Dakota Beacon

Should the BNSF tracks between Devils Lake and Rugby be repaired with public money to accommodate Amtrak service to those towns and Grand Forks?  Check the numbers -- only 15-20 passengers a day board Amtrak in Rugby and Devils Lake.  Because of rising water near the lake, over $100 million of repairs is likely to be needed to maintain Amtrak service through the two towns.  Although BNSF owns the track, the railroad no longer uses the threatened track, instead providing service from each side.  If upgrades were made, service would be interrupted for two years and the Empire Builder would be rerouted directly from Minot to Fargo.  How would you make this call?

Valley City is in the flooding bull’s-eye -- water is pouring down the Sheyenne River and releases have been increased at Baldhill Dam (upstream from the city).  The City Administrator said, “It’s the volume of the water that’s coming down the river.  It’s just historic.”  Flows in upstream towns Warwick and Cooperstown exceed 2009 levels -- a year when V.C. had significant flood damage.

Road maps show a gently curving Sheyenne River south of Valley City.  My wife and I drove through the scenic valley last fall and the river is anything but gently curving.  It’s a snaky series of oxbows -- the river keeps meeting itself.  Virgil and Tami Kratz are residents of the little valley and are surrounded by water, living with stress and anxiety on an island -- the couple said, “Someone needs to let ‘the powers that be’ know that having two ‘500-year floods’ within two years really doesn’t make for good math!”

The Fargo Forum issued a grim warning about Devils Lake saying consequences of its rise could be very serious for the cities in the Sheyenne River drainage: Valley City, Lisbon, W. Fargo and Fargo.  While the lake level is still several feet from breakout at the Tolna Coulee, erosion in the coulee could cause an earlier event.  The Forum said, “Rising water at Devils Lake cannot be viewed as exclusively a Devils Lake problem.”

You will find Stanley about halfway between Williston and Minot.  In 2000 the population was 1,280; by 2010 it had risen to 1,450.  The Mountrail County town is in the heart of oil country.  Annabelle Homes, a Minneapolis developer, will build 25 townhomes and 28 houses in Stanley, plus various commercial buildings.  Instead of asking for city assistance, Annabelle is investing more than $800,000 of its own money in infrastructure and making other payments to the town for fire and safety services.

The Dickinson Press is near the Badlands in southwest ND and the Grand Forks Herald is way across the state in the northern Red River Valley.  Both are part of Forum Communications, but they presented differing views of the state’s two-year $1.5 billion transportation budget, which includes $370 million for roads damaged by oil traffic.  The Press’ message was go slow, spend wisely, all of this money may not be needed.  The Press believes more money should go into enforcement and prevention and approves of ideas such as Stark County buying a $40,000 scale to enforce weight restrictions -- “overweight trucks can do more damage in an afternoon than the price tag of the scales.” 

The Herald encouraged more paving, observing that western ND has few paved roads, “So, the traffic has hammered gravel roads, raising ceaseless clouds of dust when the weather is dry and turning some roads into nearly impassable mud holes when it’s wet.”  The Press went a different direction, “Sometimes gravel is easier to maintain than spending thousands to blacktop a path which will turn into dust after months of travel by these bulky vehicles.”  The Dickinson paper urged the state not to waste money, “Roads need to be fixed for long-term use and not short-term.”  The Press’ clear implication was that the state should not overreact to short-term problems caused by oil development and should keep its eye on the needs of the production economy which follows.

Direct federal payments to farmers remain popular in ND, but it is interesting to note what is being said elsewhere.  The Chicago Tribune, in an editorial reprinted in the Minneapolis StarTribune, said: “Time to sharpen the plow blades.  The nation’s farmers don’t need . . . the crass form of welfare known as ‘direct payments.’  These checks arrive rain or shine, good times or bad.”  The editorial described how times have been very good for farmers and went so far as to claim farmers could barely fit the cash into “the pockets of their dusty overalls.”  However, the farm lobby is tightly organized and politically well-represented with a long and successful record of defending subsidies.

Computers, the Internet and cell phones put rural ND in the mainstream of global communication.  Now it’s possible for rural people to establish niche businesses in a way never before possible.  A Carrington business called Healthy Oilseeds was picked 2010 ND Exporter of the Year.  Healthy Oilseeds is run by the Gussiaas family and exports flax and other specialty crops to customers in Europe and Asia.  The products are containerized in Carrington and trucked to Minneapolis and Minot for rail shipment to ports.  Roger Gussiaas sees value-added, export agriculture as a way of creating good jobs in small towns.

In 2009, the director of ND’s pension funds said a $138 million investment with Santa Barbara money managers was being frozen because of suspected fraud.  The ND funds recently announced they would be recovering all the principal invested with the managers plus some profit.  This will be no help to the funds’ 2009 director who committed suicide last year -- a subsequent audit found no wrongdoing on his part.  One of the two California money managers has pleaded guilty to fraud, the other has a pending trial.

Whitey’s Cafe in East Grand Forks is an institution on both sides of the Red River.  The Herald spoke of “the eatery’s storied past: its origins in the Prohibition era, and its reputation as a place where patrons once played slot machines.”  A place where “Legions of UND students earned their tuition money behind the horseshoe bar.”  Whitey’s has not done well lately and is up for public auction on May 15.

“Never the twain shall meet” -- Rudyard Kipling, 1892.  Tara Dupper, a resettlement coordinator for Lutheran Social Services in Grand Forks, said, “I think that communities are fortunate if they have a growing immigrant (refugee) population.”  A 2010 Knight Foundation survey in Grand Forks found “only 2 in 10 or fewer residents said Grand Forks was a good place to live for  . . . immigrants or racial and ethnic minorities.”

DAKTOIDS:  The flow of the Red River north of Grand Forks in April was the second-largest on record -- behind only the disastrous flood of 1997.