The Fargo City Commission met on Monday, April 14, 2025, at 5:00 PM in the Commission Chambers. The meeting lasted until 6:32 PM and covered a range of items including consent agenda approvals, public hearings on zoning, alcohol licenses, tax increment financing, a research update on a full-time mayor and additional commissioners, and adoption of two ordinances addressing public safety and alcohol restrictions. The meeting featured a special recognition of the Solid Waste Department and the presentation of the Fargo Rising Star Award to Dustin Halsne.
Call the meeting to order. I invite you to join us for the Pless of Allegiance. Model agency of the United States of America. Roll call. Coal pack. Here. Pepcorn strand. Here. Turnbrig. Here, Mahoney. Here. Tonight we will continue to recognize and highlight the outstanding work of our city departments do every day to serve the residents of Fargo. Our team is dedicated to ensuring operations runs smoothly, 24 hours a day, seven days a week, 365 days a year. As part of the commission meeting, we're taking time to spotlight one of our departments and honor their hard work and exceptional customer service. These teams are the pillars of local government, and it's important we recognize the people who make it all happen. We're looking forward to sharing these stories with our community, demonstrating our commitment to going above and beyond to our residents. Tonight we are highlighting the City of Fargo's Solid Waste Department. The team is responsible for managing all aspects of Fargo's waste collection, disposable, and recycling. Every week, solid waste drivers make their way through the neighborhoods to do the essential work of collecting trash and our recyclables. All told they serve 29,000 residential accounts and 1,000 commercial accounts. The Solid Waste Department also does an amazing job of handling our landfill, household hazardous waste facility, and compost sites. Now we're gonna show a video that underscores the excellent work of the Solid Waste Department. We provide affordable services for all garbage collection recycling within our department. We have seven divisions of our 58 staff. Some has to do with cell construction, which a cell is where all the garbage is placed. There are some closure projects that we have to keep up on as well. And a formal closure entails thousands of yards of dirt to be moved, compacted, placed, and tested. So we've been able to perform those projects as well. And within the last year, we've completed two of those projects encompassing about 10 total acres, and it saved the city about 700,000. There's a lot of environmental concerns that we follow every year. We're regulated by the EPA as well as uh the state of North Dakota to be sure that we're being good neighbors to everyone around us. We're keeping water clean, we're keeping our site clean and managed well. We have our renewable energies program, which is methane capture. We pull the methane that's generated from the in-place garbage, and it serves two purposes. We send the bulk of that to a partner that we have locally who uses that for a fuel heat in their boiler system. And we have an on-site generator that uses the methane to generate electricity, which we put back on the grid. To date, in that program, we have captured and destroyed the equivalent of over two million metric tons of CO2. Our part in cleanup week, it works hand in hand with our public works department and some other contractors in town that help us haul material. We've set aside a handful of staff who are taken off of their daily duties, and they're just 100% cleanup week. And what we do at the landfill with that material that comes in is make sure that of the 300 trucks that we do get in per day on a typical day at the landfill, the added cleanup week trucks get to go to a different spot and be able to find an easier time in and out, easier path. So we're managing essentially two disposal sites during those two weeks. One of the helps that we've had here is in 2021, we opened the residential transfer station. The transfer station was created, I guess, in 2021 as another option for residents that might have extra household garbage to get rid of, so they don't have to hold on to that mattress or old couch until cleanup week. We really are on a push to keep recycling out of our landfills, specifically scrap metal, cardboard are the two main focuses. But in this facility, we have containers for all of those items I just mentioned. There's no reason to bury that in the landfill. It's not going to go anywhere. We can save that room for for municipal solid waste, which is what the landfill is meant for. I actually uh am retired, and uh this is a part-time job for me. I enjoy it.