Dakota Beacon

PLEASANT SURPRISE  Rob Port says columnists are often reluctant to report good news, but sometimes it’s unavoidable.  He said ND’s unemployment rate dropped from 9.2% in April to 3.8% in September.  State revenues for the 2019-2021 biennium through September were higher than forecast and the state had a $93 million general fund surplus.  ND's surplus should be the envy of many states.

THEY DID IT!  The T. Roosevelt Library Foundation has raised $100 million in private donations.  The lead donation of $50 million comes from Rob and Melani Walton (Walmart).  Other families (and their affiliations) that have pledged more than $1 million include Doug and Kathryn Burgum (ND Gov.), Steve and Eileen Scheel (Fargo sporting goods chain), Ron Offut (potato king), John Ballantyne and Michael Chambers (co-founders of a Fargo pharmaceutical) and William and Jane Marcil (Forum Communications).  Reaching the $100 million secures a ND state endowment of $50 million — earnings will be used to fund library operations. 

THE WORST KEPT SECRET  Amazon and Fargo officials are expected to announce today that Amazon will build the state’s largest building in Fargo.  Work is well underway on a 1,250,000 square foot distribution center expected to have 1,000 employees. 

SANFORD HEALTH is the dominant health system in the Dakotas and parts of Minnesota, Iowa and Nebraska.  Intermountain Healthcare has a similarly strong position in Utah, Nevada and Idaho.  Montana and Wyoming form a geographical gap between the two health systems.  The boards of the two groups voted last week to merge and form one of the nation’s top ten health systems.  The transaction will be billed as a merger of equals, but it appears that Intermountain will have the upper hand — its CEO will be the top executive of a new organization which takes the Intermountain name and will be headquartered in Salt Lake City.

SAILING AGAINST THE WIND  New UND President Andrew Armacost spoke to his 800-member faculty and staff.  He said the pandemic and budgetary pressures are the two biggest issues facing the university.  UND has 150 active coronavirus cases, most of which have sprung up in the last few weeks.  He described procedures to control the spread on campus and asked the city of Grand Forks to adopt a mask mandate — a request granted this week.  UND funding is double-barreled: tuition and state appropriations.  Tuition looks okay for the moment — fall enrollment is up.  How UND will fare with the Legislature is unknown — a reasonably healthy state budget situation gives a glimmer of hope.

A BIT SMUG?  “I received lots of hate mail, and criticism from other columnists, but nothing was going to stop me this time . . . I am proud to have taken the lead on this issue.” — Forum columnist Jim Shaw was somewhat self-congratulatory about his relentless campaign to change the name of the Woodrow Wilson School in Fargo.  Shaw’s research causes him to believe Wilson was a racist.  Shaw was part of a national movement to root out historical racists, topple their statues and remove their names from public buildings.  Critics refer to those involved in the movement as “naming police” whose objective is to selectively revise history.

THE BAD BOY LIST  ND continued to be among the worst states in the nation for coronavirus cases and deaths per capita.  Yesterday, most of the largest counties hit new highs for active cases.  Ward County (Minot) was the most extreme and had an alarming increase in both cases and deaths.

SLOPPY NEIGHBORS  “It’s very striking that the greater part of the state has just lit up with cases in the last number of weeks and months.” — Kris Ehresmann, director of the infectious disease division at the Minnesota Department of Health (MDH).  He said that early in the pandemic MDH was focused on the Twin Cities metro area.  Then, the 56 counties making up Greater Minnesota saw a tripling of new cases in September.  Some health experts think rural Minnesota may have been influenced by weak public health responses in the Dakotas and Wisconsin and could have been infected by travel to those states.  The Dakotas have also seen an eruption of cases in rural counties. 

HOW DO THE DAKOTA TWINS COMPARE?  In a letter to the GF Herald, a Bismarck man made various comparisons between North and South Dakota.  He noted SD has a population of 884,000 while ND has 762,000; Covid cases in SD were 31,000 and ND had 30,000.  At the time of the writing, Covid-related deaths in SD were 304 compared to 375 in ND.  He said if you put these outcomes on a per capita basis, SD clearly has done better than ND.  His purpose was to show that SD, which had relatively few Covid restrictions, fared better than ND which was stricter.  His conclusions are largely correct, but both states are having relatively poor results controlling the virus and their overall outcomes are not that different.

SKYSKOPES, a Grand Forks-based provider of drone services, has been named the top drone service provider in the country by Drone Industry Insights.  SkySkopes has branches across the country which focus on its core mission of utility line inspection and data collection for the oil and gas industry.  CEO Matt Dunlevy looks forward to a statewide UAS systems network which will permit flying beyond the visual line of sight in ND.  This will allow his drones to work with much less human monitoring.  His company collaborates with the Northern Plains UAS Test Site in Grand Forks.

DAKTOIDS:  The ND Insurance Commissioner said, “A vast majority of North Dakotans should see little to no change in the health insurance premiums they are paying from this year to next year” . . . Commercial airline boardings in ND in September were down 51% from the same  month last year . . . The UND hockey team is ranked No. 1 in a preseason USCHO poll.