Many things are happening in our community. I had the pleasure as mayor to be invited by the U.S. Navy Seals to do a tandem jump. The city looks totally different when you jump out of a perfectly safe airplane at 14,000 feet. I had a great view from that vantage point, but I realized that I'd better stick to my job as mayor. I don't look too good doing a hundred miles an hour and I really didn't look like Tom Cruise.
CITY HALL
This year we finished the Fargo City Hall. It is a 150,000-square-foot facility that houses about 215 employees onsite and it is flood-proof. It opened in September 2018 and is innovative, efficient and future-focused and truly a game changer for our city; but that is not all we did.
WATER TREATMENT
Citizens of this community voted for a tax in 2006 that worked on our utilities and with that tax we made a long-term plan concerning our water. We completed a $110 million construction project to treat the metro’s water, which took three-and-a-half years to finish. We also had the forethought to be able to be able to meet West Fargo’s water needs as well. We went from treating about 30 million gallons to now 45 million gallons a day and that's fantastic.
POLICE
Chief Todd came to me and said he needed a new police headquarters, so we looked at an existing building we could repurpose to save money and be more efficient. The new facility is near Central Garage so vehicles are close by for maintenance. This made the department more efficient. All of the cars are indoors now so officers do not have to hop into a cold car. Their computers stay nice and warm and they are ready to go immediately. There are a total of 212 employees working there now and the final move, which will be later this year, will get them all under one roof.
THE NDSU BISON
The other thing Fargo has are the Bison, the seven-time national champions. The mayor of Frisco, Texas told me to keep coming back because Bison fans are worth $9 million to his community each year.
FLOOD PROTECTION
As for flood protection, I want to express my gratitude to former Moorhead Mayor Del Rae Williams for her help on the FM Diversion project. Now we have a DNR permit and that is fantastic. A task force was formed by Governors Burgum and Dayton. We had members from upstream and downstream and representatives from the Minnesota DNR who worked with us on this. The citizens of Fargo and Cass County voted for a sales tax that the Chamber helped us out with. Where else would you have a community vote for a 50-year tax? Unbelievable. We need to work with our legislators and Governor Burgum to get the funding needed for this project. If you delay a project, what will happen? The costs go up. In the two year delay for this project, costs went up $150 million. If we can get this built in six-and-a-half years, that alone will be a tremendous cost saver. The new cost share for the project is an additional $300 million from the state, $300 million from federal partners and $86 million from Minnesota. If everyone puts in, we will have this fully-funded and we will not need any tax assessments.
There have been substantial efforts for in town flood protection with over 20 miles of floodwalls and levees built since 2009. But we are not fully safe without the Diversion. We would still need 100 million sandbags if we flooded at this time and we still have about 20 more miles of areas that we would have to do something to protect our city. With the Diversion, many people forget we have $50 million to $60 million dollars worth of flood insurance in this community. The Diversion is the only thing that will get rid of that.
RESPONDING TO GROWTH
We are on the radar and people around the country are watching the city of Fargo. In 2017 Bloomberg identified Fargo as a diversified engine of regional growth and as the fastest growing Midwest community from 2010 to 2017. I'd like you to think about that for a moment. In this metro area we have 235,000 people and we are projected to go up to 330,000 people in the next 20 years. That means 5,000 people every year are going to move into this community. In order to do that we have to continue to do things good for our economy.
BUILDING PERMITS
We issued $4.4 billion in construction permits in the last 10 years. There was a spike in 2014 when Sanford built their new hospital. We used to run around $200 million a year, we are now going to go about $500 million a year in construction permits and thanks to Block 9, we pushed over $500 million this year.
RESPONDING TO OPIOID CRISIS
We organized the Mayor’s Blue Ribbon Panel on Addiction. All the Mayors helped out in this and we are proud to announce that we have a 50% decrease in prescriptions for opioids since then. Our two largest medical providers, Essentia and Sanford, have worked very hard to help people quit writing unnecessary prescriptions for opioids. There has been a huge reduction in deaths from opioids and we have about 15 different initiatives we have done and because of this. Commissioner John Strand went out to the National League of Cities this year and talked about the social efforts. One of the things we changed is a mobile outreach program, so if somebody is having problems and needs a ride to a detox center or is having difficulties with their life, we can send out this mobile group to get to give them assistance. That helps in decreasing the number of police, fire and EMS trips that we have to send out which allows them to go help out in other areas.
PIONEERING TOGETHER
When we combine the efforts of Fargo, West Fargo, Moorhead and Dilworth, the people, businesses and civic organizations, we can achieve even greater things than what has happened in other, larger cities. I think we need to think as a metro and compete as a metro, not with each other. We are in constant competition with other cities and we need to think big. Here are some things I think we can and should work together on. We have some buildings for sale, including Mid America Steel, the former police station and the former public health building. There are parking lots downtown that could be developed. West Fargo, Dilworth and Moorhead also have sites that people would love to have you look at. Let's look at different ways that we can develop and grow this community.
PERFORMING ARTS CENTER
We can have something as nice as the Washington Pavilion in Sioux Falls (South Dakota). We need to do this this. This area is North Dakota's entertainment capital and we need to continue offering and expanding opportunities for the culture of the metro. Arts, culture and entertainment all contribute to people choosing to live here and we are competing against national competitors. The Performing Arts Committee is working on site options, design, planning and operation of this facility. We view this as a private-public partnership and we need to figure this out and this is one of the goals of our team.
Another area our team is working on this year is the FARGODOME expansion which includes 50,000 square feet of convention space. I believe there is a need for convention space in this community and I believe it belongs at the FARGODOME. If you combine that with the SHAC (Sanford Health Athletic Complex) and the additional 50,000 square feet, we can have a variety of different people come in to the community and do their conventions. The FARGODOME is publicly-owned and we want to bolster its trajectory and not offer a competing facility. The other issue we have to remember is the FARGODOME is part of the reason we're in the black because every time we go for a championship, so that really is a nebulous thing although many of us believe the Bison will be there every year but we still need to have a different way.
CIVIC PLAZA
The other thing going on in the community is the city plaza and Downtown Focus. We just completed the downtown study of what's going to happen in the community and now that City Hall is complete, we want to focus on the city plaza. That should be one of the front yard experiences downtown. The program will encourage visitors throughout the region.
RED RIVER VALLEY WATER SUPPLY PROJECT
Another area we need to talk about is the Red River Valley Water Supply. We think that if we ever got to a drought it would be a $25 billion catastrophe so we're going to continue to work on that.
DEVELOPING TALENT
We need to offer internships in every sector to anybody over 16 years of age and we need more females in the STEM fields. Zoe Bundy gave a presentation to the Greater Fargo Moorhead Economic Development Corporation and she received a standing ovation. This young teenager talked about getting young women into science areas. We need to retain the youth of this community. We have One Million Cups, TEDx and we need to have a community that is capable of keeping them. At NDSU, 79% of the native North Dakotan graduates stay here if after college but only 38 percent of the out-of-state grads stay in this community. We are competing with Minneapolis, Chicago and Denver. Ladies and gentleman, we are educating them and fostering their growth and we need to double our efforts to keep them here. We also support the Chamber’s Feeding the Future initiative and believe a workforce academy belongs in this Metro.
ECONOMIC GROWTH
Through our TIF efforts, we have seen a $360 million increase in property value in the TIF district, from $10 million to $374 million. We have also seen the collective property value of downtown Fargo increase by $450 million and with Block 9 another $100 million. Without these efforts, homeowners would be seeing a 4% increase in their property taxes just to offset the growth of the city, so incentives do work.
TOGETHER, LET'S DO FAR MORE
I challenge each of my fellow mayors and members of this audience to harness the energy that we have and become the EEME Epicenter of the Upper Midwest (that is education, entertainment, medical and economic). Fargo, Moorhead, West Fargo and Dilworth is America’s next great metro. We have the diversity, creativity and the economic growth. I'm excited to work with Chad Olson and equally excited to welcome Bernie Dardis and Johnathan Judd on this team of mayors. You know that we do great things together but together we can do far more. Thank you.