Dakota Beacon

Score: Bats 2, McClean County 0.  A second McClean County employee has been diagnosed with a serious illness believed to be caused by bat droppings at the courthouse in Washburn.  The 100-year-old courthouse may have to be abandoned.  Voters turned down a new courthouse in 2002.  McClean County straddles Lake Sakakawea and is about halfway between Minot and Bismarck.

Politics is local.  Brows were furrowed at the Minot City Council when members of a task force discussed President Obama’s goal of phasing out nuclear weapons.  Minot AFB has a nuclear mission which includes B-52 bombers and underground missiles.  The Council was comforted to hear that discussions of nuclear reduction rarely go anywhere.  Relieved, the Council quickly moved to approve a $470,000 bid for restoring the Amtrak depot -- a job to be done with federal dollars.

Former NDSU President Joseph Chapman took heat for a variety of spending and budgetary problems at the school -- he was also accused of not playing nice with others in the ND higher education community.  It seemed almost inevitable that his chief financial officer would be next to get the cudgel.  So it was no great surprise when John Adams, NDSU Vice President for Finance, made his resignation.  However, he did not go down quietly.  His resignation letter accused Chapman of bullying and ignoring warnings about the budget.  Expect more financial issues to leak out of NDSU.

By early March, 21 candidates had announced their interest in becoming NDSU president.  All but three were out-of-state candidates.  They ranged widely in experience from interim president, Dick Hanson, to an associate professor of Spanish from North Carolina.  One interesting looking candidate was John Gardner, vice president for economic development and global engagement, Washington State University.  From 1987 to 1996, Gardner was director of the NDSU Carrington Research Extension Center.  The 21 were narrowed to 12; more applications are expected.

Bobcat left Bismarck in December, leaving a question mark over the Northern Plains Commerce Centre, a city-owned logistics facility.  The situation looks rosier now that Schuff Steel is coming to the NPCC with 250-300 employees to manufacture wind towers.  The business needs lots of real estate -- the Schuff plant will occupy 70 acres.  The whole deal is driven by $7 million of federal tax incentives for a clean energy project in Bismarck.

The Jamestown Sun has a daily feature called “Follow The Sun,” which shows photos of travelers away from Jamestown holding a copy of the newspaper.  In this context, “Sun” has a double meaning -- almost all the travelers look well-tanned and are pictured avoiding the ND winter in sunny locations such as Phoenix and Honolulu.  There was one outlier -- a glum looking couple shown in the shadow of the Seattle Space Needle.

ND average teacher salaries were $41,600 in the 2008-09 year -- 50th in the nation.  The state uses a salary schedule based largely on education and experience.  The schedule is partially blamed for low salaries -- it does not recognize outstanding teachers, all salaries move together.

Eight members of a Minot middle school basketball team were injured.  No, they didn’t have a tough game -- their school bus hit a cow.  The 70-passenger bus was chugging across the prairie after a game in Beulah, when two cows appeared in the road.  The bus struck one and veered into a snowy ditch.  The boys are not seriously injured, but the bus and cow are disabled.

Floyd Boutrous (93) was the son of Syrian immigrants who settled in the Bismarck area 100 years ago and peddled food, pots and pans to farms and small towns.  Later the Boutrous family opened “The Corner Grocery” in Bismarck.  Floyd became a successful businessman and a leading ND patriot who became known as “Mr. Constitution.”  Floyd died in March believing “the biggest honor you can ever have is to be an American citizen.”

George Thompson (84) grew up on a farm near Steele and, like many Nodaks, was lured by the sirens of California.  He and his wife worked in downtown Los Angeles, but it wasn’t a good fit.  According to his obituary, “They kept calling George to come back to shear sheep (he was an expert shearer) and the city really wasn’t the life for small town-country people.”  They came back home, where George happily became a heavy equipment operator for the next 25 years.

Herald Editor Mike Jacobs examined the hockey rivalry between the U.S. and Canada, in particular, the close relationship between Grand Forks and its Canadian neighbors.  He made an interesting side observation: Canada’s major cities and much of its population are south of GF.

UND’s Energy and Environmental Research Center has become one of the largest employers in Grand Forks.  Many of its contracts are related to energy technologies such as hydrogen, conversion of crop oil, and clean coal.  The EERC employs about 360 and expects, on average, to add one employee a week for the next two years.  The growth requires more space -- EERC is proposing a $14 million expansion.  The EERC is a successor to the UND Lignite Research Laboratory.

The Red River Valley sugar industry has completed most of its planting plans for this spring.  The genetically modified Roundup Ready seed used by most growers has already been purchased.  A court decision in San Francisco on March 5 could block those plans leaving growers with few alternatives.  The suit was brought by organic farmers in Oregon’s Willamette Valley where the GM seed is grown.  A Forum editorial takes the position that if the court responsibly considers current science and potential economic damage there should be no injunction against using the GM seed.