Last week the story broke that the Tristanis are leaving Hazelton.  This highlights the flip side of the concept of “Small Town North Dakota” — we romanticize the image of a one horse town, without bothering to remember the problems that come with them.

What happens when you bring new ideas to a small town in North Dakota?  At best, it seems, you run afoul of the city council.  Ask Larry Waith.  At worst, well, ask the Tristanis.  Ask Steven Jones, who was fired as chief of the Larimore police because he had the audacity to enforce the laws townies preferred to skirt rather than repeal.

The damning undercurrent of the Hazelton account, however, is the total lack of local economics in that city.  The Tristanis tried to set up a cafe and it failed, so they turned to fixing and flipping Bismarck-area houses.  Tom Weiser, who spearheaded the project to lure folks to the town, himself works at Wal-Mart.  In Bismarck.

I guess you can forget any notions you had about “close knit” being in the equation for our state’s small towns.  Or that they’re hospitable and inviting to new people and ideas.

NDSU isn’t looking for much in a new President, just someone who isn’t Joe Chapman. They don’t even care if the new guy has a Ph.D! It doesn’t really matter if they know about education, or the research process, that’s not what the President does anyway. The President does important things like: Attend dinners! Fire their own bosses! Hire themselves bodyguards! And develop a healthy cult of personality around themselves!

This latest push to dredge the entire barrel, instead of just the top, is sure to pay off by delivering responsible leadership, right? After all, ANYONE would be better than the State Board homewrecker and diamond-crusted home builder that was Joe Chapman, right? Right?

Larry Waith has a small wind turbine, which he set up on his own land in Wishek. The unobtrusive 2600-watt unit sits atop an unremarkable 12 meter pole, whirring softly as it generates free electricity for Waith’s home.

The City of Wishek wants him to take it down.

Why have they done this? Because Brent Thielges, a city councilman who lives nearby, is annoyed by his neighbour’s personal initiative and environmental responsibility, and compares it to torture.

Yeah, I can totally see how saving money and not burning fossil fuels to power your television rates up there with brutalizing someone’s humanity.

Thielges complained to his fellow councilmen, who acquiesced to his campaign of red tape against Waith. Mr. Waith was willing to pay a small fine for forgetting to ask for a building permit, but will not stand for the council to impose more fines for the turbine to remain standing.

After a month of back-and forth, the matter is to go before a judge. Does the City of Wishek really believe they can subject landowners to bills of attainder based largely on the whims of just one of its members?

All eyes were on the Senate Finance Committee’s draft bill for healthcare reform, and it seems very little of substance has changed.

In continuing the pursuit of health-care “co-ops”,  The Senate Finance draft bill provides a possible loophole for scam artists to form shell companies to drain away the government’s startup subsidy.  Moreover, multiple co-ops will be allowed in each state, severely diluting their market power against established insurers.

The bill does next to nothing to aid people who want to buy insurance across state lines, requiring “national” plans to be registered in every state they want to do business in.

The bill does nothing to grow the risk pool.  People will be permitted to buy plans that only cover catastrophic claims, leaving the rest of people who opt for traditional coverage with higher premiums than if everyone was paying a fair share.

And naturally, the Senate Finance Committee asks much less of health insurers in general than HR 3200.  Seniors will pay 5 times as much as young people for the same insurance policy.  HR 3200 limits this to 2:1.

The bill fails to take any sort of leadership on malpractice reform, instead suggesting that states try out some pilot programs of their own.

Kent and Max have compromised on almost everything, but with Republican “support” for any substantiative measure evapourating, what have they gained?  I say ignore Kent’s boondoggle and pass the HELP committee’s version through the Senate instead.

It was outrageous when it cost $900,000. But guess what? It actually cost $1,470,000, and Joe “I want a bodyguard” Chapman is already living in it.

How does a project $600,000 over budget even get finished? Did the construction company lick its lips and forge ahead, assuming that the legislature would cave? Or did Joe Chapman raid NDSU’s general fund to make ends meet?

Either way, Joe Chapman seems to be able to get away with just about anything he wants, including firing his own boss. Don’t count on the State Board of Higher Education doing anything that might indicate the presence of a spine on Thursday.

Lloyd Omdahl has some sage commentary on our ongoing feud with Manitoba over water issues.

It’s time for North Dakota and Manitoba to give up re-enacting the Hatfields and McCoys and resolve their disputes over the Devils Lake outlet and the 30-mile dam along the Manitoba border. These differences have lasted so long they are becoming intergenerational.

We’ve drawn this out long enough. Time to make a deal.

The Senate has been feverishly whittling parts of the proposed health plan away, although the exact details seem to be out of reach, as even getting hardish numbers on the amounts being slashed from the proposal requires anonymous leaks.

This is the most important legislation of the decade and I’ve yet to see a draft. I’ll just have to ask for a copy.

One of North Dakota’s mega-rental firms has been caught scamming the disabled with illegal fees for companion animals. A Fair Housing of the Dakotas followed up on complaints and found Goldmark openly admitted to asking for a $235 up front and $20 a month.

That may not be unreasonable for your average pet owner, but it’s obscene to ask someone with a medical need for the animal to pony up.  If Goldmark does anything but immediately correct the problem and return its ill-gotten gains, then it is not a company that deserves anyone’s money.

It seems Kent’s plan isn’t making waves out there.

As a North Dakotan, I hear the word “cooperative” and get warm fuzzy feelings.  But I also know that the most successful cooperatives are the biggest ones.  So it is puzzling to me that this was not the goal of Senator Conrad’s proposal.  The problem with Kent’s idea isn’t that it’s a cooperative.  The problem is that it doesn’t even try to create the One Big Cooperative that would be needed to make an impact in the marketplace.

Instead, Conrad wanted to create the opportunity for people to create their own cooperatives.  This is a solution that is piecemeal and onerous on individuals and small businesses, as they either have to make their own co-op, or sift among the proliferation of tiny ones that come about as a result of the present proposal.  All of them will then be at the mercy of private capital firms, because each of these tiny cooperatives will need re-insurance against catastrophic claims larger than their customer base could otherwise pay for.

A key problem for me in judging the merits of this or any other legislative proposal which hasn’t actually hit the floor of Congress is that the text of these proposals aren’t readily and publicly available on THOMAS, the site that keeps track of officially filed bills and amendments, and amendments to the amendment, et cetera.  If Conrad’s measure is there, it’s not apparent to some serious search attempts.

Having key proposals like this being traded around backrooms, between politicians and better-placed journalists, is no way to run a country.

The Wal brothers are at it again — Wal-Mart and Walgreen’s, who spent upwards of $200,000 on lobbying against North Dakota’s laws that protect small-town pharmacies, have launched a petition drive to prop up the law that their money failed to pass. They hope to be able to start their pillage by the end of 2010.