Dear Minot:
It’s mid-January at the City of Minot, and that means we’re in the middle of preparations for our annual State of the City event.
This year’s State of the City is scheduled for Feb. 8 at the Minot State University Dome. The State of the City is open to the public, with my speech scheduled to start shortly after noon. You’ll need to purchase tickets if you want to join us for lunch, which will start shortly before noon. Details on lunch tickets will be coming soon. The rest of the event is free to attend.
This will be our seventh State of the City event, which was created with one simple goal: To provide our community with information about the most recent year at the City of Minot, and to look ahead to the upcoming year. Making the State of the City become reality take an enormous amount of work from a lot of City employees and a host of community partners. But looking back on the past year and focusing on the year ahead is important, as it allows time to reflect on the ongoing challenges we face as a community and the successes we’ve enjoyed.
We’ll talk more in detail during my address on Feb. 8, but if we reflect on 2023, we will see that by working together, it was a year of great accomplishments in our community. Things are happening, and our community is changing for the better. Work is well under way on our city’s second public high school. Trinity Health opened its new medical campus in southwest Minot, and the Magic City Discovery Center is thriving on north hill.
At the City, we completed the move into a new City Hall in downtown Minot. Flood control continues to move ahead, as is the Northwest Area Water Supply project. Our curbside recycling program began this summer, and Fire Station 5 in northwest Minot is open and successfully operating. It’s been a busy and rewarding year at the City of Minot.
Of course, we will always face new challenges, like continuing to design, fund, and construct the remaining phases of flood control to protect our community and other sections of the Souris River basin. I know it’s January, but we’ll soon begin work on the City budget for 2025. Long-term planning for the inevitable growth of our community continues year-round, and we know we must prepare for that with new and expanded infrastructure. Those are good challenges to have, as they reinforce what we already know: Minot is a growing community with a bright future ahead of it as a city. I prefer to think of those challenges as opportunities to address our needs and to best position our community to meet the demands of the next decade.
As always, we will strive to meet our challenges head on, because we know the decisions made today will make Minot a better community in the future. Our previous generations of leaders taught us that, and the decisions they made decades ago have shaped our entire community. Now it’s up to your elected representatives and our community leaders to ensure the needs of our growing city are addressed to lay the foundation for the next generations of civic leaders and government officials.
We’re expecting a great event on Feb. 8, and I encourage you to join us. If you can’t make it to the event in person, you can watch it on the City of Minot’s social media platforms, including Facebook and YouTube. It’s important that we gather as a community to share not only our challenges, but our success stories and our vision for the upcoming year. Please join us on Feb. 8.
You can find more about what’s happening at the City of Minot at minotnd.org, or find us on Facebook and Twitter. We’d also encourage you to sign up for our monthly electronic newsletter on our website.