An open offer to the City of Crosby

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.

Since arriving, I've done what solutions people do with a new place: I read it. Every council packet and set of minutes the city has posted, the adopted 2026 budget, the State Auditor's filings, the Department of Revenue's levy tables, and the program rules for every state, federal, and foundation dollar a city of 2,400 on the Cuyuna Range can lawfully apply for. All of it public record; every number in this proposal links to its source.

What I found is a city working hard with too few hands — and real money sitting in programs built specifically for towns like this one, going unclaimed mostly because applying takes time nobody at city hall has.

This proposal asks the city for nothing. No contract, no fee, no decision from the council. It offers three finished pieces of work, free, on dates that matter this month — and explains how, if the city ever wants more, other institutions would pay for it. All I'm asking for today is thirty minutes.

None of this is a criticism of anyone at city hall. It's the arithmetic that roughly 70% of Minnesota's cities — the ones under 4,000 people — are living with: a fixed staff, a levy that residents genuinely cannot absorb faster, and a state aid formula that has been flat statewide since 2023. Crosby has been candid about the strain in its own meetings, and recently approved $30,000–$34,500 for outside help just to close out the year's books. The 2025 State Auditor budget survey lists Crosby as "Failed to Report" — not for lack of effort, but for lack of hours.

My read: Crosby doesn't have a spending problem so much as a capacity problem. The two levers that actually move a budget like this — grant dollars and better information at decision time — both take staff hours the city doesn't have. That's a gap a systems builder can fill. Cutting harder can't close it; capacity can. (For the full plain-English walk-through of the city's finances, see The Numbers.)

These are programs Crosby (or its fire department, or a local partner organization) qualifies for right now or within weeks. Every one is real, linked, and open to a city this size; where a detail still needs confirmation from the program office, it's marked.

This table is a sample, not the full list. The complete inventory — every program, every deadline, every match requirement — lives at Money on the Table and is kept current.

Free means free: no contract, no invoice later, no strings. It's how I'd like to introduce myself to the town I live in — with finished work instead of a brochure. Everything below is built entirely from public documents.

Why give work away? Because in a town this size, trust is the only credential that counts — and the fastest way to show the work is real is to hand it over and let the city judge it.

The honest question is: how does one person deliver grant capacity that normally takes a staff? The answer is the same one I've built for private companies for years — software does the searching and the first drafts; a person makes every decision.

Two design rules are non-negotiable and worth stating plainly. First, the system reads only public documents — the same budgets and minutes any resident can download — keeping every workflow squarely inside the Minnesota Government Data Practices Act. Nothing nonpublic ever enters it, by design. Second, a person approves everything. The tools are quick; the accountability is human.

If the free work proves useful and the city wants it continued, here is the part I'd most like thirty minutes to explain: there are institutions whose stated purpose is to pay for exactly this kind of help, so Crosby's general fund doesn't have to.

In plain terms: a future engagement would be scoped under the $25,000 threshold in Minn. Stat. § 471.345 (professional services, one council motion, no bidding process required) and sequenced so reimbursements are approved first — designed from the start to cost the general fund approximately nothing. Whether that ever happens is entirely the city's call, entirely after the free work speaks for itself, and on the city's timeline — there is no urgency on my side and no expiration on the offer.

Small towns get pitched constantly, and most pitches deserve the wastebasket. These are the rules I hold myself to, in writing, so the city — and any neighbor reading this — 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. Anyone who offers "10% of what I win you" is telling you something.
2. Public data only, always. Every system I run touches only records that are already public under Minn. Stat. ch. 13. That's not a limitation I tolerate — it's a rule I designed around from day one.
3. The city owns everything. Radar, exhibits, drafts, and any future work product belong to Crosby, as public records, whether or not we ever work together again.
4. The city attorney reviews anything before it's signed. Any future agreement follows the League of Minnesota Cities' standard contracting practice: defined scope, insurance certificates, a data-practices clause, termination for convenience.
5. Every claim carries its source. Each number in this proposal is linked to the public record it came from, and anything I couldn't independently verify is marked "confirm." If I ever hand the city a figure I can't source, throw the whole document out.

Thirty minutes, at city hall or over coffee, at the city's convenience. Bring skepticism — it's the correct response to an offer like this. I'll bring the funding radar and the peer-city numbers, and leave both behind regardless of how the conversation goes.