The Fargo City Commission met on Monday, March 3, 2025, at 5:00 PM in the Commission Chambers. The meeting included the launch of a departmental spotlight series, a Rising Star award, consent agenda approvals, multiple public hearings, presentations from Gate City Bank and Sanford Ambulance, policy discussions on downtown code enforcement, camping resolution, lead service line replacements, and a heated debate on overtime management. The meeting adjourned at 6:38 PM.
Call the meeting to order. But again, with Pledge of Allegiance, I invite you to join us. Roll call. Cole Peck here. Pepcorn? Here. Strand? Here. Turnberg here. Mahoney? Here. We're gonna do a little something a little different tonight. This evening we are launching an ongoing effort to showcase and highlight each of our city's departments and everything they do to keep our city running smoothly. No matter the season, we have city employees serving our residents 24 7, 365 days a year. Our departments and our staff are truly exceptional, and we will be taking time at the beginning of our commission meetings to honor them for their dedication, hard work, and customer service that makes local government work for all of us. We look forward to sharing this information with our community and continue to show the commitment to our going above and beyond for our residents. Tonight we're highlighting the water department that operates the Fargo's Regional Water Department or Water Treatment Plant, which serves residents of Fargo, West Fargo, and Cass Rural Water District. The staff at the water treatment plant monitor our water quality around the clock, ensure it's pure and safe to drink. We're monitoring the cost daily, each each chemical and each treatment plant, which is more favorable to treat. So whichever is most suitable to treat uh from a cost and quality, that's what we choose to do. So we have two treatment plants, uh, an older lime softening plant that can produce roughly 30 million gallons per day, and then we have a newer membrane plant that can produce 15 million gallons per day. A typical average usage in the winter time in the city of Fargo is right around 14 or 15 million gallons per day, and then the summer it almost doubles. We've seen peak flow is up to uh 32, 33 million gallons per day. So attributed to that is a lot of lawn watering. It really increases or doubles the demand on the treatment plant in the summertime. Some of the things you might not think about that impacts the water in the city of Fargo. If there's a heavy rain, there is dams and reservoirs in the state, the snow melt, the spring flooding that brings a lot of turbidity or cloudiness of the water. And then with seasons, with the river freezing over, we can run into frazzle ice. We have a lot of things that we have to watch out for. One thing really important to us is uh drought supply, Red River Valley water supply project. So we recently completed a pumping station that will lift water out of the Cheyenne River, and it'll run by open channel all the way to water treatment plant. In Fargo, we have to have the plant operated 24-7 because sometimes we're making 20, 30, 40 changes a day because the river in Fargo can change really fast, and we really strive to provide consistent water quality. We have online instrumentations and operators constantly looking at water quality trends, the flows that are going out of the plant, the chemicals that we're using. Our river is very challenging, and we do have to make a lot of changes throughout the day. So in the city of Fargo, you know, we do have 11 water towers, and we have a computer model of the entire water system, which has all of the pipes, all the water towers, our ground storage reservoir in it. In a typical water tower, when you design them, you can think of it as having a couple different sections in the water tower. One of the sections is used for fire protection. If there's a fire in town, there's water that's readily available to the hydrants in the city. There's another section in the water tower that's for equalization storage. So like in the morning when everybody's using the water, there's a really big demand on the water system. And then there's one other section in the water tower that's kind of reserve or emergency storage also. One of the cool things about working in Fargo is we we work with several other departments. We we work, I think, very well as a as a team together in getting projects done. So it's really important. So we deliver really good projects for our citizens. As we spotlight achievements of our city departments, we're instituting a new honor of our city employees called the Fargo Rising Star Award. In each department, the award will go to an employee who has been with the city of Fargo for seven years or less and has gone above and beyond in their service to the community. Tonight we'll be saw our very first Fargo Rising Star Award. The recipient was chosen by the department leadership with the water treatment plant. This award goes to Matt Hager.