SCHMID: LOOKING BACK FROM THE LEFT COAST - MAY 4, 2014
BARONS VISTA A “lighthouse to travelers arriving in Dickinson.” -- That’s the description of a 15-story hotel tower which is proposed as the centerpiece of a $300 million residential, hotel and retail development in west Dickinson. The Forum News Service says the tower “would be the tallest building in North Dakota.” It should be noted that the capitol building in Bismarck is 19 stories. The planned development is called Barons Vista, named after the Singapore-based Barons Group which will make the investment. The Forum article indicates such investments are needed because local businesses alone are not able to keep up with the growing market.
UP, UP AND AWAY “Who would have imagined that North Dakota would be the hotbed of commercial aviation?” -- An engineer at the MIT Center for Air Transportation. An article in Bloomberg Business Week describes how ND is a bright spot in the nation’s flagging small airports. The state’s airplane boardings have doubled in the past decade. Minot’s annual passenger boardings are over 200,000 and the city is constructing a $45 million terminal with six gates. Williston now has 100,000 annual enplanements and may need a new $220 million airport.
DISCRIMINATION, NO WAY, NOT US. NDSU insists that it does not discriminate based on race. Forms distributed by the school include language saying NDSU “does not discriminate on the basis of age, color . . . race,” etc. Blogger Rob Port must have had a hard time suppressing a grin when he pointed out the discrimination language is included on forms students use to apply for a Cultural Diversity Tuition Discount. The CDTD application is accompanied by a point chart. Who gets the biggest discount? Someone who is a member of an Indian tribe (15 points), has low income (5 points) and graduated from a tribal college (3 points). Blacks and Hispanics don’t do quite as well -- they get only 8 points, more if they are also low income. ND allows affirmative action in college admissions.
THEY PUT LENNY ON ICE By now, we know that FX’s TV series “Fargo” does not take place in Fargo. It’s set mainly in Bemidji, still, Fargo gets in the act. In the second instalment, members of a Fargo crime syndicate mistakenly snatch a character called Lenny from a Bemidji bar. Upon realizing their mistake, the Fargoans take Lenny to a frozen lake. Conveniently, they have an ice auger, which is used to bore the hole in which Lenny disappears. Writer Ryan Johnson kindly summarized the episode for Forum readers.
LOUD AND NUTTY Little Craig Cobb created a moment of massive hysteria last year when he tried to take over the southwest ND town of Leith (pop. 19) and make it a haven for white supremacists. There was a scramble to denounce him -- editorials, politicians and demonstrators jumped on the bandwagon. Cobb was proclaimed a terrorist and marched off to jail and a mental hospital. At the end of the day -- Cobb didn’t harm anyone, but was loud and nutty. Released on probation, he proclaimed “I want to retire from white nationalism because I’ve had it.” He’s going to Missouri -- Bye Craig.
THE DUKE ELLINGTON BAND In his column “Neighbors,” Bob Lind talks about a Fargo concert by the touring Duke Ellington band in November 1940. The concert was recorded by engineers from the Extension Departments at the ND Agricultural College and SD State. Their work is now considered to be one of the finest recordings ever made of the band. Lind’s article mentioned the band arrived in a special Pullman car on a train from Winnipeg. A biography of Ellington mentions that his band was unique because it traveled with private rail cars. The reason for the cars was to avoid the difficulty blacks had getting hotel and restaurant accommodations, particularly in the Deep South. Ellington lost the cars when they were requisitioned by the military at the start of WWII.
NEW SUNNY DAYS Financial distress is behind the TAT. The tribes are now producing 30 percent of ND oil production and in the past nine months collected $184 million in oil tax revenue. Chairman Tex says if they were a separate state they would rank No. 7 in oil production. They have splendid plans: $100 million for roads, another $100 million for a new bridge across Lake Sakakawea, $45 million to house the staff of a clinic, and much, much more. All good news for the tribes.
EVENHANDED GRACE? Each week the Jamestown Sun awards Bravos and Buffalo Chips. Last week, Carrington’s Job Development Authority received a Bravo for making innovative student grants in exchange for employment agreements to keep students in the area. Rep. Kevin Cramer wasn’t so lucky, the Sun gave him a Buffalo Chip for calling President Obama a “juvenile delinquent in the White House.”
GRUMPY DONALD Donald Poochigian is a professor in the Department of Philosophy and Religion at UND. He believes UND sold its soul when it lost its historic liberal arts focus and became a business and technical school. Poochigian thinks that was the purpose of NDSU.
SOMALI REFUGEES The Somalis in Minnesota and ND have a special interest in the story of the 15-year-old boy who stowed away in the wheel well of a Hawaiian Airlines plane in San Jose, Calif. He survived and is in a hospital in Hawaii. Somalis in the two states are mostly refugees and their children -- the San Jose boy is a Somali refugee whose birth mother is in an Ethiopian refugee camp.
DAKTOIDS: Nodaks have good reason to be concerned about rail safety -- rail shipments of Bakken crude oil increased from 9,500 carloads in 2008 to 408,000 carloads in 2013 . . . Should Fargo grow in or out? The city has an estimated population of 115,000, but only four people per acre. The city’s development goal is nine per acre . . . Rural ND school districts have a hard time finding teachers for certain hard-to-find specialties. Tom Dennis of the GF Herald suggests using differential (higher) pay to attract those specialties -- a change from single-salary policies in most districts . . . The CHS plant under consideration near Jamestown will require 2,500 gallons of water per minute around the clock.
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