buffaloridgeblog

As if it wasn’t already hard enough to recruit strong women and good lookin’ men to work in South Dakota’s sweatshops and that man-made badlands know as the Bakken, Minnesota just clinched the deal, joining Iowa in offering marriage to gays and any other couple of interested adults that aren’t already hitched. Same sex couples can apply for marriage licenses as soon as August 1st, I’d suggest Amtrak add extra cars to the eastbound ‘Builder, Jefferson Lines run extra buses, and Minnesota County Recorders on the Dakota borders prepare for the onslaught.

Gov. Daugaard might as well put on some dark glasses, pack up the SD recruiting kiosk at Mall of America, and slink back to South Dakota under cover of darkness…

Yup, the GOP governor of South Dakota, a permanent backbencher in the republican governor’s group by the name of a Mr. Daugaard, is coming to the Mall of America to persuade all us overpaid Minnesotans to move to South Dakota where unions are all but illegal to work for less. Less like in $12 an hour to drive a double trailer rig to haul twice the payload at half the pay. Less like unfilled jobs in South Dakota offering that same low teens dollars per hour for skilled machinists and welders. And way less like semi skilled jobs paying minimum wage. No thanks, South Dakota… I’ll stay retired on my union pension in Minnesota that pays more than your jobs!

Methinks Mr. Daugaard’s real intent is some tax free shopping for pricey suits he thinks befits the governor of barely a state, with the taxpayers picking up the tab for the trip. And a GOP governor from anywhere west of the Alleghenies has to have cowboy boots to go with that suit, and he’ll probably pick them up at Mall of America too. Meanwhile, on the South Dakota economic development front…

The finally opened and barely operating (after millions in public subsidies) Northern Beef Processors is laying off workers, claiming lack of “operating capital” to buy cattle. Having burned through 150 million in foreign investors and South Dakota taxpayers cash, Northern Beef may be about to join South Dakotas two previous failures in taxpayer and foreign investor backed CAFO, the failed Veiblen megadairies. The beef and dairy markets are shrinking, there’s excess capacity everwhere, and what does the SD GOP run government do?  Recruit even more! 

Not having learned a bit from those failures, SD Governor Daugaard was just off to California recruiting more dairy farmers. Now he’s off to Minnesota to recruit workers for the SD GOP’s pet enterprises that are laying off workers on their way to bankruptcy. At least the foreign investors got citizenship out of the deal!

South Dakota under the GOP… The Badlands for business and workers!

Global warming we can handle… Drier and a couple degrees warmer, just farm like it’s Nebraska instead of southwest Minnesota. Maybe have to irrigate and actually rotate beans with the corn, but we’d get a longer growing season in the bargain. If only climate change was so simple….

Had a couple years of great crops up here on the Buffalo Ridge on the northern plains- plentiful precipitation, even a little too plentiful, more on that later. Early springs and late falls with hot summers to make the corn skyrocket. ‘Twas a couple years of silobusters that came out of the field dry, high test weight too. But last spring the drought moved north, with the spigot being turned off from July through December. We made it through on some residual soil moisture, and for the lucky farmers that had a crop to harvest, the higher prices made up for the smaller yields. On my own little homestead and my neighbors gardens, we low tech “irrigated” from the nearest lake and managed a respectable vegetable crop, and my little vineyard overflowed with juicy grapes.

So I come back from a few weeks in the Everglades in February, expecting another global warming early spring riding my motorcycles… Not! We’ve seen a steady bombardment of snowstorms and even a couple NOAA certified blizzards, even snowed again today! The good news is that the drought is over… The bad news is that today’s updated flood forecast for the Red River of the North at Fargo is for a crest of 38 to 40 feet, just shy of the all time record. Even 38 feet will put this years flood in the highest five crests ever, with three of those five occurring in the last five years- The 2009 crest set the record at 40.84 feet, followed by a 2011 crest of 38.81 feet. With over a century of records and what looks to be 60 percent of the highest crests occurring in the last five years, we got some weird weather goin’ on here!

And the cost of all this global weirding? Ever been in Fargo for a flood? I have. Figure on a hundred dump trucks with police escorts hauling dirt to build the dikes, plus a couple dozen loaders, ‘dozers, and ‘hoes working day and night at a cost of upwards of  $10,000 an HOUR. Easy to see why the near annual flood fight in the Red River valley alone runs well into the millions. The (maybe) fix: A billion dollar bypass channel around Fargo that should be able to handle a hundred year flood. But given that we’re seeing hundred year floods about every other year, an elementary application of Stats 101 suggests that a real hundred year flood would see downtown Fargo become an island between the river and a new back channel down the I-29 trench.

This year’s and 2011′s floods sandwich a drought that saw our rural water systems in southwest Minnesota and the Buffalo Ridge stressed to the point that new industries requesting water had to be turned down. The (maybe ) fix for that is the unfinished Lewis and Clark water system, a better part of a billion dollar bunch of pipelines and pumps to bring water from the aquifers along the Missouri as far as south central Minnesota. Good luck getting that funded with the GOP halting all “pork” except their own.

So yes, we can maybe mitigate global warming for a few billion dollars just for the Buffalo Ridge and a bit beyond. But this ain’t global warming, it’s global weirding, with a return of the dust bowl, the flood that swallowed Fargo, and the Hurricane that dumped the built environment from Miami to Naples back into the Everglades in the offing…

Maybe it’d be a little cheaper to cut back on our greenhouse gas emissions?

Having gotten our federal taxes off in the mail a week ago, thanks to an extension due to winter storms state taxes for those of us living in southern Minnesota had to be in the mail on friday. So what are we paying, and what are we getting for our money?

Lets start with the raw numbers- Minnesota income tax rates range from 5.35 to 7.85% depending on income and ability to exploit various and sundry exemptions, credits, etc.. Not very progressive, and perhaps explains why there are probably more low income than wealthy tax refugees from Minnesota in Florida… When you’re living on $20k a year, spending 6 months and a day in Florida can save you around $600 a year. Iowa, despite all the propaganda we’ve heard from the Minnesota GOP, has a higher top rate of 8.98% but a more progressive bottom bracket rate of .36%, which may partly explain why one sees less Iowans in Florida trailer parks. North Dakota ranges somewhere between, with income tax rates varying from 1.51 to 3.99%, but given that they’ve been gifted with one of the world’s biggest oil deposits, they probably don’t even belong in this comparison. South Dakota is the outlier, trying to scrimp by with zero income tax… More on that later.

So what do we get for our state tax dollar? Well, our small towns on the Buffalo Ridge are a good measure. My home town of less than a hundred souls maintains paved streets, a water system, a park, and a bunch of other stuff towns do, and about half of that is paid for by local government aid from the state. Twenty miles west in South Dakota, the streets are dirt and get a 4 by 4 if you want ‘em plowed, and if you want water drill a well or pay a five figure fee to hook up to rural water. And don’t even think of parks…

So clearly South Dakota is cuttin’ corners to get away without an income tax, and starvin’ small towns is just the start. Screwin’ over government workers contributes too, with SDSU in Brookings continually advertising skilled maintenance jobs with little success because they only pay around $12 an hour. And while shortin’ the staff on pay, the Dakotas have never been too proud to accept billions in federal welfare… Over the better part of a century the Dakotas have benefited from a  plethora of pork barrel projects. The WPA was just the warmup, followed by the Missouri River dams and hydro projects, the Interstate System, the world’s 3rd largest armada of ICBMs, multiple military bases, four laning highways to towns of less than 10,000, and now billion dollar flood control projects. The highway projects are illustrative- by objective standards I-29 would have ended at Sioux Falls and in fact wasn’t on the original Interstate System planning maps back in the 1930s. But thanks to lobbying by the Dakota’s long serving (read “high seniority”) congresscritters, I-29 was penciled in. In it’s wake came a bunch of other 80% fed funded highway projects, like the 4 laning of US2, US12, US81, US83, US85, etc.. By objective standards like minimum 10,000 vehicle a day traffic counts most of those projects would never have been funded, while practically every major highway other than the Interstates running out of “the cities” in Minnesota would have received that same 80% federal funding!

The conclusion? You get what you pay for, unless your state is highly proficient at hoggin’ the federal feed trough! 

The storm is just now winding down, and it’s been a wild few days of freezin’ rain, sleet, and a foot or so of snow. And with the temps unwavering from a few degrees of freezin’, that snow, etc. was the wet and heavy kind. Thus thousands of folks have been rendered electrically powerless… Nothing unusual in most rural areas from time to time. Thus for a night and the better part of a day I could enjoy my usual view (between snow squalls) of over a hundred wind turbines while I sat in the dark save for the odd candle or flashlight.

Now you’d think the first tap off the transmission lines from these wind turbines would be right into the nearby farms, homes, and towns. But next town over to me is the local wind farm maintenance base of Florida Power & Light, and up the ridge a bit in Canby Duke Power from almost as far away as Florida just bought another wind farm operation. A mere couple hundred miles away, Xcel Energy has it’s own fleet of wind turbines. 

Now mega energy companies that trade in power by the megawatt seem to think only in regional if not national grids, and thus it’s no surprise that they want to distribute power in hub and spoke grids hundreds of miles across. Reminds me of when I worked at Yellow Freight and saw one pallet of freight from Sioux City to Sioux Falls take a thousand mile tour through KC and the Twin Cities because Yellow insisted on routing everything through hubs instead of adding a spoke to take that pallet the hundred miles from Sioux City to Sioux Falls. Thus the power from the wind turbines almost in our back yards is “shipped” many miles away, then maybe mixed with power from dirty coal and scary nuclear plants hundreds of miles away and then “shipped” back to us. Doesn’t help either that the wind turbine permitting laws favor big companies rather than local community investors.

Makes “micro grids” and community ownership of power production and distribution sound tempting…

Hi, country cousin here- You know, the folks that grow your food and preserve our natural and cultural resources. We’re a lot like you, believing in living wages, family farms, small business, equality, and stopping global warming. ‘Cept we know how to drive tractors, etc…

Now we know you city cousins don’t do it on purpose and don’t mean to hurt us, but some of the stuff you do makes us wonder if we’re on the same side. I know, things like municipal and co-op power companies and why tiny towns persist is a mystery to you, but before you legislate us out of existance, could you listen to us a bit?

For a start, here in Minnesota we have a program called LGA, and that stands for Local Government Aid, with the state sharing some of it’s largesse with less fortunate towns that don’t have a lot of tax base, have a lot of older infrastructure that’s expensive to maintain, etc. The republicans have been shortin’ us on LGA, but now that the democrats are back in control of the legislature LGA funding is going back up to what it should be, and the formula’s gettin’ revised.

That’s where we got a problem, the proposed formula figurin’ that a town of less than 100 like mine can get by on a budget of around $400 per person. But a town of over 100 is some how expected to need more like $600 a year to keep the lights on, fresh water flowin’, the streets passable, and the city park neat. OK, we can take a hint- maybe that $200 a tiny town head penalty is to motivate us to disorganize our tiny town? If that’s the intent, it’s not workin’… We’ve now about a hundred towns of a hundred souls or less here in Minnesota, up about twenty since the 2000 census. And no, the co-op doesn’t charge us a third less for fuel for our city’s tractor because we’ve less than a hundred of us here. And our tiny towns provide a lot of services that we can’t afford to provide without LGA help- Like the playground in our park that kids from the townships for miles around play in, because we’ve the only playground for over 5 miles in any direction.

Second, and I’ll cut the laundry list there, could you remember us when you mandate wind and solar power percentages. Our (we own ‘em) little municipal and rural co-op power services out here were making and distributing renewable power long before it became popular- for example, a lot of our power comes from East River Co-Op and has been 30% renewable from hydro for decades. We’ve got wind power aplenty out here too, and it’s a lot cheaper than solar, so please don’t force us to buy solar when we can get more bang for the buck with wind. And please remember that some of our municipal and co-op power services are tied into long term contracts to buy dirty power from coal- we don’t like it either, but we’re stuck with it. forcing us to buy solar generated power can thus make us pay twice for electricity, and worse yet a big solar producer that uses public subsidies to plop down in our town will bankrupt us if we’re forced to buy power for them at artificially mandated high rates. The big boys like Xcel Energy can spread those costs over multiple states and millions of users, our small town municipal power services and county sized co-ops can’t. And the big boys in the power biz would just love to see our little municipal and co-op power services forced to sell out for peanuts.

We’ll get to why we need safe roads and rural transit just as much as you need new billion dollars light rail lines in another discussion…

Historically the west has attracted the disenfranchised- we now know that not just some but most of the cowboys were black, and educated women that could only find menial jobs in the settled east found their skills as health care workers, teachers, etc. in demand on the western frontier. It ain’t much different in North Dakota’s Bakken oil boom industrialpolitan area, with health care workers in such short supply that a hospital imported over a hundred nurses from the Phillipines. Teachers and government workers are in such high demand that school districts and cities are building apartment buildings for them. And in non traditional jobs for women, it’s all hands on deck, including the drilling deck. Given that demand, you’d think that North Dakota would hang the “women and everyone else welcome” sign out and pass GLBT inclusive human rights laws, offer Planned Parenthood free rent, and use a sliver of all those oil tax dollars to fund a kick butt human rights enforcement agency.

But Noooo… The NoDak GOP legislators just outlawed abortion in their scattered state and sent a message to women engineers, nurses, doctors, teachers, truckers, and roustabouts: You’re not welcome. Williston and Stanley and dozens of other oil boomtowns are trying to turn the boom into lasting development, encouraging workers answering the call of the boom to move out of the mancamps, settle down in a home, and become lifelong residents. Warren Buffet calls that “family formation”, and it’s what drives real long term economic growth. Said “family formation” in most cases requires women, and in some cases requires gay folks too. 

You don’t build families, towns, and sustainable economies by denying women health care and sending a message that your state is anti-woman, anti-gay, and anti-just about everything except big oil companies and bigots…