Hoeven Fiddles While the Bakken Burns

By Charlie Barber
Staff Writer

“Some stretches of highway in McKenzie County have more traffic than parts of Interstate 94 and than U.S. Highway 2, a four-lane highway between Minot and Williston.” - Bismarck Tribune, 3/21/10

“Gov. Hoeven said he was putting together a work group on the issue Monday, but that he doesn’t think a special session is the right approach.” - Bismarck Tribune, 3/30/10

“We have left undone those things we ought to have done.” -The Book of Common Prayer

In several unsuccessful attempts to develop “cozy relationships” with oil companies on the Bakken over the past few years, I have made trips to Williston, Stanley, Tioga, and a few other places on top of America’s most obvious answer to dependence on foreign petroleum, and messy ocean oil spills.
But, while not making it as an “oil baron,” I did find some underreported stories.
Not the one about North Dakota rapidly overtaking California in oil production. Not the one about how jobs are aplenty, but housing is scarce.
Not the one about how some folks who live on the Bakken are getting rich quick, but how others are afraid to head to town because of all the trucks.

Not the ones about increasing deaths that point more and more to narrow highways and shoulders, unrealistic speed limits, and inadequate signage and lighting that could have been more intelligently planned by the State government.

These stories have been well covered recently in the Bismarck Tribune.

The real news is that Governor John Hoeven doesn’t really give a damn about what goes on up there, since they all vote Republican anyway. As long as oil tax money keeps flowing into State coffers, Governor Do Nothing keeps his greedy, pinchpenny cronies happy.

The Northern Plains Good Ole Boys Hoeven cowers to have shown in the past two legislative sessions that they would spend plenty of public money on their own pet projects, but precious little on highway, street, and other infrastructure for McKenzie, Williams, Mountrail, and other severely impacted counties.

Hoeven made a short trip up there recently, and the good news is that he didn’t recommend evacuation, as he did when he first saw the flooding in Fargo in 2009.

The bad news is that Hoeven didn’t recommend anything serious to deal with problems of traffic for pedestrians in Williston, housing and infrastructure there, and in Watford City, and lethal driving conditions at many intersections all over the Bakken.

Two obvious solutions have been ignored for what can only be political considerations. A special session of the Legislature could have been, and still could be, called to spend some of the surplus “rainy day” money on conditions brought about by a deluge of oil and water trucks. But Hoeven is arguably more hated by Republicans in the Legislature [especially the House] than by the Democrats. That would be messy, and unbecoming for “The Man Who Would Be Senator.”

A second responsible move would be to petition “Team North Dakota” to explain to President Obama that every drop of oil and every cubic centimeter of natural gas should be wrung out of the Bakken and Three Rivers Formations, before another offshore oil rig is set up. But, of course Team North Dakota is presently all Democrats, and Hoeven is trying to change that. No matter how much he may have worked with Team North Dakota behind the scenes in the past, he couldn’t possibly do such a thing like that in public in 2010. The Party of “No,” which is busy telling voters to repeal the Health Care Law instead of underwriting safe highways as a national security asset, might be very unhappy with him, for one thing. For another, voters might decide that, as long as Hoeven was publicly behaving like a Democrat, ie. responsibly, they might as well vote for the real one, Tracy Potter.

The most poignant stories center around anger that affects people who live and work on the Bakken. They are legion, too many to be explained in a single column.

One of them told me that they wished every legislator who lived south of Underwood and east of Highway 83 would be forced to take a bus tour of the Bakken during weekdays when the trucks are rolling. My suggestion was that they go alone, in a compact car, to experience the amount of terror appropriate to the situation.

But if you really want to experience fear up there, try driving a truck.

I’ve driven trucks with trailers, and I can tell you that truckers, on the whole, get a bad rap, simply because of their size. The guys on the Bakken, to be fair, are just as upset as the people they frighten. They know very well that inadequate signage, traffic lighting, and intersection shoulders are the real culprits, and are sickened at the thought that their truck might be the next one featured in a story about highway deaths.

Local cops, dreading rising body counts for pedestrians and drivers alike, are stricken by neglect of rational traffic control at intersections like Highways 2 and 85; awaiting only the “inevitable” number of deaths before something is done.

One of the saddest things about our brothers and sisters on the Bakken is that they, like the rest of North Dakotans, supply an heroic, proportionate percentage of our armed forces, obliged to fight in regions of the world which contain oil, but where the U.S. is hated. Yet on the Bakken, awash in oil, amidst friendly people, folks have been ignored by a generation of leadership they voted for in their ill-considered pursuit of energy resources in the Middle East, at prohibitive costs in U.S. blood and treasure.

Let’s face it, the urge to pursue technology we now use on the Bakken faded in years past, along with previous oil booms, because Washington D.C. just let corporations pump it out “over there,” and protected them with our troops when necessary.

We all know how well that has worked out.

If you are a Democratic/NPLer from regions which benefit greatly from oil tax revenues, like Fargo, Grand Forks or Bismarck, drive on up to Williston and hug a Republican, or even a Tea Party member!

I did, and it didn’t kill me,...at least not yet.

If you are a Republican from these places, you should drive on up as well. Although hugging might not be your style, listening to these folks might actually be very therapeutic for them, and definitely educational for you.

You would find out what Governor Hoeven has NOT been doing.

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