Planning Commission - workshop

All right, with it being 8am, let's get started on our full week of learning about the budget. So first of all, I want to thank Team Fargo, all our staff who have been working hard over the last several months to propose this preliminary budget for us to start reviewing. As we continue to grow in the number of people choosing to call Fargo home, we know that's put increased pressure on departments to continue to provide exceptional services to our neighbors, all while trying to balance the desire to limit the financial impact on our neighbors. The goal of these workshops, as it's been communicated to our commissioners, is for the public and the commission to get a high-level view of each department's budgets and their requests and goals for 2027. We have scheduled a follow-up finance committee meeting for July 27th next week, which is open to the public and will be live-streamed and recorded for the Commission to receive and discuss follow-up information based on questions we all come up with over the next three days. Due to our limited time, departments have 20 to 30 minutes to present their information. And as I communicated out to the commission last week, what we'll do is have the first questions reserved for the liaison commissioner to that department. And if an additional time allows within the 20 to 30 minutes, we'll open up for additional questions from commissioners. It'll be important for us as commissioners to write down our questions. If we can't get to them in person today, we ask that everyone send those to the city administrators by the end of each day so that they can get those out to the departments so they can get back to us all with that information prior to July 27th so that we can spend that time really digging into those questions and the responses and spending that time working together on the preliminary budget as a reminder for everyone you know this is this is an ongoing process we have the next several months to continue the conversation so we have the august third commission meeting is when we want to approve the preliminary budget to meet our august 10th statutory deadline september 14th will be the public hearing on the final proposed budget that's also a commission meeting and that is That's the public hearing, excuse me. And then our final vote on the budget is scheduled for September 28, to allow us to meet our October 12 statutory deadline. So with that, I'll turn it over to the team to get us kicked off.

Great. Thank you, Mayor and Commissioners. Good morning. Thank you so much for your time here the next three days. We sincerely appreciate it. We know this is a pretty significant amount of time commitment, so thank you for being here. This year, as the Mayor mentioned, is really about trying something different, really doing some different formats so that you really get an opportunity to connect with our department leaders so you hear from them real authentically, their stories of what they're planning for in their own words. connecting you to their work for 2027 and really beyond that. And so it's a real opportunity for them not only to connect with you, but also connect with colleagues and make sure that the public is also aware of what we're planning for in 2027. I also just want to note that really what these teams are doing throughout the organization really matters a great deal. These individuals that you're going to see here over the next three days are leading really, really great teams of people that care a lot about Fargo, They care a lot about our people. They care a lot about our businesses. And they're doing everything that they can to support the good work of the city of Fargo in 2027. And so you're also going to hear a lot from the perspective of those human capital stories. Human Resources has done a great job pulling together information just to try to tell that story as well of what it takes to pull this all off, what it takes year in and year out to support a growing Fargo, but then also our existing core neighborhoods as well. And so finally, I just want to thank our finance team, Susan in particular here to my right, for all of the effort that went into the creation of this binder. This is a lot of information this year, and it's a lot of information that comes earlier this year than we've done in years past. So I think, again, it's a real great opportunity. And in addition to Susan and her team, Jill and her team have also put a lot of work into the human capital side of this. And finally, to our departments, too, I say thank you, because these binders and this information also does not come together without their good work as well. And so with that, we just look forward to a good, productive three days of discussions. And we're happy to answer your questions following that. So I'll leave it at that. Thank you.

All right. So good morning. I, too, want to welcome all of you to the budget workshop. Thanks for joining us. This is the second year we've had the budget workshop. We learned a few things last year, and we want to continually improve. So we welcome your feedback on this process. So the binder includes 400 pages, as Michael mentioned. We're not possibly going to be able to cover every detail. So instead, the intent of the three mornings is to encourage a dialogue regarding this budget. The specific objectives are listed. We want to preview the preliminary budget as proposed by the budget team. We want to introduce particularly the new commissioners and the public to the departments, to people, to processes and the related revenues and expenses and answer any of your questions as time permits and jot down those that we don't have time for. And then we want to identify topics for future maybe more substantive meetings. So to those of you maybe in the audience or online that did not get a binder, The binder information is available online via a click at the City of Fargo website. If you go to the Finance Department Budget, little click here tab, there is the link. And then throughout the presentation, we're going to identify the corresponding tab and page number so you can follow along. One thing yesterday, I did notice that the online pages aren't all oriented correctly for easy reading, so we will get that fixed today. So I apologize for that. That's on our notes for next year. So our presentations are going to follow the order and contents of the book. And the departments will be available to entertain questions. But each department, as both Michael and the mayor said, is only allocated 20 to 30 minutes. So we'll keep the presentations at a pretty high level. Additional questions can be posed directly to the department. They can be discussed at next week's finance committee meeting or additional meetings until the final budget approval. I'm going to identify a few people. Seated a couple seats down is Wyatt Papenfus. Wyatt was recently promoted to the Assistant Finance Director. He's going to be presenting on Wednesday, and he's also here to help me with questions. And then he is going to help as the parking lot attendant, but he's going to maintain a list of questions that we want to come back for for future discussion. And then I also would like to acknowledge and express my thanks to everyone involved in the budget process. This is a huge lift throughout all of the city departments, especially my finance team. Tasked with the budget is a very, very new finance manager, Ramona Adams, and then her staff, Jess Hoyum, Lindsay Tester, and Rebecca Sanders. They were very busy frantically printing and punching holes on Thursday. So just a little bit about today's agenda. We're going to start with finance and HR overviews by myself and Jill Manette, kind of add some context. And then I will speak about general fund revenues. And we're going to take a 15-minute break at 9.45 approximately. And then we're going to conclude with general fund departments that are, as noted, in the full agenda. All of the presentations are queued up on the slides and the presenters are around the table. So we'll be able to move through the information without breaks and hopefully get through pretty quickly. We've also encoded agendas for Tuesday and Wednesday. And we do want to point out that tomorrow's starts at nine instead of eight because of a meeting in this room. And then Wednesday, we'll be back at eight o'clock. And unfortunately, I'm doing a very lot of talking that I noticed when I was putting this together to start. So first thing in your binder, we wanted to put an organizational chart. This is actually a foldout. So it's a very high level with all the department heads. We thought this maybe will help you start putting some faces to names. And then it's also a reminder to all of us of who we work for. At the top of the org chart is the residents of Fargo. So I'm gonna work on a finance overview. Those of you following along, it is tab two, page seven. So historically, the budget presentation has been focused on the general fund. This year and beyond, we're gonna expand to include all of the other funds. And so to that end, we're gonna start a little bit with accounting 101, the city of Fargo. on the screen is kind of an abbreviated version of the fund structure. There's a fold out with much more detail. But don't get too attached to the fund numbers because they're going to be changing shortly. But as we navigate throughout the various funds over the next three days, I wanted to provide a big picture of the funds that are main that are maintained by the city so that you can see the depth and complexity and how they interrelate. The most common general fund I created this actually when I started to kind of help me understand, so I kind of put the general fund as like the sun in the center because everything revolves around it. We typically provide more attention there, but there are many other types of funds and specific components that we list. We have three types of funds, governmental funds. Those are financial resources that are managed by the government to fund programs, services that benefit the public. These are really more public service-driven than profit or holding assets for others. Most recognized is the general fund, and that's where property tax revenue resides. Wyatt is going to provide an overview on Wednesday about some of the other governmental funds, the special revenue, the capital, and the debt service, along with the fiduciary funds. fiduciary funds are those that are held for the benefit of outside parties. And then proprietary funds, those are the type of funds that the government uses to account for operations that operate similarly, similarly to private business. So that would be utilities, Fargo Dome, transit, those will be discussed on Wednesday. So by now you might have noticed the little fidget balls. I'm not gonna call them stress balls yet. We'll call them fidget balls. But I liked these because I thought they helped visually explain a concept that's presented on the page, how interrelated everything are. So this week, we're gonna be presenting to you a preliminary balanced budget. And like this, there's only so much space. So if we need to create more space, we need to squeeze something else. So there's just not a lot of opportunities for us to make a bigger digital. And I did pay for these myself. They're not, it's my gift to you. Just to go over the timeline, I think we've all seen this at other meetings or at the new commission orientation. But, you know, this is a very laborious process. We start, you know, way back in the spring in March. We start working with all the different departments. We have several rounds of department, cabinet, and budget team meetings. Commission liaisons attend meetings with their departments and the budget team. This week, as the arrow shows, we are at the budget workshop. We also have a finance committee meeting scheduled for next Monday to kind of further vet any of these concepts. As the mayor mentioned, you will be asked to approve a preliminary budget on August 3rd. The preliminary budget process kind of used to have more teeth, as it was intended, to set the mill cap. Now that we have the property tax revenue cap, it's become kind of more of a first step. So the public hearing will be held on September 14th, and the commission approval for the final budget is September 28th. So just a little orientation on the workshop materials. Each department head prepared a narrative of their department's responsibilities, an org chart, current and emerging issues, position control, and other items as applicable. Any personnel or capital requests and proposed approvals are listed. We also provided a summary of their budget and historic department financials. Department heads were reminded of their time allotment and they have a latitude in what they wish to present. So please ask questions or reach out if you need more information. The next slide is a plug for our software conversion. I think you're all aware of our dated software. At the left, we're showing screenshots of our current DOS system. So to research an invoice, we have to jump on at least four screens and then switch to LaserFiche to view the invoice. On the right is a demo of our Tyler dashboards. So we're scheduled for January 4th go live for the financial module. and then a mid-2027 date for HRM payroll. We're going to be very busy starting in August. We anticipate, though, a much less manual budget process for 2020, and I hope to retire the budget binder. So without further ado, before we get too deep in the details, we did want to give you a high-level preview of the general fund as it's presented by the budget team. This is on page 10. So we're proposing a balanced general fund budget with revenues of $147.5 million. Some key components are general fund revenue growth of about 4.8%, expense growth of 3.5%, property tax growth is within the cap as mandated by Century Code. And then new for this year at the bottom, kind of highlighted in blue, we've intentionally budgeted a $1.7 million general fund underspend. That allows us to maintain our 25% ratio of general fund balance to revenue. Other considerations beyond just the general fund, we have a cost of living adjustment of 3%, an addition of 11 FTEs within police, human resources, public works, and the library, and then proposed rate increases related to utility operational costs. We also have capital expenditures for repair and replacement. As we go through, I noted over the weekend a couple of omissions that we'll talk about. The general fund will need to be adjusted a bit before we approve on Monday, but it should be an offsetting. So the net should still be very similar to this. And then again, unless we find a bigger ball, if we want to make changes, we're going to need to reshuffle this to maintain a balance. And then the final piece that I wanted to mention is just our general or our finance committee structure along with scheduled meetings and topics. So we have the meeting scheduled for July that we'll talk about budget follow-up. We also have meetings scheduled for August, October, and December. I currently don't have monthly meetings, but we can talk at a future meeting if we think we want to do that, kind of have some ideas on how we could maybe incorporate the budget process as more of like a full year with different departments presenting. So we can talk about some ideas there, but just to make sure you have those on your calendar. Now I'm happily going to turn this over to Jill to talk about human capital.

Thank you, Susan. Good morning, Mayor and Commissioners. So when we think about I should mention too, this is on tab three, page 12 for those following along in your binders or online. So when we think about human capital or personnel as it relates to the budget, we think about how we can attract our top talent, how we engage and retain our current employees. Some of those key factors that we really need to think about is how do we remain competitive with our pay structure and our overall pay? Likewise, our benefits, how do we remain competitive with especially retirement and health being those primary benefits? Appropriate staffing levels is also really equally important. That allows for manageable workloads for our employees and then overall work-life balance as well. And then, of course, work environment. We won't be focusing as much on work environment today, but through our employee engagement survey, that survey and the follow-up processes that have occurred, really reinforce the importance of pay and benefits and staffing as an important factor. So we'll be providing a lot of information today and throughout the budget workshops related to pay benefits and staffing. Pay and benefits makes up about 75% of the general fund expenses. I think we can probably all agree that people are our greatest asset at the City of Fargo. I'm going to start off by providing just some high-level information to help inform your budget decisions as it relates to human capital. And then each department is going to have the opportunity to discuss these considerations as it relates to their teams and their overall department. So this chart shows our regular employment categories at the top. So we have 1,095 in our full-time 40 category. We have 71 employees between our full-time 30 and part-time 20. And that just means they're scheduled somewhere in the 30 to 39 hours a week or 20 to 29 hours per week. And then we have two contract full-time positions for a total of 1,168. On the right-hand column, you can see what that full-time equivalent or FTE, what that equates to within the regular category. With temporary and seasonal, that, of course, varies throughout the year. Recently, when I looked, we had 618 employees. Again, that can change by the minute, by the day. But at that point, we have 1,786, so just under 1,800 active on payroll. I want to just touch briefly on our overall turnover rates. So our retention rates have been really pretty strong when we compare to the national average in 2025. The average turnover, just under 3,000 U.S. organizations, the average was at 13%. And the survey data actually excludes retirees where our numbers include those exiting for all reasons. So you can see in 25, we experienced an 8.65% turnover rate. Like many employers, we experienced those higher rates between 2021 and 2024. But we are trending in the right direction, which is very good. In 25, we adopted a total compensation philosophy to provide just a broad framework for decision making on all things compensation and benefits. Essentially, we needed to really determine overall if we were going to with our pay if we were going to choose to lag market, to match market or be market competitive, or to try to lead the market within our region. Ultimately, we advance the recommendation that our philosophy be to be market competitive or trying to match market within the region or within that primary recruiting area for particular positions. So to get there, we use a combination of an internal job evaluation process to create that internal equity. I'll talk more about that in just a minute. And then we conduct regional market surveys. And we also utilize local market data to determine if we are market competitive. So I want to just briefly expand on what we mean by market competitive or matching. So at market, that green box means when we look at our minimum, our max, our average rates of pay, ideally we're within that 95 to 105 percent of market. That's truly trying to match market with those levels. Within market is in that orange box, and then outside of market would be the red boxes. So even at that orange level, we know that we need to review and consider whether we need a market adjustment to be competitive for that particular position. And of course, factoring in how are we able to recruit? Are we retaining? Again, looking at regional and local market factors. So internal job evaluation. At the city, we've got 350-plus individual positions. And so we use a job evaluation system, which is common in large organizations, to really determine ultimately what pay grade positions are paid in. And with that tool, then we use these same criteria for every position that we review, which is important for equity and consistency. But again, from there, we utilize market data to determine if we are overall market competitive, both our pay structure and then with individual positions. So this slide shows a grade 12 of our current pay structure, and you all have a copy of the full pay structure in your binders. So we have a structure for our general positions or non-public safety, and then a pay structure for public safety. Those were separated out in 2025 following the conducting of a market survey and establishing that new structure. Again, that job evaluation tool helps us determine which grade a position should be assigned. You can see there's a job evaluation point minimum and point maximum. And that, for positions that fall within this range, they would be assigned to the grade 12. When we review market data, again, we're able to see if a particular benchmark position is lagging, matching, or leading market, and this helps determine the overall pay structure, if it's competitive, as well as determining if individual positions need a market adjustment. So they might fall within this point range, but if the pay through the market survey is determined to be higher in order for us to be competitive, we might move individual positions to say a grade 13 or 14 as an out of grade adjustment. Overall, our structure has 27 grades currently, and each grade has 11 steps. So if someone's hired into step one, they'll move to step two on their one year anniversary date. And then they'll progress through the grade. Each year, it'll take them 10 years to reach the maximum of the grade. So our step increases range from 3% on the lower end up to an average of just below 2% on the upper end. Once the employee is at step 11, they no longer receive step increases. They're only eligible for a cost of living adjustment if one is awarded. One other thing I want to point out, our range spread from the minimum to the maximum is 30%. Through our regional survey, the average range spread is 42% across the region, so a much wider range spread. So we currently have pretty narrow ranges, and that creates some challenges with being market competitive, and we'll talk a little bit more about that in a minute. So just to give you an idea of how our positions are structured throughout the grades, this chart shows the number of employees by each grade. So you can see in that center area of our pay structure is where the majority of our 350 plus positions are placed. And this just shows the distribution of our non-public safety or general. So when you look at steps one through 11, this chart shows that 27% of our general employees, again, non-public safety, are at step 11 of their pay. So I mentioned earlier, once someone reaches step 11, they no longer receive step increases, only a COLA. This is one of the key reasons that it's so important to ensure our pay structure is market competitive to retain those experienced employees. Keep in mind that we found several positions through our market survey, especially in the upper steps of the grade that are below market. So our upper steps are much less competitive with market average in the overall pay structure than they are at the minimum and the mid. looking at fire and police so again we just implemented that pay structure in 25 we are at 39 of our fire employees who are at maximum the survey this year did show in terms of base pay that we are market competitive so that's good people will naturally cap out within pay structures But again, that's why it's so important that our pay structure is market competitive, because as our experienced employees reach those maxes, we have to ensure that their base pay is competitive. And then for police sworn, they're at 37% at maximum of their assigned grade. Again, the survey this year showed For the positions that are on the public safety pay structure, that base pay is at market. So again, COLA is a really important factor for those who are at max. Just a quick look, I wanted to show you, these are the cities when we talk about our regional market survey. These are the cities and it shows the states. where we pull that market information. So as we developed our total comp philosophy, we also reviewed which cities all of the departments felt were the best comparisons for pay and benefits. And so we used to survey 30 cities. We're at 20 cities that we feel are the most comparable at this point. And this is something that we'll continue to review on an ongoing basis. So our regional comp and benefits survey, again, we're trying to get into a rotation, although this year we surveyed all of these benchmark positions. So currently the plan is to conduct regional survey for our public safety positions annually because of the just ongoing movement of pay and benefits. The technical and administrative positions will be surveyed every other year. And in early 26, all of the categories shown above were included in the survey. So we had about 101 general positions and 23 sworn and civilian public safety positions that really helped inform some of the proposed market adjustments. Next, I want to just talk very briefly about high level some of the findings with the survey. So one of the things we compare in the survey is our overall range, range structure, I touched on this a little earlier, ours is at 30%, the region is just below 42%. So you can see already what some of the challenges in comparing our our pay with with region, our range spread, at 30% is we are finding more issues at the top end of the pay structure. And you can see that when you look at the benchmark for our general positions, our min and our mid are looking really well aligned with market, our max falling below market. And you can also see then within police, collected the min and the max, and of all of those positions that we collected, we're at anywhere from 3% to 18% on average above market, and for fire, 2% to 9% above average on our overall market. So with the general positions, we did identify a number of positions that we'd recommend market adjustments. Again, we can cover that more a little bit later. But implementing the new pay structure did help us to remain market competitive with police and fire. Just a little bit about history of COLAs. So we've averaged about 3.3% COLA for city employees over the last five years. In 2026, we received a 3%. Each year we consider what other local cities and counties are doing for COLAs as well as looking at the employment cost index or Index, or ECI, which shows a 3.4% increase in salaries over the last 12 months, both in government as well as private sector. So that's a good indicator for us to try to follow. Currently, as Susan said, a 3% is factored into the preliminary budget. Every 1% of COLA in the general fund costs about $775,000 roughly. Okay, and I'm gonna go through these next few fairly quickly in the interest of time, but our survey also includes information on benefits. So when we look at our health insurance, our overall premiums, I have this broken down only With two of our tiers, we actually have four tiers of coverage where employees are able to cover only children or only spouse in there. But this shows employee only and family. So we're really pretty well aligned with the region. On the family coverage, You can see our overall premium is actually lower than the average in the region, so that's a good thing. We do pay a lower percentage of the premium. The city pays a lower percentage of the premium than what the average employer throughout the region is paying. So again, that's something that we would like to look at. Part of what's factoring into that number, though, is also that the regional average is a higher dollar amount, too. I think that's everything on health and then on our retirement benefits. Again, we're really fairly well aligned with the rest of the region. When we look at averages, of course, some employers in the region might pay the entire employee contribution. As with health insurance too, there are some employers that pay that entire employee contribution. But when you look at the split, whether it's the overall city plan, the defined benefit plan, or our police and fire pensions, we're within two to 3% of those average contributions. Okay, and last I want to talk about staffing. So Susan mentioned position control. You'll see this in your binders for each department so that you get a good idea of the positions and the number of people within each department. As we talked about earlier, really staffing does have a significant impact. on our ability to recruit and engage and retain. You know, when you think about public safety and calls for service or the number of calls or medical calls that our fire department might be going on, as compared to other communities, local but within the region as well. As our numbers kind of creep up, as our workload creeps up, that's a definite factor in our applicant's decision to come and work with us or work with another city within the region. So with that, I just want to talk briefly to about a few years back, we adopted the concept of staffing for success. We really wanted to identify where we had staffing gaps based on industry norms or indicators for specific positions or departments. So this chart shows the most significant staffing gaps are for those departments that are in red. The departments in yellow, there are staffing gaps there as well, just a little bit lower percentage of their department. Our goal is really to utilize all of this data, and there's a lot more detail than what you see here in the chart, just to provide data to inform the addition of positions each year during the budget process so that we're really trying to fill those gaps wherever possible. And then we want to develop a plan to address our most significant staffing gaps over the next five to 10 years as the budget allows. Okay, so looking at human capital overall, this chart shows by fund, the impact of the new positions, reclassifications and market adjustments. So broken down by general fund and enterprise fund. The full detail is included in the document titled departmental human capital adjustments for 27, which is in your in your binders. You'll notice that the market adjustment amounts are not pulled over into the proposed column. So as Susan showed earlier, if we are able to fund any of the market adjustments, and there are a significant number of positions that we found to be below market, then that would require adjustments in other areas. But right now, this information in the proposed shows the number of positions, the 11 positions that are proposed to be funded, as well as our overall reclassifications, which is around $55,000 worth of reclassifications where the positions have changed. So lastly, again, I just want to, we covered a lot of information on human capital and the challenge is always just the most strategic way to invest in human capital under current budget conditions. But look forward to working with all of you and providing any additional information that you need as you work towards adopting a final budget for 27. Thank you.

Thank you, Susan and Jill. Commissioners, any questions at this time? Based on what was shared? Commissioner Peterson? And then Commissioner Strand? Commissioner Strand.

Thank you. I'm curious about defined benefits versus defined contributions. I see that, but we have a new category, don't we, with defined contribution retirement plans?

We do now, yes. Yep, so the bulk of our employees are still covered under that defined benefit, but we did collect data on the defined contribution plan as well that we offer new employees through NDPERS. That is similar to a 401k. So that change definitely is going to be a factor in recruiting and retaining employees in the coming years. For someone who has been on the ND-PERS defined benefit plan, they may be eligible to go back on under certain circumstances, but otherwise our new hires who've never been part of the ND-PERS defined benefit do come on to a defined contribution plan. Still a good retirement plan, just different, right? Not that guaranteed monthly benefit, like with the defined benefit plan.

And how is that affecting recruiting? Would you say overall balcony view?

Yeah. so far i don't think it's had a significant i think we are going to find retention over the coming years i would i would foresee that that may become an issue because once you became invested in the defined benefit that three year after three years of service it really is one kind of one more check in the column of why you might want to stay with the city. I think there are many, but that was one significant one. With the defined contribution, it's very similar to those 401ks in private sector. So I think over time, we're going to see potentially an impact on overall retention. But time will tell, and that's something that we want to track.

Commissioner Peterson?

Mr. Mayor, thank you. A lot of my questions are simply educating myself. So first, page 25, we talk about compensation. We talk about the cities that we use for analysis. I went through and I just pulled the data on population load of all these places. And a lot of them, like Minneapolis, St. Paul, Lincoln, Nebraska, Des Moines, are exponentially bigger than the Fargo-Moorhead metro area. I also noticed we don't include the counties. Those are our immediate peer groups. I would suggest we modify. My main point is I suggest we modify who our target. Obviously, if we talk about Minneapolis and St. Paul, That has nothing to do with us. The metro area there is six and a half million plus or minus. So I contend that they're going to probably yield a higher result in the end. And then places like Topeka, Kansas, Wichita, Green Bay, Springfield, Missouri, those are actually Midwestern that are similar population sizes. So I don't know. How we get to that, so just again, just sharing common, just a couple questions. Item 2, page 28, when we talk about where we're getting our 3%, I can't find that data point. So I actually went, I go CPI, and I pull up Bureau of Labor Statistics as well. I'm actually showing a higher than 3%. baseline? So like CPI right now, we're saying in the Midwest, and this varies depending upon which CPI index you look at, and you probably know all this, but with that data, with that question, where do we get the 3%? Yes.

So the indicator that I'm actually looking at is called ECI, or Employment Cost Index. And that, too, comes from the Bureau of Labor and Statistics. I can send that information out.

That would be because I Googled that, too, and I couldn't find it. So that doesn't mean you're wrong. It just means I couldn't find it. Again, my default is always I go to CPI within the Midwest. And again, there's weightings there. If you could send me that link or send us that link, that would be helpful.

Absolutely. And that did show at 3.4%. But as a budget team, the proposal right now is at that 3%. But that certainly is something for you all to consider.

Perfect. Thank you. And then item number 29, health insurance. I am proposing that we research this year. This isn't a this year budget. This isn't 27. This is a 2028. We need to research becoming self-insured again. Who, what, why, where, how, don't know. But mathematically, what I've seen through my workings, not just locally here, but regionally and nationwide, We have the capacity to self-insure, and I asked this question, if you remember, one of the very first things we discussed. And this may completely be a waste of time, I'm not gonna lie, but I really think it's worth our time and effort to figure out what would happen if we start capitalizing ourselves instead of being subject to the whims of outside forces. Additionally, I think we need to have a gym membership reimbursement. And that's a little bit selfish, not going to lie there either. But the math, in my previous life, the math worked. And how do I know the math worked? Because Blue Cross Blue Shield told us to do that and incentivized us to do that, right? So the big beast that is Blue Cross Blue Shield would not push us in a direction that would cause them to lose money, right? They know that if you maintain a healthy lifestyle, generally speaking, you're going to have less heart attacks. Generally speaking, you're going to have less diabetes, those sorts of things. So encouraging, what they've said is encouraging our members, their members, right, to be more active. And I know we have a, I saw a line item for wellness, too, within this budget. But I think that that needs to be investigated, and not for this year, but I think for next year regardless. And there is a cost to it, but In the end, there's actually a savings. So what should happen is, let's pretend we maintain status quo. We add that gym. They're going to say, it's going to cost us $20,000 a year as a city, as a consumer. And that will then yield a savings with lower health care costs over time, right? So momentary cost, long-term gain. So there's that. Next one is page 33. I'm just curious about this. This is an education piece. So we have requested, proposed, so Who approved the requested portion? I'm guessing portfolios and the department heads. But then who did the final proposed approve? So who made the choices in starting point and ending point? How did we get there?

So the requested comes from each department. Each department submits a budget request that includes human capital, but of course operating and capital as well. And so that's what that number reflects. And then the budget team collectively pushes items to the proposed column. Who is the budget team?

So the budget team consists of the mayor. The outgoing mayor wasn't a lot involved in this particular budget, knowing that he was term limited. So going forward, the mayor will be involved. But it also includes Michael, Brenda, Jill, and myself.

Okay, so theoretically, in request, it should be the department head of the portfolio figuring out what's going on, and that would then go to the decision makers, and they would then, like the pre-filter, and then the final filter would be the budget team. Well, I suppose in the end, yes. Okay, thank you so much. I think that's...

And Jill, as Jill mentioned, we use the staffing for success kind of as a driver for which positions are moved forward to the approved process.

Perfect. Thank you. Thank you, Mayor.

Jill, also do you want to touch briefly on the cities and why they were chosen? My recollection is it kind of evolved when we started talking about the public safety sales tax and working on that pay plan, those departments collectively, and then we moved into asking all departments you know basically who are you losing people to you know maybe it's not necessarily the counties but you know we have to be mindful of the twin cities because that's who you know our our team members are are looking because they want to advance their career so

Yes, that's correct. Especially with the fire department had noted people leaving were heading to Minnesota in the Twin Cities area. So that was one of the factors there. Our region used to be, if you drew it on the map, quite a bit larger with 30 cities throughout the region. And so we did an internal survey to make sure that every department really had an opportunity to weigh in on that. And typically with surveys, yes, you're trying to get as close a scope, size and scope as you can. And often what happens then is your cities or your other employers, you have some that are a little bit smaller and some that are in that larger range. Overall, they should kind of offset with the data coming in so that you're, you know, smallest employer and your largest employer are offsetting a little bit. But we really want to another factor was making sure that we pulled in fire departments that were accredited or cities with accredited fire departments. So that was another factor that weighed in, in pulling those 20 cities together. So, again, that's something we can absolutely look at, but we did work with each department to try to understand either where they're losing people to or where we're attracting applicants from.

A real quick response, then Mr. Stanton has a real quick question, and we'll keep moving on. No, go ahead. It's on the topic.

Thank you, Mr. Mayor. I'm hearing what you're saying. I think that, though, we don't have, like, Valley City, right? We don't have Jamestown. We don't have Devil's Lake. So you've got the yield to the greater level, and our own data says that people aren't leaving, right? You've got, I think, 37% of the firefighters are maxed out. I'm hearing what you're saying, but in the same breath, your own data sort of counters that narrative in terms of we leave the small cities out, which I find, if you include Minneapolis-St. Paul, I'm actually cool with it, as long as you include Valley City. And then if we had a massive turnover, Yielded by and so if we have a massive turnover plus we have you know everyone leaving before they max out I'm 100% with you. I think that we're Paying very well, and that's awesome. That's the way it should be but again I would I am questioning the data set because of the population mode.

Thank you Mr.. Strand, thank you.

I'm curious about the the balcony view again of employees and retaining employees and We have had our employee survey last year, which told us 30 or so percent of our workforce is thinking of being available to leave. Can you tell us where those folks land? Are you able to tell in our spectrum? Are they the folks at the highest levels of steps and lanes? Is that the highest risk of loss of employees, or is it across the boards? Do you have any sense of where those workers might be in our range?

Yeah. You know, if I'm recalling, and it's been a while since I've looked at that data specifically, but I think it was pretty well spread throughout the workforce. You know, because we did collect demographics in terms of years of service. and some other demographic information. So from what I'm recalling, it was pretty well spread throughout our workforce, anywhere from our newer on up to our people who had been here for a number of years.

Thank you. Susan, it's time for general revenues.

All right. We're going to get started now. We're working into the budget. So if you're following along, we are in tab four. Page 45. I'm going to walk you through the general fund revenues, the preliminary proposed. So we're projecting an increase of $6.7 million, which is a 4.79% increase. You know, one key point here is that our current financial software doesn't track revenues by department. Obviously some revenues aren't department specific, but there are some that are very department specific. Health is gonna be a good example of the significance of department related revenue. They track their revenues and their expenses internally by project, and they're gonna present this to you during their presentation. But going forward with our new software, to the extent that it's practical, We're going to assign general fund revenues to departments in order for you to easily depict kind of net department expense rather than gross. Sometimes the gross department expense is misleading. Page 45 or 6-ish? Tab 4.

And just to note, what you have on the screen doesn't necessarily align with those right now, if that's what you're looking for, Commissioner.

Oh, sorry. I just talked, yeah. 45 is the first page of that tab. It might not be the exact slide. So as noted on the top, general fund revenues are estimated based on calculations, trends, and assumptions. So we have nine kind of buckets, if you will, of general fund revenue. I'm gonna walk through the various categories and kind of talk about the logic behind those values. So the first line is property tax, and we're all pretty familiar with by now the property tax revenue cap calculations. We will do a separate slide on this regarding that actual calculation. Next item is franchise fees. Those are primarily from the utilities, so XL and Cass County Electric. Those have been largely flat. And then to a much smaller extent, we get franchise fees from cable. And as you know, cable is declining. So those revenues are going down. We can assess per century code up to 5%. Currently we are at four and we are not making a request to increase anything at this time. Licenses as permits. Those are primarily construction. related construction trends are down. They were down significantly in 2025 from prior year and the budget. We projected 2027 kind of as mid-level. I'm hoping for a little bit of pickup there. We have no fee, no inspection fee increases are proposed for 27. Typically they're on kind of a five-year rotation. We're finalizing that and then we'll assess again for 2028 going forward on the last one on this particular page is federal grants those are primarily the health department and they are based on anticipated grants so to move to the bottom of the page state share revenues again those are health department and other department aid fire police library Those are based on anticipated grants and distributions. I also update kind of the big two, the state aid and the highway funds. We get provided guidance from the North Dakota League of Cities. They work with the OMB and send out guidance on where they think we'll be in the next biennium and how we should budget for that. And then local grant revenue. It's called grant, but it really means any kind of local entity that we bill. So for example, schools and county. So those are based on our existing contracts. Charges for services. Those are also based on contracts. Trends versus rate. Also included here is the engineering and utility admin and finance charges that we assess on those projects. So it's based on the upcoming capital improvement plan. And then we also have a general fund overhead allocation to the enterprise funds so that we can allocate out the cost of some of the service departments within the enterprise funds since you know, they obviously utilize the services of those funds. And then we have transfers in, at least for the next few years, I'm separating those. Since public safety sales tax, that's what the means, it's logo for public safety sales tax. That is, it's per the approved 2027 plan with some adjustments. We're going to talk about that a little later. Actually, tomorrow when we talk about police and fire, we'll go through the plan as was presented and a few of the adjustments that were made for this year with the approval of the chiefs based on their priorities. And then the rest of the transfers in are primarily enterprise transfers in. The city may transfer up to 20% of enterprise fund revenue to other funds. So we split this with Fund 475, which is a capital fund, which allows for capital related to the general fund. And then also the general fund obviously is listed there. And then the last item is miscellaneous. This is primarily interest and some other various revenue calculations. So I'm gonna stop there and see if there's any questions before I jump into the property tax revenue calc.

Will you turn on your mic, please? We turn on you, thanks.

What exactly is an example of miscellaneous?

It's primarily interest earnings on our cash balances. But then there's also some other revenues, and that's where we don't consider court fines as like a charge for a service. It's actually a fine, a penalty, so that gets thrown into the miscellaneous.

Thank you.

Commissioner Strand?

Thank you. I'm curious about the charges for services, and in particular the engineering department. There's conversation about changing the funding formulas for edge development, and that would affect bonds and affect specials. Do we have a sense of how that would ever, if we get there, how that would impact our engineering department and revenues.

Can you tell me the first part of your question again, the funding formula?

The conversation about how we fund edge development and whether the formula of bonding and or specials or do they self-fund when there's leapfrog development out to the edge. Right now, our engineering department contracts those services and there's immense revenue. And I'm just wondering, maybe down the road, I'm curious what the impact of that department would be if we, as we modify, if we do those funding formulas for development.

That is one of the questions that we have when we talk about this. I think what we've kind of landed on is The reason for those fees is to reimburse, you know, the city for all the engineering costs associated with managing that process and also, you know, the finance charges along with all the bonding. The bigger component is the engineering fees. You know, regardless of whether we're managing it in-house or somehow the developer funds it, city is still going to be need to be involved because we want to make sure the roads are built to our specs so i don't anticipate that part going away perhaps there would be some adjustment for the the finance part if in fact the city isn't financing those but i think the bigger component will still always be part of that commissioner peterson

Mr. Mayor, thank you. So I said I'd go through a line-by-line basis. That wasn't a spiritual statement. I literally have highlights on every sheet almost going through this entire book. So Mr. Mayor, I'm not sure how to attack these because I know the spirit of this was basically informational. This really does get down to the dollars and pennies. should we wait for the finance meeting? How would you like me to conduct myself regarding literally, I mean, you can see, I have questions on every other line.

Yeah, I appreciate that, Commissioner. I think what would be best is if you're able to, I mean, if there's any kind of top line discussion, let's keep it there, but the specifics down, if it's pennies and dollars and specific expenses and income, if we can get those drafted up and then sent, then we can all discuss those and see that information before the July 27th meeting.

Okay, let me touch on a couple broad points. points then and i'll leave the rest to the the perhaps we can just get together and go through them and then we could type up kind of a summary whatever you in the mirror okay so broad brush uh first uh within franchise fees i see a couple lines and this is the 30 60 000 foot view obviously we have a block of it but then you continue down to charges for service right away fees my understanding was this is an educational piece for chad The franchise fees are essentially rent for right-of-way. Is that true?

That is correct.

Okay, cool. So then my question would be, maybe this is a question you and I can talk, or Mr. Redlinger, Mr. Mayor, all of us can maybe. I'm seeing redundancy in right-of-way, and I can't find the numbers tying together. So educational piece for me, there, I'll stop there. The other one is, I noticed that we have, so SROs, school resource officers, we have officers in schools, we have officers all over. How is that figured out. So my prior life was 80% full cost went to the Kindreds and Castletons. So I had an SRO in Castleton. Castleton School District paid 80% for that person full. That's hiring, equipment, and salary on an annual basis. The logic was no more complex than 20% of that time is summer plus. We also knew we could call that person out for help later. So I have SROs in multiple lines here. How was that cost basis figured out? And maybe the chief.

I'll give a general answer on that, and then we can get more specific answers. Because we have the same thing with nurses, school nurses as well. I think they're treated slightly different. The SROs are full-time staff, and we do charge the schools only for the portion that they're working in schools. They put them to work elsewhere during the summer. Regarding the nurses, I think there's kind of a combination. There are some that work full-time and get reassigned in the summer. There are some that just work. during the school year, so they would be 100% assessed.

So it is weighted based on time? Yes. Correct. Perfect. Okay. I'll yield the rest of these to a different time. Thank you. Brenda has a comment on your right-of-way one, though.

I can answer your right-of-way question pretty quickly. So we have some utilities that service the city as a whole, and those are franchised. We have other utilities that have come in and handpick who they service, and they are charged a right-of-way occupancy fee. So depending on if they service the city as a whole or if they're just servicing a client depends on where they land in that.

Thank you. I think so that's the second line that I'm seeing. I'm seeing the holistic and then the subcategory is the piecemeal people. I want to service client X and that's it. Correct. Outstanding answer. Thank you.

Commissioner Turnberg.

Thank you, Mayor. So, for instance, with the SROs, is that a percentage paid by Fargo residents, and then the other percentage from your county taxes?

Or school taxes? Correct. So a school resource officer would be the school district. They would approve the school board, much like the city commission would approve that agreement to add that SRO. And then we would cost share in that. So that would be their responsibility to come up with their portion. We would do ours. Okay.

Because I know last year we discussed that you're being taxed three times for school nurses. So it comes out of the city. comes out of schools, comes out of the county, and yet some of those people don't even go to school in Fargo. It's so goofy. So I'm just wondering, does that get cleaned up a bit? Or do we still do it that way?

Yeah, so there wouldn't be double taxation for the same personnel. It's just a cost share. So somebody takes 20% of a cost, somebody takes 80% of a cost. The nursing example is the one I was going to add that Susan did. Nursing is a great example of where we might have some that are shared 50-50 with county. We might have some that are shared 20% with us and 30% with someone else. And so it's going to be kind of specific to that circumstance, but no one is sort of double taxed. It's just more cost sharing for economies of scale.

Gotcha.

Thank you.

Commissioner Strand.

Just a quick update. If you'd remind us, especially for the new folks here, The user fees for Cass County Electric and Xcel, we modified them a couple years ago. Just give us that history, if you could, so we know how we got to the 4% that we're at now, and the max is five, I think, potentially.

Looking on that, I believe it was 24 was the first year we basically doubled. The franchise fees had been two, and then in looking for additional revenue sources. We doubled that to four, and I think that was effective 2024. It'll be the year that there's a big jump in that.

We can pull that. We'll make the note of that, Commissioner, and make sure that that background gets provided.

Susan, the question I have is funds such as the prairie dog funds from the state, which are we all hope and pray show up but never know, and it looks like we'll be able to get them in 2027 or however they're allocated. Where would those show up in revenue, if at all, or do they come in later and then we reallocate?

Correct. Those do not run through the general fund. Prairie dog funds are for construction. So they are receded into a 400 level fund for construction. And Wyatt is nodding, so I said that correctly.

So in that case, would they be included in the budget in that fund? Or is it kind of when it shows up, then we decide how we prioritize?

With the CIP, we are actually not budgeting for those capital components at this time. We bring that forward. It's actually on the Finance Committee for October, and Tom will be presenting his plan for the projects and how we'll fund them, including prairie dog funds. All right, good questions. I'm going to get a little specific here since this is only the second year of the property tax revenue calc. I wanted to just walk through how that calculation is done. I want to remind everybody though, so this is actually a property tax revenue cap calculation. So it's a cap on the revenue that municipalities can generate from property tax. It's not a cap on your individual property tax. So your property tax may increase more than 3% depending on different factors. The assessor's office is charged by Century Code to maintain the property values, market value. That may be more than a 3% increase. Our cap only allows us to generate revenue in aggregate from all parcels. So the property tax cap is defined as the greater of the base levy plus 3% or the adjusted base levy plus 3%. So on this page, we're looking at the base levy. This is pretty simple. It's the greater of the prior three years levy that is subject to the cap. So last year's levy plus 3%, so $51,773,000. So calculation two allows us to adjust for growth. So we start with the prior year levy, and then we add the taxable value of any new additions that come on through annexation, through new construction, or parcels that are new to the tax rolls. For example, something that was exempted for some reason. So you can see the new in green is 24 million. What's been removed through either, you know, annexation outside of the city or taking something off the tax rolls for an incentive or some other reason. Those are in red. That's $5.8 million. So the net add is $18.2 million of taxable value. So then you apply the prior year mill calculation. So that allows us to grow our base $1 million $41,022. So, you know, as we talk about continued growth, growth is very important. So we have that new levy plus 3%, so then our new base is $52,846,000, like the higher of which is generally going to be a growth factor. There's also a carry forward provision if we don't use the 3% cap. We are proposing to use the 3%. So represented here is that 53.8 that we just talked about. There's also a levy that's not subject to the cap. For this, this is one of the examples that is applicable to Fargo is taxes that we levy to pay for City of Fargo special assessments. That is updated annually. So it's $957,000. So basically, our full levy would be $53.8 million. Then the next step is the airport, the Heffernan National Airport mill allocation is included within the City of Fargo's property tax rev cap. So my understanding is that the airport intends to request the equivalent of two mills, as they have historically. I don't know that they've specifically done that, but it has been communicated to me. So the mill value, as per the April assessor's report, annual report, is $913,000. So the equivalent of two mills is $1.8 million. So then the gross to the city after the airport deduction is $51,000. Then one more step so that you can tie this all out. So we have gross to the airport, gross to the city after the airport deduction. Then we budget at 95% because we assume everybody pays prior to February. Then one little wrinkle, because nothing's ever simple, is that Right now, the homestead and the veterans credit, we reallocate those to arrive at the general fund levy. Those should actually be recorded as state aid. Then we have to add the other levies, the mobile home, the late taxes and the delinquent taxes to arrive at that property tax line. So I did want to point out one thing. Since this year is the first year with the significant increase in the primary tax credit, the $1,600. While it's still property tax replacement from a GASB standpoint, it's state aid. So last year when we were doing the budget, you know, we had all the complications with the property tax cap and we didn't have any historical data. So I didn't want to money the waters and I left all of that as property tax revenue. Coming later this summer when we have the accurate number for the state's aid, we're going to have to do a budget adjustment to move that to state aid. We'll be doing that this year and next year because I'm going to budget this as property tax revenue. And then this is just kind of an interesting tidbit. So this came from March data from the assessor's office. So the city of Fargo has 29,500 residential parcels. 22,000 of those were approved for the $1,600 credit. So if you do the math, that's $35 million. Our 20% share is about $7 million will be reallocated from property tax to state aid. And then this last page is just kind of a mock-up of what I would send to the county. It has the mill value, our adjusted levy, and then the levy that's not subject to cap. Anybody have any questions on that?

Commissioner Peterson and Commissioner Strand.

Mr. Mayor, thank you. So in your Senate role, you're still wearing, technically you're still wearing your Senator hat. I didn't check your voting record, but to get on the record myself, the realization of the 3% cap, whether it's five years from now, 10 years from now, or 15 years from now, is going to come back to bite local governments. We are going to wind up short. And this isn't just a theory. This has already happened in Colorado. They repealed TABOR. 99% of TABOR has been the taxpayer bill of rights that was passed in Colorado. I appreciate the spirit of the 3% cap. I genuinely do. I think the reality of it, though, the math needs to be reworked over time and maybe in that next session when you're out of office, obviously, then. But to our friends in Bismarck and my friend the governor, I hope they pay attention, especially to smaller jurisdictions that the 3% cap is devastating to in terms of expenditures. year-over-year, to some degree we're almost forced to yield or to charge the 3% because we can never go back and recapture that. And again, going forward, knowing full well we're going to be short over time, that means an increase in fees, that means increases in other things to make sure we can operate the city as our citizens have come to expect. And I think that, again, we're almost forced, they've almost forced our hands to the 3%. follow that with. Over time, we will be short. So again, hopefully our friends in the legislature and my good friend in the governor's office will rethink the way this is done. Again, I appreciate the spirit of what they're trying to do, but I think over time we're going to be set up to fail. Thank you, Mr. Mayor.

Mr. Strand.

Thank you. I'm curious about the airport. You've alluded to it here that their request is for two mills, which is 1.827 plus million. At what point do we discuss that topic in more detail?

I think that would be a good topic for Monday.

Okay.

The airport, Michael, they've requested to meet with this group. I don't know the timing of that. I'll let you talk to that.

Yes, Commissioner Strand, thank you for the question. I do believe that we are still attempting to schedule that joint meeting with the airport authority and the city commission. We had five or six special meetings we needed to get scheduled. I know we're really working feverishly to get that in hopefully yet in August is to have that conversation.

And just to preface what I'm looking to learn there is after we've partnered with the airport to build the ramp and its cash flows, I'm curious if the cash flows would warrant us being able to reduce our commitment from the taxpayer to support the airport in light of their increased revenues.

I've looked a little bit at their financials, and yes, they are generating above budget. What they're going to say is they have debt service now, with that ramp and they're using that to pay that extra cash to pay the debt service. You know, in looking at this over the years, what I've come to, I think, acknowledge is that the airport is going to tell us that State agencies, federal agencies look for what's the city's participation, what's our support. I'm not in those conversations, so I don't know that for sure. I mean, obviously, they have the big airport construction, but the truth is the airport is always going to have big projects that they're funding. They're talking about a $100 million runway project in the next few years. So they're always going to say that they need to show the local support. So I think that becomes more of a political decision than a financial decision. So that's something we can talk about next week.

Susan, before we go on to the next section, I'm looking at page 48. And I know, again, Mill Levy is kind of It exists, but it's not as much of a factor when we do our financing. But when you're looking at that comparison of the other cities, and I'm seeing the blue column and city percent of total, is that saying that just over 19% of our total property tax for a Fargo taxpayer is the city's responsibility and the other 80% would be the other political subs? Is that what I'm reading?

That's correct. So on this slide, I wanted to show a comparison. This is from the assessor's office annual report that comes out in April. I know you've been inundated with information, but if you haven't looked at this, this is really fun stuff. This has got good stuff in there. There's all kinds of nuggets. So I dug this out. This is comparing our peer cities for the 10-year comparison. It has population, their taxable value, how it's grown. and then their total city mill levy and how much of that, or their total property tax levy within the city and how much of that actually goes to the city versus the other municipalities, and then the effects that has on an estimated average property in a residential and a commercial setting. So what the mayor has alluded to is, yes, we have several school districts, so this is ISD number one, if you're paying taxes in ISD number one, less than 20%, so 19.22% of your property tax is the city's. And if you look down and you think about it, the city's the one entity of all of them that provide service that everybody uses. I don't have kids, I don't go to the parks, I probably should, but I don't. But I'm still paying 80% to those entities. And then when you look at the peer cities is what's most interesting to me is all of our peer cities, the average is about 24%. So this next slide is not in your book I was playing last night. So I did a little what if. So what if we were comparative to our peers? I'm not advocating anything. I'm not second guessing. I'm just saying. You know, if in fact we were with our peers and actually assessed about 24% of the total, that would be an extra 21 mills. That would be another $18.7 million flowing through the general fund every year. So, I mean, I understand that the value of a Fargo mill far exceeds our peers. but so do our assets and so do our obligations. We have more streets. We have more buildings to inspect and assess. We have a full health department. We have a very comprehensive transit. We have way more public safety calls, more city staff, more facilities, more equipment to maintain. So I just thought that was kind of interesting.

Thank you. And I'll just add to that. As I've learned both through the campaign and now as I'm sitting in the mayor's office is the goal is not to be competitive with our or the school district or the county or the park district, but I think just an awareness for the public to understand that just under 20% of your property tax is for the city. And the fortunate thing for the city is we have the ability, unlike those others, to collect revenue from other spots. So that's where, when we talk about the hotel lodging taxes and sales taxes and getting people to come here and spend their money, not just live here, that helps drive down and impact that on our property tax payers specifically. It's a nugget I'm walking away with and again, it's not meant to be Compatible with the other political subdivisions because we want to work in partnership with it But I think just for the public to understand when the city is talking about our budget right now We're really looking at that proper and people are concerned about property taxes It's that 20% is what's going towards the city and and I know others may have different opinions or things to add to that But those are just things that I'm learning as we move forward. So, thank you

Just conclude the revenue section. So obviously, if you have specific questions, we can be happy to address them. I think I wrote this wrong. We do not have a break. Next. Sorry. I think I was optimistic when I was working on this. I'm going to talk a little bit more. And I don't know why, but I volunteered to address all of these because they relate to finance or they really don't have an owner. So we're going to quickly go through tabs five, six, and seven. So there's a lot to cover. Most of these departments are pretty straightforward with little change from year to year. I've indicated in the narrative that there's org charts and details, so I'm just going to talk really high level. This order somewhat follows our general ledger codes, if you're wondering why there's this. So basically, I'm going to go first. I'm taking one for the team here. I'll field your questions as we go. So first department, city administration. That includes the city administrator and the assistant city administrator. Key functions are listed there, primarily policy development, recommendations to the commission, and operational management. And they represent the city either directly or in advisory capacity for all the groups that are listed there. a quick look at the work chart. They report to the Board of Commissioners. The current or emerging issues are noted in your narrative, so I'm not going to review all of those. I just picked out a couple of key ones. Reorganizing and consolidating the boards has been kind of an ongoing process. Long-range forecasting and strategic planning, something we need to dig into. And then continuing the interagency collaboration to end homelessness. Financial summary is presented here with the details in your binder. The major changes on this particular budget is that the strategic planning director position had a retirement in June. That position is not proposed to be filled. Those responsibilities will be redistributed among different departments. There were no capital or personnel requests. And the other item on here is that next year is a legislative session, so we will have lobbyist fees. Those are kind of in every other year. Any questions?

Mr. Peterson. Mr. Mayor, thank you. So topic for discussion at a later time with our assistant city administrator. I know we're advertising. But I'd like to have a discussion as a commission with you being a full-time mayor now. Is that assistant needed? And I'm not saying yes or no. I'm just saying I think we should discuss it A, B. We have this topic on our agenda later today regarding the lobbyists. Senator, Mr. Mayor, I'm going to make a motion, not now obviously, but to make that lobbyist position go away. I think between you and I, and if anyone else obviously wishes to participate, I think between you and I, We can do exponentially better than an attorney from Bismarck and not being critical of that person's work in the prior years, and you have a better connection with her. It was, in my experience, her. I think you and I can do better than that and save us money so we can amend this budget, not today, obviously, but take some dollar figure and even $10,000. I've never spent more than $6,500 on all my activities, and that's going to national stuff. So I think that should be a topic for discussion, Mr. Mayor. Other item I have... I'll stop there. Maybe this will be a meeting thing. So Mr. Mayor, that's my two ideas. A, topic for discussion of assistance is needed, A, and then B, the lobbyists, I think you and I can do exponentially better than our wonderful attorney friend, who you know probably better than I do in Bismarck. So thank you, sir. Thank you.

Other questions related to city administration budget? All right. Go ahead, Susan.

OK. If not, we'll move on to city commission. This department includes the commissioners, and it also includes the staff that supports the commission and the administration. Those positions upstairs are a liaison, really, between the constituents and the board. The services that they provide, you're probably familiar with, but they're all listed in the narrative. The org chart up there is the current vacant executive assistant position, along with both Diana and Jody that you've met. The expenses here include the City Commission salaries, administrative salaries, and related expenses. There were no personnel or capital requests. A financial summary is presented here. I'm going to own up to one little error that I noticed over the weekend. Our budget process has very manual processes. The payroll module does not talk to the financial module, so we need to do a lot of manipulation with spreadsheets. I do not believe, and I need to double check, that I have the mayor in as full-time. When I pulled the data, I thought it was pulled as of the time that it had switched, but I don't believe that's the case. So I'm going to remedy this when we meet again on Monday. There's another issue that I need to talk about that we're missing as well. Both of those should be covered with the slight surplus that we have, and then we're waiting on our health insurance premiums. I think that'll go down, so I think it'll still net out to about where we are.

Any questions on city commission?

Mr. Turnburg.

How do we have other miscellaneous for 7,000 and then miscellaneous for 10?

That's a good question. I don't know the answer to that off the top of my head, but I will look into that. Wyatt's got that down. We'll get back to you on that. Any other questions? All right, now we're going to look at city attorney. So the city attorney is a contracted service through circling law. As noted here, the city attorney provides general legal services to all departments and elected officials, along with affiliated organizations. Ian identified a very long list of current or emerging issues. including the Convention Center, the Red River Valley Water Supply Project, Code Enforcement, Capital Projects, and the related services. And then separate, but related, we also have the City Prosecution. That's also contracted through Circland. staffed by three attorneys and three legal assistants and help from other circling staff as needed. The scope of service is listed there, and it's a wide spectrum of matters. Again, Ian identified a long list of current or emerging issues. Municipal court is now a court of record, which increases courtroom time. There's additional caseload within the district court and expanded support for Fargo Police, including education and training. The next slide is the combined expense of the attorney and prosecution. The expenses have been consistent basically from year to year since we switched over that contract. Does anyone have any questions here?

Commissioner Strand? Thank you.

I'm just curious about the topic of city attorney. in the background it's been mumbled about a few times whether we explore in bringing that internal to our administration and i don't know how we'd ever vet that and if would ever be pro pro what the pros and cons would be but i'd still at some point like to know how that could look and if it would be worth weighing to do that or not at some point in the future do you want to weigh in on that one

Sure.

Commissioner, so just very briefly, just in the interest of time, for the benefit, too, of the new commissioners, we did do a pretty extensive RFP process here in the last three years, I believe two years, resulting in a circling agreement. And so there are a couple of options embedded within the circling agreement. But to Commissioner Strand's question and inquiry, that is something that was vetted at the time. determined to be something that simply didn't have the overhead and the kind of cost allocation at that point to be able to support. Internally, it was deemed to be more cost effective to contract out, but it's certainly a conversation that the commission can entertain at any time. But we do operate under a contract right now with options within that agreement. The commission will likely need to be, I think it's the end of this year, need to exercise one of those options to continue services. If it's not this year, it's the next year. So I'm happy to provide some background on that, but I'll just leave it at that for right now.

Mr. Peterson. Mr. Mayor, with my giant question mark and my highlights, I second Commissioner Strand's motion.

Thank you. We'll continue that discussion then. Susan.

All right. Next we'll move into the departments and divisions under the purview of finance. The first one is the Combined Finance and Auditor's Office. These departments provide fiscal services in support of government functions. The major services are all listed. It would be typical accounting and functions as you would expect. The current or emerging issues, you know, the one we've already talked about primarily is the software conversion. So that will keep our team busy for the next several months. Second item that I wanted to mention is just the restructure of the auditor's office with longtime auditor Steve Sprague retiring. Earlier this year, we kind of split out those departments or kind of restructured some duties. So the financial duties that had been done in the auditor's office were moved to the finance department. Records management and utility billing remains with the auditor's office. This is kind of an update on that. Still navigating through a few things. For example, like a special election coming up. But I think overall, it has gone well. You know, new to the auditor's office, we've moved the freedom of information records requests to the auditor's office. That is, I think, more time consuming that we probably give credit to. So, you know, Angie's, we're trying to navigate that, balance that. We do have budgeted for this year some FOIA software that will aid both the auditor's office and the police department as they manage those voluminous record requests. Next slide is just a quick org chart. The finance department, there are 17 staff, including payroll, purchasing, to enterprise accountants. We are very soon to be at full staff after juggling the responsibilities of vacancies for several months, so we're very pleased about that. There are seven staff within the auditor's office, and includes staff who manage the utility billing process, and those are expensed to the Water Department. There are no personnel requests for this department. We had one capital request for funding for our software implementation. To date, the funding of that has been paid through set-aside ARPA monies, but we knew we would need additional funding as the process progressed. Then we did have one copy request, and the little asterisk means I moved that to the operating. So the financial history here is listed. Main changes are personnel. It's kind of the impacts of the absorption of the auditor role into the finance department and shifting of some of those responsibilities. And then other services includes the new software expense. For a period, we're going to be paying maintenance on our old and new systems until we fully transition. Any question there?

Mr. Strand. Thank you. If you could go up in the balcony and tell us about the Tyler relationship right now, because I know there's been some bumps in the road, plus you hugely needed new software when you arrived here in your department. And then my last question is, is there any traction in the future that you see with, they've been reporting at the National League, for example, priority-based budgeting successes.

and i know you've said we're not near there yet but how how do we look in the big picture with us and tyler please at my conference two weeks ago we actually met the guy that is in charge of the priority-based budgeting for tyler our tyler representative made sure that i met him so i said i'm going to report back to commissioner strand that i met you because he's very excited to hear about it So yes, that is on our radar. So our Tyler software, just a little update, the history. We went out for an RFP four years ago already. We had a broad group of people that helped us evaluate software needs. As the slide showed, we are in need of some updated software. We looked at the updated version of our current software. We had a proposal from Oracle, which was kind of, you can do anything you want with Oracle. And then Tyler, which was, Tyler's primary focus is governments. So they kind of come in with a framework already of fund-based accounting, which was really advantageous to us. So we also continued, we had hired a consultant to help us do the RFP. We kept them on to help us with the integration. During that process, we learned that Tyler had a new version coming out. It was enhanced general ledger, and it was cloud-based, and the idea was that within five years, everyone would have to switch to that one. So we as a team collectively decided our existing software, while painful, works well. We're not in a huge time crunch. Why would we do this conversion and then do it again in five years? So we offered to beta test it with them as a live client. I think they'll acknowledge they were probably not as far along in the process as we were maybe led to believe. There were some starts and stops. We finally had to say, we're done. You know, we can't have our team helping you fix your bugs. You need to do that and then come back to us. And in their credit, they did. They haven't charged us for the last year and a half for all of our sessions, all of our training. We're going to finish our training. So they've been very good partners. They've acknowledged us as very good partners. Before we picked this back up again, they came out in April and did a full demo. There's still a few little hiccups, but by and large, it's working very well. We can see all our processes. We're basically getting the white glove treatment for a software company, which is pretty unusual, I think. They joke about the red phone. If Fargo calls, it's the red phone, so they pick it up. I'm hoping that relationship helps us along the way. So, yes, so we did meet with them when we were at GFOA. They had a big booth. They invited us after for some hors d'oeuvres, and we got to meet a lot of their leadership, and one of them was the priority-based budgeting. Priority-based budgeting is kind of a software that goes in, it uses AI, and it looks at how you're allocating your money and suggests different ways you could do that based on what your priorities might be. I'm a little skeptical, to be honest, but it's something we will certainly look at.

Mr. Mayor. Mr. Turnbull.

Susan, many of these are very consistent numbers. I'm just curious, miscellaneous, how do we go up $10,000 from last year?

That is a good question, but I know the answer to that one. That is the copy machine that I had previously budgeted in capital, but since it's under $10,000, We really don't capitalize it. We should pay it out of operating. So we have worked with our purchasing department in looking at all of the myriad of leases that we have for copiers. By the time you're done paying a lease, you could have bought four copiers, and then you don't own anything. So now we just buy them outright. We're going to have lots of boat anchors someday. but it's saving us a lot of money citywide, so kudos to our purchasing team for doing that.

Mine's about 20 years old, so good job.

Well, we just run them until they die, basically.

All right, continue on.

Okay. Next is the city assessor that also falls under finance department. Obviously, you know, we're all familiar with with their department, they main property ownership information, appraised property and administer property tax exemptions. Their services are all listed for you. You know, primarily their function is to ensure equity and fairness and property tax distribution. They need to maintain valuations at the median sales ratio of 90% to 100%. That's what they spend most of their time on. They also work with education and project assistance. Current issues, they too are implementing new software. It seems to be a theme. They're a little farther into the process. They are in year two of a two-year project. This is their org chart. They have 12 positions, including The assessor, the deputy assessor, they have appraisals, appraisers, and then administrative staff. Their personnel request is just a little bit of seasonal part-time funding. They hire interns in the summer when they're most busy to do appraisals. And they have capital. Capital is the year two of two of their new software system, CAMA, Computer Assisted Mass Appraisal System. And then this is their financial. The main change here is their new software maintenance, starting with 2026 budget. The annual is going to be about $75,000 a year. Any questions on that?

Mr. Peterson. Mr. Mayor, thank you. A loaded question. What do they need gasoline for?

If they use their personal cards of reimbursement, I think they just go that's a good question Well, actually it's um, I think we build a from the fuel pumps we bill out to the department Good answer. Sorry. Yes, that's the answer. We allocate out the we allocate out the city fuel to different departments So you'll see that and police and health and anyone that's my question.

Yes so we have some indeterminate number of vehicles and Pieces of equipment throughout the city. I would love to see what the pieces of equipment and vehicles are I didn't see anywhere in this book other than the requests for additional stuff And my follow-up question is well if we're asking for additional vehicles, how do we know? Well, because there's a vehicle list somewhere that says these are going to expire so recurring theme throughout this entire book for me is I need to know how many things we have and who they're appropriated to so we have fleets and I realize this is if this can't be accomplished this year and We must have it by next year.

I'm sure we have it. I think we do, too.

Ben manages that very well. A couple of departments have told me that directly, but I don't see it. So educational piece for me. I'd love to see those data points, because then I can justify buying new squad cars. I can buy new widgets. And I can actually account for, oh, this is why they have gasoline. Mr. Mayor, enough of me babbling. So thank you.

Actually, when I think about it, we don't, I don't think we include on the sheet that we give you, but most of these are replacements. You know, they're, as opposed to new, we should do a better job of identifying, like, what's a new piece of equipment that we're buying because we need, like, a new snowplow because of new area versus this is five years old and it's on the recurring replacement list. So we'll do that. Okay, three minutes. Let me see if I can make it. So municipal court, that also reports up to finance. I'm not exactly sure how that happened, but it does. So I work with Shiloh. She does a very good job at municipal court. They have jurisdiction over criminal and non-criminal violations of code. They have five or six sessions a day, Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday, and a little bit on one session on Monday and Friday. Courtroom appearances can be almost 100 a day. So they're very busy. Major services are listed there. The org chart, they have the elected judge, two alternates, clerk, deputy clerk, and four associates. Issues that are listed, I think the primary one from a financial standpoint is the increased number of sentence days and then the higher per day jail cost. We'll talk about that in a second. Personnel, Shiloh did request an additional associate deputy clerk. This was a new request. Because of that, I asked if she would more monitor the situation over the next year or so and see if it's an absolute need or if there's some other way we can supplement it. So I may be back next year and ask for this position again. The other capital items, those are things that were addressed in the operating budget, so not capital. And then the expenses. The biggest change here, if you look in the other services line item, that is the Cass County Jail charges. So the new rate for the Cass County Jail, To give them credit, we had been at $85 a day for many, many, many, many years. After a long discussion and approval at the commission level last year, that rate went from $85 to $120 a day. And then we are seeing additional jail sentences by the judge. So 2022 and 23 had approximately 4,400 jail days, 25 a year to date, 26 are trending at 6,800 jail days. So the budget for next year is based on the anticipated increased jail days and the higher per day cost. Any questions on that?

Commissioner Strand.

Thank you. Just a note on those jail expenses. If I recall, the reason we raised our rate from 85 to 120 was so they could justify billing the feds for that. And we needed to have that local kick in to warrant that higher rate for the feds. But here's my question about municipal court. Do we have a timeline on the future of the GTC municipal court building location and what the implications might be if there's transition to the court also or not? I'm guessing it's on all of your radar.

Very much so, Commissioner. I would just say that will be a quarter three, quarter four action item yet this year. So you will hear more about that in the coming weeks.

Commissioner Peterson?

Thank you, Mr. Mayor. A couple line items. Security services for 36,005. Do we do... Do we reimburse internally back to PD? Correct.

Yes, that's exactly what it is.

I love that. That makes me so happy that's in here. Awesome. And then credit card fees. I'm guessing it's cheaper even with the fees just to secure the dollars ahead of time and know we have them. Correct.

However, they should decrease because they have new software as well. It allows us to put the fees on top, so anyone that's paying online can do that. So that should drop next year.

Okay, we're still budgeted, but cool. Wonderful.

I didn't have any history, so I left it. Wonderful. We should see an increase there.

And the miscellaneous expense skyrocketed. I guess that's copiers again.

Yes, she's also getting copier.

Awesome. Thank you. Thank you, Mr. Mayor.

Thank you. And one thing I'll add, Commission, is that as we've seen our crime data, one thing that law enforcement has done is increase traffic patrol based on concerns raised by the public. That has led to more traffic citations, which then leads to more court dates. And I assume that's also tied to some of the increased jail time. I wouldn't be surprised if we start seeing that that's repeat offenders or people who aren't taking it seriously the first or second time the judge gives them and then continues on. But this is a true showing of us of we pull one string over here and how it impacts another part of our local government as well. So Commissioner Peterson.

Mr. Mayor, thank you. To Commissioner Strand's point about the $120 a day, it's not to justify the feds. It's actually what our true cost is. We're actually losing money at $120 a day. It does not include amortization of the building, but we vastly undercharge it under a federal contract, and I can talk to you about that offline as to why. But luckily, that number has been accelerated, too, because we were subsidizing our federal government. I voted against it, just a reminder. Outstanding.

All right. I'm going to breeze through these last four. I call these the orphan divisions because they really don't have owner. So I volunteered to discuss them. First one is general support. That's a cost center for things that aren't specifically allocated. It's primarily financial expenses like banking and other things. And then workers' comp. I'm just going to point this out. So this division, that's the second error that I noticed in my review. So the personnel costs listed here are made up of two things. It's the city pensions actuarial determination, the supplements that we make to the city pension, and it's also the general funds worker comp premiums. So the actuarial contributions are down significantly due to the market gains. However, the workforce safety premiums, they're also down, but they're omitted on here. The approximate should be about $300,000 per year. This is a good example of, again, why we need our updated software. So as I mentioned, the financial and the payroll don't talk to each other. Most of the benefits comes from a payroll export, but we need to hand update the worker comp. It was not done. So my apologies. I noticed that when I was reviewing. We will address that along with the other item when we meet again on Monday. I believe it should net out, and we should be still kind of nicely balanced at the number that we showed earlier. Any questions on general support?

Commissioner Peterson. Mr. Mayor, thank you. I once again have one of these sheets. So I'd like to take some time when you have time to run through these rather than waste everyone's time here. So I appreciate that.

Thank you, Mr. Mayor. Yes. Unallocated is a budget convention. It helps us anticipate or reflect Budget salary savings. So with our software, we have to budget as if every position control position is filled 100% of the time. We know that's not true. We have vacancies. So we'll use this to estimate what our salary savings would be so that we are not kind of over budgeting so that we're being realistic. The actual salary savings gets posted to the department. So this really is only a budget convention. Any questions on this?

Mr. Peterson. Mr. Mayor, thank you. Educational piece. Do we ever go back and use this as a slush fund, for lack of a better term? Or is it simply, as you just said, it's just a line item as a placeholder?

It's a line item as a placeholder. Outstanding. And then throughout the year, we go back and we don't allow you to use salary savings. You can reallocate within your operating budget, not salary savings, unless it comes to this FAR committee. And there's a reason like Because we are short on staff, we had to hire camp staff or something that's commensurate, but it's not a.

So again, not a slush fund? Yes. Great, you're going to make me cry. This is so great.

I'm glad. Commissioner Turber. Go ahead.

I've noticed just noticing everything around me and how much it costs that I do get a lot of mail from the city. Does this include public health and all departments, the postage? I believe so. I'm just wondering if for $90,000, if there's ways we could, not, I mean, even during campaigns, it's so much easier to go digital and have emails to people or something like that, which is free compared to 90 grand in postage.

Right. We continue to look at that. I think we'll see some significant change with our new software because we'll be able to send out our statements on an email basis if you give us your email rather than monthly snail mail statements. So Hope to see that change, but because we don't have any history, I just left it.

Perfect. Thank you. And if I could add to that, I think some of it also ends up being statutory required mailed out information, like the new property tax changes and things like that. The state included that where that's where we saw an increase of people paying attention to their property tax statements, because it wasn't just if you had a valuation change of 10% one way or the other or more. It was everybody received a property tax statement. And again, whether that comes from the county or the city or anything like that, but I think that's an opportunity for us to visit with our partners at the state about what, are there opt-out options, are there opt-in options, how can we reduce that burden on the local political subs for sure.

Okay. Transfers out. This represents funds that we're moving from the general funds, so think the sun in the middle, to the other funds for very specific purposes. I've listed here specifically what that is, and kind of the buckets are special revenue, so it's the city's share of some of these regional trainings, SWAT, BID, and the aerial drone organization. Debt service funds are to pay the debt on city parcels, capital projects, there's a couple internal Interfund loans that we're repaying, and then the general fund subsidies for those enterprise funds who don't generate adequate revenues to cover their costs. Transit is the one we most commonly talk about. Also, the Civic Center, given the status of the Civic Center, you know, I just left the budget as is since it's still kind of unknown. Basically, that subsidy pays for their utilities. And so here's the history there. Any questions on this one? Anybody?

Commissioner Peterson, that's right. Mr. Mayor, a question for you. So obviously these are going to come up later in a separate form. Should we save our questions for then? I think probably prudent. I just don't want to be...

If you're okay with that.

Yes, perfect.

Thank you.

Commissioner Strand?

With regard to transit, what's the lay of the land there? Is it increasing? Are we stable now with regards to the state support and Minnesota's support or...

Sorry, I have on here to say that, and I forgot. So they're going to talk on Wednesday, but this subsidy is just slightly less than last year, so it did not increase. They'll talk about it a little bit. They have plans to go up to the legislature and see if we can get some more money, not to steal their thunder, but Minnesota got some additional money, so Moorhead is working on a microtransit. Because of that, they have more miles. The revenue allocation is shifting, so... Our allocations stayed about the same.

And if I might continue just briefly, Mayor, in the transit lane, are all of their drivers now fully incorporated into our workforce numbers?

Yes.

So everybody knows that's a recent transition and new.

Okay, last item. So economic development, this is... This was a new cost center. It was established in 2021 to help our budget transparency. Decreased significantly over prior years. In the past, we had $100,000 of FMEDC dues. That's now being paid by the county. We pay it $1,000 minimum so that we have our board seat. The Workforce Academy 2025 kind of was the fifth and final year of our annual $300,000 contribution. and then last year we ceased our contribution to emerging prairie so this is basically all that we're paying right now um youth works is a statewide organization for kind of at risk at risk youth so that is that so as you can see it's decreased considerably from last year so is that for helping

Fargo youth who are troubled at 43,000, what does that go to?

Correct, those would be vulnerable youth that would be a service provider, and that, correct, as Susan illustrated, that would be for Fargo youth, correct.

Okay, thank you.

And I would just add, too, this list, not too many years ago, also included other miscellaneous outside agencies and other community support entities. Some have gone away entirely. Some have been absorbed by other areas. But I would just note this, to support what Susan just said, this is dramatically down. But I did also want to make that same note, too, that we do need to continue some level of operating support to the Economic Development Corporation so that we retain our board seat. That was a big discussion point over the last two years.

Commissioner Peterson?

Mr. Mayor, thank you. Mr. Redlinger for that point. With Mr. Gilmore's retirement, if our staff can take on his duties internally, outstanding. But if for whatever reason they start struggling, I think I'd be amenable to supplementing. I'd let experts be experts, so to speak, and supplementing our friends at the EDC to take a portion or all of that over. Again, topic for a different day. Let our staff be the guide. But again, just sort of maybe...

Trial balloon or a warning flare to the team if we really start struggling you need to tell us as a commission We can I have an idea not to fix it, but well the other four agree don't know but in the future Thank you mayor Thank You Commissioner I would just add on that point we are trying to divide and conquer as best we can there's gonna be elements that the EDC Really wouldn't have a home you know for some of our programs some of our activities like pilot like RenZone, but there are other things that absolutely for primary sector we want to continue to leverage our relationship there because they have the staff that we don't have to be able to keep that up. But I think that for at least the next year, we're going to try it. We're going to separate that out between assessors, planning, and my office, just try to figure out how that can work. But I thank you for that because this is going to be a test. We haven't really had a year yet where we don't have anyone looking after that relationship with the EDC as well. So we're just going to have to stay close.

All right, I think we're ready for a break. Scheduled for 15, your call if you want to.

Yep, we'll honor everyone's 15 minutes. So we will plan to just be back here at 10, I'll just say at 10.12. At 10.13, you just got a minute back for the public to know. So we'll be on break till 10.13 and we'll start promptly at that time to stay on track for everyone's schedule. Thank you.

Thank you. you Thank you. Thank you.

All right. Thank you, everyone. Since we have everyone seated at the table, we'll get started in a couple minutes than we originally stated. But with that, we'll turn it over to Scott Anderson with our Communications Government Affairs team. Thank you.

great good morning mayor and commissioners my name is scott anderson i'm the chief communications officer for the city of fargo having joined the city not quite four months ago myself i first want to thank the finance department and the other members of the communications and government affairs team they've given me a lot of guidance leading into the budget this year as i believe the first email i received about the budget was my second week in my role so trying to get caught up as quickly as i can with that And while I'm still relatively early in my tenure here, their efforts have given me an opportunity to review our department's approach to our budget and how we're looking at things. So just to give you a quick overview of our department and the things that we that we take care of here. We serve as the central communications and public engagement resource for the city of Fargo. The department helps ensure residents receive timely, accurate and accessible information about city services, programs and initiatives, while providing communication support and technical assistance to all city departments and staff, including our elected officials. the department oversees the city's external communications efforts including media relations public information multimedia campaigns website management social media channels branding standards printed publications event planning and government access television operations including the broadcasting and live streaming of public meetings such as this one that we're doing right now news conferences and other community events. The team also supports citizen engagement initiatives and coordinates communication policies and messaging across our city departments. In addition, the communications and government affairs team manages internal communications, emergency and crisis communications, and intergovernmental affairs coordination with local, state, and federal partners. So here you'll see the makeup of our team. We're currently made up of six members. Currently three of our roles are vacant. It's important to note that while this team on the screen provides assistance to all 21 departments within the City of Fargo, There are other departments within the organization that have roles within them that serve some level of communications function. Those roles do not report to me. They report up through their department heads. So if you have communications questions regarding departments such as our public safety departments, our library, MATBUS are just a few of those examples, those department heads would be able to speak to those communication roles and their complete functions. So for our current or emerging issues, these are just a couple of things that as I've come in, I've noticed these are in line with what they have been in the past, but I've made just a couple of revisions to some of this. So for data-informed communication, our department continues to strengthen its use of analytics. any engagement data to better understand our community needs, improve our outreach strategies, and ensure residents receive information in ways that are relevant and effective. This is an important step to what we do because it encourages our communication efforts to avoid that shotgun approach, just kind of throwing everything out there to see what works, in favor of a more efficient targeted strategy that allows us to hone in on what is actually working and making a connection with our community. by continually identifying what platforms and content formats actually Resonate we can become much more likely to share messaging that connects with our Fargo residents And I know this next one is something that I've heard many of our new elected officials discuss and something I'm really excited to Get more into and that's our resident engagement and responsiveness It's important for us to be improving how our residents can connect with our city government this allows us to be that connection point that helps us be an open government that promotes transparency with our community. Again, events like this, our ability to be able to broadcast these to multiple different streaming platforms and on our government access channels, this allows our public to be even more engaged. And so this is a key point in what we do. Civic participation is also something that we're taking a really good look at and seeing what we want to do moving forward in the next year. Our department currently works to expand those opportunities for residents to engage with local government. by reducing those participation barriers and offering that accessible in-person virtual or digital opportunity that might exist. Again, this is something that I know in talking with the mayor and some of the other commissioners as well, we're looking to amp up, I guess I would say our civic participation and what we're doing in the community in terms of public engagement meetings and things of that kind. We're in early conversations for what that looks like. But it is a focus for us and trying to get out there and make all of you more accessible to our residents as well as other department heads and subject matter experts who might be able to help answer questions as to certain topics that are going on throughout the organization. Another thing that we need to make sure we're keeping our eye on is digital accessibility. It's important for us to ensure equitable access to our public information, and that remains a major focus area through our commitment to maintaining digital platforms and documents that meet or exceed that WCAG 2.1 level AA accessibility. So this is a standard that was initially going to be in place April of this year. That got pushed back until next year for municipalities, I believe, 50,000 population or above. But we're doing what we can to make sure that the information that we put out on our website and through other digital means, including social media, is meeting those specific standards. So some other comments I just want to include. Over the past eight months, so this started before I got here, members of the comms team have been looking at ways to find cost savings within our operational scope. These efforts range from restructuring contracts, reviewing and in some cases eliminating some of our annual subscriptions that we had in place, and moving headshots and other professional photographic needs in-house. We have a very competent photographer, as most of you have learned, doing headshots recently. If we were to do those externally, that could cost us thousands of dollars every time we need to do that. Here we have a setup and we have a person to be able to do it, so now that's something we're doing completely in-house, along with many of our other photographic needs as well. While those efforts have realized cost savings of roughly $150,000, we continue to evaluate our approach to budgeting across the department in an effort to responsibly manage resources required to do our jobs while meeting expectations from both our internal partners as well as the residents of the City of Fargo. You'll notice we have no personnel requests this upcoming year. You'll notice a few capital expenses. This is to maintain our technology that exists within this room as well as Gateway Commons, which is the room over at the police department. We help with the technology over there as well. We do have a space over in Sky Commons that we also help manage, but as we know, Sky Commons is going to be coming offline pretty soon as the Civic Center gets repurposed. And so as is possible, we're going to reallocate the equipment that's over there in that space into these other rooms as we're able to help manage some of that cost saving as well. uh here's a look at our general fund expense this is our ask for 2027. you'll notice in our personnel allocation we have six current employees we have three vacancies within our department but as i've come in as i'm trying to understand the scope of work that our department is looking to execute and what makes sense going into this next year. I really try to hold steady with a number of our different operating expenses. However, with our personnel expenses, while I still have those vacancies currently, I am not funding those vacancies into the next year. I want to see what our department looks like in 2027 without funding those. And so the majority of the cost savings you'll see coming from last year into this year is from those three vacancies that won't be funded going into 2027. That's it for me, though, so happy to answer any questions.

Great. Commissioner Turnberg?

Yes, thank you, Mayor. How many comms positions are almost hidden in other departments? So... For instance, police and fire together, I have one. Is that true?

So police and fire together have two communications employees. What I would say is, I don't know if I would categorize them as hidden necessarily, but they operate on multiple levels. So with public safety, they are mainly communications focused. However, in other departments, I know they take on additional responsibilities outside of just communications. I would leave that to those department heads, though, to talk about. how they utilize all of those.

But where else are they? So they're police and fire. There's two.

Police and fire have a couple. Matbus has one. Public health has one. I believe library has one. I don't know, again, completely the staffing of every department only because they don't report to me. They don't We help them every now and then if they ask for backup or assistance with things like photography or social media posts and things like that. But again, I'm not sure what allocation exists within each department.

I think, Michael, I just think we could be so much more streamlined in communications and all of communications should be together. So then that's all under that budget. And I don't think we need as many people as we do. to do. We don't need to post every day on social media. You know, we've been told by local media stations that they do not want to feel like they're being in competition with us. We should just be a resource and not actually be gathering the news. So I'm just wondering if this is open to as the city to restructure this.

Well, thank you for the question, Commissioner. As noted by Scott, we have had a pretty significant reduction, streamlining within what we have here within the span of control of comms GA. I'd want to support what you just said. A lot of those other positions, I'm thinking of the one at the Fargo Dome, that is actually doing a bunch of other sales activities. It's not just comms. Health also doing event promotion as well as communication activities. So we'd be happy to answer questions about what happens outside in those other groups. But with the public safety piece in particular, we were simply trying to, in the last year, get that work closer to those departments that were consuming that without it kind of taking away from what was happening here. So not adding to it, but really just trying to keep it closer to the action so that those couple of staff in particular could report directly to the chiefs and really support them. So we have found a lot of efficiencies and economies, I believe, in the last year, but we'd be happy to just try to kind of separate that even a little bit more just to describe how some of those functions really I think we would find are actually not as much comms as they are other activities as well for those departments, but happy to get into that.

But maybe that's not the most efficient way to do it. Now, it seems like if the comms add fire and police, what budget does that come out of?

It'd be both public safety sales tax as well as general fund, I believe.

And then there's two police officers. So to me, it just looks like if we could do some rearranging and streamlining, we could really be more efficient. And we certainly don't need to fill the other roles that are open. So I think that's wonderful, Scott, that you've figured out how to make the department work without having to fill those. You know, we look at some of our neighboring cities and if they're using an iPhone, they're doing video recording that way, we have nicer equipment than when I was at the television station. So there are ways for us to really, I think, tone it down and not spend as much. This isn't, it's an important service, but it's not a core function.

Other questions? Commissioner Peterson?

Mr. Mayor, thank you. I think this would be time to get, I have a very limited number of questions regarding, is that okay to jump in as quick? Okay, thank you. So your CapEx, for lack of a better term here, there's redundancy in what the requests are, same thing over and over, right? So it's You go Commission Chambers, Gateway Chambers, and Chambers and Commission Gateway. Can you walk me through the expenditures proposed on this happy sheet here?

Your capital requests?

Yeah, your capital requests. So you have Commission Chambers AV, Gateway Commons AV, and third line is Chamber and Gateway Communications Equipment. So I'm guessing it's different widgets within the same system. But can you walk me through? And if you can't right now, it's OK. Just sometime in the future would be fine. And maybe let's do that. Let's have him in the future. I'll write it in my commentary for that one. But I think one thing that is prudent within this, you've got a number of line items. Marketing, public relations, graphic design, photography, and web design. The one that caught my eye, all three caught my eye. But the big one was the $100,000 expenditure for the web. Are we not capable of doing that internally? This isn't a criticism, it's just a question. Are we not capable of doing that internally? And so we're externalizing that? Or is that, what is that? Is it maybe a better question?

Yeah, so a number of those are web services. Think of contracts like Zen City falls under a web service contract. Zen City is a contract that not only do we utilize, but our engineering department utilizes as well for the Fargo Streets website. We currently hold that contract, and so that's an example of one of the contracts that falls under there. And I can give you a list of all the contracts.

That'd be great, because I see it skyrocketing for $80,000. So something different is transpiring this year? So if you could walk me through that, that'd be great.

Yeah, and some of the adjustments to the specific categories are moving things. When I came in and I was looking at the budget, we had a number of different line items and categories that seemed to overlap a little bit. And so some of that reallocation of funds is me trying to line up, to take things from one line and add it into another line that makes more sense in terms of trying to describe what it looks like.

I'm liking that even better. Okay, outstanding. So a lot of this is housekeeping. Yes. Love that. Okay, thank you.

The other thing that I think that they should get a lot of credit for is, as Scott mentioned, that $150,000 reduction. Our contract for maintaining all of this was like, 24-7, I mean, we would have someone here in case one of those screens blew out. Like, we don't need that, and we can get by without it. So Brian went through, like, line by line. There's equipment that's old that we're not having maintenance. If it dies, you know, we'll leave it until it dies, and then we'll replace it. We have backup parts with old ones that he can swap out. So they've done a really good job of trying to tidy that up a little.

Mr. Mayor, one more thing. So thank you for reading the tea leaves. Sir, and coming to us with a budget that made sense. Gratitude, I realize sometimes it's very hard to do that, right, because you've got people that have preconceived notions of what transpired before. I know your noose, that probably didn't make it any easier. So from my one person speaking to you, thank you so much for doing what you did to make this a little bit easier for us. Thank you, Mr. Mayor.

Any other questions? Commissioner Strand.

Thank you. The math isn't quite making sense to me. If you have three vacancies that are not filled, but you have six or five people in your department right now. We have six. Six. And we've had two move over to the police department, I believe. So that would take us to two more that would have been there otherwise. I don't know if any others have moved over or not. Sorry. So we've trimmed there, but how about FOIAs, information requests? Because that used to be done in your department, in the comms department, and now I think it was alluded to that's being done in the auditor's department. So that's another position that's kind of vacated or opened up or shifted over. And I also thought we had purchased some software a few years ago to manage FOIAs, but I don't know if that ever got implemented or not.

I think FOIA wasn't designated as one person in comms. I think they kind of shared that. And there was software that wasn't used. It was maintained on a spreadsheet. So that's what we're currently doing, but we are going to transition to some software next year.

And lastly, these vacancies, you're not requesting any personnel positions right now, but you're acknowledging those positions existed?

So in position control for HR, those positions still exist. But for the sake of the budget, I am not requesting the budget for those vacant positions going into next year.

And Scott, you referenced the digital access. Is that and maybe you can expand on it for the public specifics. I know there's a number of people who ask about this is, you know, when we load up our agendas, for instance, they're generally scans. And so they're hard to be searchable. Is that what you're talking about is things like the agendas and minutes and make it more user friendly on the outside of the building?

Yes, yes, that's correct. So there are a number of conversations that still need to happen within the organization to make sure we meet that deadline coming in April. My department is one of a few that are working on this, along with my friend next to me from IS. But yes, that is exactly what we're talking about with the digital accessibility piece.

All right. Seeing no other questions, we'll move on to human resources. Jill Manette. For those following along, that's tab nine, page 116.

Okay, thank you. So I'm excited to talk about the HR team and our role with the city. This slide is just a high-level overview of the HR team's primary responsibilities. We work with people during their whole employment life cycle. So from the time they're applicants to employees, and if we're fortunate enough to retain them through retirement, then we ultimately work with them as retirees as well. We also collaborate with all levels of leaders across the organization to really try to create the best employee experience that we can here at the city. Just a couple of interesting stats that I want to share before we move on. So in terms of recruiting, in the last 12 months, we posted around 160 positions and have received about 3,750 applications during that time. In terms of onboarding, we onboarded 372 new employees over the last 12 months. 214 were in regular positions. And that includes, to your point earlier, Commissioner Strand, the new transit employees that came on to the city as City of Fargo employees at the end of 25. So our total number also includes about 158 seasonal and temporary employees. So just wanted to give you an idea of the kind of the volume over a 12 month period. This next slide shows our overall org chart for HR. There are 11 of us who are full-time employees, and then we have an HR analyst who works about 16 hours a week, and an HR associate who works about five hours a week. So in our staffing for success slide, You saw that HR is one of the departments in that red zone where we have a significant gap in staff levels. So according to SHRM, the Society for HR Management, that ideal ratio is about one and a half to four and a half per 100 employees. We certainly don't need the four and a half, but we would love to work towards getting to that at least one to one and a half of us per 100 employees. So I'm really proud of the work that our team does, but we are challenged to keep up with the needs of the organization as departments grow and we have new leaders stepping into new roles. There's a lot more that we want to do in terms of orientating and training. So my hope is that we'll be able to grow as our workforce grows over the coming years as well. So the way that our HR generalists and HR managers provide services to our employees and managers is through designated service areas. So this chart shows how we divided the departments into teams of an HR manager and HR generalist so that we can provide focused and informed services to those departments. The team is also cross-trained, so if someone's out on vacation or a leave of absence, that we continue to provide services to all departments. And as you can see, we've kind of taken the approach of each service area having at least one of our largest departments and then filling in with kind of related functions as much as possible. We talked earlier about our role in recruiting and engaging and retaining. So our priorities for the team, employee engagement, that survey occurred in 25. We had really great participation for our first citywide survey and really learned a lot. So there's ongoing development of action plans to address areas where we need to improve and looking at how do we support those areas where we already have issues successful things happening. Another area compensation, I talked a lot about that earlier this morning. So again, just want to reiterate, you know, we've got a number of market adjustments that are not factored in right now. But we know that our pay structure and some of our pay for some of our positions is at a point of lagging market in some cases significantly. So that's something that we want to continue looking at throughout the budget process. And then Susan mentioned earlier the ERP enterprise resource planning and UKG dimension projects. So the HR payroll function will start up again in 2027. We're really excited to have current software that we'll be working with. and have information kind of at our fingertips, where now we are very heavy in spreadsheets and having to pull reports to provide the kind of information like we did today. And then UKG, that's our timekeeping system. We're transitioning from just the current version migrating to a newer version. So the finance, HR, and IS teams have been putting a lot of time and energy into that. I also just want to mention, coming up, I'll talk more about safety and training as other kind of critical areas that we really want to focus on. And again, where I talk details in the budget, I'll cover that. But we know that leadership training, ongoing leadership training is something really important that we want to Continue to offer to our leaders and really expand on what we're offering now and then of course Investing in employee safety is absolutely critical to minimize incidents and injuries to the extent possible So budget priorities again kind of our number one priority is to grow our team so that we can better serve our employees and I already mentioned training and safety, trying to increase those citywide budgets. While some departments have training budgets or lines within their own, the citywide training budget is currently at $12,500, and we want to start moving that up again to where it once was. Safety, again, another area that's critical that we need to really increase so our resources, our citywide resources are able to be better utilized there. And then other areas of the budget that you'll see that are increasing are really keeping up with ongoing costs of recruiting and onboarding new employees, as well as providing an internal employee health function. for our public safety departments, our largest users of that employee health department, but certainly citywide we have utilization. And that's everything that I have for you.

Any questions? Commissioner Turnberg.

Thank you, Mr. Mayor. Jill, can you tell me, What is the difference? So you have other miscellaneous for $5,500 and then miscellaneous for $38,500?

I think the other miscellaneous might be related to office furniture and computers. Our miscellaneous line is where we capture a lot of the, like our survey, our dollars that we spend on our survey and other items that don't have their own separate line. But I think the other miscellaneous may have been capital, Susan, does that sound?

But that's what's coming up. So you're saying you're getting?

The miscellaneous.

We're getting new capital equipment?

We will merge these next year so we don't have other miscellaneous miscellaneous. The other is, I believe, their copier rental, the other miscellaneous. And then the miscellaneous is safety compliance, employee recognition, you know, the event we have every May, and then an employee wellness program. So that's what those totals are. And then I don't know what the 13.5 is. I'll have to look and see what that is. Could we maybe break those out? Yes.

Going forward for next year? Yes. Thank you.

Commissioner Peterson, then Strand.

Mr. Mayor, thank you. You did touch on this a little bit, just as an educational piece for myself. The doctor's line item, is that what we discussed regarding the eternal? Yes. When is the last time we did a look to see if the math on that made sense?

Just in recent months. And we've been collaborating with the health department because it's a shared function between health and HR.

Fargo Cass Health? Yes. Okay.

and with our public safety departments, again, being our primary users as well. And so there are, right now we bring those services internal to our employee health clinic. There are some opportunities for savings if we simply sent people to those clinics, but the sheer volume that we bring as an employer, it's been, relayed to us from our larger health care facilities that their preference is for us to continue to have those services in-house. So that's an ongoing discussion. We are due for a new RFP if we're going to continue those services in-house. And through our last discussion, I believe that is where we have landed.

Okay, I'd love to see the math on that.

Not questioning, just to validate my concerns and make sure that The math does work. So Mr. Redling remains a question whoever love to see the math on that So you have a line up for other services at 70,000 wondering what other services represents?

This on page 122 and we can talk about that later too if it's an unknown I Think that's probably what I was referring to earlier where we have our again our employee engagement survey is in there and Our compensation consulting, so as we do our regional market survey or looking at our pay structure, we have consultants that we work with for that. Those are the largest functions within the area.

Fox Lawson or for the consultant?

We currently use MRA. Okay.

Yeah. So we don't do that internally?

Okay, that's okay. It's a combination. We do the job evaluation internally, but the market survey we send out and have MRA do the actual survey, and then when it comes back internally, that analysis and costing is happening within our team. So a combo-wombo kind of thing. Yes. Awesome. It's a combination.

Thank you, Mr. Mayor.

Commissioner Strandt.

Thank you. A couple of thoughts, questions. One is dealing with seasonal and temporary employees. I think you said the number 158 or something. Looking at the 2026 budget to 2027, there's a really substantial drop financially. Is that because we addressed the public health employees in the deck that were, so many of them were categorized as temporary and there was a desire to get rid of that categorization of so many people being part-time? Or where does this land?

Are you looking at within the HR budget or citywide you're saying?

The HR budget, you went from 45-261 to 16-307 for temporary seasonal. But you had said, I think, 158 seasonal temporary employees. I thought I heard you say it. I guess I'm wondering, I recall we had a bunch of employees with the engagement center that were classified as temporary, and I believe there was an intention to get as many of them off temporary status. Did that happen?

So to start with your question with HR, I think... I hope that that's actually an error on this sheet. We'll look at that. I think that that actually reflects what the additional dollars that were being requested for 27, rather than the total budget for our temp variable employees. So we'll look at that. In terms of the health department, Jen is going to be able to answer that much better than I can, but I know that with the movement of the Resource and Recovery Center, they've actually eliminated a couple of full-time, the need for a couple of full-time temporary positions. And so I think, I'm not recalling, I think they just moved some of the budget line for temporary seasonal to other department divisions as well. But you'll see the specifics on that in the health section.

Which is fine. With regard to, we had an overall discussion, an upper level discussion about overtime in the last few years. Where are we at with overtime, overtime tracking and management and budgetarily? How's that all looking right now across all the departments?

That may be something that we'll need to compile and bring back to you at our next meeting. I don't have those figures. Susan, do you have?

No, that's actually a pretty manual calculation. We did that, when was the last time we looked at that? Maybe this spring. So we can revisit those. There's a lot of reasons why we have, over time, with the seasonal work that we do. Engineering, for example, they work a lot in the summer for us to hire people to do all that work in the summer, then what do we do with them in the winter? So we've analyzed that. And really, our percentage is pretty common with our peers. So that's the last information that I recall.

And I have in my list, Commissioner, to run that report this fall. So you can kind of see two snapshots. We did the one in the spring. It's a dynamic situation, obviously, throughout the year. But per your earlier request this year, earlier this year, we'll make sure to satisfy that and just give you a snapshot of what's going on, I'll say, in September or October.

Thank you. Any other questions for Jill? Question I have, and I should have asked it when we were talking about overall compensation, but just as we talk about that health insurance placeholder we have, the potential price increase, do you have a date certain of when we will know that for how we can factor or not?

Yeah, so unfortunately that comes very late in our budget process. We have an estimate of somewhere in the 6 to 10 percent of an increase. But Usually, very end of August. Typically, it's more so that first week of September when we have the full renewal numbers. And, of course, we're hoping for the lower end of that estimate.

Thank you. Commissioner Karnberg?

It's not a very big number, but I'm just curious about this after speaking with some other people in the community. But your cell phones, does everyone in your department have a city... issued cell phone?

Not everyone, but we do have, I would say 75 plus percent of our team does. And often that's for also communicating with, you know, employees outside of work hours or with applicants. where we really don't want our team using their personal cell phones when they're conducting business or communication, texting with applicants, texting with employees. So we do have a larger portion of our team, again, I think somewhere in that 75 plus percent that carries a city cell phone.

I'm just wondering from a 50,000 foot view, if we couldn't save thousands of dollars by not issuing everybody a cell phone. Because I know, speaking with the business owner, he said he just added another number to his current phone. Well, that can be an option. You can have many different emails off one phone. We all have smartphones now. Is it really necessary? And coming from HR, maybe it is. But whatever is on my personal phone is still FOIA. available, correct? And this just seems like a great way to cut down on some of those, you know, I don't think everybody likes carrying around two phones either. And if you're going to call it at one, it's going to ring no matter what, if it's the work phone or the personal phone. So is that something we can do? citywide?

I can take that. So we last looked at that topic about three years ago. We looked at the voucher policy for those employers that have created a voucher for the exchange for personal use of a personal device, but putting work related things in there. We really elected at that time due to open records to really retain the information. So we really wanted to try to keep information that was city related on a city device, just given the kind of framework of North Dakota law. That also becomes an IRS taxable event if we are to voucher that and say give somebody 50 or 60 dollars a month to be able to allow them to or allow us to use their personal device to be able to send work messages to. So really at the end of the day, and we can revisit this again, we really rely on our department heads to determine who should and should not have. I think that Jill's example is a good one in our professional offices that primarily have in-office workers. I'm going to say, yeah, that's probably 60%, 70%, 75% would have city issue, but not everyone. And then you get out into some other departments and other areas, especially outside of public safety, where it just actually doesn't exist and it's not to a great extent. But we do have all of that data. We also had a question two or three years ago at the same time concurrent to that about the contracts and should we open it up to a different provider or should we continue to use our Verizon contract. that we've had for a lot of years. So it's a big question here that, just given the number of units that we have, but it's also one that we really rely on those departments to help us manage.

But isn't it just overcomplicating? Because everybody has a computer, so you're doing your emails on a computer. You don't have to have the luxury of a cell phone to do emails. So do we all need a second phone? I mean, if we're

using our computers for that yeah again that kind of goes back to the department had discretion where we've really relied on them to say i really think that that inspector in fact needs cell phones and we need to be able to contact them after hours and we need to be able to keep that city data on that on that city issue but you're still calling them i mean whether it's

in one hand or the other, right? So it's not like you can't be contacted on your personal cell.

That is correct, but we really try to keep those.

Or adding another cell number to your own phone so you separate it.

We can certainly revisit all that. We did actually look at that too at the time. That was kind of a new offering and we were able to add that on and append that. That was also deemed at the time to really not solve for the open records issue or problem needing to be able to retain the information. So if someone was texting, and we had a records request for that information, it would still be on a personal device and we'd still have to be able to kind of get that device from the individual to go help comply to that records request. So happy to revisit that. I just know that the last time we visited about it, we really tried to keep it to that lowest level possible at the departments to make that call and really just be austere as they could. But they'd still be getting record requests off your computer.

Your work device. Or there's some departments where it's just absolutely not necessary. to have cell phones that have them now? I'm just thinking of ways we can stop. Sure. Happy to revisit that.

Yeah, I think the last time we looked, we really had them where they should be and where they shouldn't be. But we did have a reduction, as I recall, some years ago. But we can certainly kind of take a scan of the universe again just to see if there are new ads that should also be removed. Thank you. You bet.

Okay, we'll move on to Information Services. Ron Grunenberg and Commissioner Peterson is the liaison for that department.

Good morning, Mayor, Commissioners. Thank you for your time and attention this morning. So my name is Ron Grunenberg. I'm the Chief Information Officer in charge of Information Services. Within IS, we have basically six functional teams. I'll go through kind of what they do. If you have any questions, you can speak up right away or we can handle it afterwards. So basically, Cody runs the desktop services, which is our front line. You've probably dealt with people from his team already working with your laptops and your phone allocations and things like that. Oh, thank you. They take care of all the first frontline stuff. So if you contact IS, they probably are the first point of contact. They will get you connected to the proper department to help you resolve whatever issue happens to be going on. They deal primarily with desktops, peripherals, laptops, phone issues, all of those areas. We also have a business services team run by Dave. This basically does our website development, does application development. We do integration, moving data from one application to another, try and streamline things for the rest of the city so that there's a limited amount of duplicate entry and things like that, trying to move data from one application where it is to the other application where it needs to be. So in particular, we're doing a lot of that with the migration to the new ERP and things like that. We've integrated lots of things over the years, and now we've got to reintegrate them with the new application. Todd leads our public safety team. The public safety team is funded by the Red River Regional Dispatch Center, our public safety access point here. And they primarily run the CAT RMS system, so the Computer Aided Dispatching Record Management System that's used by all the public service agencies in both Cass and Clay County. with the exception of the Sanford Ambulance. I guess everybody else, all the member agencies of RRRDC plus all the volunteer agencies and stuff that are not direct members. We support everybody. So Darrell leads the GIS team. Geographic Information Services is is a way to tie data to maps, basically. And this deals with both underground infrastructure and above ground infrastructure. Your maps and data are only as good as the quality of the data and the tying to the maps and things like that. And so we really do a lot of quality control on that, trying to get accurate information. Maps are used by, I guess at least 90% of our departments. I mean, primarily the public safety agencies use them. And we merge since we support Like I said, Cass and Clay County, we get GIS maps from the counties and the neighboring cities. We merge them all into one so that that goes into the dispatch center and their map system reflects everybody's stuff. But the disparate departments, so Cass, Clay, Moorhead, West Fargo, are all responsible for what the content of their GIS system is. But we merge it all into one system so it's seamless for the dispatchers. So Matt leads the network services team. They run the computers, all the communication stuff, wireless stuff, wired stuff, make sure everything talks to each other and telephony and things like that. Basically, our goal is that you don't know we exist because we've made it keep functioning. And then Nick, my... Chief Information Security Officer and also Deputy CIO, leads the Cybersecurity Services Team, which is helping protect all of our systems from cyber attacks and things like that. We've got standards we need to meet for CJIS, which is for criminal justice. We've got PCI stuff for credit cards. We've got HIPAA stuff or health stuff with the health department. Those are the primary regulatory areas, but we also have some best practice frameworks. So the NIST cybersecurity, the NIST privacy framework, and the CIS critical controls. We try and map against those so that we're performing better each year, or at least up to par in competing with all our levels on maintaining our cybersecurity. Let's see. That one, all right. All right. Current emerging areas or biggest areas are escalating costs around equipment purchasing and subscription costs. the technical equipment you've probably seen in the press that costs are going up substantially for all computer related stuff with the explosion of data centers, pre-buying and all of the chips and things like that that's driven up the cost for everything. There's not very many technical things that are not affected by by those rising costs of chips and things like that. And we have equipment that we maintain equipment anywhere from five to ten years but equipment ages, it needs to be replaced when it starts hitting the end of life, needs to be replaced when there are cybersecurity issues around the equipment that the manufacturer's not supporting anymore. We do mitigate some of that by isolating stuff, things like that, so that it's not as vulnerable, but both those costs are things that we see escalating and not in a very controlled way, so. We have application system upgrades that we work on. So every, even the hosted systems, we've got a lot of on-prem systems, we've got a lot of hosted systems. Anytime any of those are upgraded and things like that, we need to verify all the integration points. We need to make sure that everything functions properly. So we do test upgrades of those systems typically. tested in the test environment, make sure it functions as expected before we put it into production if we can. Cybersecurity threats are, and you've probably seen in the press, the AI is really taken over in that area, so escalating attacks, all driven by AI systems on the back end, so it's happening at very fast speeds. We do maintain a contract with a vendor that monitors our systems so that when we're not on-prem, then we still got somebody looking at stuff that's happening so that if something plagues it, they will get notified, they will reach out to us. If it's something we've predetermined how they should handle it. They will handle it right there, but they will reach out to us and let us know something unusual is happening and we need to respond to it. And then I have network services team is available 24-7, so somebody who is on call will respond to that and work to mitigate whatever's happening. A couple of major projects that are that are coming up are mentioned previously by HR and Finance. We're upgrading the Tyler ERP system. Our accounting system is central square right now. We're moving it into the Tyler ERP system, which is a hosted system. As I mentioned earlier, we've got a lot of integrations that we had going on. We're trying to make sure all of those integrations happen in the new system. And then our time and attendance system is moving from an on-prem chrono system to the hosted UKG system. Same company, they merged and they're moving everybody to their hosted system. That's a general trend for most companies is they're moving you from the on-prem system to the hosted system. Typically on-prem systems are upfront capital costs and the hosted systems are typically operational costs. They tell you that they're saving you money, but in reality, if you look at the five-year timeline on that, it's typically not saving you money. You're paying more money. We hold it out as long as we can, but at some point, they don't support the on-prem anymore. You have to move to their cloud system if you stay with that product, replace it, A vast majority of the new systems are all going to be hosted systems. That subscription plan is the direction that everybody's going. We've got a couple of core systems that are going to be end-of-life. Our storage system, which is on-prem, supports all our servers and things like that, that's going to end of life in a couple of years. And so we're going to be replacing that system when it no longer is supported by the manufacturer. And then in three years, the phone system that we use is going to be also end of life. So we're going to start re-envisioning how we're going to do the phone system in the new when we move. So right now, there's a lot of desk phones out there, and in the future, we might move away from that. Lastly, last couple of things, I guess, Microsoft. So we've had Exchange on premise for decades now, and our five-year um contract with microsoft is ending at the end of this year they have raised their on-prem costs substantially so now we'll be moving everybody to microsoft 365 because the uh it will save money even though it's costly it's going to be the low-cost way to go if we stayed on-prem it would cost us more So, and then the other thing is we do 24-7 support with my network services team, supporting dispatch center, police and fire outside hours, and then emergency support for other departments like landfill and library if something significant happened outside hours, but generally those are not, Emergency events that I'm gonna call teams in from their weekend to solve if it can wait till Monday, so Let's see what's on our slides here, okay, so As I said that the sand is going to be a major expense and we're going to need to buy that before the middle of a year and a half from now or two years from now, I guess it is. And then desktop and laptop replacements, we try to replace every five years. We've changed some of our replacement timelines over the last couple of years because Microsoft said, has stopped supporting Windows 10 and we had to get rid of all the laptops and desktops that did not support Windows 10. I won't say all of them because we still have some that are purpose-built and we isolate them as best we can, but that's a very small amount. Wasn't much changes in my budget requests, so... Just we support everybody in the city. We try and support them 24-7 like it says We do planned and Emergency maintenance make sure the 911 systems work in all the buildings and things like that because we've got the communications and stuff like that phone systems so and That basically covers everything oh That was on your slide. No wonder I was lost there. All right. For questions.

You did a good job of trying to work through it. I think we've all been there. Commissioner Peterson, any questions before we go to Commissioner Trenberg?

Yeah, real quick. Obviously, I have new guys who didn't help prepare the budget, and that's fine. Eagle View and then NVR. So Eagle View seems like a really aggressive price. Did we get the good guy deal on that? Why is it so cheap?

So this flight, so each time we do flights, we try and partner with other entities. So this flight, we are partnering with the Diversion and with West Fargo. And the Eagle View software will give us oblique views, aerial oblique views.

Perfect. Thank you. What's NVR? Educate me.

So that's just like a DVR, only a network video recorder. It records all our cameras. So the cameras that are operating on our buildings all record to a device on-prem and that records camera movement for 30 days, I think it is.

Thank you. And then you did touch on this as well, something that the commission to think about. I'm a big tech person. I like these things. I like investing in this sort of capital. What you touched on was the accelerating costs of widgets. That's not going to stop. It's going to get worse. Is there a rationale for over-investing in hardware such as laptops, the widgets that you need, over-investing in the near term, knowing there's finite dates where they become useless, right? They become, like you said, paperweights. And I don't know how much dollar analysis or cost analysis you've thrown into this, but is there a rationale for overspending or getting closer maybe to your request and make it defensible, and that's going to save us X in 2028. Does that question make sense, sir?

Mr. Yep, yep, totally. The problem with that question is you're, asking me whether laptop prices are gonna be substantially higher a year from now or two years from now than they are a year from now. And I believe that's probably true, but I also see that there's a bunch of big requests for chips for the data center stuff. They'll cancel the multi-hundred million dollar request and then all of a sudden, that changes the whole economics of the chips. So I am fine with over-investing if that's the direction that you guys would want us to do. I don't know that I'd say it's even over-investing other than investing. The flip side of that is there's an end of life on that and then we have a similar discussion five years from now and you tell me, Ron, why are you asking for a million this year when you only asked for 200,000 last year? And I say, well, because five years ago we bought a million dollars worth. And so there's some balancing there, as well as my team having enough time to deploy things, get people moved from their old system to their new system and stuff like that.

So are you comfortable with this budget?

I will live with whatever budget you guys decide I'm going to live with.

Best answer ever, Mr. Redlinger. I believe in you. Thank you. Thank you, Mr. Mayor.

Commissioner Turnberg and Commissioner Strand.

First of all, can you tell me what is the lifespan on the computer?

Typical, even... Yep, we try and replace every five years, basically. Do we replace on a schedule, or do we replace as needed? We try and replace on a schedule. We... generally probably meet that at 60% or something like that, and then the next 40% moves to the next year's schedule. So you'll see that we have lots of equipment that's probably six, seven years old, even though I tell you I replace every five years.

But we keep using it until it's no longer.

Of course we use it until, or if it dies, of course we replace it right away. Okay, thank you.

Commissioner Strand?

Thank you. Initially, an observation and a question maybe. We have, I came from the school district. Commissioner Gullixson came from the school board as well. Commissioner Peterson came from the county. And Mayor Beauchesne came from the state. All of these entities, best I can tell, have different parameters and rules and regs for document retention. records retention, how long we store things. For example, I want to say that when I arrived at the city about six months into it, I was informed that they purge our emails. And I had to have an extension through your department so my emails don't get purged along with the system purging. My sense of the state law is record retention for seven years, I want to say. And I want to say the school district, that was their implementation, was a seven-year retention of emails and communications. But I don't think we're there. I think we're way shorter than that. And I'm not sure how we mesh with state law or with our other entities. But I think that's a general topic to look at from, in a sense, of record retention and storage. And then in the same lane, we might have times have somebody ask us for proof of communications and documentation of emails and texts and so on. Then I think I found out at one point that our city issued cell phones don't get scoured or scrubbed for record retention issues. So that just general topic to me is a really important big topic. how long we can maintain things, how we compare with state law and other local entities, and how we can get the most comprehensive record retention as long as possible. That's just a general topic. Last thing I'll note here is, and Commissioner Peterson, I think you're maybe one of, somebody I'd consider the AI expert locally in an elected's capability, but every single conference I go to, There's somebody at the dais talking about AI. And I don't know, are we lagging your department, or are you waiting for permission from our department to go down that path of seeing what AI benefits could be to our city? Like, for example, rock-crunching jobs, work that doesn't get done easily that we maybe need to fill with positions. I just don't know where we're at with the future of AI and where we're aiming and where we need to go.

that's you wanted to talk before okay okay so I judge some quick notes if I miss something you need to speak up so email retention actually your emails you can keep as long as you want your emails what the email retention parameters are is six months. This is for our appliance that tracks all the emails that we have. But what you do with your own emails, we don't really limit or control. But we make sure that we keep copies of all the emails for the last six months so that we can search that really quickly and provide responses for FOIA requests and things like that. You could end up saving emails forever if you want. And we can help you and show you how to do that.

But so I get a request and your system goes back six months.

Yep. Well, how do they get the other three years?

You know, that's my question is...

If they wanted the other three years, we'd need to reach out to you and ask you what you had. And you have kept however much of that three years, you would need to find that.

I think this is an issue we need to address. You know, just in the bigger picture of... of how much we retain, how it retains, and let the system retain it for us so we're not on our shoulders individually if we mess up or not. Because those requirements are still out there to retain records.

And all of the subdivisions are meeting the state requirements, I believe. But I thought it was seven years. It is not seven years on emails.

It's a topic I would like us to visit.

so thank you commissioner peterson oh sorry i had a couple more from for john um commissioner strand uh cell phones if we wanted to manage all the cell phones we could do that the mdm contract would end up being very costly though um you know something i would guess in the neighbor of 150 000 a year or something like that But we could do that. That would get software installed. This is all on city-owned phones. If we move to a voucher system and people use their own phones, we would not be able to do that. But we could get MDM software for all the city-owned devices, install that on there, and then we'd have full control of the systems. So AI, we are... We're probably not leading the pack. We are looking at various things within our span of capabilities. We don't have infinite time, of course, so there are AI things going on. My hope is that things like the new ERP system will have AI things built in, and you won't have to do that with an outside system. We currently do most of our stuff with the co-pilot, Microsoft does a very good job of providing some walls around what data is available and it doesn't get out of our system or our control. Where other systems, you'd end up, that data that gets out into the AI system becomes knowledge that the AI system has and the proper queries or somebody's wrong query would provide some information to them that we may not want them to have. So I think that covered everything, hopefully, Commissioner Sharon? Okay. Commissioner Peterson.

Mr. Mayor, thank you. First, high praise. Commissioner Strand, thank you so much for thinking so highly of me regarding AI. I think it's overstated, but thank you. So this will be a topic I'll be digging into in the next year, not just coincidentally because of the portfolio, but I'm fascinated by this myself. I'll be talking about it when we get to transit as a side note, too, just to sort of get the gears going. The other issue is if we retain... X amount of years, it gets to be a data storage issue, right? We've got to have capacity to put it on something somewhere, and that gets to be prohibitively expensive. I typically kept as much... I think I'm going to replicate what you're doing. I'm going to try to deviate from that six months. I want to keep as much as I can because it's selfish. A lot of the things I do when I communicate with others is... intentional. It's like almost a note-keeping system for myself. Plus it shares, say I see a PDF that's prudent, I'd share it with Commissioner Strand and then you'd have that. I'd keep it on my station as well. So I'll be downloading that myself. But long story short, I will be very curious to find out what we can do to use artificial intelligence. I always said to extract the mundane. People are fearful that we're going after jobs and we're starting to create these voids in the human capital area. That's not what AI, it's not capable of doing that yet to any great degree. But extracting mundane tasks, things like permitting, scanning a plan set through, getting a building permit in 15 minutes, this is all possible. There's cost to this, but the swing is, right, the analysis of cost versus benefit. And if we can't find employees, that really gets to be a wonderful thing. So I'm on it, Commissioner. Thank you.

One other thing to add to your observation Commissioner Peterson, is that when we're responding to FOIA requests, if we're searching through six months of data, it takes a certain amount of time. If we're searching through six years of data, that response to that FOIA request is gonna take the software just that much longer because the amount of data it has to sift through. And it would sift through everything looking for things.

And if I could ask, and I understand if we don't want to talk about it publicly, but are you able to highlight the conversations that were had last week with National Guard and the relationship we have from a cybersecurity standpoint?

Yeah, sure.

I think just cheerlead, let everyone know the partnership we have.

Yep. Well, and it's a nebulous right now, so I'm not on the record for that partnership. But a year ago... A year ago, the CISO and I went to a National Guard national event called Cyber Shield, where they spend a week, actually the Guard members spend two weeks, and this is basically a real-time, live, cyber event going on to train them. There's people on their teams that are attacking a system. There's people on their team that are defending the systems, which established a good relationship between us and the local guard. And we have very significant cybersecurity presence with the guard systems here. And so we've begun conversations on how we're going to establish a working relationship, hopefully a MOU with the Guard at some point where we would be able to reach out to them and get some help from them if we have a cyber incident. Minnesota's one of three in the country where they have a statewide agreement. And as I understand, these are older agreements and not something that we'd be able to Established with the state at this level Now at least the way things are but they used the guard to help with the With the st. Paul breach that happened about two years ago now brought the guard in helped with I Went to some of the things helped with fixing their MDC's and some other things they had some specific missions the guard helped him on so So we're working with them to try and establish a working relationship.

Thank you.

Yep.

All right. We'll move on to facilities.

Good morning, Mayor, Commissioners. My name is Becky Majerus. I'm the Director of Facilities Management. So department overview. So first of all, facilities is often misunderstood and sometimes not understood at all. I didn't know what it was when I decided to go back to school, but turns out I really like it. So our department overview, we offer maintenance services and or some ancillary services to 32 facilities in the city of Fargo. We also manage 24-7, 365 emergency on call between our maintenance techs. um planned and emergency maintenance for facilities includes roof repairs carpentry painting janitorial for building systems that includes hvac plumbing electrical fire suppression systems generators and elevators and for grounds it also includes lawn lawn care snow removal and parking lot maintenance among many other things we are also an advisory resource for other departments and we provide project management for capital repairs, renovation, and construction. A section of our team manages the physical security system, adding and removing access, assigning badges, etc., and evaluates security vulnerabilities across the City of Fargo facilities. Five years ago, the Buildings and Grounds team consisted of seven maintenance attendants. The team has been transformed over the last five years to include the physical security division, a maintenance supervisor, a project manager, And my deepest apologies to Jeremy, a facilities manager. We reclassed that position a couple years ago. This has allowed us to grow from supporting 15 facilities in 2022 to the current 32. This structure is more capable of supporting a cohesive, proactive approach to facilities management rather than reactive emergency repairs. To better understand what facility management does, I've included our driving principles for our team. When we're deciding on a project or a task, we want any of our tasks to address one of these driving principles. If it's not, we need to rethink what we're doing. The first principle is to take care of the assets that are entrusted to us. Transitioning from a reactive to a proactive model helps to avoid many emergency repairs, which typically can cost three to five times higher than just maintaining your scheduled maintenance. The second principle is supporting the goals of the City of Fargo. This means not only supporting the overall goals of the City of Fargo and the Commission, but also the department specific goals across the organization. A third principle is making our facilities great environments for employees and visitors. A well main facility reduces complaints and service requests, which pull technicians from their scheduled tasks. At the same time, overall employee comfort is increased and absenteeism is reduced when you have a well maintained facility. And finally, we are preparing for the future. By tracking equipment conditions, we can avoid premature replacements, and we can extend asset lifespan by 20 to 25%. When I started four and a half years ago, I developed these key strategic initiatives, which we are working over the course of many years, as there really was no formal facility management program prior. The four strategic initiatives are to create a knowledge library of facility documents, policies, and processes. Our facility manager created a SharePoint page for us, which consolidates our documents to one online location. Those documents are constantly being added, removed, and updated. So it is a living library. Second initiative was to collect information to implement a computer maintenance management system to record, monitor, and forecast our asset lifecycle costs. I am really excited to report that our CMMS was successfully implemented and went live this spring. We are now collecting crucial data to develop into a consolidated facilities master plan. To give you an idea of the scope of this CMMS, we started by uploading 2,400 preventive maintenance tasks across the facilities that we manage. Our third initiative is to consolidate vendor service contracts and negotiate cost savings. We are working very closely with purchasing to identify these opportunities as our contracts come due for rebid. And fourth, we are collaborating with other divisions to develop best practices and centralize facility management services. As facility management absorbs the maintenance duties for various divisions, we work very closely with those divisions' leadership to understand how they have been operating and ensure we have the best outcomes going forward. Currently emerging issues, big one is retirement and recruiting. Across the industry, we're seeing high numbers of retirements of maintenance technicians. The skilled trades are struggling to recruit as a whole, and given the vast range of knowledge that these employees have collected over their careers, finding qualified replacements is difficult. A new approach, such as front-loading apprentice positions, may be necessary to train our next generation of technicians. Second is cost of goods and services, and that seems to be a general theme. Since COVID, inflation and supply chain issues have dramatically increased the cost of goods and services. And while our budgets are capped, the cost to maintain what we have continues to rise, and we need to get creative to meet our minimum maintenance standards. And third is our deferred capital replacements. Facility management is not a revenue producing department, and I acknowledge that fully. And the support that we provide is expensive because it's buildings and building systems. So when you consider building equipment replacement, deferred infrastructure replacements push the cost further into the future. In the interim, repair costs continue to rise, and the future replacement cost is only going to be more expensive as we defer these replacements. So personnel requests, I have no personnel requests. I did request an increase to our, excuse me, our overtime budget. We had a very, very minimal overtime budget for a department that is 24-7. So I did request, I think it was 24, Or was it 16? Sorry, it was 16. 16. Okay, so 16,000 to cover some of that. And then under capital requests, you'll see multiple capital requests that are sometimes specific to departments and sometimes are overall for the entire organization. As you review the summary of the general fund expense and look at our budget historicals, please keep in mind that we have nearly doubled the facilities that we support over the last five years. And this year, nearly all of that 7.89% increase is actually a reallocation from the fire department as we pull their maintenance tasks under the facilities department. So it's simply a reallocation and not necessarily a budget increase for the general fund. Aside from just the fund 101, we also manage the following budgets for Civic Center, Newman Outdoor Field, and also the Skyways that all have their own sources of funding.

I think that's it.

Yep.

Thank you, Becky. Commissioner Turnberg?

And then Commissioner Strand? Can you tell me, Becky, which City Hall parking lot you have a capital request in for to redo?

That is the south lot, which if the Civic Center project goes forward to become the convention center, that is something that they are looking at addressing. I simply put it out there because we've actually requested it the past few years. and those of you that used it while underground was not available probably noticed the shape that it's in.

But that could, once the convention center goes through, that could very well be a part of that.

Yes, that could be addressed.

Okay, and then do you, in that knowledge library, do you happen to have like a map of those 32 buildings, what is occupied and what we own and what we lease? Is there something that identifies those?

Most of our facilities are owned. There's only a couple that are leased. I don't, within the document library, we have all of the CAD drawings. So we have like the floor plans and things like that. We also have a summary of the facilities that we have, their locations, their square footage.

Or how many for sale?

We don't have.

Do we have any right now?

Of the 32 that we manage, we don't have any for sale. That would move further into probably the assessor's office as far as, or into administration as far as other properties that might be available for sale.

Thank you.

Commissioner Strand and Commissioner Peterson.

Becky, you alluded to and mentioned the facilities master plan. Where are we at in that process?

So there are several departmental facility master plans out there. They all come from a different direction. For example, the library has a master facility plan that kind of talks about their operations going forward and where they should be, what they should focus on operationally. PD did a master facility plan that talked about what facilities they need across the city going forward. As far as a facilities master plan for all of the buildings that we manage, We're using the information from the CMMS to build that master facility plan that really tells us, OK, when do we need to vacate buildings or look at relocating? When do we need to replace critical infrastructure pieces? And so with the CMMS being brand new, we're still collecting that information. But over the course of the next couple of years, I hope to be able to pull that all into a full facility master plan.

If I might continue, that will be a huge undertaking and a major, major accomplishment. Yes. And majorly needed. You alluded to $203,000 for City Hall security. What will that mean briefly, and how about all the other buildings security-wise?

Sure. So that really came from direction from the previous commission as far as security enhancements that were needed in this facility. Again, it's going to be up to this commission to decide what the appetite is. The $203,000 was specifically to add some sort of metal detection, weapons detection. What is not included in that $203,000 is the additional personnel requirements that would be needed in order to man those specific stations. So that is not a comprehensive cost, just because I don't include personnel with my piece. There is another piece on there that's the security system replacement and or upgrade. the current system that we have is several versions behind and going forward i would like to look at installing a system that is up to date current that is managing our badge systems and get it across the board uniform for all of our facilities mr peterson mr mayor thank you uh love that you're doing the master plan uh you said you've got two years between

today and the finality of it, what are we doing to proactively manage those emergency or potential emergency situations that may transpire to minimize our overall cost?

»» Sure. I have an amazing team of technicians. They are very aware of what is going on with each building. And so, number one, even prior to my starting, they already had a lot of things on preventative maintenance schedules. I rely very heavily on them right now to let me know where our equipment is at and what is the most critical to be replaced because they're monitoring those costs. Now that we're going to have those in CMMS, it'll be much easier to run the reports, find that data. We have all of the assets listed in that system with their ages. So again, right now I'm relying very heavily on my maintenance technicians. and very skilled group of people.

So your budgeting, if I may, Mr. Mayor? So your budget increased a little bit in terms of repairs and maintenance. You went up $150,000, well, $112,000. A, is that enough? And then B, if I look through your capital requests and based on the chart I'm reading the things that are funded and the things that you requested that aren't funded, To me, window tinting is one of the least important things on this entire list. My perspective, not anyone else's, maybe not even the Commission's. If I was to pick things like security over window tinting, I would pick security over window tinting 100 times out of 100. So in terms of allocating $100,000, I get it may be a bit of a pain to have our blinds shut and there's some HVAC costs. My guess is it's solar heat gain is the problem.

Part of it is solar heat gain. Another one is we have significant issues, especially on the east side. Our blinds are not even enough to keep the glare off of computers. So it's a work environment issue too. It is a work environment issue as well.

Our architects are just...

So, I will not speak to that. So, you know, I understand that. I will say that some of these requests, which you are aware of, we are looking at what we have this year that we might be able to accomplish this. We did get pricing back on the window tinting and it is significantly less than what was budgeted and the budget estimate we got received last year. So that is a positive. And then, again, security, that's really up to the commission and what that appetite is to install some sort of additional security in this building.

Okay. So wonderful. Thank you. Just so you know my mindset regarding deferred maintenance, it's a dirty word to me. It's as bad as any one of the swear words you can think of off the top of your head right now. So if you ever in the future can finagle more dollars out of this commission for deferred maintenance, try to do that. I'm an advocate for you because deferred maintenance costs exponentially less than waiting, right? And you'll hear other elected governing bodies say, well, deferred maintenance, it's cheaper to build a new thing than deferred the maintenance thing. Well, no, we should have not deferred the maintenance thing. We should have fixed the roof. That way you don't need a new whatever. So I'm thinking of the commission 20 years from now that won't have to have that dialogue, right? So wonderful. Thank you, Mr. Mayor. That's all I have.

Can I just quick? Probably one of the best examples of why my position exists is the dichotomy between the Civic Center and this building here. The Civic Center is a perfect example of deferred maintenance over and over and over. This building, they recognize the need for facility management. order to make this building that 50 years from now it doesn't look like the civic it looks as good as it possibly can for 50 years old and so that is why my job exists that's my purpose here with the city and i intend to do the best i can with that thank you with that we'll move on to inspections uh sean radnick and commissioner strand is the liaison for that department hello my name is sean radnick i'm the inspections director for the city i'm in inspections we

handle quite a few different things. We do, of course, all of the building inspections as well as the plan reviews and the permitting of all the buildings in the city. We do code enforcement, rental enforcement. We also do zoning enforcement and stuff, which we partner with the planning department on. Basically, the services we provide are we review construction plans, inspect all existing residential rentals of all types, inspect for junk and junk vehicles. It's part of the zoning enforcement. We issue certificate of occupancies for buildings. We do permit issuance for all building mechanical plumbing, electrical signs, and other areas. We do construction inspections, inspections for code requirements, zoning inspections, record retention. We work with a multitude of different people, from citizens to architects to engineers. We field all the complaints and things like that for these particular areas as well. Our organizational chart, we have 26 people in our department. Most of them are inspectors. We have me, the director, the assistant director, Three plan reviewers, two that are commercial plan reviewers or plan reviewer twos and one that is residential plan reviewer or plan reviewer one. The plan reviewer twos are pseudo management for our commercial inspectors, which we have three of and they're inspector twos. Our plan reviewer one is a pseudo management for our building inspectors, our residential building inspectors, which we have three and a half. I'm gonna explain the half. As well as the assistant director and myself, we take care of everything else, which includes all of the rental, code enforcement, HVAC, electrical, and plumbing inspectors. We have a half residential inspector, half rental inspector. So he helps out with that. He goes back and forth. So he helps with a lot of the rental properties and stuff that become kind of rough and tough for some of our guys, for some of our people. And then he also does residential inspections for, he has a certain area he looks at. So there's 26 of us, like I said, to our principal office associate and then our office associate three are the ones that kind of round us out. Current emerging issues, we always put community safety at our top priority. With the ever expanding community that we live in, our rules are ever expanding. We always have more inspections, plan reviews, more code enforcement, more rental. Everything is always expanding on us, so it's never a peaceful day in our department, basically, because we're always looking at something. There's always somebody complaining. As well as, you know, we try and operate very lean in our department. That's why we have inspectors that do more than one thing. Some of our code enforcement inspectors also help out with some of the boards and committees we have. Some of our rental inspectors do the same thing. We try and act as our own liaisons between other departments and stuff like that. We don't have somebody appointed to that position. It's just if you're interested in doing it and you're a code enforcement inspector, well, now you guys are going to be in charge of the code enforcement task force. And that's going to pull in a lot of different departments together and stuff. So we look at an efficiency path for our department. We try and use everything that we possibly can. to its fullest extent. And then if we need something additional, we'll ask for it. As you can see, we don't need anything right now. We have no personnel or capital expenses. Although we could use personnel, our personnel are efficient and we're lean and we know our jobs and we can get our things done quickly. I'm sure that there is going to be a big question about other services on ours because that is a very weird line item. Not on this particular one. But if you look at the more Condensed one, we have other services. What we do as part of our code enforcement rental and building inspections is called dangerous buildings. We also do junk abatements and we also do vehicle towings and some different things like that. All those actions are actually assessed back to the property, but we have to take them on as a line item within our budget. That's why it looks really erratic. Some years it's $2,000, another year it's $143,000. That's demolitions that we've had to take on and then assess back to the property taxes. That's junk abatements we've had to take on, securing of buildings, things like that. So that's a weird kind of erratic one. Other than that, as far as our expenses and stuff, they're pretty, we try and, like I said, run pretty lean and keep everything as low as possible and only ask for what we need. So with that, I'll stand for any questions. Thank you. Commissioner Strand?

Thank you. Sean, you know, Your department's gone through a real major transformation, best I can tell, especially with properties that are into severe blight and they're actually unsafe. And the city used to wrestle with them and were kind of paralyzed, I believe, until you finally got a handle on this. And you're coming back routinely to the commission with properties that need to be brought up to standard or addressed or demoed. And thank you for that. It's a really major need in the community. Here's... Here's what I want to know. You know, routinely, if we hear from people, the complaints are out of left field, like neighbors fighting with each other or not getting along with each other or encroaching on each other's properties. So many of these topics that come to us go to your department. What's your overview do you, recommendation, how do we get the citizens with those needs and complaints to the right people in your department and help them get the result they need?

So I would say, Commissioner Strand, at that point, putting us in contact with those people is the best way to do it. Either having them call the office directly or email our office directly, and then we can assign those to the appropriate inspectors and stuff so that they can have a conversation with that person. A lot of times as we're going through a conversation with a particular person on a particular issue, we find out a lot more information and we actually find out if there's a lot more going on or what some of the backstory is to it. So we're actually able to help the citizen better. It's easier for us to connect with them on a personal level. So in many instances, like we have a guy, several people, but okay, so we have an older gentleman, he's in his 90s right now. and he has issues with boats. He has two boats on his property, but he's also in such a state of declining health that he can't do much with them. So through our code enforcement activities, receiving complaints and talking with this gentleman, we're trying to figure out a best path forward for him. Well, he's decided now because he has to do certain things to put these boats on a proper parking surface, he's gonna get rid of the boats and he's actually looking at transitioning into you know, care outside of his home because he's got significant issues and stuff. But sometimes our department is kind of a bridge that helps them understand that they need additional help. So we've had a number of cases like that, especially when it comes to like hoarding situations and things like that. So our best communication is always with either the person that's complaining or the person that owns the property because we have to deal with the property and the property owners or tenants. not somebody who's coming onto the property from outside doing stuff. We don't have the authority to deal with those people. And that's more of a PD matter. It helps us address that and allow PD to understand what's going on.

My last thought and comment and maybe question is, you have 26 people in your department that are out engaging with the public. And sometimes they're in pretty unsavory situations. You know, I've wondered in the past, like, can we get them hand-me-down, like, body cams or something? How do you address the risks that your workers and people are put into out in the general public? I mean, I'm just curious, because it happens.

Yeah, and the way we address that is through collaboration with other inspectors. That's why it's very important for us to have a half inspector. Not that he's a half inspector, but he only does half the jobs half the time. It sounds really bad. Anyway, we go in teams. A lot of times we'll take additional people with. We'll alert the PD of what might be happening, say if we're doing towing. We posted some vehicles and it's two weeks later and now we're going to tow those vehicles. We will let PD know. And usually they either do a drive-by or if it's a known person to them, they'll come on site with us. And they'll stay on site with us. As far as body cams and stuff, we have looked into that. But a lot of our, let's say like rental stuff gets into very unique situations where we're there with authority to do certain things, but we can't show like a personal or their personal areas. where we can go in and look at certain things. We can take pictures of certain things. But as soon as we have, say, like a body-worn cam, then we're starting to show their personal areas, the areas that should be private. And it gets into a lot of laws like that. So we dance a line between that sometimes. So the body cams, we've looked into it. And it could be a good idea in some instances. in some instances not to. But as it is, we try and flag certain areas if it's gonna be a problem and bring additional inspectors or ask for PD support on it. So.

Any other questions? Thank you, Sean. With that, we'll go to our final discussion today with planning and social services. commissioner gullickson is the liaison to the planning department and i'll just preface with we're going to be spending a lot of time with the planning staff over the next couple months as we look at the land development code incentives growth plan discussions to get us up on speed so recognize that as we have questions and what you know is needed today versus what will be ongoing especially over the next month and two so thank you nicole

Thank you, Mayor, and good afternoon, I guess almost. And so I also have with us our Assistant Director, Mark Williams, and as Mayor mentioned, absolutely, I might suggest in one of the informational meetings that we just do a whole department overview, if you will, on some of the things, because much of what we do is tied to adopted strategies, adopted plans that are vocalized and community driven as well as previous commission driven and so obviously there are big picture plans over 10 to 20 year visions and implementation plans and so we're just part of that system as it's moving forward so what we do kind of when we talk about our core mission and core why we exist It can be broken down into master planning, permitting, grant administration, and the implementation of those strategic plans that I mentioned. 80% of our time is in that permitting business, if you will, so we are probably the only department that prioritizes site plan permitting. All the other departments, this is a generalization, is doing it on top of other things, on top of inspections, on top of their other core to core major job. And so our office kind of facilitates when things are coming in through entitlements, land entitlements, And that is very much dictated by the legal system, the Century Code, and federal laws, if you will. So property rights very much is a first and foremost component as part of the public process in that system. And so how are we governed? We're governed by the Planning Commission. So these are all boards that the mayor and the commission appoint, including the Planning Commission, the Board of Adjustment, Renaissance Zone Authority, and the Historic Preservation, as well as the City Commission itself. These are advisory committees. You might be part of, recall some of the conversations, especially Commissioner Strand and Commissioner Turnberg, We had many other boards and commissions that we used to oversee, but the ones that are legally mandated are the four that you see sitting here. Our work is divided into four divisions, departments, kind of like Sean. We split our people into overlapping duties, and we have 14 people on staff. As you will see in Jill's work, that's the first time I've seen the percentage of shortage. We're 30% understaffed. and during the pandemic we probably lost 50 of our staff and so we have had high turnover and are more stable than we are now you'll hear me talk a little bit about about this as well i've been the director for eight years mark came over from public works but was with the city how long have you been with the city uh 24 years, I've been almost 20 years, and so you do have some of the most long-term tenured staff as well. The rest of our planning staff, other than Christy Silskar, Albert Gilson, our office manager, and Jasmine Markison, I would consider newer staff. And so current planning, which is like the 80% of our workload, we have Donald Kress leading that, Megan in the urban, Megan Elsag in the urban development division, and then HUD administration, that's the grant work that we're, given by the federal government. And then the long-range planning, you'll see three people there, and that's really just led by Kim Citrowski. And Mark and I probably, the other two people are Mark and I. The rest of the staff are your case planners that you'll see at the planning commission leading each of those cases. So this is how we're organized. And it's a very, I would call, even though it looks structured here, it's somewhat loose, if you will. And so Chelsea Loverson, Luke Warman, Elena Espeth, and Megan Allshug, all split duties, if you will, between the different boards that we support, as well as the day-to-day intake process. The Christy Silskar and Jasmine Markison lead our HUD administration. They are, I will say, veteran HUD administrators, been doing HUD administration. They're some of the most national experts, trained by Monica Graber, who is, again, one of our long-term members. And so it is really, if you compare us to other cities across the state who are really struggling with regulations and administration of regulations, I would say our staffing issues are related to succession planning, making sure folks are ready to take future seats, and training. So a lot of my time is spent training. And Mark's staff, Mark and Donald Kress, he's, I should say, one of those capped, as you talked to Jill's perspective, are in terms of termed out, if you will, in the 11 steps systems. Donald's one of those capped out staff members. And so Donald spends a lot of his time training myself, Megan, Kim, as we train the next incoming group of planners. One of our issues is NDSU doesn't have a planning school. And so if you think about planners, we cross-train, if you will, into geography, demography, legal, of finance, land use law, and I'll say land use law is our most important thing and why Mark and I exist. We have only three, myself, Donald, and Mark, that are actually educated planners through planning school certified programs. I'm your only certified planner, one of few in the state. And so it is a resource that's really hard to find in this region. And so much of that recruitment is out of state or out of the city. And so that's something to think about as we bring in more folks. So our key functions really work. I'll speak a little bit about this tonight and again a whole informational meeting about how we work with other departments. We're one of your few departments that's external facing as well as internal facing. We support Mike Redlinger and Brenda Derrig and finance quite a bit in big picture strategy work, working with both community development and economic development. I'd be remiss to say in the last eight years we've transitioned how we do community development in quite some way. And we've really had to minimize that work to be basically only HUD administration. And so you're probably, maybe if you've been following the planning department over the years, over the decades, very much more out into the community working with nonprofits and community members, neighborhood level details. And we've had to really retract some of those things to really just focus on HUD administration because it's become so complex. Again, it's very much a legal process and set by state and federal laws, and that gives us the authority to do zoning. If we didn't have that authority, we wouldn't be doing zoning. And we do, all of our strategies, strategic plans are built on robust neighborhood involvement that is quite in-depth. Mark started a, when he came back over from Public Works, we developed our own, if you will, capital improvement plan And so this is a list of those. When we did go 2030 and 2011, our previous comprehensive plan hadn't been developed since 1969. And then our growth plan in 2024 that was just adopted, the previous plan was in 2007, pre-09 floods. So a lot has changed. And so the point of this is we invest over the last decade into these strategic plans, how to keep them updated and current with things as they transition and as community needs happen or as other departments' needs happen. We work a lot with the utilities, engineering, transportation to integrate into these strategic plans, if you will. And so much of our budget is related to the support to make those plans. So some emerging issues that I see forthcoming or that we're working on right now and that we are somewhat staffed and resourced for includes the new land development code, as you've heard about, I know. And I should say most cities, this is about a three to four year process. We've been trying to do it in a year and a half. we might not meet that year and a half, and so it might take a little bit more. It's gonna be hard consensus building as we move forward. The growth plan implementation, I'll talk about more tonight, incentive policy updates. The HUD administration, we have two projects. So as we think through, most of our work is built on five-year, 10-year increments. So to change these plans or to change things, takes time. So a year ago, the City Commission approved an action plan that includes two new HUD projects. One is public infrastructure program, where we're doing alley paving. We'll be in our core neighborhoods, in our low-mod income neighborhoods, and so we'll be kicking off Madison neighborhood um alley paving project and then the other is using home funds for tenant-based rental assistance as opposed to new construction and i can go into depth on on why that is and then much of mark's work over the last year has been in parking operations as we transition parking operators so we do manage the downtown parking, public parking. And as discussed, technology is a huge need. GIS matching our parcel data with our assessor's data as we try to talk about the ROI related to incentives is a huge need. You'll hear more about that over the coming. And then really as administration needs more support for Things like convention centers or other things, sometimes that hits our way. And so our department helps support other departments. Lawsuits, things like that hit our department. So my big thing in summary is we don't really have a lot of white space, if you will, in our department. It just really takes one illness, one big project to kind of take us off path. And that's probably the main thing that's changed over the last couple years. With that, I'll stop here before we go into social service funds, because that's a whole other topic.

Commissioner Gullickson, any questions? Commissioner Turnberg?

So where does the push cart issue fit into what department of the department?

Great question. I would say that's part of the ongoing operations for downtown planning. So it's in our work plan for this year.

And does that, in all seriousness, is your department handling the new transition of how we handle parades? covering them and paying for them or who is doing that?

Primarily in... I get confused with the push carts and... Yeah, no, downtown issues as a whole, we could do a whole onboarding on downtown. I think one of the... I'll come back to that question, but as it highlights, one of the struggles our office has is we make these strategic plans that have a lot of public input but then the implementation horsepower that takes. And so unfortunately what we try to do is unmarry from those plans because it's everybody's plan, not just the planning department's plan. And so as we go into operations, trying to find those partners to do the work to implement the things as part of the transition plan. So downtown planning as a whole is a tricky subject. But I would say from the push carts, that very much is in our work plan to update Chapter 18. It has been a pain in our side for quite some time, for decades. And then I don't know, Brenda, if you want to talk about the other item.

The other item you would have talked about is the event permitting is what we've been talking. And that's somewhat been led through our office, but really between PD and engineering, they've kind of been steering the conversations together.

Well, the trick gets, and maybe not to push back on Commissioner Peterson, but the trick really becomes when you have multi-departments overlapping and touching different ordinances, and that's where we really need city administration support and assistance over time, because we're all looking for direction, and we're all looking for You know, we can self-lead ourselves and self-collaborate with the commissioners, of course. But when everybody's got balls moving in the air, we're squeezing other priorities. And so I constantly have to come back to, is it mandated? You know, to set our priorities, is it mandated? Do we have a deadline? And is their funding at risk? And then who is being harmed or hurt? And that's how we spend our time.

Commissioner Strand, then Peterson.

Thank you. I'll just acknowledge the department and the role these folks play in our downtown discussions. We meet monthly with a whole bunch of stakeholders. And so much gets handled and addressed and vetted in those downtown discussions. People have no idea how far reaching those topics are. And thank you for your work on that. Here's my question. Nicole, I think you said you have 30% under staff positioning. You're short 30% in your department. And yet you're losing, not losing, but we've seen a lot of folks transition to our neighbors, like to West Fargo. Morehead. I'm not going to say they're cannibalizing our staff, but we're losing really key players. How do we address that? How do we keep your folks in their departments? What are our biggest ways to bolster up your department and not only fill the vacancies, but keep the ones you have there so that our neighbors don't hire them away after you've done such a good job preparing them for the world out there?

Great question. I think I would say we've lost two to Hennepin County as well. And I think it's a nature of emerging professionals and their transient nature. And as part of giving them those hopes and dreams and, and goals that they can attain, attain. And it's a tricky subject that I look forward to working with your team and HR on more fully.

Mr. Peterson.

Thank you, Mr. Mayor. Outsider looking in, I saw your department as a catch-all. So when a thing would happen, they'd throw the thing at you and say, figure the thing out. I think that's how you have increased retention. I think you get back to doing what you're supposed to be doing and not all the things. That's anecdotal side note. You touched on the parking issue. I noticed, I heard you say you're still going to be involved in parking, or did I mishear you? And if that's the case, you are.

Yes, we're fully involved in parking, and I would say Mark is most involved in parking.

So whether he likes it or not, probably. And I was actually hoping that wasn't the case, which is why I see a zero in your allocation here, went from $60,000 to zero. I was hoping we were housekeeping that into another group, but that's not the case?

Funding, it is. So I'll let, maybe you are.

Parking is actually a special revenue fund. So all of the parking operations is in 200 level fund, 240. We'll talk about that on Wednesday. Wednesday. Yeah.

Yeah, so there's the staffing workhorse, and then there's the financial piece.

So this was a housekeeping thing, regarding bookkeeping, because it was obviously a 69.

So what line item are you looking at? Yes, parking enforcement, yes.

Yep.

The expense used to go to their account. So as one of the suggestions of the consultant that we hired, and I don't disagree, they said, why don't you keep all your parking stuff in one spot, which is true. We used to keep the parking fine revenue in the general fund. Well, that didn't really make sense. It should go with the parking. So we tried to combine all the parking revenue expenses for the budget into the 1-240 account.

I like that a great deal.

To help clarify that, $60,000, like what Susan's saying, when we did our parking study and onboarded our new parking manager, the idea was consolidating all these funds. And that fund actually paid for on-street enforcement while there was a parking enforcement fund that paid for the facilities in 241 account. So we're combining those. Okay.

That's what I'm saying.

Okay. Because we do on-street and off-street enforcement.

Okay. Thank you. Thank you, Mr. Mayor. Great. Any other questions? I would all add in just some concepts around planners or the planning department as I've learned more about your work and previously had worked with you all as a citizen. I think part of it too is as we do things like updating the land development code and talking to what Commissioner Peterson talked about is really focusing the work. And, you know, again, we're operating off a 30-year-old LDC, so there's a lot of, I don't know if monotonous is the right word, but it's not what planners go into their work to do, right? They're dreamers, they're creators, they're, you know. So I think the more that we can take off that plate by updating the code, that hopefully allows you to maintain those plans and help us with those community side of things as well. Can you talk also to us about, with our, I know there was some significant changes with the census. Is it just specific to Fargo, our relationship with the federal government, or is it the whole metro area in terms of just some of the things, whether it's dollars that we receive or how the federal government looks at us as a community. Again, is that a Fargo thing, metro, and then what does that mean?

I think it's the Council of Government's MSA. I don't know, Michael, or it's our, as our population, it's a metro, it's a MSA capacity. It's most affected at transit and metro cog. The planning department isn't as affected, nor is HUD as affected yet, but I don't know if you want to talk to.

That's a great summary, and we are tracking that with MetroCOG, so just for the commission's benefit, just know that we're tracking that at the staff level, but then also the policy board will have some conversations about that and the implications, not just next year, but two years, three years, four years down the road, but hard to believe we're going to be right on the cusp of another census process here in 2030 as well, so we'll be right there, but Nicole's summary is very good.

So the next category, I try to separate these on the agenda because not all things on social service and allocation hit the planning department any longer. So don't look at the label at the top. And so in your packet, you'll see in your binder social service allocation. And that has migrated over the decades quite some time. And over the last, I would say, eight years as we renovated our HUD administration, we also cleaned house a bit in the social service allocation funds and worked with the previous commission as part of that. And so the two things I wanna most, in your report you'll see kind of the historic use of these funds and where we sit today. The main things I wanna bring to your attention this year is at the 2026 budget, so last year at this time, We did make the change to remove the snow removal program. So we used to do snow removal assistance for those that income qualified. And it's roughly maybe around 30 folks a year or so. And there's a number of different elements related to that that we could go into detail. And then the other is what I would call a current policy on partnerships with non-government organizations. And so you'll see line items in the budget related to the Arts Partnership, the Indigenous Association, the Community Land Trust. And the policy there is really You can think of these organizations a fee in lieu almost. They're providing that support that the city staff can't provide. And so if we want these entities or programs in our community, they really do need a metro-wide match. I know like the Arts Partnership matches in combination with two other cities. And it's a metro-wide approach. Same with Indigenous Association and others. So I do know those are probably up for discussion. I just want to bring those to your attention. They've always been somewhat controversial. So I just bring that up at this point.

Nicole, do you want to advance the slides a bit? There is a separate section for social services. This is the end of your planning. Oh, sorry. So then there's kind of the history of... Thank you.

So probably the the biggest line items are the support with a downtown community partnership We used to have a city department Downtown planner we no longer have that downtown planner and instead really rely on rocky Schneider to as the DCP Director to help manage the day-to-day economic development kind of management of downtown and then Yeah, and I'll let you read the rest. But I know you're, I don't want to go over, we're short on time, but I'm glad to talk through. And it's hard to look at the five-year history because you've got some CARES and COVID money kind of in there a little bit. So I'm glad to provide more, any questions that you have on that.

Commissioner Peterson. Thank you, Mr. Mayor. So when it comes to these situations or groups like this, I always ask for more data. My logic is no more complex than how do we know they need $210,000, right? How do we know they need 90, 30, 45 without the data of their books? How can I justify spending a dollar on any of these, whether we agree with it or not? So my question to the team leaders would be, prior to this or sometime in the near future, we've got technically until September, but October or whatever, I need more data to understand their finances. That's the only way I'd support any. And I'm not even going to talk about their mission. It could be for anything. It could be for giving money to a CHAD fund. I'd need data to support that because that to me makes sense. So whatever data you have that can justify this investment, please share that with me. And that's inclusive of the boards, you know, so the members of the boards, the decision makers, and then the finances behind that, please. Thank you.

Commissioner Turberg. Thank you, Mayor. Didn't we vote to end our the Arts Partnership and Indigenous Association, and then also the Human Rights Commission, would that have been included in here as well? And why do we have money put aside for the Arts Partnership and Indigenous Association when we avoided those committees?

Sure, so I think they're different than the commission work. So this was work outside the commission work, and then as a historical work with those commissions, Yeah, I'm not explaining this very well, so I apologize. I'm sure you guys are all hungry, so I wouldn't let you guys go. So I'll try to do a short and then maybe offline or as a separate informational meeting if we want to talk about this in particular. I'd be glad to do it. And I'm glad to stay as long as you guys want today. And so, yeah, so all of these have probably like a 15-year kind of trajectory history of how they got to be where they're at. And so, yes, you're correct. The work of the Native American Commission was ended and the work of the Arts and Culture Commission was put on hold. Fargo Youth Initiative was transitioned. And so the work of those boards, the community work and the staff support and the budget of those were all zeroed out. These sit outside the commissions of those works.

So is this basically us doing charity to these different organizations?

It's supporting their, I mean, to some degree, it's supporting their operations to work metro-wide. And so recognizing they're doing work that we used to do on behalf of the city staff and on behalf of the city work. And some of them, like the Arts Partnership, goes all the way back to Mayor Furness era. And so there's reasons for each of these requests.

If I can quick jump in to your first question of what you're seeing. So as you can see on 2026, the Arts Partnership was approved. with the 2026 budget. And so there's a difference between that board work that we've been working on and that community aspect. And so those funds have been carried into the 2027 budget.

But isn't this that almost the same as what we were doing with Juneteenth and Martin Luther King Day where we stopped funding?

No, this is a little different than that. Yeah, so you're correct. We did stop funding that work. That stuff has all been zeroed out. This is, the arts partnership is specifically to the Tri-Cities Metro grant program. So they do a arts organizations granting program that West Fargo and Moorhead and Fargo pay into. And then they offer grants to arts organizations. So this is our partnership. I'm not doing a good job explaining it, but that's our contribution. And I don't know if Commissioner Strand, you probably have longer history with it. And so that's outside the work that the Arts and Culture Commission did. The Arts Partnership and the fund here has been in play, I guess, for 30 years. Yeah, 15 to 30 years this has been an allocation to the Arts Partnership.

I would suggest that we take a deeper look at that. I was under the impression that with getting rid of the committees, we're We're saying that that's not a core city function. That's something that can be handled outside of city government. So I would just like us to take a closer look at that money.

Any other questions? Commissioner Peterson.

And one more thought regarding the data gathering. It's also the contribution weight. with our friends in Horace turning into Valley City. We need to start, I would suggest that on a myriad of different discussion topics, we need to start bringing them into the fold. And if they don't participate financially, which I'm guessing they probably won't in any which way or form, at least we're having the open dialogue saying we want you to participate so that 20 years from now they can say, well, they've been asking us for 20 years. We see a benefit. You know, There should be a benefit to these that we can justify, right? So let's pretend we continue on these, even after the closer look. It's time to start engaging our neighbors to pay their fair share. And I will stop at that. I think you all know what I mean, thank you.

Mr. Turnburg?

Well, and I think it's also important to remember that Fargo residents carry the load on so many different items. The airports, most of public health, there's so many things that only Fargo residents pay for. I think it's okay if we're not giving just because the other people are, because we do a lot more in many different areas than the surrounding cities.

Thank you. Before I have any closing comments, Mr. Redlinger, Thompson, Derrick, anything?

Not a lot to add. We'll see you for day two tomorrow. Thank you for all the time today. Again, we understand it's a significant amount of time, but just as we were doing today, taking good notes of questions you have. If other questions pop in your head tonight as you're thinking about this, please send our way, and we will schedule some follow-up meetings. But please know that this is exactly what we were hoping for in terms of informal dialogue.

to be able to get questions to the table earlier rather than later in our process so thank you for your time anything else all right with that again yes we'll be at nine o'clock tomorrow um i know it's uh been a long morning but appreciate uh department leaders and administrative support in this i think the more information we have the more information the public has helps us make good decisions so appreciate your time and endurance and uh we'll see each other each other later this afternoon for our commission meeting but then again tomorrow morning thank you