Agenda - Council Work Session - 05/12/2020

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the first wave, we successfully completed interviews with two of them. These interviews took place on the phone and Google Hangouts and were semi -structured. Given the low response rate, we developed a list of wave 2 cities, bringing the total number of attempted cities to thirty. The City Administrator from the City of Ramsey sent an updated recruitment letter, designed to reflect the chaos of the COVID-19 demands. After the recruitment letter was sent, our research team followed up with the option to schedule a phone or video conference with us or complete a slightly paired down survey on Google Forms (Appendix C). This second wave of recruitment yielded one video interview over Zoom and three survey responses. In addition to the introductory email from the City of Ramsey's Administrator, this second wave of recruitment included cold calls to four cities, which yielded an additional video interview on Zoom. The interviews were recorded and stored on the secure T-Drive available to Masters students at the Humphrey School of Public Affairs. From the interviews the research team determined what combination of revenue sources each city used to fund their roads and their rationale for choosing these alternatives. The research team also interviewed a representative at the League of Minnesota cities who is knowledgeable about current legislative items that may influence how Minnesota cities fund their roads. This interview provided more data on new road funding options that may become available to the City of Ramsey in the near future. This interviewee also introduced us to an additional city that we were able to video interview over Zoom. Once the interview and survey data were collected, the research team members who attended the interview or downloaded the survey response developed contact notes summarizing the information. The research team then used ATLAS.ti 8 software to code the contact notes with each member of the team coding every contact note to ensure consistency and to triangulate our results. Using the data we collected and analyzed from the literature review and interviews, we present the City of Ramsey with information about how comparable cities in Minnesota fund their roads and why. We also provide recommendations to the City based on our research to suggest alternatives that could fit within Ramsey's context to more sustainably fund their roads into the future. Ethical Considerations The projected risk in undertaking this project is low for researchers and participants. This is primarily assessed through the nature of the risk being at the interpersonal level. This mainly stems through potential negative interaction with City Officials/Administrators, which may then lead to less access for further research. Another possible point of risk may be upcoming elections at the municipal level. With upcoming elections and certain city officials campaigning to keep their positions, there may be limited strength in some of the data we collect through these respondents. This could ultimately weaken our research and skew data results and recommendations; however, keeping names of cities and officials confidential allows us to capture more comprehensive information. To minimize the risk of breaching ethical standards, this study paid close attention to our preparatory work for introduction with our participants. We provided them with the scope of our research and the interview protocol prior to the interview to allow them the opportunity to understand its intent and assess if they would like to participate. We explained to them that nothing they said would be associated with their name yet we explained that we cannot guarantee their anonymity. Finally, we guided them through an oral informed consent script just prior to the