An election story with a happy ending

By Jim Fuglie

jimfuglie920@gmail.com

A friend of mine, a well-known Bismarck liberal (I have a few of those), came up to me after church the other day and asked, “So, are you moving out of the country?”

I knew he was referring to the future of America, in light of November’s presidential election. It’s kind of been a half-joking theme among those of us who aren’t happy with the outcome of that election.

I said that I was taking deep breaths and staying put, but that my wife had been looking at Winnipeg real estate ads. We commiserated for a bit and moved on to happier topics.

But I want to tell you an election story with a happy ending. It’s about an obscure county commission election way out in the badlands of western North Dakota. Some good guys won. A little background.

I’ve written on these pages about the saga of the proposed new bridge over the Little Missouri State Scenic River a few times in past years. You might remember that at one point some years ago, one of the former Billings County Commissioners — who shall go unnamed here because last time I used his name, he sued me (he lost, I won) — said as many as a thousand trucks a day would use the bridge. A lot of those, by the way, were his company‘s trucks. (Just sayin’.)

I last wrote about this in early 2023. That’s when Billings County Commissioners voted to use their power of eminent domain to condemn 66 acres on the west side of the river on a ranch owned by descendants of former North Dakota Congressman Don Short (anybody whose age begins with a number smaller than seven won’t remember him) to build a bridge and a road to get to it.

The vote to do that was not unanimous. 2-1. The holdout, an old cowboy named Dean Rodne, didn’t think it was very neighborly to take someone’s land, against their will and then build a road on it, and a bridge, to accommodate the hordes of oil tankers that will go roaring across the land in clouds of dust, coating everything from prairie grass to ranch buildings to livestock and wildlife with a fine coat of badlands dirt.

But after the vote, the next thing that happened is the county placed a “fair market value” check in a bank account for the Short family, who owns the land now, and took possession of the 66 acres. The Short family declined to take the check.

Court battles ensued, battles which have not yet been settled. Most importantly, though, the Short family who owns the ranch now convinced a federal judge to grant a temporary restraining order against the county to stop any action while other judges (and likely juries) consider whether the county was within its rights to do that.

The county commissioners appealed that decision to the Eighth Circuit Court Of Appeals. The appeals court hasn’t ruled yet. These things can take a long time when you get into the federal court system. So the restraining order is still in place.

But it doesn’t matter anymore. Because then the November 2024 election came along and there were two of the three seats on the ballot — Rodne and one of the commissioners who voted to condemn the Short land. Rodne’s a cagey old cowboy. He recruited a fellow named Jim Haag, the retired county road superintendent, to run against that guy.

Haag drove road graders for 37 years on the badlands gravel roads of Billings County and made a lot of friends keeping the roads open in the winter and graveled in the summer. They remembered on Election Day 2024. Not only was Rodne re-elected, but Haag joined him on the commission: a new majority.

The first meeting of that new majority came on the first Tuesday in December. They debated about what to do about the bridge, and it was pretty clear that Rodne and Haag were going to kill it. But on the advice of lawyers, they waited 24 hours while the lawyers for the county and the Short family worked out details.

They reconvened the next day and, in a 2-1 vote, decided to ask the judges in the cases, sometime in the next 60 days, to dismiss everything and end all the court action. By the end of the 60 days, the condemnation proceedings will go away, the Shorts will get their land back.

And that’s that; the end of the “Bridge to Nowhere” in the North Dakota badlands. For now. There will be another county commission election four years from now. I’ll report.