Five candidates – four active – vie for East Grand Forks’ only competitive City Council seat

Four East Grand Forks residents still hope to fill the City Council seat that’s set to be vacated by Chad Grassel, the son of longtime Eastside civic leader Dick Grassel.

It’s the only competitive race for a spot on the council dais, and each of the four people still pursuing the at-large seat spoke to the Herald about their plans for the city.

Justin LaRocque, a restaurateur who owns The Spud Jr. on DeMers Avenue and runs Rockin’ Up North Fest, said he was inspired to run during the coronavirus pandemic. He said he felt East Grand Forks’ city government was generally more passive than Grand Forks’ and did not seek or disseminate information about the virus, the Paycheck Protection Plan and other aid for businesses hampered by it, as quickly or readily as their neighbors across the Red River.

“But the problem was a lot of the answers . . . were coming from the North Dakota side, which, obviously, we could not take advantage of,” LaRocque said Thursday. “Grand Forks did a very good job at leading and making sure that people had the information that they needed. I was making calls, I was getting calls, I was trying to gather as much information as I could. And I just thought that, you know what, if I'm going to do this on my own time, why can’t I do this on a bigger scale?. . . And there's no bigger scale on getting information to the community like the local city government.”

His broader pitch to voters is reminiscent of that of Brandon Bochenski, the recently elected mayor of Grand Forks, who campaigned on promoting citywide growth. LaRocque said he’d try to “showcase” East Grand Forks and draw businesses and new residents there, perhaps via tax incentives for first-time homebuyers , who typically seek a home in the kind of older neighborhood that was wiped out by the 1997 flood.

Restaurants and other hospitality-minded businesses in East Grand Forks are fantastic for a town the size of East Grand Forks, LaRocque said.

“As a community, I think we have to be marketing ourselves every single day because, just like a business, if we're not growing, we're dying,” he said. “Any good business needs a marketing plan. . . . How can we be better? And how can we attract new clientele or new residents to our community, and what do we have to offer and help them really showcase what we have to offer?”

Brian Larson, a construction manager at UND and former member of East Grand Forks’ Parks and Recreation Commission, said he hopes to represent families that are similar to his own: two working parents with young kids who play sports, are active in Cub Scouts and so on.

“I think we could benefit from more representation from some of the younger families that have kids actively involved in some of the sports and things like that,” Larson told the Herald.

Larson said facilities management is a passion of his, and he hopes to refine the city government’s long-term budget plans for large-scale improvements.

“I would be a strong voice at the table, trying to make that a priority, ensuring that we have capital investment funds for all of our facilities and all of our responsibilities,” he said, referring particularly to East Grand Forks’ deliberations on the scope – and cost – of renovating its baseball diamonds and hockey rinks , which were prompted by the looming failure of their outdated refrigeration systems. “These are city facilities, and we just don’t have that savings fund built up ready to make those investments.”

He also said he’d reconsider the city’s assessment policy, which presently requires property owners to pay for the entirety of most large-scale street maintenance projects in their neighborhoods. East Grand Forks administrators and officials reconsidered that policy last year and left it as-is , which has presented the city with a conundrum on a multiblock segment of 20th Street Northwest , where total estimated maintenance costs outstrip the city’s budget for street repairs and adjacent property owners’ willingness to pay out of their own pockets.

Larson stopped short of advocating for a dedicated fund for that type of street maintenance, but said he’d want to take a “deep dive” into the assessment policy if he were elected this November.

“Has it served us well? Yes or no,” he said. “If the answer’s no, what can we do to tweak this thing?”

Larson also said he’d try to push for more affordable childcare in the city. It’s unclear how much he’d be able to do from the council dais, but if elected, he said he’d try to lobby other local and state leaders to make it happen. Larson’s children just aged out of childcare, he said.

“It’s unbelievable how expensive it can really be,” he said. “And that really hampers some of the adults' ability to continue to progress their career at the same time that their kids are in childcare.”

Mohamed Mohamed, a translator and interpreter, filed the paperwork to run for the at-large Council seat on Aug. 11, but he recently decided to stop pursuing it because two members of his family have fallen ill, which means he often has to travel to the Minneapolis area to help care for them.

“I wanted to have a representative, a voice for people of color in my community. Since we’re here, we need to have a voice in how the city runs,” Mohamed, who moved to East Grand Forks about six years ago, told the Herald. “I’m not someone who’s leaving this city. I’m going to be here for a long time. If things work out, in the future I’m interested in being involved at a later time.”

Per Wiger, a Grand Cities musician and writer, said he sees an “epidemic” of short-term thinking in East Grand Forks City Hall and beyond on issues ranging from mosquito control to housing.

“We spray, and then, two days later, we have a mosquito problem again,” he said. “It costs a lot of money, it kills off pollinators, it’s just not a good long-term solution. It’s not a solution at all to the problem of mosquito overpopulation. It’s at best a temporary bandage even though there are actual solutions available.”

The University of Minnesota, Wiger said, has developed a treatment that inhibits mosquitoes’ first generation in a given season, which he suspects would ultimately be cheaper than regular sprays and wouldn’t harm the region’s dragonfly or bee populations.

But Wiger’s misgivings about the city’s mosquito control program is just an example of the sort of myopathy he sees. Wiger said there’s a shortage of “next-level” and affordable housing in East Grand Forks and said the city needs to figure out how to address that problem, which might mean a program in conjunction with local credit unions to ensure residents can borrow money on favorable enough terms to secure housing, or encouraging developers to create “truly” affordable homes.

“Not just upper middle class housing developments,” Wiger said.

He claimed that developers frequently build homes that are of a modest quality and sell them for significantly more than they’re worth, which he said leads to a dearth of housing for people who need it most: “The low and middle-income families who we would like to keep here because that’s the bulk of the community,” Wiger said.

He added that he’d like to work on “community resiliency,” a concept he said has become top-of-mind during the COVID-19 pandemic and wildfires that have devastated swaths of the West Coast. Wiger said he’s thinking of ways a community can produce its own food and noted that some U.S. cities have community gardens , wood-fired ovens and grain mills.

“I see no reason to believe that our vast, highly complicated system of food delivery is . . . going to be robust and functional in even the middle future,” Wiger said. “Certainly, it’s not a sky-is-falling, we-have-to-change-everything-now sort of situation. I’m not saying it’s doomsday upon us. But I don’t think that it is unreasonable to look at the pressures that we’ve faced in the past year and the data points that we can extrapolate toward the future and say our communities need to be more internally resilient.”

Frank Wirsing is a funeral director who said his top priority, if elected, would be establishing a municipal internet service provider in a style similar to the city’s water and light utility.

That, he argues, would help students learn remotely, especially during the coronavirus pandemic, and establish a better technology backbone that would attract businesses to town.

“It's getting to the point where access to internet should be more utility based as well,” Wirsing said. “Upgrade the technology of the area because, by doing so, it helps to bring in other businesses, and other businesses that make everything a lot more appealing to the more modern crowd, especially when we have things coming up in Grand Forks like (Grand Sky) and stuff like that. We need to start moving forward and lifting things up, especially technologically wise.”

Hundreds of cities in the United States have set up their own internet service providers of some variety. Bagley and Barnesville , Minn., which are relatively close to East Grand Forks, both offer city internet service alongside telephone service and other utilities. A state law signed in 1915 and updated in 1991 stipulates that a city cannot set up a telecom service where one already exists without a referendum in which at least 65% of voters OK the idea.

Beyond a municipal internet provider, Wirsing said he’d hope to attract businesses to East Grand Forks in other ways.

“The easiest way to do so is always tax liens,” he said. “But you can't just say, ‘You don't have to pay taxes.’ Of course, there has to be caveats to that thing. We’ll give you a tax lien if you bring in a business for X amount of years and X amount of jobs and X amount of what have you. But there’s always financial incentives. Everything in business comes down to the bottom line.”

Election day in East Grand Forks and beyond is Nov. 3. Minnesota residents can vote early or vote by mail , as well.