John Odermann, CHI St. Alexius Health's manager of mission and ancillary services and Trinity High School football coach, announced his candidacy for Dickinson City Commission, Friday.
Odermann sees the role of a commissioner as one of facilitator empowering city staff to run government effectively.
“We need to be willing to stay humble and realize we do not have all the answers,” he said. “This community has a lot of very smart, capable people, many of whom are already in public service with the city, police department, the parks and rec, and other areas. We should tap the knowledge that is readily available to us, and utilize and support them in building a stronger Dickinson. I do not see it as the City Commission’s job to run the city. It’s our job to facilitate the effective governance of it.”
Odermann said the city commission needs to facilitate conversations with various city stakeholders.
"Ask those people in the community, ‘Hey, what do you guys think we need,’ but then also be able to collect all that information and look at it, compartmentalize that information, and make a decision that’s best for the community based on all the information that’s presented," he said. "People need to understand that maybe my project is third or fourth on the list when I think it should be first, but you can’t get to that point unless you have the conversations that are necessary to have. I don’t know if those conversations are taking place right now."
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Odermann believes that his experience in multiple community organizations will aid him in facilitating discussion.
"One of the things that I think is a skill set that I have, is bringing people together," he said. "I think I have a lot of different and varied relationships with the different leaders in the community as well as front-line staff workers, and I’ve been able to build good, positive working relationships with people in a lot of different places throughout the community."
Odermann is a board member for the Dickinson Area Chamber of Commerce and Stark Development Corporation, and the Trinity Fine Arts Booster Board. He is Chairman of CHI’s local Bio-Medical Ethics Committee, the District 37 Republicans, and the Chamber’s Government Relations Committee. He also serves as one of the hospital’s representatives on the Northland Healthcare Alliance board of directors.
Odermann wants conversations and collaborations with various stakeholders to help drive the strategic growth of Dickinson, one that is fiscally responsible.
“From a fiscal perspective, I believe it is really important for the city to responsibly manage the budget and do so in a way that is always cognizant of our debt,” he said. “We expanded rapidly in the last 10 years and that debt was necessary, but we need to be vigilant to not become too dependent on oil revenues from the state and be fiscally conservative with our budget going forward to prepare for possibly lean times in the future."
Odermann wants to help Dickinson face its upcoming challenges and move forward.
"There’s a lot of really big challenges that I see on the horizon, especially those challenges look like they might be a little more serious than when I decided I was going to run, with what we’re looking at with the oil industry in western North Dakota as well as the impacts that are going to result from the COVID-19 shutdown," he said. " ... There's going to be hard decisions and hard conversations that need to be had, and we need to make sure that the right people are at the table for those conversations, and I think I can help build that ... openness to communication that I think the community's going to need in the coming months and years."
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