So Public Works has a pretty widespread umbrella. We're made up of five divisions, which is your
streets, your central garage, your mains and hydrants, forestry, and vector control. As winter
wraps up, we're trying to get it out and prepare for our summer activities, but spring really has
to do with our street sweeping. We try and get it cleaned up out there because we have a lot
of people that ride motorcycles, so we do that. Plus the appearance, cleaning up the garbage in
the storm retention ponds, along the fences, along the outside of the interstate ditches. Anything we
maintain, that's a big thing for us is we want to make a push in the spring to get everything cleaned
up, polish everything, and make it look good for our community. Even though we have multiple divisions
within Public Works, we're one team. So when we see weather events like snow come in, we band
together as one team, and you'll see our forestry division folks. They're running our Sanders out
there, our mains and hydrants team. They're running our snow plows in the alleys and doing all the
alleys. We have our own sidewalk division that's doing sidewalks, and then our street team is
focusing on trying to keep the streets clean. We do the same thing when it comes to a wind event,
and when we have large wind events, a lot of trees are lost. We kind of take all our folks from our
street department, our mains, and transfer them over to our forestry division so that we can serve
the city while still saving its money by not adding a lot of employees. So there's probably two jobs
that we do that are a huge part of keeping the city going, and one of those being the stormless
stations that we have around town. We have 85 of those, and those need to be monitored closely and
serviced on a daily basis to keep them up and running. The other one is the sanitary system.
We have over 420 miles of sanitary lines in the ground in the city of Fargo. We actually
cleaned over a million feet of sewer lines last year. The city of Fargo is growing at a fast rate,
a lot of construction going on. One of the numbers that actually surprised me is we hauled over 4,300
tons of debris off the streets last year. That comes out to 8.6 million pounds of dirt, gravel,
any sort of trash that you might find on the streets. As far as jumping in other equipment
and helping out other departments, forestry, water department, we're team Fargo. I mean,
we'll do anything we can to help each other out. You're touching everything that you're seeing
driving around almost that's above the ground and below the ground, and so you can find interest in
almost anything here, whether it's operating equipment or it's how the infrastructure works,
our water infrastructure works, and we spend a lot of time educating, and one thing we do at
Public Works is we'll give you whatever you want to exceed, and people kind of like that,
that we try and promote within and like to educate our people. I think the biggest thing
with Public Works is we really believe we're in the customer service business, and we take a lot
of pride in that. Our team works hard to try and make residents happy. We may not be able to do
everything they want, but we try and find a middle ground with every rest that we touch.