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So Public Works has a pretty widespread umbrella. We're made up of five divisions, which is your

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streets, your central garage, your mains and hydrants, forestry, and vector control. As winter

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wraps up, we're trying to get it out and prepare for our summer activities, but spring really has

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to do with our street sweeping. We try and get it cleaned up out there because we have a lot

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of people that ride motorcycles, so we do that. Plus the appearance, cleaning up the garbage in

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the storm retention ponds, along the fences, along the outside of the interstate ditches. Anything we

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maintain, that's a big thing for us is we want to make a push in the spring to get everything cleaned

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up, polish everything, and make it look good for our community. Even though we have multiple divisions

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within Public Works, we're one team. So when we see weather events like snow come in, we band

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together as one team, and you'll see our forestry division folks. They're running our Sanders out

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there, our mains and hydrants team. They're running our snow plows in the alleys and doing all the

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alleys. We have our own sidewalk division that's doing sidewalks, and then our street team is

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focusing on trying to keep the streets clean. We do the same thing when it comes to a wind event,

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and when we have large wind events, a lot of trees are lost. We kind of take all our folks from our

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street department, our mains, and transfer them over to our forestry division so that we can serve

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the city while still saving its money by not adding a lot of employees. So there's probably two jobs

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that we do that are a huge part of keeping the city going, and one of those being the stormless

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stations that we have around town. We have 85 of those, and those need to be monitored closely and

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serviced on a daily basis to keep them up and running. The other one is the sanitary system.

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We have over 420 miles of sanitary lines in the ground in the city of Fargo. We actually

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cleaned over a million feet of sewer lines last year. The city of Fargo is growing at a fast rate,

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a lot of construction going on. One of the numbers that actually surprised me is we hauled over 4,300

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tons of debris off the streets last year. That comes out to 8.6 million pounds of dirt, gravel,

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any sort of trash that you might find on the streets. As far as jumping in other equipment

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and helping out other departments, forestry, water department, we're team Fargo. I mean,

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we'll do anything we can to help each other out. You're touching everything that you're seeing

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driving around almost that's above the ground and below the ground, and so you can find interest in

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almost anything here, whether it's operating equipment or it's how the infrastructure works,

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our water infrastructure works, and we spend a lot of time educating, and one thing we do at

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Public Works is we'll give you whatever you want to exceed, and people kind of like that,

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that we try and promote within and like to educate our people. I think the biggest thing

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with Public Works is we really believe we're in the customer service business, and we take a lot

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of pride in that. Our team works hard to try and make residents happy. We may not be able to do

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everything they want, but we try and find a middle ground with every rest that we touch.