Who's behind this, and why

My name is Jimmy Davidson. I moved to Crosby in 2026 and I intend to stay — this town and these lakes are why I came. I've spent my career as a solutions developer, building the front-end and back-end systems that let companies handle more work without hiring more people: order pipelines, document systems, reporting dashboards. The unglamorous plumbing that makes a small staff feel like a bigger one.

I run a one-person practice called Agentic Personnel Solutions. Every word on this site is written by me, and every mistake on it is mine to fix.

The Cuyuna Compass is an independent, one-person publication about the public business of the Cuyuna-range towns: budgets, grant programs, deadlines, and plain-English explainers of documents that usually arrive as hundred-page packets. Everything here is built from public records, and every figure links to the source it came from, so you never have to take my word for anything.

Two things it is not. It is not affiliated with the City of Crosby or any government body — no one at city hall reviews, approves, or pays for what appears here. And it is not a newspaper. The Cuyuna Range already has one, the Crosby-Ironton Courier, and this site doesn't compete with it. Think of this as one resident's public notebook: the reading and arithmetic I'd be doing anyway, published so anyone can check the work.

A city of 2,400 runs on a handful of staff. The information that would help residents and officials make good decisions exists — but it's scattered across state databases, auditor filings, levy tables, and council packets that few people have time to read. Gathering it into one legible place is something one person with the right tools can actually do, and it seemed more useful to do it in public than in a drawer.

There's also a self-interested reason, and I'd rather state it than have you wonder. I would like some of this work to become paid work someday — paid for by the outside institutions that exist specifically to fund capacity for small cities, not by Crosby's levy. The fastest and most honest way to earn that is to do good work in public first and let it be judged. The full offer, including exactly how the funding would work, is written out in The Proposal; it asks the city for nothing but thirty minutes.

These are the rules I hold myself to, in writing, so that anyone reading this site can hold me to them too:

1. Flat or hourly fees only — never a percentage of a grant. Contingency fees violate the Grant Professionals Association Code of Ethics, and most state and federal programs won't allow them as a grant cost anyway.
2. Public data only, always. Every system I run touches only records that are already public under Minn. Stat. ch. 13. Nothing nonpublic ever enters it, by design.
3. The city owns any work product. Anything I produce for Crosby — free or paid, now or later — belongs to the city, as public record.
4. The city attorney reviews anything before it's signed. Defined scope, insurance, a data-practices clause, termination for convenience.
5. Every claim carries its source. Each figure links to the public record it came from, and anything I couldn't verify is marked as unconfirmed. If I ever publish a number I can't source, throw the whole page out.

If anything on this site is wrong — a number, a date, a characterization — email me at jimmy@agenticpersonnel.com and I will fix it and note the correction on the page. A site that asks to be checked has to mean it.