentioned earlier, and that also plays into what we do every day too as emergency responders. One thing that... We mentioned earlier emergency management is under the fire department currently, and there was in the 2027 budget originally with the original proposal from 2025 to speak to commissioners about reprioritizing. I took that out so that we can focus on this training ground station four. As important as those functions are, We're competing for limited resources. So this year, we didn't ask for any additional FTEs. But what I did ask for was an adjustment to our out-of-grade pay. As I mentioned before, we have three or a captain in each truck. We have a driver positioned in each truck and a firefighter. Well, we always have somebody on leave and vacation when somebody fills in. Back in roughly 2012, we implemented a fixed dollar amount, $0.50 an hour, $1 an hour. And that hasn't changed since. So I had proposed going to a percentage of a 5% out of grade per position, and that so far has not moved forward in the budget, but I believe it's very important because then it fixes it in perpetuity. As the salaries adjust, that just moves along with it. So that was one of the things that I identified earlier. And then some of the department goals. This relines with our accreditation status. In 2009-2010 for our new electeds, that's when Fargo Fire became accredited the first time. And every five years since, we've accredited again. You go through the Center of Public Safety Excellence to do that. And the times listed are part of that accreditation. And those times aren't just the accreditation that makes it up. It's based on NFPA standards, in this case particularly 1710 and 1221, which depicts what the goal should be for response times. There is no state standards for firefighting, for training, for response times. It's using those NFPA standards as the guidelines, what we do for determining that. So those goals are tied to that accreditation, except for the reconstruction of a training facility in Station 4. Budget sheets. This was part of the capital requests for this year. The lower... The concrete replacement, that falls above and beyond our facilities repair, which is in the rest of our budget. With eight stations and the amount of concrete that we have, we're constantly fixing concrete. There's, just like Ben mentioned, with the temperature and our climate, we've got heaving, breaking, whether it's inside or outside the station, we're always chasing broken concrete. The vehicle replacement, this is technically in our budget. I coordinate with Ben in public works on this replacement schedule. And as Ben mentioned, we're going to have to adjust this moving forward with the cost of things. Right now we're on about a 14-year goal for replacement of fire trucks. Internally, we watch the hours of usage and we try and rotate them from busier stations to less, you know, to extend the life of these things. One of my priorities when we're ordering these vehicles is durability and longevity. Like I mentioned in our pre-build meeting for the architects yesterday, it's function over fancy. Galvanized frame rails to protest the rusting, the air ride suspensions to keep, so we're not pounding the trucks to death on the roads, the security, making sure they have the ability to lock the compartments when they're not attended. All of those things is a priority. But what gets to be a problem down the road isn't so much that we can't fix them, it's trying to get parts. The industry is revolved to they're changing things so quickly. I've seen clusters and parts on fire apparatus obsolete in three years where we have to go to a different model, different technique to keep them running. So it's not a want, it's a need. that we maintain the replacement of these schedules simply to make sure they're functioning. When our frontline vehicles come out of service, we have standbys, and it's equally important. So technically, when they come out at 14 years, it's not 14 years. There is a standby mode for at least six. So there's not a day goes by where we don't have a standby vehicle in service. With the many vehicles and maintenance that we have, there's always one in for service. There's always one in for just annual maintenance. We have to do annual pump testing. We have to do destructive testing on the ladders, the pump operations, all of those. So we have a standby vehicle in service every day. So while it sounds like 14, it's actually longer than that that they're functioning. To take a step back, the VPLOW, we do all of our own snow removal. One thing about our fire stations is they never close. We're open 24 hours a day, seven days a week. They're fully staffed. We do all of our own snow maintenance. We do our ground maintenance. Not because we want to, because it's a fiscally responsible thing to do. But to do that, we also need equipment to do that. So that's what, and then sometimes we rely, if we have a blizzard at two in the morning, We rely on public works a lot to help us in those situations. We keep in contact, but they're busy, and sometimes we need to get out in front of it, and that's what this, for the battalion vehicle we're talking about here, is so that if we had to get out in front of an emergency truck during a blizzard, that's what that's for. So the final sheet, looking at our budgets. As you can tell by the overall budget, roughly 94% of that is salary and benefits. That number does not include the capital items that were mentioned in the sheet before, and then the rest is operating. And I know you guys have a breakdown of that sheet in your book, and so I stand for any questions regarding any of that information that I provided or information's in the book. Mr. Goldstein?

Anything?

Is the liaison?

The thing that I would add is, as the chief is encouraging you to check out the station, do the ride-alongs. I spent last Thursday at Station 4, and then we also traveled along to 5 and 6, and it is drastically different. It really is a facility we do need to invest in. It really is. I encourage you to check it out.

Commissioner Peterson.

Mr. Mayor, thank you. Chief, thanks for being here. So I'm looking at my team here. So prior to our election, some of us anyway, you made the investment of three-some million dollars into that site that is potentially for the new training center as well as located adjacent to a rail. With the intent of... the thing I didn't know was the replacement of fire station, the implied replacement of fire station four. Am I reading too much into that? Station four would not go there. That would stay at its current location. Okay, so that wouldn't move, so I have control issues. That's one of the biggest things I have. I micromanage often too much. But I really struggle when we appropriate dollars. And the ship has sailed on it, just so the commission knows my thoughts on this. When we appropriate dollars with sort of a thing that we're going to do someday, I really struggled when I saw that go through at the last, I think it was the last meeting before we took office. Regardless, I am very curious to find out, you said, and it's in here too, the replacement of the training center. My main concern there, and I talked to other local political subs, We should be doing, and maybe you are, this is a question, not a statement, are we engaging our other political peers to be a regional training center? And why I'm saying that is the state legislature funded Minot's regional training center. a lot of it. I think it was $600,000, Senator. I can't remember what it was. There was a substantive dollar figure that was invested within other political subs within the state of North Dakota from our friends in the legislature. So if we treat this as a regional training center, not just a Fargo training center, there's a greater propensity that we could capture state dollars. And there's not a shortage of resources in Bismarck. There's a shortage of political will sometimes. So, I think I'd like, if we do need it, which I believe you, I would like to see the structural engineer's report. I mean, you must have a report of some kind. I'd love to see that report. the intent with, if we're proceeding with something, even if it's just sort of conceptually, where that evolves into, because that training center is googling around. Once the city commission made the purchase, I jumped on the internet and started looking for what these things would cost. So I'm curious to find out what that study will yield in terms of a result, because those things can be tens of millions of dollars. And all of a sudden, if we're committing $3 million in land so we can save $200,000 in salt, which I think is logical, getting it by rail, That's super, but we're then needing to still somehow find within the next, if it's structurally unsound to the point where it's no longer safe to be utilized, two questions. First of all, what's the cost of that? But followed by, there is an amazing training center up in Grand Forks and at 27, this is my down the rabbit hole that I get on sometimes, amazing site up in Grand Forks, brand new, shiny, 27 acres. Could we partner with our friends in Grand Forks and train there? So they become the regional hub because I don't think you're gonna be training every day, right? So what does that schedule look like if we partner with our friends in Grand Forks? And you're going to say, well, we have mobility issues, hotel. Well, doing the cost analysis on that, I think, would be a curious thing, which, again, is why I always struggle with we're going to buy a piece of land in anticipation of doing a thing someday. And I do think you need a training center. But what does that look like in terms of relationships with other local political subs and relationships maybe with our friends in Grand Forks where we don't need to pay for one, we simply need to buy hotel rooms and mileage? So I'm curious to find out over time, learning more about your department. I think you're well run. I also started digging around just for the, I'll stop after this. We are very well prepared in terms of should something bad transpire. There are plenty of cities that do not have the coverage that we do, and I think that's a great choice. I think the city commissions prior to us, the mayor prior to you, mayor, made very good choices in terms of coverage. I'm happy to see we have eight stations. I'm looking forward to learning more And I will stop. Thank you, sir.

Chief, if you have any response?

Well, it's a very, you know, I welcome the discussion. There's a lot to this. I'm very, you know, as the chief in Grand Forks for seven years, I'm very familiar with their training center up there. The regional concept is a big topic. In North Dakota, there's approximately 350 fire departments, of which less than 10 are full-time career. And so the needs of a volunteer organization, well, at the end of the day, they go on the same type of calls. How they get there is much different. I've had conversations with the chiefs from both organizations on each side of us, one being in Minnesota, which always, you've got that river dividing the two states, so that adds a layer there. And then I've, with West Fargo as well, and we've had that Conversation about fees for service. If they want to use the facility, are they willing to pay a fee to utilize it? Both open to those conversations. We just have not sat down and said, okay, what does that look like? Is it by the hours, by the weekend? How do we do that? Are you going to put a training captain there? All of those things. And then there's the other component when you start talking about training out of town, and I mentioned minimum staffing. With 250 hours per person per year to try and do the facility training hours that we need, when you look at what the overtime would be to backfill those, it would be substantial. And then logistically of getting people out there. Overtime right now, as also Ben mentioned, In the old days, we couldn't get enough overtime. I'd cancel vacation if a shift of overtime was a possibility. Not anymore. It's not a priority for people. Time away, family time is more important. So limiting that overtime is important. So that would also have to be in that consideration if we're going to send people out of town to the training we need. Logistically, to answer your question about why, and this all went through the other commission. We had a lot of conversations about this. It isn't often you get an opportunity to buy a seven-acre piece of industrial land in the middle of town. The training that we do is oftentimes loud. It's noisy. It's dirty. And so we're in an area where we're going to bother nobody. And so that really is a priority. But I think we could have a lot of those conversations. And I think, like we talked last night, we'll set up a time get-together. I would love to show you out to the location and talk more about why this is a great fit now.

Mr. Strand, did you have something?

Bill, I think, Chief, that I'd like you to know how much appreciation there is in the community and at the leadership table for the work your folks, especially the fire department, did on the public safety sales tax. It was a yeoman's task. And what they did in the PR that they put out to the community, the heart they put into it, it was really something to see. And it was controversial in some people's minds. But they just need to be on and ongoing for the sake of public safety and our law enforcement and our fire department. They need to be appreciated daily for that effort, which we'll continue delivering for 20 years.

Thank you. Thank you. And I'll close with just, and I give you permission, Chief, to correct me, the work that we've been doing together out in Bismarck in regards to emergency services response across the state and learning kind of how challenging, and I don't want to call it a political hot potato, but it's really challenging when everyone agrees that we need to do a lot more in our state for emergency services, but then we have a committee studying it for a year and a half. and there doesn't seem to be movement of what that looks like because that might mean places like Fargo or Grand Forks or Bismarck or Minot might get a little more because of the regionalization. I mean, the reality is is our fire department, our police departments have the MOUs and understandings that they're always gonna show up wherever our neighbors need them, right? Vice versa too, but we have the specialization and that's where we can provide the training. Going into this next session, I know there are a number of conversations of other communities nearby us that are interested in creating training facilities too. And I think we have to figure out that value proposition of how, if we're looking for state support or other resources to help support that, again, how can we continue to be the great neighbor we are? So it's not about other communities missing out on opportunity, but what more can we provide as part of that? You can respond to that if I'm off in left field or anything like that.

The regional concept, there's a lot of discussion about that. I can tell you at the state level, at the fire service level, there's a ton of confusion right now. The community you're referring to with Mayville, yes, they bought a John Deere dealership, from what I understand, and looking for a solution with turning into a regional training facility. There's proposals. There's a changeover at the state fire marshal's office of a regional concept. There's been driven from legislators out the western side of the state, as you know, with the wildfire issues. and what the state can do to help with that. Right now, the designated training organization in the state is North Dakota Firefighters Association. It's an association that's under the insurance commissioner's office, and they hold a training event. The big one is once a year in March, and it draws primarily volunteers. A lot of the career department people help instruct at that, actually. There's been different proposals from different people about a regional concept, and none of them have really come to the top of what that looks like. And so legislatively, this could be a very interesting session because it started with helping the rural areas out in western North Dakota with the wildfires. I mean, we had some injuries and fatalities as a result of those wildfires, and they were really looking to help. And that's what was driving a lot of that. But I can tell you, with some of the conversations that have went on, and I'm in a lot of different organizations out there, there's a lot of confusion throughout the state on what that looks like. To my knowledge, there's not another training facility in the state that gets money. The NDFA's budget comes through the insurance commissioner's office, and that's part of the insurance reserve fund that was allocated back to the communities. They had taken their 5.5% out of that, but now it comes directly through the insurance commissioner's office. And so I agree that this year legislative could be interesting to see some of the changes coming through the state.

Thank you. All right, we'll continue on to Chief Stefanowicz with the police department.

Great, thank you, Mayor and Commissioners. So I have to be careful here as we begin for a couple of reasons. One, just in the interest of time, make sure that we stay on schedule. But two, as we enter into just item number one, really, I could probably spend the next two hours sharing information about it. While I don't share Ben Dow's passion for fuel, I do have a passion about our department and sharing how day-to-day operations look and staffing models and whatnot. Just as a quick overview, we have three divisions, our neighborhood services, professional standards, and criminal investigations. Each of the captains are sitting behind me to my right. With that, that brings forth staffing and a number of different training things that need to be funded. Some are very complicated, some are very expensive. So just a recent criminal investigations training that a person went to was just over $17,000 for a certification. They're very expensive, but very much needed. So the days of a law enforcement officer jumping into a car with a pen and a pad are well over. And unfortunately, a lot of this stuff, whether it's equipment and otherwise, it's almost subscription-based versus we can buy it, use it for its useful life, hopefully stretch it out for as long as we can. Those days are over. But there'll be some things as we talk through some data points here that I've Happy to share with you, but there will be some information that would probably be best done either one-on-one or in small groups over at the police department so we can walk you through what that truly looks like. There's gonna be some numbers that I'm gonna share with you that I'm just gonna call on paper. On paper, it's this, but in reality, this is how that impacts us and this is truly what it looks like. So overall, we have 201 sworn officers and 31 civilian employees for a total of 232 folks that we're dealing with on a day-to-day basis. in our operations as we deal with just around 100,000 calls for service. And when you think about calls for service, those also generate caseload for our investigative folks. And I'd be remiss to think that, or to not mention that truly everything that the police department does, we end up out front, but then on the back end, there isn't a person at this table that we don't use as a resource regularly. whether it's Ben Dow and his team to keep us running as it relates to squad cars, coming up with a plan, making sure that we've got our men and women out there whenever they need to be, and come up with creative ideas as to how we can make sure that we still have enough vehicles for everybody. Wyatt, if I could give him, if we were playing Monopoly right now, I'd give him a get-out-of-jail-free card because he helps us constantly, constantly with grant funding, which... which is, I said monopoly, if we were playing monopoly. And the reason I mention that is because without these other folks at the table and their areas of expertise, there's just so many things that we couldn't get done. So with Wyatt's help, I mean, whether it's through the police foundation and donations, through the state grants, through the DOJ, we've brought in over the last handful of years about $3.8 million. And that wouldn't be done on our own without help from everybody at the table as it relates to HR and tracking folks and making sure that we got the right people doing the right things like It's just an amazing team and I'd be remiss if I didn't at least mention them as we walk through this so Oh, it doesn't match with it. So the org chart's very complicated, but similar to the philosophy that Ben mentioned, our ask and where we're focused is boots on the ground. And you'll notice that. So on paper, today, we have one officer vacancy at the line level, one, on paper. The reality of that looks like seven people in the training program, out in the field training program, so they're out in a car with somebody. Then we have 13 people in the academy, so that's 20 people right there that aren't out taking calls for service or managing caseload for our investigative division. So there's 20. Just in the last month, we had 22 folks that were on extended military leave, family leave, or... or injured. So very quickly on paper, one number, but reality looks like another number. Our other vacancies, so total right now on paper, we have six vacancies as it relates to overall. So one officer, one detective, two sergeants, a lieutenant, and the assistant chief physician. Those are our six vacancies currently. And similar to the philosophy is we've asked our supervisory staff to take on more responsibility, do more with less, While we work through trying to figure out staffing models so we can put more boots on the ground But at the end of the day, we'll go through a number of different data points that shows this, which is the theme of many folks here at the table is why we need more help and why we need more boots on the ground as we work through this. So a formula that regularly gets mentioned, and of course for every formula, there's a counter argument to the formula. I'm not unwise to that, but right now we stand at about 1.4 officers per 1,000 people. a goal for us was to get near 1.6, 1.7 per thousand, the national average being two per thousand. If we were to do that and we applied the ratio of about 20% of our staff being gone for FMLA injury, all those other things, we would be nearing that kind of 240 mark. Now that's a long ways from where we're at with 201. There's no way that we can take a swing at that today or tomorrow, but over the course of time, we need to start taking bites at that apple and moving forward, all while considering all the other folks here at the table and their asks and what they need to do to run their departments. So as we look towards that, I don't want to focus just on that data point of a 1.4 or 1.6, because then you consider the crime rates. Well, our crime rate is currently down from last year, so we've got a 10% reduction. which is fantastic. But then we have to look at, well, what were the concerns of the community? What did that look like? What did the crimes look like? The crimes of violence versus all the other data points that are included there. And then we have the perception. And then what our community expectations are. So the expectation from the community is that they're going to see a lot more officers out and about. So we are doing the best to remain visible, make sure that people understand where we are, what we're doing, trying to make sure that just just as a kind of a fun data point, visibility. In the last probably nine days, we've had officers, sergeants, lieutenants, the captains, either on TV, on the radio, like we're doing everything we can to share the message, help everybody understand what's going on, not just with the street fair, but all events, just making sure that everybody gets an opportunity to hear from officers on their day-to-day and understanding what all that looks like. which to me is really, really important as we share messaging, because we need our community to understand what our challenges are, what we're doing to work on those, and then what our future is going to look like. So as we work through the perception data point, the crime rate, and then that 1.4, it suggests that we're lacking in a number of those. So we're trying to move forward as it relates to staffing, but again, very difficult when we've got tight budgets and other things. To Commissioner Turnberg's point, as it related to the public safety sales tax, we went back to the table and went towards some of the pieces of equipment that we knew that we could scale back so that we could focus attention on people. Because priority number one is we have to have boots on the ground. We have to have people out there so that when Tim's team calls us from the library. We can get people over there right away that we've got a good response time. So managing all three legs of that table as it relates to the crime rate, public perception, and community expectation, we've got a difficult task because some of our community members have a really, really high expectation and we have a high expectation of ourselves. But to meet that becomes very difficult when we're spread across 50 square miles as we're working through this. So when we're behind in staffing and or other things as we're managing calls for service, then training becomes an issue. Many times in police department budgets, one of the first things that gets cut is training dollars. And I would argue that that should be near the end of what should be cut as it relates to a police department's budget because we have to train our people so that they can respond appropriately because they are out there making decisions very very quickly at all hours of the day and night and very difficult decisions so making sure that they have the their training needs met is extremely important and if we don't train them They will learn on the job. And this is one of those that we don't necessarily want everybody learning on the job every day, that we want to control the environment and work through it. But if we don't, then another thing that can happen very quickly is that they're gaining this experience. And because of the call volume, not just for the police department, but for the fire department, for Ben's team, what happens is they gain experience very, very fast. And then our people become a hot commodity as it relates to the other organizations that are both right here locally and regionally. And we lose people to that. And we're nearing that point where we're at a critical point where now the appeal to go to one of those other places with the experience that we've provided for them is a real threat to our staffing models. That is certainly something that we really need to focus on, making sure that people feel like they've got the appropriate training, they've got the appropriate equipment, they've got enough people to manage the calls for service and their call loads, that they aren't run through the wood chipper, and they feel good at the end of the day that they were able to accomplish their goals and follow-ups and meet the citizens' needs. That's extremely, extremely important for our folks to make sure that they have that as we're working through it. Some things that have happened to us over the year that have put us in the position where we're at is we end up with some specialized positions that draw people away from those initial either call takers or the detectives, investigators that are following up on caseload. What I mean by that is, so let's say a handful of years ago we added four officers. Conveniently, now we have to service the airport. So now we brought in four officers, so that helps us with that mathematical formula, but now they're stationed at the airport 18 hours out of the day, which in the end doesn't necessarily help us out with the other volume. Now, it certainly helps us in the end that TSA mandates that we have people up at the airports. They won't open the gate without having an officer there. That's not the issue. The issue is it's taking away from those call takers and other folks, so we kind of need to grow. Similar issue with SROs. So we've added SROs over the years, which is great because it has a dual effect. Those folks that are in the school, they're building relationships, they're helping us with a number of things. But at the end of the day, too, we need more folks out taking calls for service and then again following up on caseload. The caseload as it relates to our Criminal Investigations Division gets really, really complicated really, really fast. And as technology is introduced into all of these things now, it gets even more and more complicated. Search warrants, things of that nature, take a really long time to get returns on technology. So everybody's carrying with them a cell phone and that can take sometimes a month, maybe even longer to get information back as it relates to the cell phone or maybe an app that somebody's using to get that return. The things that we were able to do 20 plus years ago are just very, very different today. And it takes more manpower. So a focus for us overall is going through our organization and finding out where we can squeeze. And what I mean by that is where we can squeeze more from other support groups. So making sure that we have our sworn folks doing sworn things, not necessarily managing spreadsheets and other things of that nature, scheduling appointments and whatnot, and using our other folks around the table to help us with those things. Recognizing that once again, if we start doing something, we have a downstream impact at everybody sitting at this table. We add the traffic safety team. that they are doing a fantastic job. We've reduced a number of complaints, and statistically speaking, they're just doing a fantastic job as it relates to that data point. However, there's a downstream effect to that. Now our records division has a lot more to deal with as it relates to just specific, those six officers and their specific duties. That impacts Shiloh and her group at municipal court. Again, just that downstream effect. As we add officers out on the street, that means we're running vehicles longer and more frequently, and that also means that they're bumping into things, like just all kinds of things that can happen there. Also, as we add folks on the street and or community expectations change, arrests. So if we make more arrests on certain offenses or whatever a primary goal for us would be, is that now we complicate things for Sheriff Johnner and his team And then municipal court, the state's attorney's office, as more people are now either being housed in the jail or pushed through the legal system. And the state's attorney's office has often mentioned that they're not able to keep up with their caseload. And a lot of that, I mean, we take 100,000 calls for service. A lot of our business is, a lot of their business is coming from us. And then municipal court obviously servicing us as we're dealing with either traffic citations or misdemeanor arrests. Again, we can really, really complicate or flood the system. If we were to back up 10 years or so, maybe just a little bit longer, we had officers that would write 100 to 150 DUIs in a year. If you took that group of people and just allowed them to do blood draws for all those DUIs, we could inundate the state in just a handful of months and create a backlog for months. And just again, sharing that everything that we do, we understand that there is downstream effects and we wanna make sure that that's represented as we ask for things, whether it's people or vehicles or all these other things, we understand that there's downstream effects, at the end of the day, we still need to move forward. We still need to start taking small bites at this apple and making sure that we've got enough people to do what we need to do. But our focus overall is line level folks. If you look at the request, the request was for eight officers at the line level so that we can work through all of this as it relates to responsiveness. Now, sometimes through other conversation, I think that we discuss like why, why that number? There is a reason for that number. And so if you take the 24 hours in a day, if you added an officer, so let's say today that we got granted one officer, That one officer is only going to cover a portion of the day for us. That does not get us 24-hour coverage, nor seven days a week. We need three people to at least cover the 24 hours in a day, but then that only gets us four days in a week, and now we go uncovered. So literally to get us an additional officer out there on the street 24 hours a day, the minimum is at least six in the current model. So we add at least one person into our neighborhood services group, and then we'll be able to add investigators and or detectives into that group because, again, there's a downstream effect there. When an officer takes a call for service, many times there's either search warrants that need to be written and or complicated portions of the investigation that take either a certain certification or skill set, and they don't necessarily have the time to follow up on that or deal with that. that information, that case that gets pushed up to our investigative group who does an extremely wonderful job with that. So that becomes, again, very complicated very, very quickly. As we talk about overtime and all the other things, basically what we did as a group was we went through our budget and we tried to find anything that we could to scale back that we can control. Now, just about 92% of our overall budget is salary and benefits, and we don't necessarily have discretionary decisions to make inside of that, but there are other funds certainly in there that we do have the discretion to either up or down or figure out what we can do differently. So as we comb through there, we were able to scale back a handful of those items focusing on what is it that we can focus on so exactly that we can work towards our goal and the fact of adding people, making sure that they've got the right equipment. So if today we were asked to do something very simple as, hey, you need to reduce your budget by $50,000, That's really easy to say when we're looking at just a number. $50,000, we'll do our best, not saying that we can or we can't. We would do our best. Maybe to those that are just interested in the number, well, let's take $50,000 from this account. We'll achieve the goal. That might have been our 6850 account, which is safety compliance, which is body armor. We will not, we will not ever skimp on body armor. We will make sure that we stay on schedule with body armor to make sure that our people have the equipment that they need to do the job. But that doesn't mean that that can't come from someplace else is what I'm getting at. So all of those things are what I'd really like to share with you on a very personal basis and walk through some of these things as it relates to some of the decisions as we're trying to navigate through this very difficult and complicated time as it relates to budgeting and what we need. But at the end of the day, the community expectation is that we are going to show up for calls for service, that we're going to be out there, that we're going to be visible. And to do that, we need to keep up and we need more people. So our focus shows that we're trying to do everything that we can to scale anything else back that we can to focus on those people. To include, we had a conversation with Ben Dow about what we can do on some of our replacement vehicles so that we can upfit other vehicles. Because just as an example, Not that this was a flawed philosophy, but it was just a philosophy that was created so that we could get by. And that was we were also pushing out vehicles that didn't have MDCs inside of them. There wasn't a mobile computer, so the officer couldn't take a crash report. They didn't have cages inside of them, so if they needed to put a suspect or somebody in the back seat. But now those vehicles were used for assignments that would be sitting quite a bit, such as a school resource officer. However, Those vehicles still need to be used by other officers and so forth. So not just the SROs, but as the agency grows, we need to use those for day-to-day business and we need to make sure that they're fully outfitted. So in collaboration with Ben and his team, we were able to come up with a plan over the last couple of years to make sure that all of our vehicles have all the necessary equipment inside of it. And then also using some of our, what we would refer to as plain vehicles, just your standard vehicle, and replacing that with more of a patrol-related vehicle, but then we have to come up with the equipment cost to put that inside of it. So Ben is probably being a little bit shy about the extent of many of the spreadsheets as it relates to the 15-year plan, specifically for the police department. But inside of those spreadsheets, our team has gotten together to and specifically laid out every single piece of equipment that's inside of there, and their age requirements, such as a radar unit. A radar unit might have a warranty of three years, but a useful life of five, but a max life of seven. And some might be run longer than that. And we need to make sure that we stay on top of those schedules with everything. Because what we don't want is to come here and say, we need $100,000 to replace all of our radar units tomorrow. Instead, we would rather stay on schedule with the cars and have smaller bites at that apple over time to make sure that we don't ever find ourselves in that position. But to do that, that takes a lot of organization from a lot of different people. But again, right now we have sworn members for the most part doing a lot of that. So we're trying to shift that into some of our civilian personnel and then relying on Ben and his team. to really lead the charge on a number of those things. So again, overall, takes a lot to make the police department work. And again, we'd be happy to walk everybody through kind of pull the curtain back on the day to day operations, what all that looks like is correlates with the budget, and why we're asking for what we're asking. But I also realized that I think our time was supposed to be around 1230. So I'm just trying to stay on schedule with that.

Any questions for Chief, Commissioner Peterson? Well, right, but I've been deferring to you all first, so go for it.

Thank you, Mr. Mayor. Chief, thanks for being here. I obviously respect what you and your compatriot there do more than I can say. I do need to understand, do you apply for JAG grants? Yes. Okay, and I don't see a revenue stream on them. Where would that be in here?

It's not in here because we don't recognize the revenues but it does show up in, if it's a federal or a state or a local grant, in the general fund revenue.

Okay, but it's somewhere. It's somewhere. Okay, awesome. That's very important to me because, in fact, in my prior life, I was actually forwarding them to Mr. Redlinger. If you recall, Mr. Redlinger, I'd go to these national things and I'd bombard all of my sheriff and then my city administrator with opportunities to make sure that we're at least pursuing those things. From my perspective, So better question. If we were to appropriate four positions or more, can you fill them?

That's a great question. So it's timing. So previously, if you back up a handful of years, at one point we were at 32 vacancies and we had this very same conversation of why would we grant you more positions when you can't fill your current positions? And so it's timing. So the difficult part for us is it takes just about a year, maybe just a little bit longer than a year by the time we actually select somebody, hire them, train them before they get out on the street. Well, today, right now, at this moment, we have 14 people that are retirement eligible. Well, we just started an academy, and let's say that Chief Lorenz now retires on me tomorrow. Well, there we go. We're immediately back, and now we can't start our next academy until January. That means they're not out into training program until June, July, and then they're not out working the street until August. And there's just a lot that can happen in there. So we need to get to that point where we have more positions so that when we have the opportunity to fill and or overfill, we need to be close to that number. But right now with only six vacancies, our next class, we can absolutely fill that and whatever potentially we are granted through the course of this budget cycle.

Okay, thank you, Mr. McKinney. Then you may have heard about an hour or so ago, I volunteered you for an activity at the library. You'll never hurt my feelings with truth. Would that make any sense at all to you? I'd look for both of you for responses. It seems to me that if we're allocating 150, whatever it was, within your budget right now. It's around 115 for the contract security. Plus the additional request for an additional safety person. Would it make any sense? Again, I believe in specialization. Does it make any sense to have you and your team take that over? And again, you won't hurt my feelings with truth.

Today the answer is no. But I have a couple of solutions that we could work through that actually help us both out in all of that. So again, not for a conversation here openly, but I have a few ideas and strategies.

Respectfully, Mr. Mayor, I'd like that dialogue to continue to see what it can turn into, how it can evolve. So long story short, just to get on the record, I am all for appropriating four. And frankly, I am all for trying to get more than four. And figuring out within the budget how to make that work. I am a public safety person. I always have been. I think not only my personal experiences, I think I've shared some happened to my family directly, which obviously impacted me and my family directly. Beyond that, I was pro-law enforcement for all of my previous to my election prior. And now, I am still there, and my main concern is, as you said, computing the downstream effects because there are impacts. You couldn't have said it better, sir, but long story short, I am for these positions, and I am for finding more if we can possibly figure it out. So, Mr. Mayor, thank you.

Other questions for the Chief?

Anything to close us out, Chief? Just a couple of small details that relates to a couple of the budget items, just because I know that you'll see it inside of there. So you'll see one like in the Office of the Chief for like $66,000 that relates to recruitment. That is not recruitment in the sense of like giveaways and things marked with Fargo Police Department. What that is is that's onboarding new officers. So that's background checks. That's polygraph, psychological, exam, medical. It's everything that it takes to bring them on. We just had a really hard time trying to differentiate, so we wanted to put it in a different bucket so that we could go back and see how much exactly that we were spending. There's another one that's labeled other services in that same account in 5054, and that is $38.99 for about $27,000. That is tied to our mental health check-ins, and or if someone's involved in a critical incident and they're referred out to a provider. So again, trying to differentiate how much we're spending on referring out versus how much we're able to deal with internally as wellness coordinator and as we work with the rest of our partners at the table here and trying to figure out what's the best way to provide services for our folks.

Thank you. Susan, anything to close us out before we dismiss for tomorrow?

Nope, just want to remind everyone that tomorrow is an early morning. We'll start at 8, 8 to noon. Thank you.

Great. Tomorrow will be our final day for the budget workshops, so 8 to noon tomorrow. And again, commissioners, if you have questions that you want follow-up information, please try to get those to city administrators by the end of the day so we can keep those moving forward to prepare for our July 27th meeting. Thank you all. Thank you for your time. And have a good day. Enjoy the rest of the afternoon. Get some lunch.