Month: February 2016

Dickinson Police Dispatch Completes Move to Public Safety Center

Dickinson Police Department communications specialist Kim Schwidnt works in front of her eight-minotor dispatcher display inside the department’s dispatch center, which moved its operations to the Public Safety Center on Thursday. The dispatchers had been working in the Law Enforcement Center despite the department’s move to the Public Safety Center in September.

 

Gary Steffan said he couldn’t help but get emotional early Thursday morning when he turned off the lights inside the Dickinson Law Enforcement Center’s dispatch room.

“You never see a dispatch with nobody in it,” said Steffan, a communications specialist in his 12th year with the Dickinson Police Department. “That doesn’t happen. But today, there wasn’t. … It was emotional. Somebody has to be in the chair.”

On Thursday, for the fi rst time since the LEC opened more than 30 years ago, there were no dispatchers on site as they offi cially moved into their new and much more spacious room at the Public Safety Center.

Computer and phone network issues kept the dispatch crew from making the move along with the rest of the department last September.

“We did feel ostracized a little bit, because they left without us,” said a joking Dana Becker, the department’s public safety support specialist.

Now, Becker said, they’re in the Public Safety Center for good, with at least two people ready to answer 911 and dispatch police, fi re and ambulance services 24 hours a day.

Four dispatch stations in the new center sit on a false fl oor with thousands of telephone and network cords running beneath it. The massive technical undertaking of ensuring everything in the center worked perfectly before communications specialists could move their operations there delayed their move for nearly six months.

“Our network wasn’t ready,” Becker said. “We have redundancy in this building, so we have network in one side and in the other.”

If a line is cut on one end of the building, the other side will take over, she said.

Dispatchers also now have eight computer monitors in front of them and the ability to raise their desks to standing height. The monitors lead to quicker workfl ow and make dispatcher’s jobs easier.

There are monitors for maps, the call system and offi cer locations. In the old dispatch center, many of those displays would be on single screens.

The old dispatch center at the LEC remain operational, despite being shuttered.

“We have full redundancy,” said Stark County Emergency Manager Bill Fahlsing, who has an offi ce in the dispatch center and will spend about eight hours a week there. “If something were to happen to this center, our dispatchers could leave this center, go to the Law Enforcement Center and still ensure that 911 and emergency calls are being answered.”

Becker said despite relaxation not being part of the job description, being in the new dispatch center Thursday created a sense of relief.

Dispatchers took quieter moments and leaned back in their chairs, taking in their new and much larger surroundings. While he’s impressed with the new setting, Steffan said he enjoys what he does because it’s personally gratifying.

“Just knowing that you give the community your best possible service — whether it’s the police, fi re or ambulance, whatever their need is — (you are) trying to comfort them until offi cers or somebody in a uniform arrives on scene,” he said, “and knowing you did everything possible to help them until more help arrives.”

‘Crossing’ into new territory: Oilfield entrepreneur enters restaurant business with new steakhouse

Seth Murphy knows next to nothing about running a restaurant.

But he knows what he likes: great food, a place he can both bring his family and conduct business, and a venue that can be used to give back to the community.

He wants The Crossing to provide all of that and more when it opens next summer.

The Dickinson oilfield entrepreneur said he isn’t letting the western North Dakota energy industry downturn keep him from diversifying his business ventures.

“Everyone says it’s a hard industry, and I’m sure it is,” Murphy said of the restaurant business. “But hard is a relative term. Not everybody deals with what we deal with by 5 a.m. every morning either.”

Murphy, the president of oilfield service company SM Fencing, said he wanted to start a business separate from the energy industry that would be able to provide an amenity to southwest North Dakota community.

He and his company believe they’ve found that opportunity with The Crossing, an 11,000 square foot steakhouse and bar under construction on north State Avenue near the Sierra Ridge apartment complex.

Kodee Gartner, the management director of Endeavor West — Murphy’s latest business entity that will function as the operations arm for The Crossing — said being a part of the team starting the restaurant has been rewarding in that they’ve been able to start with a blank canvas and move forward independently.

“What is our vision and how are we going to get there?” she said. “There is no blueprint. This is us sketching it out on a kitchen table, and trying to figure out what this is going to look like and how this is going to go. One of our biggest advantages is our team is deep in common sense.”

When complete, The Crossing will have two levels and ability to seat around 270 people.

Beyond that, Gartner said, The Crossing will have two private conference rooms able to provide space for everything from parties to board meetings, and another area she said can be called a “multi-use space.”

“We want The Crossing to be where people celebrate their life’s biggest moments,” Gartner said.

While the group’s main focus is to bring another dining opportunity to the area, it also hopes to use The Crossing as a philanthropic entity.

Gartner, who like Murphy is from the Killdeer area, was brought on board a little over a year ago and she was sold on The Crossing, in part, because of Murphy’s wish to conduct more philanthropic efforts.

“When I started on, what was appealing was he’s looking for a legacy impact,” she said. “… That’s part of the Crossing’s DNA is there will be social good woven into it.”

Gartner said The Crossing wants to be known as a gathering hotspot and the restaurant of choice for locals, both old and new, and be able to cater to changing social demographics.

“It isn’t a goal to build this to service the oilfield if and when it comes back,” Murphy said. “We’re building this to serve the locals that have been here that input good into the community. The agricultural segment is going to be a big part of what we play to.”

Ashley Lamphier, a business development specialist with Endeavor West, came to Dickinson from the Atlanta area through her friendship with Gartner. The two had worked together in the past, and after moving here, Lamphier said she fell in love with the area and her new company’s long-term plans, starting with The Crossing.

“I really see it as becoming almost a cornerstone of the community,” she said. “I think it’s going to be a big place where people can gather.”

As for the food, Murphy said he wants The Crossing to be as meat and potatoes as it gets, catering first to southwest North Dakotans and staying away from “fancier” entrees. A “simple menu” is planned.

They hope to have a general manager hired this week. That person will be charged with hiring around 30 employees, and running the day-to-day operations of The Crossing.

Murphy said he hopes to hire a manager he can trust to implement a strong work ethic while also being unafraid to try new things.

“None of us have restaurant experience,” Murphy said. “We know what we like. We purposefully didn’t bring anyone into the team that had restaurant experience because the way you’ve always done it is not always the right way. Just because it’s been done one way for 30 years doesn’t mean it can’t be done better.”

The boom’s gone, and some people in southwest North Dakota are OK with that

To get a sense of what’s happening in a community, it’s often best to consult the local barber.

Paul Ellerkamp owns Big Sky Barbers, a two-chair shop he runs with his younger brother in a north Dickinson strip mall.

Their business is a small, but accurate representation of the highs of the oil boom, the slows of the bust and the ongoing market stabilization the area is going through today.

The surprising similarity between the oil boom and now, Ellerkamp said, is his bottom line.

“We’re not turning away 50 people a day,” he said with a small sigh of relief. “… But somehow the bottom line is about the same. We do not see as many oilfield guys as we used to. I won’t even begin to give you a percentage of how much that has dropped off — but quite a few.”

As Dickinson and its surrounding small towns settle back into something similar to the pre-boom world, Ellerkamp said there’s plenty of positives to take from it.

“Overall, if you’d look at it from a person that has been here 10 years, or has lived here all their life, they kind of liked not so much of the hustle and bustle,” he said. “It’s definitely more of the hometown feeling.”

And so it goes for life in Dickinson and southwest North Dakota, where an oil boom brought thousands of people to the area, only to leave many high and dry when prices collapsed in early 2014 and kept falling through early January.

Now, instead of eyeing expansion and trying to track uncharted growth, most businesses and cities are planning for modesty and hoping they can plan for the possibility of both a calm and busy future, should oil prices and activity suddenly rebound.

Major projects and commercial development in Dickinson have all but come to a halt as the hub city begins paying off deficits created by infrastructure and building projects that helped alleviate the booming, oil-driven economy.

What remains of Dickinson’s once hurried building sector is on the public side, where the Dickinson Middle School building is taking shape and water treatment facilities are under construction. New commercial developments — such as stores and restaurants — while still opening, aren’t coming at as fast of a clip as they were the past two years.
However, Dickinson’s economy isn’t faltering — even in the face of low oil prices and uncertain farm commodities and livestock prices.

“We know we’re rebalancing the Dickinson economy now,” Stark Development Executive Vice President Gaylon Baker said in his State of the City speech on Jan. 19. “We’re going to get back to a more normal situation.”

Even the small towns in southwest North Dakota aren’t sweating the slowdown much.

“Some projects have kind of slowed down. Traffic has,” said Chuck Muscha, Killdeer’s mayor. “But I think probably the main people who had the biggest effect is the business owners. When this transpired, things were booming. Now they’re closer to normal.”

Mark Benz, who owns the Grab n’ Go convenience store at the corner of state Highways 22 and 200 as well as petroleum distributor Benz Oil in Killdeer, said the slowdown in activity is noticeable on both the visual and business side.

But, he said he’s maintaining a philosophy of “no rash decisions.”

While the convenience store opened in 2012 at the height of the boom, Benz Oil has been around since 1970. So Benz said he’s seen plenty of highs and lows in the oil business.

“One thing I know from being in this industry this long is it can change awful fast,” he said.

Even in Bowman County, where oil has been a part of life for decades, they’re subtly feeling the effects of the slowdown and playing the waiting game.

Like Dickinson, Bowman County doesn’t have big plans for 2016, County Commissioner Rick Braaten said.

“As far as our road and bridge budget, that’s our biggest one, all we’re doing there for this coming year is maintenance,” he said. “We’re not doing any projects or construction in 2016. We had a feeling funds were going to be quite a bit lower. We decided not to do any improvements on our roads this year.”

Teran Doerr, the executive director of the Bowman County Development Corp., said she has seen people lose jobs, businesses report slower sales and more housing come on the market.

“It almost feels like it happened overnight,” she said.

A carbon dioxide pipeline planned by Denbury Resources to use for injection on older wells in the county is still coming but the project is moving much slower, according to Denbury representatives.

New England, like Bowman, had been planning for 2015 to be the year it began seeing increased activity from the oil business.

Two oil rigs were drilling into the Tyler formation west of the city in Slope County in 2014. If they hit, the town of about 700 people was bound to boom. But the wells didn’t produce and when the prices dropped, Marathon Oil cut its losses and moved on.

“Surprisingly, we are still doing well,” New England City Auditor Jason Jung said.

The city wrapped up the first of a likely four-year street and water project in 2015, Jung said.

The best decision the city made during the boom was not to overdo things, he said, adding that while new housing has sprung up and most new people who came to the area stayed, some are losing their oil jobs.

“The oil, we had some positive effects from it and we haven’t seen the negative effects,” Jung said. “We might be one of the few towns that might be that way instead of the opposite way.”

To the north in South Heart — Dickinson’s unofficial suburb — it was merely three years ago that South Heart Mayor Floyd Hurt stood with a shovel in hand and political dignitaries at his side to break ground on the new Dakota Prairie Refinery between his 300-person town and Dickinson.

Now, the refinery is operating but recently reported a $20 million loss traced back to low oil prices and lack of diesel fuel use in area, a crew camp in South Heart has closed and a planned massive facility for oilfield service giant Schlumberger is smaller than it was planned to be and very quiet.

Hurt said South Heart is still fairly happy with where it’s at, however.

“The best thing to do is just sit tight and wait and see,” Hurt said. “If it starts going up and things start generating again, then make plans to move with the times.”

During his State of the City speech, Baker called it “highly unlikely” that the area’s energy industry would ever again “relive the speed, volume and chaos” of the past oil boom.

And, if folks around the area are to be believed, they’re just fine with that.

Theodore Roosevelt National Park gears up for a busy year

MEDORA — Theodore Roosevelt National Park’s top official believes it could be a big year for the western North Dakota people’s playground.

Planning is already underway for the National Park Service’s yearlong centennial celebration, and Park Superintendent Wendy Ross said TRNP is anticipating a sizable boost in visitors thanks to both centennial events and North Dakota Tourism’s nationwide marketing push that highlights the park.

“The centennial is just big,” Ross said.

The publicity push, featuring actor and Minot native Josh Duhamel, includes TV commercials filmed in the park’s South Unit near Medora last summer that are now beginning to air nationally.

“I’m very optimistic,” Ross said. “I think our summer is going to be amazing.”

Boosting visitors

Ross became acting superintendent in November 2014 following Valerie Naylor’s retirement. The “acting” label was dropped last July and she moved into the role permanently.

Her goal is to capture a larger audience and get visitors to the park who may have never been there, or even heard of it, before.

TRNP’s 2015 attendance figures show it had more than 586,000 counted visitors — an increase of about 26,000 people from 2014. However, Ross said those numbers may not be entirely accurate after park officials discovered some of its people counters hadn’t been working for weeks at a time. That glitch has been fixed, she said.

“I’m really concerned about capturing what we get in terms of visitation this year,” Ross said.

Interestingly, Ross said the park is noticing a small demographic shift in who frequents the area.

“We’re just seeing more foreign visitors,” she said. “… We see people who don’t traditionally go to national parks. They’re curious about what it’s all about.”

Ross said she’s looking for opportunities for the park to become relevant to what she calls a “curious generation” beginning to travel more

“The generation that didn’t travel to national parks as children,” she said. “That’s really our opportunity now with all this promotion.”

Being ranked as the No. 5 place in the world to see in 2016 by The New York Times may play into that too, she said.

Ross said park officials worked with the Times’ staff for the piece, so they knew it was coming. But they didn’t realize the park would rank so high on the list, or be mentioned alongside some more exotic locations.

“It’s been great positive press,” she said. “You couldn’t ask for anything better than to be on that list.”

Oil and tourism

Ross said summer tourism now hops back into the front seat of North Dakota’s economy after low oil prices hurt the state’s energy industry. However, the byproduct of low oil prices is lower gas prices low, which benefits the park with both in-state and out-of-state visitors.

“When that starts decreasing, in terms of price, tourism comes up and we see that everywhere, in all national parks,” Ross said.

She said the park’s North Unit, about 15 miles south of still-booming Oil Patch hub Watford City — where the population has increased from 1,600 to around 7,000 in the past five years — has become the park’s “new front door.”

“There are all these countries represented in Watford City that were never there before,” Ross said. “It’s our chance to be relevant to a new generation and a new group of people, to think about that.”

There are challenges up north, however.

The park is working to replace its North Unit Visitors Center, which is currently a collection of portable buildings. But a replacement may be a couple years away from reality, Ross said, because of budgetary concerns. Still, she’s trying to make the North Unit more of a priority.

“It used to be a sleepy backwater, real wilderness experience,” Ross said.

TRMF’s involved in NPS centennial

The Theodore Roosevelt Medora Foundation plans to play a role in the National Park Service Centennial as well, said Justin Fisk, the foundation’s marketing director.

The foundation is sending Roosevelt impersonator Joe Wiegand away from Medora for the entire month of June to travel the country doing presentations and performances to raise awareness about the park.

The Medora Musical will also “very, very likely” have the centennial central to its daily performance, Fisk said.

“They’re writing the show right now and it’s looking cool, and they’re looking for the best way to include the National Park Service Centennial in that,” he said. “It’s pretty exciting.”

Fisk said over the next month, more centennial tie-ins and plans will be finalized between the park service and the foundation.

“With the partnership, you can actually get a lot more done,” Ross said. “You can use community members and partners to fill in some of the nuts-and-bolts gaps, but you can also create those meaningful ties your communities.”

Ag commissioner: 2016 outlook ‘pretty dismal’ for farmers

Doug Goehring may be North Dakota’s agriculture commissioner, but at the end of the day, he’s still a farmer.

Like any farmer, he has to deal with the low commodity prices that have producers from southwest North Dakota to the Red River Valley concerned and apprehensive about what the 2016 growing season will bring.

“It’s pretty dismal,” Goehring said of the state’s ag outlook. “… At this point, my understanding visiting with farmers — and even on our own farm — is there’s some hard decisions to make.”

Goehring admitted he’s even thinking about giving up a piece of rented land that may not pencil out as profitable this year.

He said he’s heard the same story throughout the state as farmers weigh their input costs with commodity prices that are lower than they’ve been in several years and are causing them to see red on the bottom lines of their projected yearly balance sheets.

“Farmers don’t see any black anywhere they look,” he said. “Then it’s a matter of trying to assess, ‘Where can you lose the least amount of money at?’”

Ron Haugen, a farm management specialist with the North Dakota State University Extension Service in Fargo, is part of a group that releases an annual report meant to aid producers in planning for the upcoming growing season.

“This has been some of the lowest prices we’ve had in several years,” he said.

North Dakota farmers are planning for their worst spring wheat prices in at least six years — nearly $2.50 a bushel lower than recent averages — with durum wheat at its lowest since 2011, according to the Extension Service’s data.

Corn prices, for the past two years, have been about $1.50 a bushel lower than recent averages and are nearly half the price of what they were in the 2012-13 marketing season.

Oil sunflowers are $8.35 per hundred weight lower than average and down nearly $5 since last year. Soybeans and canola are both at their lowest point in the past five years and well below recent averages.

“To have tight margins is actually more the norm,” Haugen said. “The last five years have seen extraordinarily high prices. This is getting back to more normal, where things are tighter.”

Despite the benefit of farmers and ranchers having the lowest fuel prices than they’ve had in several years, the gains there don’t stack up with low commodity prices.

Greg Fitterer, with Helena Chemical in New England, has been in the fertilizer and bulk fuel sale business much of his life.

He said farmers know little to nothing is going to pencil out positive at current commodity prices. Fertilizer prices aren’t much more expensive than they were five years ago, either, and he said the producers his company works with aren’t likely to back off on how much fertilizer they put on, unless spring becomes unusually dry, because they feel it’ll help keep their yields higher.

“Everything goes in cycles,” he said. “You have your ups and your downs. I’d say most guys’ goals this year is to break even. To not lose equity. It’s sad, but you’re basically not trying to strike out and hit a single.”

Goehring said he’d still like to see the chemical and fertilizer business — especially when it comes to nitrogen fertilizer and anhydrous ammonia — settle into more reasonable price in line with ag and energy commodities.

“There’s things way out of whack,” he said. “It’s gotten to a point where the industry is charging what it’ll bear and they need to come down a little bit. They’ve been squeezing too much out of the farmer, and taking advantage of the opportunity — when commodity prices are high, we’re going to get more from the farmer.”

Goehring said most farmers are looking at “bare bones minimum” spending plans to try and get through 2016 with the hope that better years and higher commodity prices — along with a better world economy, which greatly dictates those commodity prices — are around the corner.

“They’re trying to figure out everything that they can do to make that balance sheet work so they can buy another day, buy another year, another season to farm,” Goehring said. “Because chances are, a year and a half from now, things are going to be a little bit better.”