The Prairie Blog

If you dig deep enough into his FEC reports, you’ll discover that Republican U.S. Senate candidate Duane Sand is running the biggest scam EVER in the history of North Dakota politics. Either that, or he’s the stupidest person ever to run for political office in North Dakota. Read on, and decide.

If you read the summary page in Duane Sand’s FEC report, which covers all his contributions and expenditures from the time he announced his 2012 candidacy for the U.S. Senate back in early 2011, through March 31 of this year, you’ll be pretty impressed. It shows that he has raised $676,391 in campaign funds. That’s a pretty tidy sum. Especially for someone who hasn’t even gotten his party’s nomination yet. If he spent all that money running television ads in his race against Rick Berg for the Republican nomination for the Senate, he’d run a pretty good race. He might even win.

Except that you probably won’t see any TV ads for Duane Sand between now and the June 12 North Dakota Primary Election. Because Duane Sand doesn’t have any money left for television ads. He spent it all already.  No, not on TV advertising. He hasn’t done any of that. Not on newspaper or radio ads, either. In fact, I haven’t seen a single campaign ad for Duane Sand this year. Have you?

Duane Sand’s FEC report shows that, so far, in his 2012 campaign for the U.S. Senate, he has spent $594,498. And it also shows that, as of March 31, he had debts of $205,861. And those debts aren’t loans. They are unpaid bills. Added together, those numbers come to $800,346. That’s how much money Duane Sand has spent so far in his campaign for the Republican nomination for the U.S. Senate.

Hmmmm. So where’d it go? How’d he spend all that money? Well, he spent most of it . . . . drum roll . . . . raising money.

If you add up all the expenditures for fundraising by the Sand campaign, plus the unpaid bills to companies which did the fundraising for him, it comes to $705,114–about $29,000 more than he has actually raised.

That’s right, all the money Duane Sand has raised, plus $28,723 he hasn’t raised yet, has been spent on fundraising. Here’s how.

There are some basic things you do when you begin a political campaign for a federal office. You hire a campaign staff to run the campaign for you. You hire a media consultant to produce and place your paid media. You hire a “mail house” to help with fundraising.

Well, Duane pretty much skipped the first two. He’s run for office so many times that he just runs things himself. He doesn’t hire a media consultant because he doesn’t plan to do any media. He just hires a mail house. In this case (and in his aborted 2010 campaign, which we’ll discuss in a minute), he hires a team of Washington, D.C., companies who do direct mail fundraising for conservative candidates, and they start cranking out fundraising letters. And they never stop, at least until the campaign ends, at which time they pause until Duane starts his next campaign.

These aren’t just fundraising letters to North Dakota Republicans. These firms have lists of people nationwide, proven donors, who give money to conservative candidates. These firms design slick campaign brochures and write fiery fundraising letters designed to stir the blood of conservatives who give money to save the world from Liberals. And the lists are huge—millions of names. Big enough so that if only a couple percent of the recipients send a check, which is generally the case, the result is hundreds of thousands of dollars of contributions.

Well, Duane Sand hired a company called Base Connect, whose offices are at 1155 15^th St. NW, Suite 410, in Washington, D.C. So far, he’s paid (or owes them) $90,484. That’s likely for managing Duane’s fundraising campaign and writing his letters. They hired their affiliate, Century Data Systems, whose address is also 1155 15^th St. NW, Suite 410, Washington, D.C., to do the actual mailing. Duane paid (or owes) them $198,868, almost all of it for postage. Base Connect and Century Data get Duane’s mailing lists from a company called Legacy List Marketing, whose address is (you guessed it) 1155 15^th St. NW, Suite 410, Washington, D.C. Duane paid (or owes) them $44,396.

In all, Duane has sent checks (or will send, if he scrapes up the money) totaling $345,556 to 1155 15^th St. NW, Suite 410, Washington, DC 20005. As of March 31, he owed Base Connect $68,319, Century Data $18,168, and Legacy List Marketing $26,345.

In addition to management, and postage, and list rental, somebody has to actually print those hundreds of thousands of letters, address the envelopes, stuff the envelopes (that’s not done by a bunch of local volunteers sitting around their kitchen tables in Fargo, as is the case with most North Dakota campaigns) and deliver them to a post office. That’s done by a company called Consolidated Mailing Services, just down the road in Sterling, VA. Duane paid them (so far) $57,748. And as of March 31, he still owed them $73,448.96. That’s a total of a little over a hundred and thirty thousand.

And that’s how Duane Sand raises money. Total cost just to those four firms: almost half a million dollars in fundraising expenses.

If you go through Duane’s FEC report line by line, you’ll find another couple hundred thousand dollars of expenditures in printing, online fundraising, bank processing charges, additional list rentals, consulting and credit card processing. Total tab, a little over $700,000.

As of March 31, Duane had about $80,000 in the bank and debts of just over $200,000. His total expenditures for things other than fundraising come to less than $95,000. Consultants, a little polling, some reimbursement for Duane’s travel expenses, part-time secretarial staff, local event planning, office supplies, cell phones, and even rent for a small office in downtown Bismarck, rented from . . . another drum roll . . . Goldmark Realty, whose senior vice president is Rick Berg—Duane’s Primary Election opponent. Hmmm. Wonder if Duane checked carefully for “bugs.”

So if you sent Duane some money this year, hoping to help his campaign for the U.S. Senate, what you really did is help a bunch of companies in Washington D.C. make money. I was kind of curious about these people who sent Duane money, so I decided to check them out a little bit (You can look at the list of those who gave more than $200 by going to the FEC website, here, and finding Duane Sand. The FEC won’t let me link specific candidate pages.). I just grabbed a name at random, Robert Fisher, 727 S. Florida Ave., Deland, Florida, and called him. Robert sounded like a nice elderly gentleman, and after I told him who I was, he agreed to answer a couple questions. I told him I had found his name on Duane Sand’s contributor list as a $250 donor to Duane’s campaign, and asked him if he knew Duane. He said “No, but I guess he must be a conservative Republican, right?” I replied that he was, and Robert said he gets these letters in the mail, and he often sends small checks to conservative candidates. I then explained that Duane was spending pretty much all of his money on fundraising and not much on an actual campaign. There was a pause, and then Robert said “Well, I hope he raises enough.” Thank you, Robert. End of conversation.

I mentioned earlier Duane’s 2010 campaign. Wait, you say, Duane wasn’t on the ballot in 2010. Well, you’re right, he wasn’t. He thought about it for a while, though. Thought he might run for Kent Conrad’s seat in the U.S. Senate. Even formed a “Friends of Duane Sand 2010” Committee, and registered it with the Federal Election Commission in 2009. And started raising money, back in early 2009. Then 2010 came around and Kent Conrad decided to retire, and John Hoeven jumped in. That kind of dashed Duane’s hopes, but, of course, not before he had hired—you guessed it—Base Connect, and Century Data, and Legacy, and Consolidated. And gone out and raised $395,499 through direct mail. And spent $369,069 doing it. And spent a whopping $26,338 on things other than fundraising. And ran up a debt of $19,859 before he closed down his campaign early in 2010. Lots of Robert Fishers on that contributors’ list too. Whose money went to some slick Washington, D.C. “mail houses.”

Now, you might say that Duane should have learned something from that 2010 “campaign.” That he might have learned that hiring Washington, D.C. direct mail firms to raise money for you doesn’t do much for paying campaign expenses, other than to those firms, and doesn’t do much justice to those people who write checks to your campaign. If he didn’t learn that, then he is indeed just a stupid candidate. If he did, and then repeated it, on a much grander scale, in 2012, then he’s running a scam. And he probably ought to go to the pokey, instead of the Senate.

Oh, by the way, you can look at Base Connect’s website if you want a real look at how this business works. In their “brag section,” they disclose some of the successful fundraising efforts they’ve been involved in. Their poster girl is Sharon Angle. Remember her? She’s the ultra-conservative from Nevada who took on Democratic Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid in 2010. Here’s what Base Connect brags about on their website: Base Connect, on Sharon Angle’s behalf, mailed 17,936,383 pieces of fundraising mail. That’s right, 17 million fundraising letters. Those seventeen million letters generated contributions of $17,249,264. Yep, 17 million dollars. For a political campaign. (But remember, she was running against Harry Reid, the Republican’s party’s second most hated man—behind Barack Obama.) The result was $6,034,935 into Sharon Angle’s campaign coffers. But Base Connect and its partners (okay, including a nice injection into the U.S. Postal Service coffers) pocketed $11,214,329 of contributors’ money. Ouch.

There are other examples on the Base Connect website. Deborah Honeycutt for Congress in Georgia: $5,130,000 raised, $1,344,000 to the candidate, $3,786,000 in expenses. Deborah lost, too, just like Sharon. William Russell, Congress, Pennsylvania, raised $3,250,000. The candidate got $841,000. Expenses of $2,409,000. William lost too.

Okay, maybe I’m just naïve. Maybe this is just the way it is done today. In the examples above, at least the candidates got SOME of the money that small contributors sent to their campaigns. In North Dakota, if Duane Sand can raise the $200,000 to pay off his bills without sending any more fundraising letters, he will have put about $95,000 out of $800,000—a little over ten per cent—into his actual campaign.

And the clock is ticking. In just a little over six weeks, he’s going to lose the primary election to Rick Berg. Who’s going to contribute to him then? How are Base Connect and its partners going to collect on their bills?

Oh, Duane is working at it. He’s brought in the number one sleazeball in America, Dick Morris, for fundraisers in St. Paul and Bismarck today. Dick has a personal invitation online for you–look here. If you’re quick, you could still buy tickets for tonight’s event in Bismarck by clicking here. You get supper for $40. But a good bit of your $40 will go to a company called Campaign Services Inc. for handling the online reservations—if there are any. So Duane won’t be pocketing much tonight. Hope he can at least cover Dick’s flight and hotel room.

Meanwhile, Duane continues to wrap himself in the flag (literally—look here) and pretend he’s actually running for the U.S. Senate. And running the greatest political campaign scam I’ve ever seen.

SOME THINGS NEVER CHANGE

Public Service Commissioners Kevin Cramer and Brian Kalk are both running for Congress. Their campaign funds are being beefed up by donations from the industries they regulate—coal, oil and other energy executives—in what some say is a pretty shady and shameless practice.

Which reminds me of an old story told about the late Senator Francis Barth, a colorful character who did not mince words, and was not afraid to use the most graphic language he felt was necessary in any given situation. It’s probably partly true, as most Francis Barth stories are.

A North Dakota Senate colleague from eastern North Dakota stopped at Francis’ ranch to visit, accompanied by at least one other city dweller who had never been to a ranch. As they were walking by a corral, they came upon a bull and a cow, doing what bulls and cows do when they get together. The city dweller asked what was going on, and Francis’ friend jumped in quickly with “That bull is servicing that cow.”

“Yes.” said Francis, “Servicing. That’s the right word. It’s kind of like when you hear about the North Dakota Public SERVICE Commission.”

NOW THAT’S GOT TO BE ONE OF THE WORLD’S WORST JOBS

Dickinson police report that there’s a new industry in western North Dakota: selling urine to oil field workers who have to take regular drug tests by providing urine samples. But wily drug testers are catching on and putting a stop to it. The Dickinson Press reports that Jan Kuhn, clinical director of Sacajawea Substance Abuse Counseling and Drug Testing Center, said her employees follow their clients into the bathroom to be sure they didn’t bring someone else’s urine.

“You have to get right down there and look,” she said. “You can’t hide it under your arm and use a tube because if you’re being observed, we’re going to find it. We’re going to see it.”

Uffda.

HEADING OUT DICKINSON WAY? HERE’S A BARGAIN

This is an actual ad from Consolidated Telcom’s (Dickinson, ND) FREE online classified ad website:

I am selling one 12 oz. jar of HOT banana peppers. Did not realize they were the hot one’s until I tried one. The jar has been open but still fresh and minus one pepper. I paid $1.38 with tax for them but I will sell for $1.00 beings they have been opened. I could possibly deliver these within a 6 mile radius of Dickinson for an extra $5.00. Thanks for looking.

FULL SPEED AHEAD?

Think we’ve crammed all the people we can fit into western North Dakota yet? Nah. The Bismarck Tribune reported this week that Mark Williams, an executive with Whiting Oil, one of the big players in North Dakota’s oil boom (and also, generally, one of the more responsible companies working in the oil patch), said there are close to 220 drilling rigs in the Williston Basin.

“We could easily double the number of rigs, purely based on resources,” Williams said. However, he guessed growth could be capped at 300 rigs in the next few years until infrastructure can catch up.

Ron Ness, head of the North Dakota Petroleum Council, doesn’t think there should be a cap. “Oil doesn’t come all nice and neat and without some challenges,” Ness said. “But if you try to slow the pace, the first thing you’re going to stop is the investment dollar that will bring the roads and the housing and the rest. The pace of development is going to have to play out.”

MORE REPUBLICAN HYPOCRISY

Reported by Forum newspapers this weekend: Residents of 45 trailers in New Town, ND – many of them the poorest members of the Three Affiliated Tribes – have until Aug. 31 to move, after the mobile home park they live in was sold to the local Cenex station with plans to develop it to house oil workers. Unless something dramatic happens, the residents of those trailers will essentially be homeless as summer turns to fall in northwest North Dakota.

What’s being done? Well, the Tribe is looking to try to develop a new mobile home park on land just east of town. Whether that can be done in time, and homes found to place there for these residents, remains to be seen. Most of the trailers are described as “decrepit” and are unable to be moved.

Gov. Jack Dalrymple, on the other hand, says he is going to ask President Obama to send some FEMA trailers. Yep, that’s what the Republican leaders of the richest state in the nation do when there’s a problem—call the bankrupt federal government for help. And if FEMA says they don’t have any trailers available, you can bet it will be President Obama’s fault those poor folks up in New Town are homeless. Sheesh.

BIRDERS, BEWARE!

I subscribe to a ListServ group on which birders send out notices to fellow birders about sightings of interest in North Dakota. During the winter I got a message via that ListServ of a different nature, however, and I set it aside and forgot about it, but came across it this morning. It read:

If you are planning a birding trip to North Dakota in 2012 there are a few things you should know to help with your planning. The oil boom in western North Dakota continues west of US Highway 83. It is often very difficult to get a hotel room in Minot, Williston or Dickinson. In the smaller towns it is impossible. Also, renting cars can be difficult much of the time. You should be trying to get reservations now if you plan to come this spring or summer. Truck traffic in the west is very heavy, so be careful if you are birding in this area. The refuge trails that were flooded last summer were reopened this fall, so access looks good at this point. We have no snow cover over most of the state. Come see western North Dakota now, before it is gone.

POTTS, CHAPMAN AND DSU: A SHORT HISTORY LESSON

I’m not sure what happened along the way, but here, apparently, is the germ of the idea which began Dickinson State University’s problems with its foreign students. The following paragraphs are excerpted from a story by Amy Dalrymple which appeared in The Forum November 18, 2005.

North Dakota’s colleges will try to bolster enrollment through a statewide effort to recruit international students. The State Board of Higher Education voted 5-3 on Thursday to allocate $1.5 million for a systemwide plan to attract foreign students . . . Chancellor Robert Potts said the plan is a creative way to counter the bleak demographics facing the state’s campuses. Of 42,000 students in the North Dakota University System, 1,500 to 1,800 are international students, Potts said . . . The program calls for six new workers: an administrator, an administrative assistant, a director of international recruiting and retention, two international recruiters and support staff . . . NDSU President Joseph Chapman expressed ethical concerns about the plan’s proposal to pay recruiters according to how many students they attract. That violates a requirement of the National Association for College Admission Counseling and could put NDSU at risk of being excluded from attending college fairs, Chapman said . . . Potts said he will investigate possible ethical implications of the plan. “I know there’s a way to do this ethically because other universities are doing it and they’re beating our socks off,” he said.

I don’t know if this was ever implemented at the University System level. But it sure was at Dickinson State University. Apparently Lee Vickers, the DSU president at the time, didn’t share Chapman’s ethical concerns, nor did his successor, Richard McCallum, who inherited and enhanced Vickers’ initiative to recruit international, especially Chinese, students.

YOU CAN’T FIX STUPID

Most quotable public official in North Dakota last week: Al Heiser, Stark County Road Superintendent, commenting on the people who keep knocking over and tearing out stop signs out in his western North Dakota county: “It’s senseless. But you can’t fix stupid.”

Note: I know “Weekenders” are supposed to come out at the end of the week, not the beginning, and I really intended to do that, but the fishing was really good on  Friday and Saturday . . .  

Well, this is embarrassing. Yesterday I finished a long article on the State Land Board and put it on my blog. In it, I congratulated everyone from the Governor to the dogcatcher for teaming up to offer protection to some valuable roadless areas of the North Dakota Bad Lands. When I wrote it, I had been told by the State Land Department that all the parcels of state-owned land within the U.S. Forest Service’s designated roadless areas had been removed from the Land Department’s oil lease sale offering, scheduled for May 1.

Turns out that wasn’t true. Somebody fibbed. I learned last night that the State Land Department (you’ve heard about them—I’ve written about them before) is going to put a full section of state land inside the roadless area—on the west slope of Bullion Butte, one of North Dakota’s most spectacular landmarks—on  the auction block May 1. That’s a huge disappointment. Bullion Butte is one of North Dakota’s highest points, and it’s also the only high butte within a roadless area, making it far more attractive to hikers than a couple higher buttes which you can drive to. To place it, it’s the huge butte you see looking south from the plaza of Medora’s Burning Hills Amphitheatre. It’s so big that it actually changes the course of the Little Missouri River, sending it on a 40 mile or so detour to the east.

If the sale goes forward, there could be an oil well on Bullion Butte. That would be a very bad thing to have happen.

The Land Department says it will attach a “stipulation” to the lease which would allow them to prevent drilling on that section of land. The stipulation, as I shared yesterday, reads:

This tract is within an area identified as essential wildlife habitat. The lessee or lessee’s operator must contact the commissioner prior to any surface activity. Operational mitigation measures to reduce impact, including timing restrictions, location adjustments and reduced or restricted surface occupancy may be required. Habitat or terrain considerations may preclude locating a well site on this tract.

Again, as I mentioned yesterday, the operative word there is “may.” The Land Department is not known for its sensitivity to things like wilderness, or conservation, or scenic beauty, or places for solitude. It is into making money. Lots of money. Here’s one example: Last November, the Department leased out 80 acres for development right up against the fence on the east side of Theodore Roosevelt National Park. The company that leased it, Davis Exploration LLC, of Stockbridge, GA, paid the Department a bonus of $14,000 per acre for that lease—a total of $1,120,000. Davis paid that just for the right to drill for oil there. With that kind of money already shelled out, how long do you suppose it will take them to drill a well there, to recover their investment? Bison, elk and prairie dogs on one side of the fence, an oil drilling rig with hundreds of trucks driving in on the other. Well, not for long. Don’t expect to see any kind of critters on the east side of the park this summer. And when you visit Theodore Roosevelt National Park this summer, don’t bother to hike up to the top of Buck Hill. You aren’t going to like what you see.

With that kind of insensitivity already displayed, do you really think they’re going to say “No” to drilling on the side of a butte in the middle of nowhere? Hah! Fat chance.

And even if they did, by leasing the minerals, the damage is already done. The Bullion Butte area is one of those areas that the Forest Service lists as “eligible for wilderness.” One of the major considerations in that listing is the fact that there are no leased minerals inside that area. Once the minerals on the school section are leased, the door is open to development inside the roadless area. The people who make the decisions on designating areas as wilderness get more than a little skittish about that. In spite of the Land Department’s “stipulations,” once the minerals are leased to a private entity, the surface is not protected from development. This could spell real trouble for efforts to get a formal wilderness designation for areas like this. That’s why wildlife groups and others have pressed the State Land Board not to lease these tracts of land.

It‘s not a big area, by the way. Under 10,000 acres, I think, about 15 square miles.  You could walk the whole area in a day.

And so this is just one more reason why I believe the State Land Board should declare a 3-year moratorium on further leasing of State School Lands. If such a moratorium were in place, we wouldn’t even be talking about this. What we could be talking about is sensitivity to things like massive roadless buttes and National Parks. We could have a good conversation about what the responsibility of the state is. Is it just really all about money, or could we be setting an example? We could have public meetings, we could ask people for their feelings about how we should best manage our state lands. I can guess how some of those discussions might go, because I know North Dakotans.  Maybe, for example, they would urge the State Land Department not to lease that land up against the National Park named for America’s Greatest Conservation President, to leave it as a buffer zone, so critters and the visitors who come to see them wouldn’t be disrupted by an oil drilling rig and hundreds of fracking trucks. Maybe they’d say “Let’s not put an oil well on Bullion Butte. We like the view just the way it is.”

Meanwhile, here’s another call for the State Land Board to make another short term decision: take the parcel of state land on Bullion Butte out of the May 1 lease sale. And then, take it out forever. Leave our roadless areas alone. They represent such a small piece of North Dakota’s Bad Lands, let’s leave them for our children and grandchildren to enjoy.

I could say “Thanks” in advance. But I think I’ll wait a little while, just to be sure this time.

A few weeks ago I wrote about the activities of the State Land Board, and I said I was encouraged that the board had agreed to remove several parcels of land from a mineral lease sale, parcels that were part of a couple roadless areas in North Dakota’s Bad Lands. “This week we won a little skirmish,” I wrote. “We talked to our leaders. They listened. And it wasn’t so hard, was it? Let’s do it some more.”

Well, I did. I finally got to meet Lance Gaebe, the State Land Commissioner, and he shared with me the process he and the Board go through in leasing minerals that lie under state-owned land. Here’s how it works.

The State Land Department—actually its name has been changed now to the Department of Trust Lands—owns about 2 ½ million acres of minerals, and much of the land above those minerals. They’ve actually, over the years, sold off some land, but retained the mineral rights under the land they sold. About 800,000 acres of those minerals are leased to mineral development companies, who pay the state a bonus to get the right to drill for oil, mostly. If they hit a producing well, which is almost always, they pay the state a share of the proceeds from the well. The state came by those acres at statehood, when the federal government gave the state the land and minerals in sections 16 and 36 in every township—two sections out of every 36—making the State Land Department North Dakota’s biggest landowner. Those lands were given by the federal government “for the support of schools,” and they are known as “school sections,” and the revenue derived from them is used to support education in North Dakota.

So along comes an oil boom. Representatives of oil companies are scouring courthouse records looking for mineral rights available for lease, so they can drill oil wells. When they find a section of land which might have oil potential, and under which the minerals have not been leased by anyone, they go to the owner and offer some money to lease the minerals, promising a share of the riches if they hit oil. If it turns out those minerals are under a “school section,” they tell Land Commissioner Lance Gaebe they want to lease those minerals. Lance’s job is to maximize the income from those lands when they are leased, so instead of negotiating a price, he holds an auction. The auctions are held four times a year. The lands identified by the oil companies are considered “nominated” when the companies offer an opening bid before the auction, generally a dollar an acre for 5 a year lease. When the sale starts, the opening bid has been made, and anyone else is free to bid on them. Generally, other oil companies bid against the “nominator” and bidding continues until everyone but one bidder drops out. At the February auction I referenced earlier, the bids on about 68,000 acres of mineral rights brought the state $84 million. Yes, you read that right. 84 million dollars were collected to help support our schools. In one day. Not a bad day for the school kids of North Dakota. But at what price? The net effect is that there will be hundreds of new oil wells drilled in western North Dakota, adding to the confusion and congestion that already exists there. At the same time the state is trying to get a handle on the rapid development, we’re handing out new drilling opportunities like candy (albeit pretty expensive candy) to anyone who asks for them.

Anyway, as you read in my earlier post, and in the news stories in late January and early February, some of those lands nominated by the oil companies for the Department’s quarterly sale this past February were in, or adjacent to, the U.S. Forest Service’s few remaining roadless areas of the Bad Lands, areas that are being considered as additions to the nation’s official Wilderness system. There are not many spots in the Bad Lands that remain pristine, outside of Theodore Roosevelt National Park (most of which is really not pristine because it has roads, campgrounds, picnic shelters and other amenities which allow tourists to enjoy it). Altogether, there are just a little over 60,000 acres of roadless areas left in the Bad Lands, about a hundred square miles, or an area just ten miles by ten miles. That’s it. Out of millions of acres of Bad Lands, only a tiny fraction remains free of civilization. Hikers, horseback riders, backpackers, photographers, birders, and others who just enjoy nature have only those few small spots left where there are no oil trucks roaring past them as they visit these spots.

A group called the Badlands Conservation Alliance (BCA), which calls itself A Voice for Wild North Dakota Places, has taken on the cause of preserving these parcels as Wilderness. Founded in 1999 during the early public planning process for the Forest Service’s Land and Resource Management Plan for the Dakota Prairie Grasslands, BCA’s members speak out for conservation concerns in western North Dakota’s 1 million acre Little Missouri National Grassland, insuring that government agencies and leadership hear the call for ecologically functioning landscapes, protection of roadless areas, and designation of Wilderness in North Dakota’s Bad Lands. (Full disclosure: I am a member and my wife is the founder.)

Well, back in January of this year, a BCA member named Mike McEnroe, a retired U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service biologist, who keeps track of what is going on in the Bad Lands, noticed that these tracts of State School Lands inside or adjacent to the roadless areas were about to be leased, and asked the Department not to do that. In addition, the State Game and Fish Department was concerned about some wildlife habitat areas on the list as well, and was requesting that some of those areas be pulled off the sale list. After some newspaper stories in the Forum and Bismarck Tribune, which generated some discussion by the State Land Board—whose members are Governor Jack Dalrymple, Superintendent of Public Instruction Wayne Sanstead, Treasurer Kelly Schmidt, Attorney General Wayne Stenehjem and Secretary of State Al Jaeger—those tracts were removed from the February lease auction. At the time, Dalrymple, who chairs the board, said he wanted the board to develop criteria and a process to deal with school lands that have conservation value, and talked of creating an advisory board for that purpose, according to a story in the Bismarck Tribune. He later said, at a Conference on the Future of Hunting in North Dakota in March, there will be a “formal review process by Game and Fish, and each and every parcel must be looked at.”

Well, then, imagine everyone’s surprise when the list of tracts to be auctioned off at an upcoming May 1 sale, released by Gaebe’s office in March, contained the very same parcels. When I asked Gaebe about that, he said that the sale of minerals under these tracts would go ahead, but that each lease document would contain language with “wildlife stipulations” in it. The blanket stipulation phrase read:

This tract is within an area identified as essential wildlife habitat. The lessee or lessee’s operator must contact the commissioner prior to any surface activity. Operational mitigation measures to reduce impact, including timing restrictions, location adjustments and reduced or restricted surface occupancy may be required. Habitat or terrain considerations may preclude locating a well site on this tract.

Sure enough, the parcels on the list Gaebe gave me were coded in such a way that anyone buying a lease on those minerals would know that there is the possibility that there could be some restrictions on what they could do with that lease once they owned it. The problem, of course, is the word “may.” The stipulation really doesn’t require anything, except a conversation with the Commissioner. The wildlife folks I talked to say there’s no teeth in the policy.  They suggest that each individual tract contain specific language, like “not appropriate for leasing,” or “development must be at least 1500 feet (or some other arbitrary distance) from the woody draw, the lek, the lambing area, or the eagle’s nest.”

A couple of weeks after I received the list, I received an e-mail from Drew Combs, the Director of Minerals Management for the State Land Department (and one of the most helpful and respectful state employees I’ve met in a long time) that directed me to the Land Department’s website for the final, up-to-date list of tracts to be sold at the May 1 sale. In the two weeks between the time I received the preliminary list from Gaebe and Combs’ e-mail, the tracts in or near the roadless areas, as well as the wildlife habitat areas identified by the Game and Fish Department, had been removed from the list. So I inquired of Combs what had happened to make them disappear from the list. He replied that because of all that had taken place regarding those parcels, and with the new wildlife stipulations being placed in the leases, he thought he better call the company that had nominated those tracts and see if they were still interested. Well, it turns out they weren’t interested any more. Combs said the company who nominated those 2,500 acres, Blanca Peak LLC of Dickinson, had submitted an opening bid of $100 per acre when they sent in the nomination, and they had decided to save the $250,000 it would cost them for the leases.

“Hmmmm,” I thought. “Funny what a little wildlife stipulation in a lease will do.”

Well, it turns out it may not have been that simple. Blanca Peak is fronting in North Dakota for Chesapeake Energy, the notorious Oklahoma-based oil and gas firm that is facing hundreds of millions of dollars in lawsuits around the country (read about them here) for fraudulent leasing practices (You can read how they screwed a 92-year-old widow here).

It’s hard to tell from my research just who owns what, but it looks like a company called Redsky Land out of Edmond, OK, which does mineral leasing for Chesapeake, put together a storefront operation in Dickinson called Blanca Peak, which leased a couple thousand acres, mostly in Billings County, in February (and would have leased the 2,500 acres we’re talking about here if they had been offered). Another company which I believe is also fronting for Chesapeake, Clear Creek Resources, has leased nearly 10,000 acres of state school lands, mostly in Billings, Golden Valley, Stark and Dunn Counties, spending more than $10 million here. I asked Combs if he had received payment from the two companies, and he said he had. That’s a good thing, because a lot of people who leased land to Chesapeake or one of its subsidiaries got screwed, and one of the biggest screwees is a fellow named Harold Hamm. You might recognize that name—owner of Continental Oil, the biggest player in the Bakken. Hamm didn’t get screwed for long, though. Forbes Magazine reported that the billionaire Hamm took Chesapeake and its own billionaire owner, Aubrey McClendon, to court, and won a $20 million settlement. You can read about it here. Hmm, hard to choose a side in THAT fight, eh?

Chesapeake made news in North Dakota recently when it announced it was essentially stopping its drilling activities here and cancelling most of its private leases in southwestern North Dakota. There’s going to be lawsuits over that as well—just not quite as big as the one filed by Hamm. A lot of landowners did not get their lease money, and they’ve banded together and hired an attorney to try to get it for them.

That news prompted Governor Dalrymple a couple weeks ago to tell sportsmen gathered at the Conference on the Future of Hunting that “in southwest North Dakota, (oil) development is not going to be what people thought.” That was part of his reassurance to hunters that the oil impact on hunting is not such a big problem. Well, translating Chesapeake’s bailing out into a clear sign that oil activity in the part of the state in which Chesapeake was working is a real stretch. It’s likely more about Chesapeake and its problems than it is about the future of the oil industry there. And it may also be why they have decided not to lease the school sections in the roadless areas.

But I have strayed a long way from where I started this story. The real issue here is the State Land Board’s practices, and, by extension, the activities of state government vis a vis looking out for our land and its critters as the oil industry marches across the landscape. In his speech a couple weeks ago, Governor Dalrymple said “Through the Industrial Commission, we’re going to have a more formal process (for analyzing the impact of oil development on wildlife and habitat) on private land. We will now formalize that process and every single parcel that’s permitted will have a process to determine impact on that terrain.”

Everyone listening to the Governor took that to mean that when the Industrial Commission’s Oil and Gas Division is issuing drilling permits on private land in North Dakota, they will first check with Game and Fish and see if a newly-drilled oil well would affect wildlife. Wow. That’d be something. Except it’s not what it sounds like. What it turned out to be, at least so far, is that on private land under which the state owns the minerals (land that used to be owned by the state but was sold to a private landowner, with the state retaining the minerals), there’s going to be a bit of a process to see if wildlife is affected. That’s a tiny, tiny fragment of the drilling permits to be issued.

And besides, wildlife experts tell me that the process, outlined in an agreement and formally signed by the Governor, Lance Gaebe and Terry Steinwand, the Game and Fish Commissioner, has holes in it big enough to drive a truck through. At any rate, it’s going to be very difficult for Game and Fish to look at—to physically get out and walk on—every parcel of state-owned land and decide whether or not there should be an oil well there. And so, the blanket statement that there “might be problems here” will just get attached to leases, and then some oil company, who paid good money to the state for a lease, will say “Are you kidding me? We’ll see you in court.”

So, what now? What should the state be doing in the face of this mad march across our landscape? I read a month or so ago the report the Governor issued about the tour his agency heads took across the Bakken, and how we’re going to address that by appointing an Energy Impact Coordinator and spend some money helping with roads and schools and housing and law enforcement and social services (it does not address landcape, wildlife or environmental problems). You can read the report here. The problem with that report is that it addresses the effects of unmanaged oil development, not the cause of the problems. The cause is too much development, too fast. Pretty much everyone agrees with that.

So let me offer a modest proposal. Let me suggest that it is time for the State Land Board to quit leasing its minerals for a while. Let me suggest that we could slow down development just a little bit if we didn’t keep making more land available for drilling. I think a three-year moratorium on further leasing of state school lands is in order.

If you’ve read this far, you are getting the picture that what is happening here is just too much for anyone to keep track of. It took me a week to write this story, and I wanted you to read this whole story in one big gulp to get some idea of what is happening in our state, and how fast those things are happening, and how interconnected everything is. I just went back and re-read it and I am shaking my head in near disbelief.

A moratorium on leasing of state school lands doesn’t immediately stop any of the problems we face. But it is a sign of good faith on the part of our government that we recognize we have a problem and we need to try to get a handle on it. There are some natural ecological benefits to doing it—school lands in oil country are pasture lands, mostly native prairie, and so the effect would be to preserve some native prairie, which is wildlife habitat. A moratorium will give the Game and Fish Department time to go out and physically inventory the school lands and determine which should be protected and which should be drilled in the future. My guess is that they would welcome that timeout. Their job is to take care of our wildlife, and state school lands are home to a lot of wildlife.

But it’s the bigger picture that is more important. It’s government expressing its concern, telling its citizens that we see a problem and we’re going to start taking some steps to address it.

We’re not going to lose any money over it. The oil isn’t going anywhere. It will still be there in three years, or whenever we decide to renew our lease program. Besides, we don’t need the money now anyway. We’re rich. The state’s bank vaults are overflowing with cash. Leaving the oil alone for a few years is just like more money in the bank. It’ll be there when we want to go get it.

And so, thanks to Mike McEnroe. He spotted a problem, he called attention to it, and he got results. For those of us who value those precious wilderness areas, he’s a hero. Thanks to Governor Dalrymple and the State Land Board and Lance Gaebe and Drew Combs and the North Dakota Game and Fish Department, especially Conservation Division Chief Greg Link, and yes, even to Blanca Peak LLC and Chesapeake Energy. So far, we’ve got a happy ending to this one small story. Now, let’s deal with the big story.

Politicians will say the darnedest things in an election year. Take Jack Dalrymple. Please. Someone. (Sorry. Just kidding. Old joke. Couldn’t resist.)

The Governor addressed a Conference on the Future of Hunting that I attended last week. It was put together by North Dakota’s wildlife organizations, with some assistance from the State Game and Fish Department. Impetus for the event came from the impact oil development is having on wildlife and habitat in the western part of the state, although, truth be told, there was little talk of that, and more generally it was a pretty traditional gathering of wildlife types to bemoan the fact that it is hard to find a place to hunt (generally not true, but a great whipping boy for people looking for a reason to whine) and to fret over a much more legitimate concern, the decline in the number of acres enrolled in the CRP program, which has been the basis for the building of the greatest wildlife boom in our state’s history. It was a generally successful conference as these things go. Problems were identified and some solutions suggested. We have our work cut out for us.

The Governor, to his credit, came to the meeting prepared to address both the oil impact and the loss of CRP, head-on. But he made a bit of a fool of himself by pandering to the 150 or mostly wildlife-savvy North Dakotans in the audience, pretending to know what he was talking about, and telling them something that wasn’t true, and not knowing that they all knew it wasn’t true. It was reminiscent of that quote from Will Rogers: “It’s not what he doesn’t know that bothers me, it’s what he knows for sure that just ain’t so.”

Now, obviously the Governor had been briefed on what was on the mind of this crowd. We all know that the CRP program is in big trouble. The combination of diminishing farm program budgets and high commodity prices has the CRP program in a tailspin. North Dakota has already lost almost 2/3 of its CRP acres and is on track to lose 90 per cent of those set-aside acres that pheasants, ducks, and deer love to live in (see the chart below, provided by the Game and Fish  Department). That’s on the minds of every North Dakota hunter, the entire outdoors tourism industry, and certainly all the wildlife professionals who were in the room last week. The Governor had been told before the speech that this issue would figure prominently in our discussions over the course of the 2-day conference.

And so he got up and said, much to all our surprise, that we shouldn’t be worried about losing our CRP–that we should not accept the presumption that we are going to lose a lot of CRP. He said that the people writing the new farm bill will not allow CRP to expire. As he was saying this, his Game and Fish Department staff was handing out a brochure that included this chart, which says we’re going to go from 3 million acres of CRP in 2007 down to about 300,000 acres by 2019. It said that we’re actually going to be under one million acres next year—just a third of what we had as recently as 2006.

Now maybe the Governor knows about some secret deal between Harry Reid and John Boehner and Barack Obama that is going to put enough money in the farm bill to maintain CRP. If so, he should probably tell Rep. Paul Ryan, chairman of the U.S. House Budget Committee, and Senator Kent Conrad, chairman of the U.S. Senate Budget Committee, and Senator John Hoeven, a member of the Senate Appropriations Committee which will fund the farm bill, and also a member, along with Senator Conrad, of the Senate Agriculture committee, which is writing the Farm Bill, and Representative Rick Berg, who votes for the Ryan budgets.  Because they sure don’t know about it.

Or maybe the Governor just made that up, like he made up his story a couple of weeks ago about putting 100,000 barrels of oil a day from North Dakota into the Keystone Pipeline. Maybe he just made that up because he knew we would like to hear that, and that we wouldn’t know any better. Except that we do. Because we hunt North Dakota, and we can drive the Governor directly to those fields that were CRP last year and are black dirt this spring. And we know which fields on our cousin’s farm are coming out of CRP this year. We know that we have already lost almost two-thirds of our CRP and are about to lose most of the rest of it. And we were staring at the brochure his staff was handing out showing us that.

Well, we clapped when he was done, because we always clap for Governors, and because we were appreciative that he had taken time from his busy schedule to be with us, even though we knew it was an election year, and hunters vote . . . And then the damage control started. And it lasted all through the two-day conference.

First it was the Governor’s appointee, Game and Fish Director Terry Steinwand, speaking as part of the first panel discussion right after the Governor finished his remarks and left: “I hope the Governor is right and that we will be able to stem the tide of the loss of CRP.”

Then it was former Republican State Representative and avid outdoorsman Darrell Nottestad, as part of his panel presentation: “I hope the Governor is right.”

Both emphasized the word “hope.”

Then, one of Steinwand’s staff, whose name I won’t use to keep him out of trouble: “I don’t know about what the Governor said about CRP. It is slipping away.”

Then Keith Trego, executive director of the North Dakota Natural Resources Trust, probably most knowledgeable man in North Dakota about federal programs and the impact they have on wildlife: “I hope some of the optimistic things we’ve heard about its (CRP) retention come to be, but we’ll see.”

It was actually kind of embarrassing, because we were there to talk about things we could do as hunters to make up for the loss of habitat CRP provides, and so we had to kind of dance around the issue a bit to keep from making the Governor look any more foolish.

Now I don’t mean to pick on the Governor, but I’m starting to see an election year pattern here, where he’s fudging the facts for political purposes. I don’t think it is so much a cold calculation as it is that he is being ill-served by his staff, especially, I think, his campaign staff, whoever they are. The Governor is a busy guy right now and has to rely on information provided him by his staff, and he has to hope that information is accurate. Because if it isn’t, and he is passing it off as fact, someone is going to call him on it. Like when he said in that national radio address that the Keystone Pipeline was scheduled to take 100,000 barrels of North Dakota oil (by the way, since we called him on that a couple weeks ago, he’s changed his language a bit, and is now using the phrases “Bakken oil” and “Williston Basin crude oil” instead of “North Dakota oil” in his press releases).

I don’t want to call the Governor a rookie at this campaign game, because he did run for the U.S. Senate against Kent Conrad 20 years ago, but this is his first real statewide race on his own since then, instead of as understudy to John Hoeven, and these look like rookie mistakes. He needs to remember that he is the GOVERNOR now and it is important that he be accurate, and not make stuff up for political purposes.

Like some of the other stuff he said at the Hunting Conference:

Acknowledging our fears as hunters that the oil boom is out of control and is adversely affecting wildlife and habitat and hunting, and trying to assuage those fears, he said “The oil companies say we are within 10 per cent of the largest workforce we will have.” In other words, the top of the boom is in sight. Well, we were all glad to hear that. Really, really glad. Until Kari Cutting from the North Dakota Petroleum Council—which speaks for the entire oil industry—told us in her panel discussion presentation that there are 35,000 direct jobs in the oil industry right now, and that there will be 65,000 direct jobs in the oil industry by 2020. And that there are 2-3 indirect jobs created for each of those direct jobs. So that would mean somewhere around another 100,000 jobs in the next 7½ years. A pretty far cry from what the Governor said.

I could go on about his promises to make wildlife a major consideration when issuing drilling permits and leasing state school lands, and I’m going to follow up on those things in the next few days, but you get the drift.

It’s one of those years divisible by 4, and politicians say the darnedest things in those years.

Here’s what we know for sure. This is an election year. There are some deep political divisions in this country, fueled mostly by Republican leaders who, more than three years after the 2008 election, are still in shock over the election of a black Democratic president and are continually frustrated by their party’s inability to come up with a white knight, a la Ronald Reagan, or even as marginally acceptable as George W. Bush or Warren G. Harding , to lead their party back to the White House.

Faced with the prospect of another presidential defeat, these Republican leaders have accepted a strategy of electing as many Republicans as possible to lesser offices, and are using anti-Barack Obama messages which they feel might resonate in states where polling numbers show the President is not doing well, hoping that tying Democratic candidates to an unpopular president will help them preserve seats they hold now and pick up new ones, especially U.S. Senators, Congressmen and Governors.

Enter John Hoeven and Jack Dalrymple.

Hoeven, by all accounts a moderate until he fell under the spell of Mitch McConnell just about exactly two years ago when McConnell flew into North Dakota and promised our then-Governor a spot on the Senate Appropriations Committee if we would send him to Our Nation’s Capital, is currying favor with the Republican leadership by running with the Keystone Pipeline issue. It makes perfectly good sense to him. We’re a big oil-producing state, we have lots of problems caused by the oil boom in the western part of our state, the pipeline runs kind of close to our state, and if the truth can be stretched far enough, he can connect North Dakota to that pipeline (figuratively, not literally) and so make the case that Obama’s reluctance to approve the full project is hurting his state.

Except that it isn’t.

Hoeven was quoted in the Bismarck Tribune last Friday saying that construction of the Keystone Pipeline “would take 500 trucks a day off of North Dakota roads.”

Except that there is absolutely no evidence that would happen.

To further his strategy of currying favor with Republican Leadership, Hoeven offered up his replacement as Governor back home in North Dakota, Jack Dalrymple, to make the Republican party’s weekly radio address a couple Saturdays ago, and promised them that Governor Dalrymple would also beat the drum on Keystone. And the Governor did.

In that radio address, broadcast to the nation, Governor Dalrymple’s first real “15 minutes of fame,” which should have installed a real sense of pride in all North Dakotans to have our state’s leader so chosen, Governor Dalrymple said “North Dakota oil producers were scheduled to feed the Keystone pipeline with 100,000 barrels of crude oil per day.”

Except that we weren’t.

See, through those two statements, by Senator Hoeven and Governor Dalrymple, Americans who know little about our state and even less about the Keystone pipeline, were led to believe that the delay in the pipeline was really hurting North Dakota.

Except that it isn’t.

The pipeline doesn’t come here, it goes through Montana, and the Senator knows that. To get enough oil into the pipeline to satisfy Gov. Dalrymple’s claim that the pipeline will take 100,000 barrels of North Dakota oil per day, it would take more trucks, not 500, or any other number, fewer, to get the oil to the Keystone onramp at Baker, Montana. Yes, there are proposals to run pipelines from North Dakota to Baker. They may or may not be built. First, there would have to be commitments for sufficient barrels of North Dakota oil to make the pipeline economically feasible—commitments by both North Dakota oil producers to put it in the pipeline, and commitments by TransCanada, the company who wants to build the Keystone pipeline, to take it out and put it in their pipeline.

Except there aren’t.

Because, you see, what Governor Dalrymple is saying is not true. There is no agreement by TransCanada to take 100,000 barrels of North Dakota oil.

Here’s what there is.

There is an agreement between Montana Governor Brian Schweitzer, negotiated in 2010, and announced jointly by Gov. Schweitzer and TransCanada officials on September 13, 2010, at a press conference in Billings, Montana, to “construct onramps and offramps for the receipt and delivery of oil from Montana producers at points on the Keystone pipeline that had been announced by TransCanada.”

That, of course, was the Montana Governor’s take on the agreement, or at least his public proclamation. Read: This is a big deal for Montana.

Except that it wasn’t.

TransCanada worded it a little differently. In a 2011 press release, TransCanada said “In the fall of 2010, TransCanada went to the market with a proposal to move Bakken crude oil production by constructing a receipt facility at Baker, Montana. The open season was successful allowing TransCanada to sign firm contracts for 65,000 bpd of crude oil from the Bakken to key U.S, refining markets. The open season for this project closed on November 19, 2010. The Bakken Marketlink project will provide receipt facilities to transport up to 100,000 bpd of crude oil from the Williston Basin producing region in North Dakota and Montana . . .”

If TransCanada says that’s the deal, then that’s the deal. They will let 100,000 barrels of crude oil, from somewhere in the Bakken region of North Dakota and Montana (and possibly Saskatchewan), into the pipeline. Not, as Governor Schweitzer says, 100,000 barrels of Montana crude. Not, as Governor Dalrymple says, 100,000 barrels of North Dakota crude. Nice try guys.

And note to Governor Dalrymple: TransCanada says there are contracts for only 65,000 barrels, not 100,000, and that those contracts are not all from North Dakota. Those numbers, Governor, come from documents provided to me and to a fellow blogger, who requested them, by your office.

But at least Governor Schweitzer backed off when he got the agreement. He is not out there beating up President Obama. He is not out there making false statements today. He’s leaving that to Dalrymple and Hoeven. And I doubt that he likes it much.

The point is, it is terribly irresponsible for Governor Dalrymple to say things like: “Now we (North Dakota) will not be able to supply the choice American markets because President Obama says he needs more time to study Keystone . . . . The Federal government is killing energy development with overly burdensome regulations.”

He said those things in his radio address, and then he went on to say:  “We have doubled our oil production in the last four years and are about to become the second largest oil producing state behind only Texas.”

Huh? If the Federal Government is killing energy development, how have we managed to double our oil production?

I’m a little saddened that two once-responsible men like Jack Dalrymple and John Hoeven have fallen for, and are spreading, this anti-Obama Republican pap. I’m a little shocked to think that our Governor would give a national radio address and say things that he knew were not true. I think he should probably issue a national apology, but I don’t know how he’d do that. I’m saddened, but not shocked at all, that North Dakota news media wouldn’t pay attention to a story like this. You’d think that when a Governor goes on national radio and lies to the American public, that maybe that would be a news story.

And most of all, I hope that Senator Hoeven and Governor Dalrymple will stop doing this. If they want to beat up the President with facts they can prove are true, they can just go ahead and do that, even if it does reflect badly on our state. But they can’t just make up their own facts. Their offices call for better than that.

THE SCENE: A quiet winter morning in the Logan’s on Third Building in downtown Bismarck, North Dakota, home to the offices of the North Dakota Petroleum Council. The phone rings at the desk of Petroleum Council President Ron Ness. On the line is Lynn Helms, director of the North Dakota Division of Mineral Resources, chief regulator of the oil industry in North Dakota.  Ness answers. Here’s the conversation.

“Good morning, Ron, this is Lynn. Got a minute?”

“You bet, Lynn. What’s up.”

“Well, Ron, I got your draft back of the new oil regulations. Thanks for finishing them up. Ran ‘em by the Governor. He likes them. I think we’ve got a deal.”

“Okay, Lynn, just remember to keep my fingerprints off them. As far as anyone else knows, those were drafted by your staff, not mine (wink, wink). Now, let’s talk strategy. When are you going to release them to the public? We’ve got to get our lines down, our stories straight. Need to make sure we’re on the same page here. At the end of the day, bottom line, we need a good cop-bad cop scenario for this AP reporter to write about. As we agreed, I’m going to whine about them just enough to make it look like you guys are really laying some shit on our industry.”

“Well, thanks for that, Ron. The Governor really appreciates it. You know he’s got to look like he’s cracking down, with all the problems going on out west, and an election this fall. You and I both know we don’t want that Taylor guy, or any Democrats at all, in fact, in charge. So, have you got your lines ready?”

“Yeah, something like this:  ‘They are the most onerous regulatory changes we’ve ever seen. I’m a bit concerned about the cost of doing business in the state and that it could begin to discourage activity.’”

“Oh, yeah, Ron, that’ll play well. And we can live with it. It really makes us look like tough guys. Like we’re really doing something to ‘get you guys in line.’”

“So what about you, Lynn? What have you got planned when I say that?”

“Well, I’ve got a line written for Bruce Hicks, my assistant, something like this: ‘We are not trying to push industry out of our state. It’s not our goal to be the most onerous — we want to have a good business environment that is going to protect the environment.”

“Oh, that’s good. We both got the word ‘onerous’ in there. That’s the word that will stick in people’s minds. I think we’re good to go.”

FAST FORWARD: March 15, 2012. You can read the rest of the story here.

Okay, you’ve got to admire entrepreneurship, but sometimes, people in any profession ought to just stick to doing what they do best, and not venture too far afield. Here’s the beginning of a story in The Dickinson Press Saturday:

WILLISTON — A Williston-area truck driver has the solution for oil workers with nothing to do and a shortage of women. He’s throwing the “Party in the Patch” over Memorial Day weekend, advertising in Chicago, the Twin Cities and elsewhere to attract women to his weekend-long singles dance.

Organizer Troy McKinley said his goal is to attract one to two women for every five guys at the event. “This is not going to be a sausage fest,” McKinley said. “I’m trying to avoid that, to put it crudely.”

McKinley got the idea from the 2001 movie “Herman U.S.A.” about a Minnesota town with 78 bachelors who advertise for wives and are inundated with women. McKinley, a Minnesota native who has lived in the Williston area for three years, is using that same concept to draw single ladies to the party.

            “I’m telling them to come out here and meet the guys out here who are making money working in the oil field,” McKinley said. He said he already has women lined up from Chicago and he’s going to continue advertising.

The event, May 25 through May 27, will be 25 miles south of Williston just north of Alexander on a 110-acre campground that is being developed, McKinley said. The event’s website, partyinthepatch.com, is selling tickets for the event and camp sites. McKinley also is reserving as many Williston hotel rooms as he can.

Tickets cost $150 for the whole weekend for men or $20 for women.

What’s wrong with this picture? Okay, let’s start at the beginning.

• This is not going to be like “Herman U.S.A.” This is not 78 aging bachelor farmers in Herman, Minnesota, population 452, advertising for women to come and meet them, and getting 1,500 visitors from 37 states and four foreign countries. This is more like 15,000 rowdy oil field workers with their pockets full of money and their snoots full of beer, average age about 25, who haven’t seen their wives or girlfriends for a year or so. About half the testosterone in the known world could be collected in Williams, McKenzie, Mountrail and Divide Counties right now.
• “Come out here and meet these guys who are making money in the oil field.” Yeah, sure, and if you fall in love, you can just stay here and move into the back of their pickup with them in the Wal-Mart parking lot. Oh, that’s right, can’t stay there any more. But there’s a nice approach just off County Road 40 with a good view of the stars at night. You can still run in to the Wal-Mart bathroom in the morning.
• Dude’s gonna bring “one or two girls” for each five men to a party. Yeah, I’m sure this is where I’m going to encourage my daughter or sister to spend the Memorial Day weekend. Hey, Moms and Dads, if you have a daughter graduating with a Harvard MBA this spring, this would make a truly great graduation present. Her life’s probably been pretty boring up until now, with all that studying and stuff. All it will cost is 20 bucks and an airline ticket. Don’t worry, she won’t need a motel room—she won’t have a problem finding a place to sleep.
• Already got some girls “lined up from Chicago.” Uh huh. What’s that 800 number?
• Five guys are gonna pony up $150 each (Since it is Memorial Day, veterans get a $25 discount) to get a chance to look at 1 or 2 girls. Let’s say a thousand guys show up. There’ll be a couple hundred girls there to party with them, the promoter says. Hmmmm. Well, just trim up that mullet and put on a clean tee-shirt, and come and take your chances. What’s a hundred and fifty bucks? An hour’s wages? Those girls only got to pay $20 though. I’d say, for a working girl, that might just be a pretty good investment.
• Not going to be a “sausage party.” Y’know, maybe I’ve been living under a rock, but I’ve never heard that term before. I looked it up. Urban Dictionary says:

1. A party of only guys (or at least 80% guys), where there is a substantial abundance of wiener.
2. When the number of males in an environment overwhelmingly exceeds the amount of females present.
3. Any gathering that is made up of an unusually large percentage of guys.”

Okay, not as bad as I had imagined. Except for the “abundance of wiener” part.

• Memorial Day weekend. You know what the weather is normally like Memorial Day weekend in northwestern North Dakota? The U.S. Weather Service says the average high temperature is 66. Average. High. I can probably remember about half of my 64 Memorial Day weekends, and I don’t remember too many when I wanted to go to an outdoor dance and party. It’s usually cold, rainy and windy.
• Dude’s advertising though. Even got a website. www.partyinthepatch.com. Check it out. Got a sponsor listed already: Passion Parties by Darlene, The Party Lady. Your Passion Consultant and Sex Edu-Tainer (www.ThePartyLady.com). Check HER out. Or listen to her podcast at www.partygirlpartygirl.com. Or read her blog www.GreatSexSecretsBlog.com. The links are all right there on the Party In The Patch website.
• For legitimacy, the organizer says “One event planned is a bachelorette auction, with proceeds going to the local sheriff’s office and the fire department.” Oh, yeah. Sell a woman, and make it “legal” by giving the money to the cops. I suspect there’ll be a few of them around. Hope the organizer brings “one or two women” for the cops to enjoy too.
• Campsites on location rent for $20 a night. In a campground “that’s being developed.” In the next 90 days. Bet that’ll have a lot of amenities. Better bring your own generator. For a working girl with a pop-up camper (no pun intended), or a tent, though, that $20 is just another small investment that should pay off big time.
• “The event will not have strippers.” Well, at least not early in the evening. “Organizers plan to serve liquor Friday and Saturday and work with the local Eagles Club to obtain a liquor permit.” Well, that ought to work in the strippers’ favor. Get those dudes oiled up a bit before the dancing starts. And what a nice public-spirited thing for the Eagles (whose slogan is “The Fraternal Order of Eagles uphold and nourish the values of home, family and community that are so necessary and it seems so often get ignored and trampled in today’s society”) to do.
• “Shuttle service to Williston to prevent drunken driving.” Well, at least that’s a good idea. Where’s the pickup and dropoff point? Wal-Mart parking lot?
• “As he works on the details of the event, McKinley said people are telling him to expect as many as 4,000 to 5,000 attendees.” Well, so much for Zip to Zap being a really big deal. Yeah, right. We’ll see. Sausage or no sausage.

Sheesh. Western North Dakota gets goofier every day.

WELCOME BACK, FRONTIER

The news that Frontier Airlines is returning to Bismarck is good news, although maybe a little disconcerting for those of us whose ages begin with a 6, or 7, or 8. See, Frontier used to serve Bismarck when I was in the Navy, in the 1960’s, and I used to get home on the plane from Denver when I was on leave. The flight took off in Denver, stopped in Scottsbluff, Nebraska, then Alliance, Nebraska, then Chadron, Nebraska, then Rapid City, South Dakota and finally Bismarck. Up and down. Up and down. Up and down. It was the only airline serving Bismarck from Denver, so there were no other options. I didn’t even mind. I was going home! Those were the days when you could still smoke on airplanes, and I was a smoker. We’d get in the air, the pilot would come on and say it is okay to smoke now, so we’d light up, and before we could finish the cigarette, the pilot would come on and tell us to extinguish our cigarettes because we’re about to land. Only on the last leg, from Rapid City to Bismarck, could you finish an entire cigarette. With all those stops, the trip took something like four or five hours. I expect it’ll be a bit shorter now.

OUCH! THIS WOMAN IS PISSED!

The best concluding line in a Bismarck Tribune letter to the editor this week came from a Bismarck woman whose house was flooded last summer. She and her husband had pulled the furnace before the flood to save it. When she returned to the house, someone had stolen the furnace. Stolen it!  She reported it to the police, and then wrote to the editor of the Bismarck Tribune. Excerpt:

Someone stole my furnace . . . I was saving the furnace for my son and his wife (whose house also flooded) . . . I hope you stay warm this winter, or if you sold it, I hope you are enjoying the money. Talk about kicking someone when they are down . . . Besides where you are headed, you won’t need my furnace.

SORRY, DSU, BUT THERE ARE GOING TO BE SOME BAD JOKES

The funniest sort-of-mean e-mail I got from a friend last week, who knows I’m an alum of Dickinson State University said: “Any truth to the rumor DSU is awarding an honorary degree to Jeremy Lin?”

COVERING—AND THEN UNCOVERING—THE CHANCELLOR’S ASS

From KFYR-TV News, Feb. 16:

Three high level employees have stepped down at the (Dickinson State) University. (Chancellor Bill) Goetz has said publicly that those resignations were related to the audit. (DSU President D.C.) Coston contradicts that. “None of the three people who resigned, none had any inkling of the audit when they came forward and said they would resign,” Coston said in an interview yesterday.

He says Marshall Melbye, former registrar at the university, resigned at the end of December, not long after the audit started. Steve Glasser was the director of the Strom Center, which was not implicated in the report. He resigned about two weeks ago, Coston says. And Jon Brudvig, former Vice President of Academic Affairs, stepped down shortly before the audit was released, but had no knowledge of what it contained.

Who to believe? Maybe one day we will find out who’s really to blame out there. Maybe.

ROCKIN’ THE CAMPER

The most telling story I’ve seen of what is going on in the oil patch—Here’s the entire AP story about an oil well explosion last week:

An oil well exploded Sunday morning about eight miles west of Fairview, Mont., the Sidney Herald has reported. No one was injured. The well is on Commissioner Loren Young’s property. Fairview Volunteer Fire Department responded.

One nearby resident told the Williston Herald she felt her camper shake when the explosion occurred. Black smoke could be seen for miles following the explosion.

Her camper! Not her apartment, or her house, or her office building. Her camper! In February on the Great Plains! And equally important to note, the entire story was just those two paragraphs. Not long ago, an oil well explosion was a big deal. A big story. No more. Just routine, like checking the police blotter these days. Sad.

THE KILLING FIELDS

Scariest short story of the week, from KX News:

29 North Dakota oil-field related deaths have been reported to the North Dakota OSHA office from January 1, 2011 through today (Feb. 16). Bismarck OSHA Office Director Tom Deutscher says his office receives 15-20 a year on average–for North Dakota AND South Dakota.

FINALLY, SOMETHING WE AGREE ON

News release: “The North Dakota Tea Party Caucus has decided to publicly call for RaeAnn Kelsch to not run for re-election as state Representative for District 34.”

WHEN LIFE BEGINS

Bill Maher, on Rick Santorum: “He believes life begins at erection.”

NO GOOD CHOICE

A Republican Legislator friend of mine had a funny line the other day. He said a Legislator’s worst nightmare is to be walking down the Great Hall in the Capitol and see Al Jaeger approaching, quickly turning around to get the hell out of there, and finding out that Kelly Schmidt is coming from the other way.

EVERYONE?

Most mean-spirited line in a political news story I’ve seen in a long time:

“I think everyone is absolutely fired up . . . because everyone’s sick of this president we have. Nothing is a greater motivator than President Obama.”

That was from Matt Becker, Communications director for the North Dakota Republican Party, printed in the Bismarck Tribune February 21.

Everyone, Matt? Everyone?

I’ll give you the second line though. I agree that millions of young Americans were motivated by Barack Obama, to get involved in the political process in 2008, and to vote for him, and to celebrate his election, and I’m betting that will be the case again this year. And the meanness of the current crop of potential opponents, and Republican Party operatives like Matt Becker, will keep them motivated to vote for Obama again this year. Just watch.

LIBERALS

Finally, this. My readers know I am a Liberal. Capital L. And so, I was heartened to read the words below, written by television commentator Lawrence O’Donnell, Jr. I want to share them with you.

What did Liberals do that was so offensive to the Republican Party?

I’ll tell you what they did.

Liberals got women the right to vote.

Liberals got African-Americans the right to vote.

Liberals created Social Security and lifted millions of elderly people out of poverty.

Liberals ended segregation.

Liberals passed the Civil Rights Act, the Voting Rights Act.

Liberals created Medicare.

Liberals passed the Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act.

 What did Conservatives do?

They opposed them on every one of those things, every one.

So when you try to hurl that label at my feet, “Liberal,” as if it were something to be ashamed of, something dirty, something to run away from, it won’t work, because I will pick up that label and I will wear it as a badge of honor.

A little perspective on the stories in the papers recently about the State Land Board and the state’s mineral leasing policies is in order, I think.

There are more than a million acres of public land in western North Dakota’s oil patch. Most of them are owned by The People of the United States, and are managed on our behalf by the U.S. Forest Service. Some are owned by The People of North Dakota and are managed on our behalf by the North Dakota Board of University and School Lands, better known as the State Land Board.

All of those public lands have oil under them, somewhere, down deep. Some of that oil is now being pumped, more will be pumped in the future. On more than 95 per cent of those public lands, the right to drill for the oil under them has been sold at auction to an oil company, in what is called a mineral lease auction. The lease is generally for five years, giving the oil company that buys the right to drill, that long to go get the oil. That five-year deadline is what is driving the oil boom right now—once the oil companies pay to lease the land, they need to get it drilled in five years or they have to go back to another auction and pay for the same rights again. It’s an aside, but perhaps that is a policy that needs changing. Maybe if they had 10, or 15, or even 20 year leases, the boom would slow a bit and let us catch our breath. The oil will still be there.

The right to drill for oil has been withheld on about 5 per cent of the public lands in the oil patch. These are the most pristine areas of the Bad Lands, some of the most scenic and spectacular lands in our state. They include massive Bullion Butte south of Medora, the butte you see when you stand at the top of the Burning Hills Amphitheatre. It’s North Dakota’s third-highest point, a butte so big it turns the Little Missouri River nearly 30 miles out of its course. For the most part, these areas are managed by the Forest Service as “roadless” areas. The right to graze these lands has been leased to ranchers, and generally, the only roads into them are the two-track trails that the ranchers use to tend to their cattle. No one else is allowed to drive on them.

They are, however, used by hunters, horsemen and hikers, and photographers, campers and wildlife enthusiasts, who walk into and through them, and who appreciate the quiet and the solitude, the critters and the landscape. Not only used by those folks, but cherished by them.

Aside from Theodore Roosevelt National Park, there are five of these areas in the Bad Lands, totaling about 60,000 acres. Because they are generally roadless and have been protected from mineral exploitation, they remain pretty much as they have always been, and are classified as “suitable for wilderness” by the Forest Service. And so, as oil development roars through the Bad Lands, there are these five small areas being preserved in their natural state, mostly for the benefit of wildlife. In fact, there has been much discussion between North Dakota’s Congressional Delegation and wildlife supporters about introducing legislation to grant these special lands permanent wilderness designation one day. (If you’d like to read about this wilderness proposal, go here and click on the Prairie Legacy Wilderness box in the bottom left hand corner of the home page.)

There are some small in-holdings, owned by the state, and managed by State Land Board, inside these Forest Service areas.  They’re called “school sections” because they were given to the state at statehood to be managed for the benefit of the state and its school children. Those state lands also have generally not been leased for mineral development because they are inside the roadless areas and are not easily accessible to the oil companies.

Now, most people, including most North Dakotans, agree that open spaces like this have value, and that in a vast sea of drilling rigs and fracking trucks, it is a good thing to protect some small areas in their natural state. Mule deer and antelope and grouse need a place to play too. More importantly, they need a place to procreate. Like humans, they don’t like to mate in full view of crowds of people, or with trucks driving through their bedrooms. They don’t find the clatter of an oil well at all nice background music for their romantic trysts. And so they don’t mate. And their populations decline. And that makes us humans sad.

A couple of weeks ago, the State Land Board’s administrator, Lance Gaebe, announced that the board was going to hold an auction to sell the right to drill for oil on some of these state-owned lands. And some people whose passion is looking out for wildlife, headed up by Mike McEnroe of Bismarck, director of the North Dakota Wildlife Society, noticed that some of the “school sections” on the auction block for the February 7 sale were inside those roadless areas managed by the Forest Service.

McEnroe called that to the attention of the Land Board, and also the public, and people started asking the Land Board to withhold those sections, totaling about 1600 acres, from the lease sale. At about the same time, the North Dakota Game and Fish Department decided it might be a good idea to withhold some sections in southwestern North Dakota which are critical habitat for sage grouse. North Dakota’s Lieutenant Governor, Drew Wrigley, had been to a meeting in Wyoming regarding the future of sage grouse, which are threatened because of declining habitat, and are a candidate for listing as an endangered species. A listing as an endangered species could pose real problems for the oil and gas industry, and Wrigley has taken an interest in doing what he can for the grouse in order to prevent that (and because he cares about the grouse, too, I think). Wrigley, and the Game and Fish Department, apparently felt that holding back on drilling in some of this sage grouse habitat would send a good signal that North Dakota was concerned about this.

And so, the State Land Board met a week and a half ago and voted to exclude some of the sage grouse habitat and all the land within the roadless areas from the upcoming Feb. 7 lease auction. At least board members THOUGHT that’s what they did. But because of a snafu by Gaebe (either intentional or not—some folks have said Gaebe was trying to sabotage McEnroe’s work, others said he was just incompetent) the motion the board voted on contained the wrong legal descriptions and did not remove two of the tracts in the roadless areas from the auction. But McEnroe was paying attention. After the board meeting, he e-mailed Gaebe:

“Tracts 137-101-Sec 16 and 138-101 28 E1/2 are in the Kendley Plateau roadless area, and were not withdrawn.  Correct?”

Gaebe wrote back tersely: “That is correct, neither of those tracts was postponed from the February offering.”

The thing is, the board members believed they HAD removed those tracts. Now, I haven’t talked to any of those board members personally since the meeting, but the impression I got from newspaper stories, phone conversations and talk on the street is that they were pretty pissed off by that turn of events.

More importantly, based on earlier conversations with both Wrigley and Governor Jack Dalrymple about this issue (Dalrymple chairs the board), I got the impression both were pretty interested in supporting the Game and Fish Department’s request to withdraw some of the sage grouse habitat land AND withdrawing the land in the roadless areas.

And so, over Gaebe’s protests, Dalrymple scheduled another board meeting for this past Friday so board members could correct their mistakes. Gaebe spent the better part of a week whining, after the Bismarck Tribune carried a story saying “He (Dalrymple) said the land board’s job is to optimize the value of school lands for the state’s children, but the value of the land may be in conservation.”

To which Gaebe responded, in a subsequent Tribune story, “Conservation doesn’t support education for my kids and grandkids.”

Hmmm. Wonder how the Governor felt about that.

That was followed by another outrageous Gaebe statement in the Tribune: “The trust, not the public, owns state land and minerals, he (Gaebe) said.”

Someone needs to remind Gaebe that the trust IS the public.

Another interesting element to this story is the work done by State Senator Connie Triplett of Grand Forks this past week. Triplett found a forgotten section of North Dakota law which “requires the State Land Commissioner (Gaebe) to classify all land owned by the state or its instrumentalities according to its highest and best use,” as she said in a letter she personally delivered to each member of the Land Board this past week. You can read §15-02-05.1 of the North Dakota Century Code here.

Triplett wrote: “The statute defines ‘highest and best use’ as ‘that use of a parcel of land which will most likely produce the most benefit to the state and its inhabitants, and which will best meet the needs of the people.’ It is clear that the highest dollar value is not the only consideration, because the statute goes on to require the commissioner to consider ‘soils capability, vegetation, wildlife use, mineral characteristics, public use, recreational use, commercial or industrial use, aesthetic values, cultural values, surrounding land use, nearness to expanding urban areas’ and any other relevant information. It is my understanding that such land classification has never been formally accomplished . . .” Triplett concluded her letter by saying “I urge the land board to convene a special meeting prior to February 7^th and cancel the sale scheduled for that date. If the board is not willing to cancel the entire sale, at a minimum it should withdraw all 5,344 acres which have been requested for withdrawal.”

Well, the board did have a special meeting, last Friday. It did not cancel Feb. 7 sale, but it did withdraw all 5,344 acres from it. Likely the sale will go forward on the remaining acres listed by Gaebe in the sale bill. But we ought to have continued discussion of the bigger question: Absent the lack of a classification project by the Land Commissioner, is the State in violation of its own law? The law clearly says “. . . the commissioner shall classify all land owned by the state or its instrumentalities according to its highest and best use.” Granted, that is a big job, but obviously the 1977 Legislature, which passed the law, meant for it to happen. Isn’t it interesting, by the way, that the law came out of the 1977 Legislature? Those were the days of Governor Art Link, and Legislative leaders like Richard Backes and Buckshot Hoffner and Rick Maixner, the days of the coal boom, when we were passing good laws to deal with environmental impacts from rapid energy development.  The days when we had two-party government (which almost always means GOOD government) in North Dakota. Well, now that we have another energy boom, which is putting an unprecedented amount of pressure on fragile lands, pressure those leaders in 1977 could not have even imagined, and now that we can afford to do this kind of work . . . but sadly we have one party government here now. Wouldn’t it be something if that party rose to this challenge?

And so, where are we today, at the end of the first stage of this fiasco? Here’s my analysis. I don’t know Lance Gaebe—wouldn’t recognize him if I saw him on the street. Just never had the opportunity, I guess. But it’s obvious he is about to become a big player in this stage of North Dakota history. And he likes that. A lot. Month after month, we read in the paper about the U.S. Forest Service auctioning off minerals for millions and millions of dollars. And the Forest Service puffs up its chest about how much money it is contributing to the national treasury. And the dollar amounts just keep getting bigger and bigger. And then along comes the little old state of North Dakota with its own mineral sale, and now Lance Gaebe gets to hang out with the Big Oil Boys and his big brother, Lynn Helms, and now HE’S a player too. And he doesn’t want to give up even one of those acres, a thousand of those dollars, to something as worthless, in his mind, as conservation. I’m sad about that.

But it’s more than that. Those of us in the conservation community have not done our job well. We have not explained to those who see only dollar signs that land has other values as well. We have not persuaded them to look beyond the bank account. If we have tried, we have not tried hard enough. There was a day in North Dakota when we cared. When we had real leaders. And when we followed those leaders into environmental battles, and won those battles, and our state is better off because of them.

This week we won a little skirmish. We talked to our leaders. They listened. And it wasn’t so hard, was it? Let’s do it some more.