Category: News

Busy Season of Road Construction in Southwest ND

If there’s a highway in southwest North Dakota, odds are part of it is under construction.

A North Dakota Department of Transportation engineer in Dickinson said more than $200 million in reconstructions, widenings and chip seal projects happening this summer were necessary in order to ensure the department received legislative surge funding allocated to it.

“There’s a time limit on it. So we had to do a few more projects than we’d like,” said Rob Rayhorn, assistant district engineer for the NDDOT’s Dickinson District. “It’s a lot for the public to take for this year. But if we don’t take it, the project won’t be there next year.”

Nearly half of Interstate 94 is under construction from the Montana border to Gladstone — a stretch of about 72 miles — and the bridge off I-94 into South Heart has been closed all spring and summer for reconstruction. It should reopen by mid-September, Rayhorn said.

Continue reading “Busy Season of Road Construction in Southwest ND”

Theodore Roosevelt National Park Quarter to Launch Aug. 25

MEDORA — Two weeks from Thursday, a new U.S. quarter bearing the image of Theodore Roosevelt, the North Dakota Badlands and the Little Missouri River will be put into circulation.

The United States Mint will celebrate the release of its newly minted Theodore Roosevelt National Park coins with an event at 10 a.m. Thursday, Aug. 25, at the Painted Canyon Visitors Center off Interstate 94 Exit 32 near Medora.

The coins are part of the Mint’s America the Beautiful Quarters program, and one of five designs being released this year. It shows Roosevelt on horseback in the foreground overlooking the Little Missouri River and the Badlands.

Continue reading “Theodore Roosevelt National Park Quarter to Launch Aug. 25”

KLJ Admits Error in Water Tower Design

A new water tower built in east Dickinson is too tall and must be shortened, representatives from the engineering firm KLJ told the city commissioners on Monday.

KLJ engineers admitted during the regular meeting that the 150-foot tower was built 78 feet too tall because of an error that happened early in the engineering process. The firm intends to completely absorb the cost of its error.

“It did not meet our level of expectations and we let you down,” KLJ Chief Production Officer Barry Schuchard said. “We’re going to work very hard to make sure we get it corrected and I want to assure you that we’re going to take responsibility for this. There’ll be no additional cost to the city.”

The city approved a change order at KLJ’s request that would allow the firm to pursue re-engineering the tower to be only 72 feet.

The tower, which has already been constructed near the city’s Public Works Building, was engineered with specifications from the wrong city water zone, said Barry Synhorst, KLJ’s division leader.

“With the water in the existing water distribution system, we can’t get the water up to the level that it needs to be in the water tower,” Synhorst said. “Even if we could get the water up that high, because of the elevation difference, the pressures coming out of that water tower would be too great.”

Schuchard said the firm has been intensively working with city staff and its contractor to come up with a variety of options for fixing the mistake.

One option KLJ explored was to install a pump system that would lift the water up the existing tower to the elevation it needs to be at to create enough pressure.

Synhorst said KLJ consulted with a variety of peers and other municipalities — including some in Montana, where there are often challenges with pumping water because of differences in elevation — but could not come to a consensus on whether or not that idea would work.

Commissioners and engineers agreed that shortening the water tower was the most effective way to assure the project is completed by year’s end.

“I think this is the right choice too,” City Commission President Scott Decker said. “If you put a bunch of pumps into play, you have a lot of valves and moving parts that can fail.”

Kessel said the city has asked KLJ to review other projects it’s working on for the city to ensure there are no other engineering flaws.

“The city staff took this issue very seriously and have asked them to go beyond the scope of this water tower and make sure other work has been done accurately. I know they’ve also had to approach other engineering firms to verify some of those things,” Kessel said. “It’s a humbling experience for KLJ, but I do think they’ve taken the right steps to correct them.”

 

  • Public Works Director Gary Zuroff and Aaron Praus, the city’s solid waste manager, gave a presentation about implementing a city-wide recycling program. Commissioners voiced their agreement that the city needs a recycling program but made decision on the matter, other than to continue moving forward with researching the best ways to put the plans into motion.
  • Mike Lefor was sworn in as the fifth member of the city commission. Lefor, a lifelong Dickinson resident, owns DCI Credit Services and is a Republican in the state House of Representatives. He’ll serve on the commission through November, and will not seek the position that is open in the general election.
  • The commission approved a 30-day contract extension for city attorney services with Mackoff Kellogg law firm. Kessel called it a short-term solution as the city continues to deal with human resources issues stemming from its dismissal of former city attorney Jennifer Gooss.
  • The commission unanimously approved the creation of a new corporal position with the Dickinson Police Department to help provide more leadership within the department. The corporal position is a second-in-command position at the squad level and has some supervisory duties.
  • The city accepted a bid of $323,480 from Edling Electric to install new traffic signals at the intersections of 21st Street West and Third Avenue West, and at 21st Street West and State Avenue.

Parts of Southwest N.D. on Cusp of Grain Harvest

Kelly Herberholz made the first cut of this year’s harvest a week ago.

Since then, he and his father, Joe, have slowly been chipping away at their crop throughout central and western Hettinger County. Kelly estimates they have at least 300 acres done and that much of their spring wheat is running between 35 and 45 bushels an acre.

“We need more than that though,” he said with a short laugh.

Southwest North Dakota farmers are on the verge of what appears to be an above-average small grains harvest in a year where prices are well below average.

“There’s some good-looking crop out there. Now if we could just get a price for it,” CHS Southwest Grain General Manager Delane Thom said Friday. “A 50-bushel spring wheat crop is barely a break-even number.”

On Friday, 14 protein spring wheat closed at $3.85 a bushel at the Southwest Grain terminal near Taylor. Milling quality durum was $5.90.

As farmers like Herberholz are quietly chipping away at their spring wheat crop in Hettinger County — where the wheat is furthest along — he and others say and are awaiting higher temperatures this weekend that could turn a crop nearly ready to cut into one that’s falling into the hoppers of combines throughout the area.

“If the sun would come out, I think we’d all go,” Herberholz said.

This weekend — with temperatures forecast in the high 80s and low 90s, with a chance of thunderstorms on Sunday evening — could go a long way toward getting farmers in the field.

Tom Snell, who runs Snell Harvesting of Ellinwood, Kan., has 18 combines in Regent ready to go whenever the wheat is. He said they took a couple of their John Deere harvesters out north of the small town on Friday to try areas for one client.

Snell said he has seen some good crops throughout the Great Plains this summer and while this year’s North Dakota crop isn’t going to be a “bin buster,” he believes it’ll be a good one. And he wants to help get it off the field and into those bins as soon as possible.

“When it’s getting this close we’re no different than a farmer,” Snell said. “As quick as you can, you want to get going.”

Thom said he recently drove through much of southwest North Dakota.

He said crops didn’t fare well along the Highway 12 corridor between Bowman and Lemmon, S.D.

“It’s extremely dry down in that country,” Thom said. “A lot of that crop was rolled up for hay because the hay crop was short. The further north you get of that line, the better it looks.”

He estimates that five major hail events during the summer took out anywhere between 30,000 to 50,000 acres of cropland throughout the area, all the way from Scranton to Glen Ullin and, of course, north to Killdeer, where a devastating storm ripped through the Dunn County city and surrounding countryside on July 10.

Thom said crops north of Interstate 94 are at least three weeks away from being ready to harvest.

“Where it hailed it out, it hailed it out,” he said.

Thom said that in recent weeks, many farmers have been selling year-old wheat at his elevator in what he says is effort to clear storage space.

“There has been a fair amount of old crop movement, of wheat specifically,” he said. “That’s kind of an indicator that there’s got to be a pretty normal crop out there.”

Farmers aren’t the only ones preparing for harvest, however.

Mick Lewton, store manager of West Plains Implement in Dickinson, said his business has done about all it can do to prepare for one of the busiest parts of its year. He said the Case IH ProHarvest support team is also mobilized at the shop.

“It takes a little while to prepare for, but we’re about as good as we’re going to get right now,” Lewton said.

DirecTV Viewers in Western N.D. Still Without ABC Affiliate KMBY

It has been nearly two months and DirecTV customers in western North Dakota are still without local ABC affiliate KBMY.

DirecTV hasn’t been carrying KBMY — which is based in Bismarck — or North Dakota ABC affiliates WDAY in Fargo and WDAZ in Grand Forks since June 1, when contract extension negotiations broke down between the satellite provider and Forum Communications, which owns the three stations as well as The Dickinson Press.

With the blackout about to enter its ninth week, some southwest North Dakota viewers are beginning to express their frustrations.

Dave Holland, a Killdeer businessman who lives in rural Dunn County, said customers are caught in between a power struggle.

“When companies get so large, it’s all about power,” Holland said. “It’s all about controlling the market and the way they do business. The small person, the consumer, is always going to be the loser in these power struggles.”

Holland said his biggest issue with the loss of the channel was during the NBA finals, which aired on ABC in June.

Holland said it took a few calls and some personal negotiating with DirectTV before the satellite provider allowed him to replace the lost KBMY feed with the ABC affiliate feeds from Los Angeles and New York. Still, he has to pay an extra $2.50 a month for those channels and said he didn’t receive a discount in his bill for losing KBMY.

Mari Ossenfort, vice president for broadcasting at Forum Communications and WDAY’s general manager, said DirecTV pays a per-subscriber fee for the rights to broadcast local affiliates of ABC, CBS, NBC, Fox and the CW.

She said DirecTV is unwilling to pay the fee Forum Communications is asking for its ABC affiliates.

Ossenfort said while she can’t share the Forum’s asking price because of confidentiality agreements, she did say “the price we are asking is far less than $2.50 a month.”

“DirecTV refuses to pay us a market-based fee for the right to resell our stations’ signals to its subscribers and is insisting on a variety of other oppressive contractual demands that no other distributor of our stations has demanded,” Ossenfort said.

Nolan Dix, the station manager for KNDC-AM radio in Hettinger, is a DirecTV customer and said the world of broadcasting can be fickle — especially when it comes to broadcast rights.

“It’s just frustrating that somebody holds that much power that you flip on a channel and it’s like, ‘Oh wait, I don’t get it?’” he said.

Jill Eckroth said she and her family have had DirecTV since they moved to Flasher in 2006 and have received local channels since about 2010. She said while DirecTV has always provided them with good service — including hooking up their service following a recent move to a new home outside of the small Morton County town — she said the inability to watch some of her favorite TV shows, including summer hit “The Bachelorette,” has been frustrating.

“We can’t get it unless we have an antenna, but it’s not easy to do that either because it’s not always good reception and service,” Eckroth said.

DirecTV was purchased in 2015 by AT&T — one of the largest companies in the world. Since then, the satellite provider has blacked out markets far beyond Bismarck and Fargo because of prolonged contract negotiations.

On July 16, the satellite provider dropped the NBC and CW affiliates in Boston and the Fox affiliate in Miami. Last year, it had a three-month dispute with the ABC affiliate in Cedar Rapids, Iowa.

Ossenfort said Forum first proposed a new agreement with DirecTV on Jan. 27. The existing agreement expired March 31, but an extension was granted as the two sides negotiated. That extension was terminated June 1, when DirecTV turned off viewers’ access to the channels.

She said the ABC affiliates owned by Forum cover in the entire state of North Dakota, eastern Montana, northwest Minnesota and northern South Dakota, as well as parts of Canada.

“We understand the viewers’ frustration as we are frustrated also,” Ossenfort said. “The demands DirecTV is making exceed those of any other agreement we have with a distributor. We need to be fair to all our distributors. We have commitments that we need to make to our programmers.”

Attempts made via email to contact AT&T DirecTV for this story were not returned.