It’s early January at the City of Minot, which means we’re in the middle of making preparations for our annual State of the City event.
This year’s State of the City is scheduled for Feb. 9 at The Depot (15 Main Street North). 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 tickets will be coming soon. The rest of the event is free to attend.
The State of the City was created with a 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. This will be our sixth State of the City. It takes a team effort from our community partners and a lot of City employees to make the State of the City become reality. But looking back on the past year and focusing on the year ahead of us is important, as it allows us 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. 9, but if we take a moment to reflect on 2022, we will see that by working together, it was a year full of great accomplishments in our community. Work is under way on our city’s second public high school. Our business community is growing, including several new businesses in downtown Minot and significant private investments at Dakota Square Mall and other parts of Minot. Our intermodal port is busy and continues to broaden economic opportunities. The Magic City Discovery Center will open soon, Trinity Health’s new medical campus will open this year.
At the City, we’ll move into our new City Hall in downtown Minot this year. Flood control is moving ahead, as is the Northwest Area Water Supply project. Plans are under way for a City curbside recycling program to begin this summer, Fire Station 5 in northwest Minot will come on line this summer, and our façade program is helping downtown businesses restore the historical glory of their buildings.
Of course, we will always face new challenges, like designing, funding, and building the remaining phases of flood control. Or beginning work soon on the City budget for 2024. Or continuing to work on long-term planning for the inevitable growth of our community, and how the City must prepare for that with new and expanded infrastructure. But 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 meet our challenges head on, because we know the decisions we make today will make Minot a better community in the future. Our previous generations of leaders taught us that, and now it’s up to your elected representatives to ensure the continuity of our growing city is passed on to the next generations of civic leaders and government officials.
We’re expecting a great event on Feb. 9, 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. 9.
