Fargo leaders seek savings in 2025 budget – InForum

FARGO — City leaders are looking into spending to cut Fargo’s 2025 budget.

“I think there will be opportunities and places where we can tighten our belts without pain,” Commissioner John Strand told The Forum.

A preliminary budget of $133 million was approved during their Aug. 12 meeting. This is an 11.19% increase over the 2024 budget of $119.7 million.

At the time, most commissioners agreed they wanted to cut spending even more before the final budget is approved in October. Most expressed interest in using those savings to give city staff a larger cost-of-living increase.

The preliminary budget includes a 3.5 percent raise for city staff in an effort to boost retention, on top of their regular pay raises.

Still, elected officials will have to find $378,095 in spare change somewhere in the budget to afford that raise.

Some commissioners went further and advocated giving city staff a 4.5 percent raise in 2025.

To fund that 4.5 percent raise, however, commissioners must cut spending by $1.2 million from a 2025 budget that Mayor Tim Mahoney described as already being cut to the bone.

What is not yet known is what will be cut.

While more staffing would be nice, Commissioner Michelle Turnberg said, it will all come down to how much the commission can cut from the budget.

“We can’t let our budget keep growing,” she said. “We have to make some cuts and some tough decisions.”

Everything is on the table, she said.

In recent weeks, she has been talking to department heads to see if there is any “waste” in their individual budgets, Turnberg said.

There will be more internal meetings with the finance department and city administration leading up to the final budget deadline to do that, she said.

“We’ve certainly been working hard on it and there are more cuts to come,” Turnberg said, noting the city of Fargo is “very aware of where the taxpayers’ money is being spent.”

Strand also meets “regularly” with city staff to find opportunities to cut spending in an effort to get a 4.5 percent raise for staff, he said.

It’s too soon to say exactly what will be on the final chopping block, Strand said, adding that the budget is a “work in progress.”

“I don’t care if it’s the last minute,” Strand said. “We have to get it right.”

It’s critical to make cuts in ways that don’t result in a “noticeable loss of service” to community members, he said.

He relies on individual department heads to tell them where savings can be found within their organization.

“I don’t want to spend too much time in the weeds,” Strand said. “I want us to ask our people where they can help us get that savings of about $1.5 million… I’d like to see what our people can come up with, the people who know best what they have the most much needed.”

If they can’t find enough savings in the remaining time, then it will be time to trim the “low-hanging fruit,” such as sponsorships, grants and various city-issued memberships, he said.

He estimates that they total about $500,000.

Meanwhile, Commissioner Denise Kolpack also supports finding cuts to give staff a 4.5 percent raise in 2025, she told Forum via text message. She is working with city staff to try to identify what should be cut.

The city of Fargo is behind in paying employees overall, Kolpack said in early August.

Fargo staff are paid about 3.5 percent less than employees in similar cities, she said.

She floated an idea this month to fix that for the city’s first responders, a plan for a new public safety-only sales tax that was proposed by the firefighters union.

Fargo firefighters have criticized pay scales they say are inadequate to keep staff since November.

If approved by voters in November, the 20-and-a-quarter-cent sales tax measure would fund operations, equipment and new buildings for the Fargo Fire Department and Fargo Police Department.

Commissioner Dave Piepkorn and Mahoney could not be reached for comment.