FARGO — A high-profile candidate for Fargo mayor said that long before the recent drama erupted over a building project at a City Commission meeting, she vowed to recuse herself from votes involving her family’s business to avoid the appearance of conflicts of interest.
Shannon Roers Jones said it’s common for a mayor or a city commissioner in Fargo to recuse themselves in such instances.
Questions about Roers Jones and potential conflicts of interest arise from her family’s longstanding, ubiquitous business known as Roers.
Started by her father, Jim Roers, in 1976, the company bills itself as the region’s leading general contractor with expertise in construction, development, property management and real estate.
The Roers company and the city of Fargo have been tightly intertwined in past and current projects, some of which netted several million dollars worth of tax incentives for the firm.
But Roers Jones said incentives like that have only come before the commission about once every five years.
“It wouldn’t even come up once per election cycle, so I don’t see that as being a huge conflict,” Roers Jones told The Forum.
Still, serving as legal counsel and real estate broker for the company, she would have to navigate those waters to some degree if elected.
An ethics expert at North Dakota State University said it would be a difficult, if not impossible task.
Dennis Cooley, director of the Northern Plains Ethics Institute and a professor of philosophy and ethics at NDSU, said Roers Jones serving as mayor would represent an “unmanageable” conflict of interest.
“She’s so entrenched in the roles,” Cooley said. “I don’t see how this can work.”
Roers Jones sat down for an extensive interview with The Forum to explain how she would work through those issues if voters choose her over six other candidates on the June 14 ballot.
Projects & tax incentives
The Forum made an open records request to the city of Fargo to learn the scope of the Roers company’s involvement in city projects and the extent of tax incentives provided over the last 10 years.
In 2014, the city paid Roers Construction more than $4 million to serve as general contractor on the new Fargo Cass Public Health building along 13th Avenue South.
In 2015, it hired Roers to remodel and add a museum to the Fargo Fire Department headquarters for just under $1.4 million.
Since 2018, Roers has done three slightly smaller projects for the city, including a new landfill scale house and equipment facility for $810,000, remodeling at Newman Outdoor Field for $290,000 and remodeling at the Fargodome for just under $150,000.
All of those projects were awarded through a public bidding process, in which each contractor puts their price in a sealed envelope and the low bid wins.
“It’s a very difficult process for someone to manipulate,” Roers Jones said. “It’s not something that a commissioner or mayor would have the ability to influence.”
For other projects, where blighted areas were cleaned up and redeveloped, Roers company was awarded tax incentives totaling more than $3 million, according to city documents.
The first of those tax incentives came in 2006, when the city agreed to defray a portion of development costs up to $1.4 million for the Stop N Go Center or SGC Apartments at 1919 S. University Drive.
In 2010, Roers Development received $675,000 in tax incentives to build the T-Loft Apartments, an NDSU student-housing project just off 12th Avenue North.
in conjunction with the ongoing St. Paul’s Newman Center project near NDSU in Fargo’s Roosevelt neighborhood.
The Roers company hasn’t received those tax incentives, however, because townhouses that were promised as a buffer for the neighborhood haven’t been built, a step mired in delays and controversy.
Jeremy Turley / Forum News Service
Her role in the family business
As part of his position at the Northern Plains Ethics Institute, a nonpartisan organization, Dennis Cooley writes policy and provides teaching and training on conflicts of interest.
He said they arise when a person’s multiple required roles come in conflict with one another.
“Apparent” conflicts of interest can turn out to be trivial, where a person can easily achieve multiple outcomes, he said. Then there are “real” conflicts of interest, both manageable and unmanageable.
With a manageable conflict, careful steps are taken to deal with the ethical issue, in the interest of public trust.
An unmanageable conflict of interest is one where even that won’t work, Cooley said. In his opinion, that describes the scenario should Roers Jones be elected mayor.
It would be difficult, if not impossible, he said, for Roers Jones to separate herself as mayor from her other roles as legal counsel, real estate broker and immediate family member of the Roers company.
Roers Jones said that may be overstating her involvement.
She is not employed by, nor is an officer of Roers companies, she said, but rather, has her own law firm that represents Roers’ entities.
Roers Jones said her focus is land acquisitions. Rarely does she work with the construction side of the business, unless there’s a subcontractor dispute, and she does not work on background for tax incentives, she said.
She is listed as a registered agent for Roers, so if someone were to serve legal notice on any of the company’s entities, it would come to her.
Roers Jones does not do courtroom litigation, so if it came to that, she would seek outside counsel to represent the company, she said.
Her ex-husband, Ross Jones, works for the city of Fargo as a firefighter. She said that doesn’t pose a problem because as mayor, her interactions would be with the fire chief only.
Cooley agreed that wouldn’t be a conflict because of the layers existing between the two positions.
Roers Jones, a Republican, is also a member of the North Dakota House. If elected as mayor, she could legally continue serving in the Legislature. Last elected to the House in 2020, she has nearly three years left on her current term.
Cooley said there’s also the issue of undue influence on others in city government, even if not done intentionally.
If some sort of action needed to be taken against the Roers company and it didn’t happen, people would blame bias and it could cause a split in City Hall, he said.
Arlette Preston, a city commissioner who is also running for mayor, shares those concerns.
“It gets more difficult for staff and appointed and elected officials to be able to feel like they can push back,” Preston said.
City Commissioner Tony Gehrig, whose term expires in June and who is not running for reelection, said pressure for a project from Roers Jones could happen outside of the public eye.
“If she’s supportive of it, privately or otherwise, that may influence the vote,” Gehrig said, even if she recuses herself.
Roers Jones said that kind of thing can happen with any issue that comes before the city and with any government official. It’s the responsibility of the rest of the commission to make sure that influence doesn’t become too significant, she said.
If a mayor recused their self on a vote, they could not be a tiebreaker in case of a split of the four commissioners. Three of the four would have to vote yes for a project to pass.
Mayor Tim Mahoney, who Roers Jones is challenging in the June election, has a lot of influence over current commission members, she said.
Mahoney said a mayor typically cannot ask a commissioner how they’re going to vote, but he acknowledged they could be influenced, knowing he’s for or against a particular project or matter.
Jim Roers was taken to task at a May 2 City Commission meeting,
where several commissioners criticized the developer for failing to build a promised buffer of townhomes next to The View apartments on the Newman Center block.
Roers Jones refers to the contentious meeting as “the spectacle,” where Commissioner Dave Piepkorn repeatedly called her father a liar and accused him of not upholding the agreement with the city and the Roosevelt neighborhood to have the townhomes built by the end of 2021.
Dave Wallis / The Forum
As Roers Jones explained it, her father was invited to answer questions but was blindsided by Piepkorn, and each commission member had their moment to “pile on.”
She’s upset that Mahoney never used his gavel to ask for order or told Piepkorn his comments were out of line.
“The whole thing was an unfortunate political stunt,” she said.
Mahoney said Piepkorn was “a bit rude” to Jim Roers at the meeting, but that discourse sometimes has to be allowed. If reelected as mayor, Mahoney said he’ll discuss rules of conduct with the newly-elected commission in July.
The Roers company has not received any of its near $1 million in tax increment financing because the promised townhouses haven’t been built.
The company has requested more time due to the high cost of materials, and asked if the city would make a prorated disbursement of the TIF money because taxes on the project are due.
Jim Gilmour, strategic planning director for the city, said that’s not allowable under Roers’ contract with the city. He said while the contract could be amended, he still thinks the City Commission will insist the townhouses be built before any TIF funds are paid.
Roers Jones said if the matter became a legal one and she were mayor, she’d recuse herself from votes and outside counsel would be brought in to represent the company.
She’s not worried about things getting “awkward” if she’s elected and has to work with others who have publicly criticized her or the family company.
She said it would only be a short-term problem.
“I don’t like to spend the time or waste the mental brain space being mad at people,” Roers Jones said. “I’d rather focus on collaboration and look for opportunities for improvement.”