News – Page 9 – Dustin Monke

Quality-of-life factors determine if people choose to live in Dickinson

James Kramer told a group of Dickinson city leaders Tuesday that “individual factors” such as recreation, tourism, arts and culture are becoming the main influences in where people choose to live their lives.

The city’s Parks and Recreation director said he sees it almost daily when business leaders and Dickinson State University recruiters bring potential employees and students, respectively, to the West River Community Center in an effort to convince them to work, learn and live in Dickinson.

“In olden days, people moved to a place where there are job opportunities,” he said. “Nowadays, people may have two or three different employment opportunities, and they’re going to go look at those and base their decision on different individual factors. Does that community have what I’m looking for to live?”

Kramer’s comments kicked off the Quality of Life luncheon hosted by the Dickinson Area Chamber of Commerce at Lady J’s.

The luncheon featured short presentations on areas the influence Dickinson’s well-being by Terri Thiel, executive director of the Dickinson Convention and Visitor’s Bureau; Jim Kelly, interim CEO of the Theodore Roosevelt Presidential Library Foundation, and Ty Orton, executive director of the DSU Heritage Foundation.

Kramer said the parks department is turning its focus to improving long-neglected areas of its portfolio, such as the city’s trail system as well as possible improvements around the Patterson Lake Recreation Area.

He said trails are “an area where we’re lacking.”

“We definitely need to take a look at our trail system and expand it,” Kramer said. “We have begun working with the city to create a master plan and create some new opportunities in that area. We look forward to doing that in the future.”

He said opportunities exist for expansion of recreational opportunities near Patterson Lake, and pointed to the two-mile Crooked Crane Trail project that will be completed this summer as an example of that.

Like Kramer, Kelly also gave a taste of quality-of-life improvements that could be in Dickinson’s future.

Kelly spoke about the Theodore Roosevelt Presidential Library project on DSU’s campus and showed renderings of what the library would look like when completed. The project is likely to begin construction on the DSU rodeo grounds near the corner of State Avenue and Fairway Street this summer.

The first project, a replica of Roosevelt’s Elkhorn Ranch cabin made out of cottonwood trees found in the Badlands, could begin construction this summer after the final Roughrider Days Rodeo held in June.

The library — which renderings showed would be a large, sweeping structure complete with an all-glass great hall — would be years in the making and Kelly said would require “significant site preparation” as plans require vast landscaping improvements to the 26-acre site.

“As you go by the site now, it’s sort of flat as a pancake and as flat as the top or your table,” he said. “That’ll change significantly as we get into the building of the facility.”

If the library comes to fruition as planned, Thiel said Dickinson has more than enough hotels to give visitors a place to stay. She said the city has 1,773 rooms available at 21 lodging properties — a 135 percent increase from 2004.

However, the city’s hotel occupancy rate dropped 32.5 percent from 2014 to 2015 because of the decrease in the area’s oil activity. With that in mind, Thiel said the CVB’s advertising push in print, online and social media has been to promote Dickinson’s hotel availability.

“We really try to educate people in the state about that,” she said.

Orton, who closed the speeches by talking about the progress the new Heritage Foundation is making, said part of maintaining Dickinson’s quality of life is for the university to find and retain students who want to stay in the city after they graduate.

“We have students there right now that have stayed through some very hard times,” Orton said. “They stayed because of their true love of DSU and this city. They chose to stay in Dickinson because of their love for the community, because of the quality of life. Those are the people we need to make sure they can stay around, they can continue to build this community 20, 30, 40 years from now.”

Better Aesthetics Would Help Downtown Dickinson

Whenever I go downtown for various reasons, I always like to look to see what’s new.

In case you don’t know, much has changed in downtown Dickinson over the past few years.

There always seems to be a new business to check out and street art has made once-dirty alleyways and the sides of buildings a sight to see.

Of course, there’s also First On First, the popular summer street fair and concert series formerly known as Alive at Five that draws crowds too.

Good things are happening in downtown Dickinson, and the city has leaders and stakeholders happily leading the charge to ensure this.

That said, I want to both send my admiration and give some advice to the hardworking folks who have taken on the task of revitalizing downtown Dickinson.

For all the work that’s being done, I can’t help but see how far downtown has to go. And while there are some empty storefronts, my big gripe is in the aesthetics. For every downtown Dickinson building with a beautiful or classic exterior, there’s one that needs work. And some of them need lots of work.

Now, the Downtown Dickinson Association’s efforts have been key to improving the neighborhood and making sure that for every business that leaves, there’s another ready to take its place.

The time is coming for the association and city leaders to start encouraging businesses and building owners in this renaissance zone to look the part of being the vibrant downtown they so strive to be.

Look at Bernie’s Esquire Club, for example. It’s still the same bar as it has been, but a facelift to its exterior last summer has made downtown Dickinson a nicer-looking place, plain and simple.

While many of the buildings are perfect just the way they are, there are others who need to follow Bernie’s lead and invest in adding a little curb appeal.

While Dickinson’s economy is much slower than it has been in recent years, it isn’t so slow that businesses can’t afford to pay for some new siding or a sign. Dickinson has grand designs for downtown.

The public square idea for the corner of Sims and Villard Street is something I can get behind, but only if the rest of downtown follows suit. Some of the best downtowns in the country — and especially those right here in North Dakota — have made exterior renovations a key piece of their revitalization efforts.

Fargo, Bismarck and now even Williston are the best examples. All those cities learned that making their downtowns look just a little bit nicer goes a long way to ensuring people want to be there.

Downtown Dickinson has a lot of things going for it. Even as some of its key storefronts on Villard sit empty, there is potential. If the oil industry bounces back, there may not be much time or many resources available to make the improvements downtown leaders hope to make. Now is the time to push forward on beautifying downtown.

In lean times for oil industry, salespeople bear down

Joe Zayden, the Bakken region operations manager for Flow Data, had a booth Thursday, April 15, 2016, at the Bakken Oil Product & Service Show at the West River Ice Center in Dickinson. He said his company is weathering the slowdown by “basically just trying to maintain what we have.” Dustin Monke / Forum News Service

Charnel Zetsch came to Dickinson State University on a softball scholarship seven years ago.

She arrived in the early days of the oil boom and eventually found herself working in the energy industry.

Today, she’s a district sales manager for Magid Glove & Safety and is among several industry salespeople who are asking questions like this: “Why are you paying for a $10 glove when you could be buying a $2 glove?”

After all, with oil prices hovering around $40 a barrel at best, these truly are lean times in the North Dakota energy industry.

That point was drilled home at the Bakken Oil Product & Service Show this week in Dickinson. The trade show drew far fewer exhibitors than it did last year and, aside from some peak traffic moments, was considerably slower — just like the western North Dakota oil and gas industry.

Zetsch, who didn’t have an exhibit at the show, spent much of Thursday walking the West River Ice Center interacting with other oilfield industry salespeople to get a sense of how their businesses are doing.

“It’s tough right now,” she said. “We’re all kind of feeling this pressure. I think what most people are doing right now is really just ramping up and going back and looking at standard operational procedures. Whether it be inventory or the service side of things, they’re really trying to figure out where they were shorthanded and where they were super heavy-handed and try to balance the two.”

Tim Liston, who works in business development for Industrial Measurement and Control, said his company is looking at alternative ways to increase business. He said he made some good leads at the show and his booth drew attention because his company showed off its customized lease automatic custody transfer unit — a device that accurately measures oil.

As expected, Liston said business on the oil and gas production side has dropped off considerably. However, he said midstream companies — those who work with pipelines, refining or trucking — “are still spending money.”

“We’re looking for companies who still have project money available and they’re still going ahead with projects,” Liston said. “… That’s where I’m spending my time.”

The same was true for Winters Instruments sales representative Peter Chronis, who stood behind a table stocked with pressure gauges of all sizes and tried to make some connections.

The company, which has nine offices around the world, sells pressure instruments on every end of the oil production process. But, because the production is slower than a year ago, Chronis said he’s taking the opportunity to “lock in” to current customers who are still spending money, just not as much as they did during the boom years.

“It’s a double-edged sword, depending on which side of the market share pendulum you’re covering,” he said.

Joe Zayden spent two days at the trade show and called it “the slowest one I’ve been to in a couple years now.”

Zayden is the Bakken region operations manager for Flow Data, a Colorado-based company that manufactures and engineers products for wellhead automation. Though oil production in North Dakota hasn’t dropped off much in spite of the drilling drawback, Zayden said his company is weathering the slowdown by “basically just trying to maintain what we have.”

Zayden said his company is positioned well enough to pick up business from smaller wellhead service companies that are folding in the wake of the drop in oil prices.

And like most of the oil industry workers at the show, he remained confident that business will eventually pick up.

“We ain’t going anywhere,” Zayden said. “We’re not shutting down. We’re staying here.”

Residents dealing with repercussions of income tax identity theft

Stacey Buckman has her financial ducks in a row.

She’s a small business owner, does her own taxes, regularly checks her credit report and knows how the ins and outs of the Internal Revenue Service’s 1040 form.

So, she knew something wasn’t right when she filed her taxes online March 30 and almost immediately received an email stating they’d already been filed just hours earlier.

It didn’t take long for Buckman to discover an identity thief had used both her and her husband’s Social Security numbers to file fraudulent income tax returns in their names, costing the IRS thousands of dollars and essentially putting the Buckmans on financial alert for the foreseeable future.

“It can happen to anyone,” Buckman said. “You have no idea. It’s so random.”

Buckman and others who have reported income tax identity theft in southwest North Dakota are part of an increasing statistic, North Dakota Tax Commissioner Ryan Rauschenberger said.

Rauschenberger said in 2015 his office caught nearly 1,000 instances of income tax identity theft, which would have totaled to nearly $1.3 million in fraudulent refunds.

“It’s a major issue for our state and for many, many other states,” Rauschenberger said, adding this type of identity theft is on the rise.

He said North Dakota is part of a consortium of states that have organized in an effort to stop this type of fraud.

The U.S. General Accountability Office estimated that in 2013, the IRS paid $5.8 billion in fraudulent refunds because of identity theft, with more fraudulent payments likely going undetected or unreported.

Anthony Willer, of Dickinson, said he received a letter from Rauschenberger’s office last Saturday requesting verification of the W-2 forms used in filing his family’s taxes before he had even filed.

Like Buckman, Willer said he planned to file his taxes later than normal this year because he had been waiting to receive various tax forms.

“Something wasn’t matching up with the system as far as the tax amounts that were paid,” Willer said.

He said the tax commissioner’s office flagging his filings as affected by fraud helped him report the identity theft. Still, Willer said he spent an entire day making sure his family’s identities, as well as their finances and credit history, were secure.

“It’s a huge inconvenience,” he said.

Rauschenberger said it’s also important to report identity theft to the state attorney general’s office consumer protection department.

Buckman and Willer each reported their identity theft to area law enforcement, as a police report is a required part of clearing a person’s name after their identity has been stolen or compromised, Dickinson Police Capt. David Wilkie said. That police report then shows up on a person’s credit history for seven years, with it serving as a note to future creditors and to help keep their credit scores unaffected by the fraud.

Wilkie said it seems that random people are being targeted for income tax identity theft.

“It’s tough to say how they’re picking their victims,” Wilkie said. “If we knew that, it would make it a lot easier to warn people. It kind of seems like age has something to do with it. Although I have heard of young people getting their identities stolen too.”

Most of the incidents occur late in the tax season, Rauschenberger said.

Monday is the deadline for Americans to file their taxes.

“The key is you should file early,” he said. “Don’t wait until the last minute. That’s one of the major reasons we push that you should file early.”

Buckman said she typically files her family’s taxes in February or early March. She also always files with her husband, David, as head of the household. She learned that the identity thief had filed using her as the head of the household instead, which became an automatic red flag for the IRS.

How their Social Security numbers were compromised, however, remains a mystery.

“There’s really no way of knowing,” Buckman said. “In speaking with TurboTax, the IRS and law enforcement, they’re saying that in a majority of these cases, it’s being done by someone overseas.”

Like Buckman, Willer said he’s knowledgeable about taxes and never expected his identity to be stolen through his filings.

“You think it’s something that takes place somewhere else. Not in Dickinson. Not in a small area,” Willer said. “It’s quite common unfortunately. Too common.”

As they move forward, both Buckman and Willer said they’re going to stay vigilant with their finances and check their credit reports and bank accounts often. Buckman said she may even go as far as attempting to request a new Social Security number to prevent future identity theft.

“My biggest takeaway from this is to make sure I file early,” Buckman said. “File as early as absolutely possible to prevent someone else from having the opportunity to compromise you and put you in a bad situation. Because God knows where this really will end?”

Planting season well underway, though farmers hope precipitation is in future

MOTT — After 23 years of farming, Mark Anderson is happy to stick to his “game plan.”

The Regent-area farmer said neither below-average precipitation nor low commodity prices have shaken him much this year. He’s still seeding the crops he’d planned for and said Monday that he’s more than halfway finished.

Though with much of western North Dakota in a moderately dry drought, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s drought monitor, Anderson and others say they can’t help but hope for a little rain soon.

“It’d be nice to get a good rain to settle the dust,” he said. “I think everybody would have kind of a weight lifted off their shoulders if they’d get an inch of rain.”

Most southwest North Dakota farmers are in the same boat as Anderson — about half done with their spring planting while hoping for some moisture to give those seeded crops an early boost.

Garret Swindler, who farms east of Anderson in the Mott area, said the only benefit to the dry year so far is farmers were fighting wet and muddy fields just to get their crops seeded last spring.

He said the moisture left in the topsoil after winter is fine for seeding, but it’ll only be good if planting season if followed by some rain.

“There’s enough moisture there to get the crops started,” he said. “We’re definitely planting deep. … We just have to make sure that seed has enough moisture to germinate and get out of the ground. But you can’t really wait on rain either.”

Duaine Marxen, the Hettinger County Extension agent in Mott, said most farmers he works and speaks with on a regular basis have been in the field for the past couple of weeks, and like Anderson and Swindler, most are well on their way to wrapping up planting efforts. Contending with dry conditions and high winds, however, have made for some challenging days, he said.

“No one here will complain if it starts raining,” Marxen said with a laugh.

Farmers might get their wish this weekend.

The National Weather Service is forecasting some showers for southwest North Dakota this week, with chances increasing toward the weekend and into next week.

That could be a welcome relief, as Todd Hamilton, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service in Bismarck, said the Dickinson area is already 1 inch below average rainfall for the year.

“We haven’t really had any real significant precipitation in quite some time,” Hamilton said, adding it has been about six months since southwest North Dakota experienced a large precipitation event.

He said conditions are “abnormally dry” throughout the western and central parts of the state.

“We are still early in the growing season now, so there’s certainly potential for us to move out of this,” he said.

Anderson said he has wrapped up seeding his spring wheat and Swindler planned to be finished with it by today. After that, both said they’d move on to other crops such as flax, canola and corn.

Anderson said while some farmers might be trying to “outguess” the weather or the future of commodity prices in deciding what or where they plant certain crops, he’s happy to stay the course and stick to what has worked for more than two decades.

“What looks poor now may be your best moneymaker in the end,” he said. “… I’ve been through these times before. You just seed the crop and cross your fingers.”