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.

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?

The proposed refinery near New Town will not be used to process local oil, but instead Tar Sands oil from Alberta. Meanwhile, groups on the reservation want the decision to build a refinery put up to the people.

The refining process for this oil leaves pools of toxic sludge in open-air “tailing ponds”.  With no real plan to clean them up, the Athabasca River and a number of aboriginal communities along it are now one levee break away from peril.  Aboriginal groups in Alberta are exhausting every legal means to exert their original land claims to slow down oil sands development.

Why should anyone in North Dakota support a plan that uses Alberta’s filthy oil, when there’s plenty pumped out around here to feed the modest capacity of this new plant?

With economic conditions still fairly poor for heavy industries worldwide, Bobcat has shuttered its Bismarck plant, terminating roughly 600 jobs. The company will consolidate its operations at its Gwinner plant.

After 10 years leading the government of Manitoba, Premier Gary Doer has been appointed ambassador to the United States.

Perhaps a real solution to the intractable border water managment problems that North Dakota and Manitoba squabble over is finally on the horizon.

The steady chugging of wind power development around here could come to a halt.  A new report from The Economist takes a look at the macroeconomic factor that have caused wind generation in the United States to slow its expansion.  Essentially, it’s the credit crisis.  Turbines have a lot of up-front investment and take a while to pay back — something that’s easier to do when loans flow like champagne.

MeritCare of Fargo is merging with Sanford Health of Sioux Falls, combining the two largest health providers in the Dakotas into a $3+ billion operation.

I would hope they take the opportunity to lower costs to patients through proper use of their scale of operations and reductions in administrative redundancies, and to expand service in outlying areas — rather than abusing their position.

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.

Civil rights advocates in North Dakota have lost a key ally. ACLU of the Dakotas director Jennifer Ring was laid off in February. (Naturally, it didn’t hit the Forum until the other day.) The rights of the downtrodden will now have to be defended out of Minneapolis.

A deactivated missile command centre near Cooperstown has been converted into a museum. Hopefully the rest of them will follow in the near future.