Federal Funding Appropriation Round Table and Press Conference

Chad Peterson: [00:00:00] Hello Senator Klobuchar, welcome virtually to the Fargo City Commission chambers. With that we’ll call the meeting to order. Thank you everyone, this is a gathering to celebrate quite an accomplishment of our friends from D.C.

[00:00:27] When my good friend Senator John Hoeven called me a couple days ago and said, “So we have word from Washington D.C., what do you think the number is?” … I said to myself, I can figure out with my team what to do if we don’t have the funding that we need… Senator Hoeven said, “We got it all.” I said, “Is there any way they can take it back?” What a remarkable thing that our Senate leaders did for us in the North Dakota-Minnesota region.

Senator John Hoeven: [00:02:53] Well thanks Chad, thanks for your leadership… The key for today is just that we got the $437 million, so we got it. We’ve been talking about being the first P3 major public works project in the United States. Multi-state, $3.2 billion. So up until now we’ve been talking about oh we’re going to be that project; now we *are* that project.

[00:06:54] We started on this over 10 years ago. Senator Klobuchar was part of this project when maybe it wasn’t cool… She navigated all the things that it took to get to where we are today. It actually took 16 acts of Congress to get it done.

Senator Amy Klobuchar: [00:10:03] Thank you John. We have faced so many obstacles, we’ve worked across the aisle, across the river… Through different administrations, Democratic and Republican, we have consistently been able to get this funding step by step, is that John and I did this together, and I think that’s a major piece of this.

[00:11:47] I think we all know that we had this clock running. You think about every dollar that has gone toward repairing the damage, every hour spent on flood relief, every trip to the Fargodome to get the sandbags, and we want that to end.

Col. Karl Jansen (USACE): [00:18:24] Thank you very much Senator Hoeven and Senator Klobuchar… It’s difficult to put into words the impact of this development. It’s beyond what any of us thought was possible or expected. The stress of the uncertainty of funding and making the case for just such an important project, to understand that that’s behind us and the only thing that’s in front of us is putting the project in the ground, is just an amazing place to be in. We have an integrated schedule with our non-federal partner and now we know that we can join these together no later than spring of 2027.

Mayor Tim Mahoney: [00:23:50] Senator Klobuchar helped us in sandbagging in 2009… We asked for money, and the first time we asked for 50 we got 5, and Senator Hoeven said “Tim don’t lose the faith, we’ll do better next year.” We kept coming back for more and more. I told Senator Hoeven when he told me we got $437 million, I said you can mark me down as I just fainted, because I’ve never known the federal government to do anything like that.

Mayor Shelly Carlson: [00:27:42] Thank you very much Senators… It was an incredible experience to meet with both of you and OMB Director Shalonda Young. 2021 was quite the year for the diversion. I was told there was no fiscal stability for this project, and Chair Peterson, I would like to present you with a fully funded project. Let’s see what you can do with that!

Mayor Bernie Dardis: [00:31:47] The financing of this issue is much like a puzzle… All of those elements had to come together and fit together. The work that our legal counsel Mr. John Shockley has done with the bonds and the WIFIA loan… phenomenal. Absolutely phenomenal.

Joel Paulsen: [00:36:22] Thank you Senator Hoeven… When I started with the Authority, I thought to myself, why are we building a project without any money and how are we going to get this done? What we see here with this project is certainly a model for the rest of the nation. This receipt of $437 million from the federal government is really going to allow the Corps to do what they do best, and that’s construct infrastructure.

Shannon Full: [00:39:24] On behalf of the business community and the local community, thank you so much. There’s been two words that have been used over and over again: one is ‘uncertainty’ and one is ‘unprecedented’. We have a community that was uncertain about any time that we had a flood threat, and now that level of certainty will allow us to continue to lean into the ability to grow this community.

Kevin Wilson: [00:43:21] Every time I see General Spellman, he grabs me and asks me about the project. All of the senior leaders, what they walk away with is they’re very impressed. They’re impressed by the P3, but they’re really impressed by the camaraderie of this group of the communities as it’s drawn together.

Chad Peterson: [00:48:43] To both Senators, you always had time for us. You are pulled in hundreds of different directions by thousands of different people, and I hope you understand how much I appreciate your time. That communication really got us a lot further down the path than we would have otherwise. Thank you.