Invest in your Valley

This is a phrase that has been echoed by city leaders from both sides of the river. Some might say that the definition of these words is to demonstrate the economic fortitude of the Red River Valley’s businesses and its people.

I recently found myself taking a long look at this phrase as it pertains to our organization here at the Fargo Moorhead Builders Exchange (FMBX). As most of you know, our mission is to furnish as many projects’ specs and plans as we can to our members. We feel that this approach is the best for the design community and other plan issuers. One of our goals is to make sure that the project owner is getting the best bang for their buck. Competitive bidding makes that happen.

By investing in our valley, we can honestly say that the assets at the disposal of our communities are being used to its highest potential. We can rest assured that we have all of the components necessary to be successful from the design phase through completion of construction.

When we use local companies and employees for all types of construction, we are employing people in our area, paying these people a wage, who then pay taxes, and then they purchase goods and services from other local companies. In addition, people send their children to schools and colleges in the area. The cycle is almost endless.

Architects, engineers, general contractors and other plan issuers, for the most part, are looking to get the most value with the least amount of problems for the project owner. Putting these documents in front of as many potential bidders as possible, we believe, is essential to the competitive bidding process. Another option is to limit the number of bidders through an “invite only” approach to insure that bidders are familiar to the plan issuers. In this scenario there is usually some history with using those firms and it is known that work will be done in a timely and satisfactory manner as requested.

Invest in our Valley. I think our communities should be proud of the fact, that we can handle any type of construction project utilizing the local design community. Going through the yellow pages, I found that there were 28 listings for architects and 64 listings for engineers.  Some of these engineers were listed in several different categories. What I thought was very interesting was that there were 16 different categories for Engineers: Civil Engineers, Communication Engineers, Consulting Engineers, Electrical Engineers, Electronic Engineers, Environmental Engineers, Fire Protection Engineers, Geotechnical Soil Engineers, Machine Design Engineers, Mechanical Engineers, Metallurgical Engineers, Sanitary Engineers, Structural Engineers, Traffic and Transportation Engineers and Water Engineers.

A lot of these design firms have been around for a long time and are well respected in their fields.  On top of this, we have had many firms that have won awards for design and construction of projects. The AIA of North Dakota listed their 2008-9 Award Winners on their website. All of those winners were either from the Fargo Moorhead area or had ties to the area: Grand Forks Flight Support in Grand Forks by JLG Architects, Sheyenne Ninth Grade Center in West Fargo by YHR Partners, Lofts on Fourth in Moorhead by Mutchler Bartram Architects and Ottertail County Operations Center in Ottertail MN by Schultz and Associates.  In addition, individual awards were won by Robin Sim of Lightowler Johnson Associates, Leap Chear of EAPC and Kent Anderson of Hepper Olson Architects. The Test of Time Award Winner was the Nativity Catholic Church designed by Foss Architects and Interiors.

All of the companies that make up the design community have made significant contributions to their employees’ and companies’ need to insure that services will not have to be supplied outside of our valley.

The FMBX presently has 610 member companies, most of which are in the Red River Valley. There are multiple companies in most categories that can afford expertise in the completion of the construction process:

Of these 610 companies, the following is a list of companies by category: Bear in mind that companies may be listed in more than one category.

In Professional Service providers and Service providers we have members who are bankers, insurance companies, office equipment companies, motels, bonding agents etc.

As you can see we have a wealth of local companies that make up our membership categories. Many of these have been around for a long time and have been offering their services for generations.

On top of all this we have the best employees in world right here in our valley. The work ethic of our people is second to none and the quality of work is admired by the rest of the country.

Invest in your Valley.     If all of us truly believe in this phrase and put it into practice, it is my opinion that it will only make us stronger economically and our region will continue to weather the ups and downs of our economy better than the rest of the country.