Agenda - Charter Commission - 08/27/2020

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We gathered information from the Administrators, Managers, or Engineers from a total of eight comparable cities. Individuals from cities were recruited to participate in the research with the help of the Ramsey City Administrator. The research team developed scripts that the Ramsey City Administrator used to make an introduction to the first wave of interviewees. Of the thirteen cities contacted in 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 second wave 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 E)7. 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 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. The interviews were recorded and stored on the secure T-Drive available to master's 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. Table 1: Summary of Data Sources # Data Sources 37 City of Ramsey documents 2 Preliminary informational interviews; municipal funding professor and City of Ramsey City Manager 4 Semi -structured interviews with city administrators, managers, and engineers 1 Informational interview with the League of Minnesota Cities 1 Written email response 3 Survey responses Once the interview and survey responses 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 Given the low rate of response for interviews during the COVID-19 pandemic, the data collection plan evolved to include a paired down survey that was qualitatively focused. The data collected from the surveys has less depth than the data collected from the interviews, however the transition was pivotal in providing an adequate sample size for our analysis. 5