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Oct. 5, 2019 - Work Worth Doing - Doug Burgum
46:35
Reimagining the Rural West

As chairman of the Western Governors’ Association, Gov. Doug Burgum has outlined the central policy initiative of his term: Reimagining the Rural West. On this episode of the podcast, Burgum talks to Jim Ogsbury, WGA executive director, to explore the three central pillars of the initiative: opportunity, connectivity and community. Read more about the Reimagining the Rural West Initiative at westgov.org.

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From North Dakota to New Mexico and Oklahoma to Oregon, rural communities in the western United States are in a period of transition.
Within that transition lies an abundance of opportunity.
Welcome to Work Worth Doing.
I'm Mark Staples.
Today on the podcast, we're talking about Governor Burgum's work with the Western Governors Association to develop policies to help rural America succeed.
In June of 2019, Governor Burgum was elected by his peers to serve as chairman of the WGA. As chairman, he has launched an initiative called Reimagining the Rural West.
One of the reasons why when we launched this initiative is because every governor in the western part of the United States is dealing with the same issues that we're dealing here in North Dakota, which is you've got a thriving metropolitan area and in rural areas like we have in North Dakota here, you know, we've got shortages.
The WGA was established in 1984 to represent the governors of 19 western states and three U.S. territories in the Pacific.
The association is an instrument of the governors for bipartisan policy development, information exchange, and collective action on issues of critical importance to the western United States.
This episode was recorded at a recent WGA workshop in Fargo about the Reimagining the Rural West initiative.
Community builders and stakeholders from across the west travel to North Dakota to discuss the three major pillars of the initiative, opportunity, connectivity, and community.
Governor Burgum sat down with Jim Ogsbury, Executive Director of the Western Governors Association, At the end of the workshop to discuss what is being done to reimagine life in rural communities across the western United States.
Prior to joining WGA in 2012, Jim served as Legislative Director for the League of Arizona Cities and Towns.
A graduate of Harvard College and Arizona State University College of Law, Jim also served as the Clerk and Staff Director for the U.S. House Appropriations Subcommittee on Energy and Water Development.
Here's Governor Burgum and Jim Augsbury.
So, Jim, welcome to Fargo.
Great to have you here.
And you're coming up on seven years leading the Western Governors Association.
This is an organization with a storied history that's had a big impact on the states that it works with and also a big impact on federal policy.
But for listeners that may not be familiar with the Western Governors Association, just tell us a little bit about the organization.
Well, thanks, Governor.
We represent the governors of the 22 westernmost states and territories.
I think one of the characteristics of WGA is its fierce bipartisanship.
I've spent my entire career in policy and politics.
I've worked at almost every level of government, and I can assure you without fear of contradiction that the western governors are easily the most collegial, productive, effective leaders I've ever had the honor to serve.
And this is quite something in today's political environment that we see a group of people from both parties working together on trying to solve problems that are common to all these 22 Western states.
You bet.
And I think you remember Frank Luntz was at our meeting, I believe it was in Hawaii, and he said, as so many others do, that governors are really our last best hope to politically make any hay in America.
And today, here we are in Fargo.
One of the things that Western Governors does is work on policy, policy that can impact the individuals, communities, and the states that they serve.
And I said it also could have an influence on federal policy.
But talk a little bit about the approach to policymaking and, you know, why workshops and why Fargo?
Well, this is my first time in Fargo.
And as you mentioned, I've been doing this about seven years.
And this has been one of the most productive, constructive, interesting workshops we have ever had.
And thank you so much for your leadership.
Western governors take an incredibly thoughtful approach to policy.
And those people who think that bipartisanship is dead in American politics haven't been to a W.J. meeting.
You don't know who's red and who's blue.
And the governors don't care because they're facing common issues.
And a lot of these issues aren't necessarily political in nature.
And when we're looking at things like what we're talking about today, reimagining the rural West, these challenges that rural communities are facing are common throughout the West.
And it doesn't matter if you're a blue state or you're a red state.
And governors have so much more to gain by working together and sharing policy options and predicting oncoming threats than they do by bickering or, you know, hiding the ball.
So it's been amazing.
We take on, as you know, the governors take on some really contentious policy issues, too.
But yet they respect each other so much and they respect each other's opinions and each other's political imperatives.
So watching this for the last several years, I've been involved in some conversations that you think would turn pretty rancorous, but the governors have never thrown a sharp elbow.
Well, it is a great group, and I know from getting to know the other governors in the western states, we do...
Share some common challenges.
And we also share a commonality, which is with the amount of federal land, federal agencies, whether it's BLM, BOR, BIA, all the tribal lands, U.S. Fish and Wildlife, National Park Service.
Those are just five agencies that are inside of one, which is Interior.
Then you throw in the Forest Service, which is underneath the Department of Agriculture.
We've just had panelists here today from the Department of Transportation.
We've had people here from EPA. If you're in the western half of the United States, you're dealing with the federal government if you're a governor.
And I just want to say one of the great things that I've observed from WGA is the amount of, I don't want to say, pull, or the amount of attraction it has for getting high-level and secretary-level folks in the federal government to attend Western Governor Association meetings because of this commonality of interest across western states, regardless of whether they're red or blue.
There's federal policy, and I would have to say under your leadership and with the other governors that step into these roles, WGA has been a very effective voice in influencing federal policy when it comes to transportation, agriculture, energy, education, labor in the western states.
As I said this morning at the workshop, there is no other group of elected officials who, at your level of influence, are on a bipartisan basis developing and pursuing public policy that is as substantive and meaningful as important as those being developed by Western governors.
And you're exactly right.
All the public land states are in the West.
All of the most sensational national parks are in the West.
All of the most breathtaking landscapes are in the West.
And I think that speaks very much to your vision and your leadership in this initiative.
Because as we're reimagining the rural West, one of the pillars that you've identified is economic opportunity.
And what are the Some of the great assets that these rural communities have to leverage and that's certainly one of them.
What are the recreational opportunities?
They've got the access to these sensational landscapes and national parks.
They've got access to energy resources.
How can we better leverage those natural assets to create Or sustain vibrant, great places to live in the West.
And that's what we're examining in these workshops.
That's what the recommendations we will develop around those questions.
And I think it's a sensational...
It's certainly the most ambitious initiative that we've done in my seven years.
Typically, we have one person, one staff person who kind of runs this.
This is an all-hands endeavor.
We've got a full team of people who are trying to help you wrestle with these questions, and I just can't tell you how much we appreciate your leadership and developing this idea.
I would say I think you were there.
I was honored by this group to be selected as chair.
And of course, the way this works, it alternates between a Republican governor and a Democrat governor and had an opportunity to serve as vice chair under Governor Ige from Hawaii, following me as vice chair, Governor Kate Brown from Oregon.
But again, it doesn't matter what state you are in the West, there's opportunities in reimagining the rural areas of your state.
And, of course, we all know that there are some of the great metro areas in our country or in the West, whether it's a Denver, a Phoenix, a Honolulu, a Seattle.
These are great metro areas, but they occupy 1% or 2% of the land in the West.
We got the great national parks you've talked about.
They occupied very little.
So then when you got the other 95% of the rural West, that all, you know, to me represents in some of the least populated areas of the planet, but some of the most amount of resources.
And so it's not just for the United States, but for the world, we have an opportunity to examine, maybe re-examine some of the myths that people might have about what rural life is like.
What's some of the opportunities?
And of course, one thing that we've heard all day long at this workshop from every panel, whether it's been about arts, whether it's about agriculture, whether it's about transportation, we've heard about how technology is changing the opportunity for the rural West.
Maybe you've had a chance to introduce and listen today, but were any of the panelists today highlight anything that jumped out at you today from exciting insights or learning?
Today was incredibly exciting.
I learned so much I wouldn't know where to start, but I love the keynote speaker, Ben Winchester, and I loved how he talked about changing the narrative of the Rural West and pointing out that, no, we're not in the middle of nowhere, we're in the middle of everywhere.
Now that we have access to technology, it's going to create more opportunity.
And just because you've got a storefront that's closed, it doesn't mean that the rural community is dying.
It means that it's changing.
And change is essential, and we'll just help direct that change for a more productive future.
No, absolutely, because we're a rural West where every citizen has a supercomputer in their pocket.
It's a very different place in what that can happen to institutions, to industry, to jobs, to how cities are designed.
It's going to have an impact on everything.
I remember Governor Dugard of South Dakota had the Workforce Development Initiative, and one of the things we learned in the course of that conversation was that every job is becoming a technology job.
I was at a sawmill with former Governor Butch Otter of Idaho, and he made the point that the only job he was qualified to do at the sawmill was to sweep up the tailings.
Because it's completely computerized now, and technology has taken over that industry.
I just want to point out that I'm like your staff.
I wasn't a bit surprised that you would idiot the most ambitious initiative in WGA history.
Because I remember when you and I were in Vail, we had a tremendous annual meeting in Vail this last summer and really a record number of governors attending.
And you asked me, you said, how many governors are here at this annual meeting?
And I said 12. And you said, well, we're going to have 13 next year in Medora.
That's pretty ambitious.
Still a goal to make that happen.
And when you're speaking, Medora, we are looking forward to next summer on June 30th and July 1st and 2nd hosting all the governors from the western states here in North Dakota.
And that will be in the culmination of the first year of the policy work around reimagining the rural west.
And you and your team, working with our staff, we've got some great things coming up in Santa Fe.
In Idaho.
And for those folks listening from North Dakota, all of this, of course, piggybacks on top of and feeds into our Main Street Initiative, where we're, you know, the three pillars there, where we talk about workforce, we talk about smart infrastructure, we talk about healthy, you know, vibrant, safe communities.
And one thing that I took away from speakers today, too, in a world where there are more jobs available than there are people seeking jobs and you've got tremendous mobility, that even in rural areas, people can decide where they want to live first and then do the job second.
So it's kind of changed the whole approach to economic development, which is we've got to build attractive jobs.
Uh, communities.
Uh, and we've had some, you know, great, uh, panels today.
Uh, one going on right now about arts.
We've got the chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts here at this workshop in Fargo talking about how small communities we had from Maddock, North Dakota had a team of people there that rescued their opera house, uh, in a town of, uh, under 500 people.
It's, you know, it's down almost Arthur, North Dakota sized town.
Uh, and they've, uh, They gave me a copy of their book, and they put together all the personal elbow grease that went into saving and restoring this building and doing that now.
And as part of that, by saving their history, revitalizing that old building, they've shown the gratitude for the past, but they were also creating some inspiration for the future.
It's been a tremendous day.
We've had panels on transportation, on, as you mentioned, the creative arts, the Main Street presentation and tour.
We had a bit of a chance to actually tour and visit parts of Fargo's redeveloped transportation infrastructure.
It's really a testament to you that you've been able to attract such high-quality panelists.
As you mentioned, the chair of NEA is speaking right now, so...
Thank you for your leadership on this deal.
Yeah, and it was fun to be able to get the workshop attendees on the bus, get them out into Fargo.
And I think, of course, what they got to see this morning was a collaboration between the North Dakota Department of Transportation and the City of Fargo on Main Avenue.
And this was, I think, a breakthrough project.
And if people want to get additional information, we can get it from the Department of Transportation or from the City of Fargo.
But there's an entire economic study was done About all the impacts it would have on real estate values, on pedestrian safety, on parking.
You know, traditionally, when you've got an intersection of a U.S. Highway 10, which is Main Avenue, so it's a federally funded road going through town, the one and only metric that would go into that street design was cars per hour.
And that thing was gonna, we were gonna lose parking on both sides of the street.
It was headed to be either a five lane or a six lane with higher traffic speeds.
And of course, all the studies show that when you increase speed, you reduce pedestrian traffic, reduce pedestrian traffic, you reduce retail sales.
When you reduce retail sales, you reduce property values.
And then that, when you reduce property values, that puts a burden on other taxpayers across to help pick up the burden 'cause the infrastructure is still there.
So if you want to be friendly with taxpayers, it's actually counterintuitive, which is you can have some stretches of these roads where you do traffic calming, narrow it down.
City came up with a plan with bump-outs, two lanes with a center turn lane, you know, less accidents, safer pedestrians, and guess what?
Retail is booming.
Values are up.
Mayor Mahoney's called it a second Broadway, and that makes sense for people here in town that know that Broadway had been a very successful historic shopping street, but Broadway wasn't a federally funded state road.
Right.
U.S. Highway 10. And we've got U.S. Highway 10 runs through Valley City, runs through Jamestown, runs through Bismarck, runs through Dickinson.
So the work that was done here in collaboration with the North Dakota DOT in this city can be replicated across the state where there's an opportunity to really improve the economics of the downtowns of our communities.
And here's the hidden thing.
I don't know if they talked about this on the bus you were on, but one of the reasons they were going to blow it up and build more lanes was because of all the semi-truck traffic.
And they said, we've got to get these trucks through here because they're clogging up our traffic.
You know why they were driving on the business loop?
They were driving on the business loop through town because they were trying to avoid the weigh station just inside the Moorhead border.
And it's not the job of us to give up our downtowns, our historic downtowns, to help people avoid road restrictions in another state.
That's not the job of our DOT. And so, again, really digging in, doing the study like they did here, can help lead us to better solutions.
And you made the point in the last panel about how dramatically...
Our driving habits are changing.
Kids aren't rushing to get their driver's license now.
I've got a son who's 21 and doesn't have his driver's license.
I've got a stepdaughter who's 26 and doesn't have a driver's license.
And with the future of automated vehicles and this notion that we have to be much more efficient with our vehicular assets, I inferred from your point that we really have to be thinking about the future.
We need to be building infrastructure systems for tomorrow and not for the 1970s or 80s.
And I think that's another really important aspect of this workshop and this initiative is to tease out what are those threads of the future?
What do we need to be building toward?
And I think your focus on technology is just dead on.
Yeah, and I think we've really, since World War II, we've really built communities and infrastructure for one form factor.
And that form factor is the car.
Now we may think you've got, you know, small cars, big cars, but they've all got four wheels.
They all require basically one size fits all parking spot.
And that's how everybody gets around.
Whether you've got four people in the car, one person in the car, whether you're going one mile, whether you're going 500 miles, we have the same form factor.
And it turns out that there's going to be an explosion of new form factors.
And if all you ever do is need a vehicle to drive two miles to work and back every day, and that's the only use you ever use it for, and there's only one person in the car, guess what?
There's going to be new form factors.
Right.
And they are going to be, you know, lighter weight, less cost.
I mean, we've had America, you know, sort of numbed into the idea that every single family member needs to have a pretty good sized monthly car payment.
That can all go away.
We've got more parking in America than the size of the state of Connecticut.
That can go away.
That land can be reutilized, and when you take parking lots in an existing city footprint and do redevelopment, you know, mixed-use infill on those old parking lots, guess what that does?
You don't build one more foot of linear foot of infrastructure.
You don't need one more foot of sidewalk, one more foot of road, one more foot of sewer, one more foot of water.
You don't need more police to patrol it.
You don't need more snowplow drivers to plow it.
You don't need to have longer routes for garbage.
I mean, the amount of savings is remarkable because it's the width of a city that drives the price up.
And when we can come back and do infill, you know, different form factors for transportation at a lower cost, keep money in people's pockets.
You know, then we can also lower property taxes in these communities by building.
So there's a chance to really rethink with technology how we design our cities and how we can do it, which is going to benefit everybody.
And part of the reason why people want to live in a community is so they actually can interact with Some of the panels I loved today was talking about the new forms of the way people connect, whether it's around entrepreneurial communities like Emerging Prairie, One Million Cups here, whether it's around community functions like Red River Market that gets 6,000 to 8,000 people on a weekend here in Fargo every Saturday morning.
These are the new forms that help us attract and retain people to our communities and gives us a chance to completely rethink things.
So the webinar that you hosted this summer to kick off the initiative was absolutely tremendous, and it is archived on the WGA website, and I would invite everybody to go listen to it.
I've listened to it twice.
It's just fantastic.
But I think for an in-person workshop, today would really be hard to beat.
It's been exciting.
It's been informative.
So much raw intellectual data that's going into this recommendations process and this policy development process.
So it's going to be hard to beat, but I think we'll try because I think we've got the next one is November 4th and 5th in Santa Fe, New Mexico.
And then we'll be following that one up with a workshop in the first week of December in Post Falls, Idaho.
We'll be sharing a few highlights from the workshop in this episode, beginning with an excerpt from the keynote speaker, Ben Winchester.
Ben is a rural sociologist at the Center for Community Vitality with the University of Minnesota Extension.
He told attendees that common stereotypes about small towns are easily disputed with data.
Small towns are not dying.
Rather, they're changing.
Here's Ben Winchester.
Now, my undergraduate while I was in Morris was in math and stats.
I'm a data geek.
I love data.
You're going to see a lot of it, but I know many of you, like, I don't want to have you start, you know, remembering the heyday of algebra in eighth grade that causes shudders through your body.
So hopefully everything you hear today will be consumable, understandable, and really reasonable and optimistic in many ways.
So I'm going to talk a lot about Minnesota, but I just want to remind you that every trend I talk about here today is national.
It's been great to find out what we have found here is not just Minnesota.
So you'll see some of this.
Small towns are playing a role in their own demise.
There was a headline recently called From Breadbasket to Basket Case.
I don't think you could have written a more disrespectful headline if you tried, right?
Rural Minnesota's in trouble.
A poster child for the war on poverty.
This one comes from the county in Appalachia, which has the lowest per capita income in the country.
So of course, every year when the new income data comes out, the reporters from the East Coast run down to Appalachia and start talking to people about what's it like to be poor.
Like, that's not the narrative anybody has for their own life.
And actually, just recently, we did have this same county, when a major news television station came in, they basically told them to leave.
Said, we are not going to allow this to happen anymore.
This narrative that we've got describing our small towns and rural places is many times written about us, but not by us.
We just don't have this opportunity as great as we used to earlier.
We're not celebrating where we should be because we live in the past narrative.
Now, so I kind of told my boss at the time, like, man, rural areas are in trouble.
Like, we're all dying, apparently.
Like, what am I doing getting...
I mean, I'm fresh out of school.
Like, why do I want to do rural development?
Am I just going to be like a critical care assistant and do nothing but help our small towns die in a respectful way?
Right?
So...
Ideally, we talk about deficits.
I'm an asset-based community developer.
We talk about trying to identify our assets, but almost every article, every book we see talks about our deficits, what we used to have, again, what we should have had, what we could have had.
I'm going to introduce a term to you called anecdata.
Anecdata is information which is presented as if it's based on serious research when, in fact, it's based on what somebody thinks is true.
Very loud voices can carry a lot of weight in our small towns, and it can be filled with anecdata.
Now, you'll notice that anecdote is in there, right?
As a data guy, the plural of anecdote is not trend.
The plural of anecdote is barely data, right?
So when you get three or four people with very loud voices in a cafe talking about how terrible your town is, that's not a trend.
It's not something that you really want to pick up on and explore in your community, but these are the very real struggles we have.
We have gone through tremendous negative changes in our small towns.
In the early 1900s, the mechanization of agriculture alone reduced the number of farm workers by 20 to 60 percent.
This transformed rural places.
No longer could your five kids all get a job on the farm.
Now it's one kid and the other four went to the city.
We started to see an out-migration of people from our rural communities during this time.
And there really is this idyllic view of what rural is that may not be based in reality.
I mean, the governor mentioned that just 1 in 10 people right now work in agriculture.
In rural communities, it's 5 in...
Sorry, not 1 in 10, 1 in 100. Where in rural areas, it's 5 in 100. A lot of times I say I let the visuals fool me.
Because when I lived in Hancock, commuted to Morris every day, I'd be like, corn and soybeans, corn and soybeans, corn and soybeans.
And it's easy to think we're an agricultural place and that ag drives this economy.
But ag has not been the primary employer, has not had the primary income in rural areas in over 80 years.
But ultimately you're working against forces that are impacting all of you.
What differentiates success or failure at this point is social capital.
How well do you work together to help yourselves respond to this?
We are not immune from globalization.
And you want to better understand the world?
Look to us first.
But again, somehow we survived all this massive restructuring.
Because if any one of those things were going to lead to the demise and death of our small towns, show me all the dead towns.
Show me them all.
They're still around.
So what's been going on?
Since 1970, the rural population has not gone down, it's gone up.
Gone up by 11%.
What's gone down is a relative percentage of Americans living in a rural place.
It was one in four people in 1970. It's down to one in five.
And of course, this matters in one very specific area, and that's politics, right?
Representation.
We have fewer people.
But how can that be?
How can the rural population go up but the proportion go down?
It's because while the rural growth rate was 11%, the urban growth rate was 48%.
So the pie got bigger.
Even the area of the pie that's rural got bigger, but it didn't get as big as fast as urban places did.
But this is almost the headline you see every time, which is Americans prefer city life.
Not true.
Not even close, actually.
We'll look at some of this.
At the same time, some of our rural places have become so successful, they become urbanized.
Like North Dakota here, I wonder if I have years.
Yeah, 181,000 people are now living in a place that was rural 40 years ago.
Our urban places have not grown taller, they've grown wider.
And why is that?
There's a very common perception out there that the metros are a giant sucking sound and everybody wants to live there.
This is very clear that that is not true.
And this was the first glimpse into a desire for rural life on this journey I started.
So really, I worked with Randy Cantrell at the University of Nebraska, and I said, Randy, you know, we've got all these people moving in, even in the panhandle of Nebraska, where you've got like 10% to 15% population loss, right?
They're big population losers, right?
But even in these big loser places, you had people in their 30s, 40s, and 50s moving in.
So we found literally thousands of these people.
And we did a survey, because we're academics, right?
Surveys and focus groups.
And we asked these newcomers, like, why did you move there?
Why did you move to this small town?
The top three reasons were, number one was a simpler pace of life.
I mean, you kind of know this.
All the amenities, just getting away from traffic, especially coming from an urban area.
Number two was safety and security.
It was especially high with people with kids.
And number three was the low cost of housing.
In Nebraska, it wasn't in the top five.
In Minnesota, it wasn't in the top ten, but a job was not the primary driver.
So we usually have kind of a jobs-first approach, like jobs bring people.
And that would be true if we're in 1920, 1930, 1940. But today we're in a very different world in terms of economic development.
You look back on the literature, it's called the chicken or egg of economic development.
Do jobs bring people or do people bring jobs?
Right now it's a mixed bag, right?
Especially with technology.
Especially with 1099 workers and people that are self-employed or contractors for U.S. banks that can work wherever they want.
So now your residential choice becomes a primary reason.
And we talk about this.
We're in the tight labor market.
Again, when you've got people moving for non-job reasons, they're exploring living in a region first, and they kind of narrow it down to the place they end up living in.
Then they start looking for a job.
When you're in a tight labor market, this plays out very significantly.
Because I call it the warm-body approach.
Like, you've got somebody new coming in for a job, you're going to show them the shop floor, you're going to show them your tools that you use, you're going to show them the salary and the pay benefits.
Well, in the tight labor market, I'm going to get this in a number of different places.
So what's going to differentiate your job from your job from your job is everything but the job.
Right?
Everything but the job will matter more in HR and recruitment activities in the future.
In fact, Otter Tail County, they've run with this ball in Minnesota.
They've got a rural rebound coordinator for the county, and all he does is he works with employers to work on all the non-job related aspects.
Like, what about your wife?
Or is your kid like playing baseball?
We're going to tour the school.
I'm going to take you out fishing for an hour.
Like, you need to get people to envision what their life is going to be like here.
Moving is super scary.
This is a problem.
This is an opportunity problem that we have, which is how do we welcome truly new people into our communities?
So again, part of that Otter Tail model is they have a grab-a-bite program, which is basically you find out about a new person in town, you take them out for a meal.
The number one, the only rule they have is the Ben Winchester rule, which is you cannot ask them to sit on a board.
You can't ask them for anything.
We've got to find ways to kind of bridge these two.
So back to the narrative a bit.
The Pew Research Institute did a study a number of years ago that asked Americans, like, all right, Americans, we know that 80% of you live in urban places and 20% of you live in rural places, but if you could live wherever you want, where would you want to live?
51% of Americans said they prefer to live in a small town or a rural place.
Why don't they?
In many ways, I argue the narrative is so negative they think they never could.
Why would I live there?
I don't like to hang out in the post office.
Right?
Like, all of these, all of these proclamations about rural and how we describe it, not just by others, but we use this language ourselves.
Oh, I remember when we used to have full Main Street.
Don't have that anymore.
Like, you know what?
In all the interviews and focus groups I've done with newcomers, nobody ever said they moved to your towns for pity.
What I mean is, nobody has ever said I feel really bad you lost your grocery store 20 years ago.
I'm going to move in to help you out.
Right?
Nobody ever does that.
So why do we continue to hold up this narrative of the past as if it's going to proclaim the future decisions that we got?
It doesn't.
It has nothing to do.
That past, at this point, has very little to do with any decisions people make to move back to our rural communities.
So migration for me opens the door to talk about the narrative because many times you want to know the best narrative of your town?
Talk to a new person that just moved there.
They have some of the best stories about why they just chose your place.
The number one audience for a negative narrative are your kids.
These are my kids.
They know what narrative means.
They know what positive and negative means, like for better or worse, right?
The Center for Entrepreneurship does this thing, they go into high schools, they have this longer community involvement program, but they go into high schools and they ask high school students, like, if you move away, the juniors and seniors, if you move away, do you think you're going to come back?
And like asking high school kids what they're going to do in the future has zero predictive value, right?
But really, if you end up in one town, 40% of the kids were like, I'm going to move back.
If I move away, I'm coming back.
But in town B, 80% of the kids said they're going to move back.
What's the difference between those two places?
The narrative.
Are you giving your young people a narrative of hope that there's actually some place for them to come back to?
Or do we continue to tell all the new people, like, what's the number one thing new people hear?
It's like, why would you move here?
And then they're told 10 years later, well, you're not really from here until you've been here for 30 years.
Like, come on, let's get past this.
Let's invest some positive emotional energy in our narrative.
So these newcomers are moving in.
They're creating groups.
They're building their community.
They're diversifying the economy.
They're buying and starting businesses.
They're working from home.
8% to 12% of folks are working from home today, beyond just childcare, right?
They're living in a region.
No town is a one-stop shop.
No town is a one-stop shop.
Do not believe you need everything in your town.
You need to recognize the aspects of the regional assets that you've got.
And people that move in are more than warm bodies.
So the bottom line is people want to live and move to your small towns for what you are today and will be tomorrow, not what may have been.
So for me, rural revitalization is well before us. - Kim Conoco, Executive Director of the North Dakota Council on the Arts, led a panel discussion on the restoration of the Maddock Opera House. led a panel discussion on the restoration of the Maddock Originally a mercantile built in 1905, a passionate group of community members renovated the building and, in 2017, opened the Opera House to the public.
Maddock Opera House board members Paul Backstrom, Rachel Markstead, and Lee Hagen joined the conversation to tell the crowd how this project has impacted the town of Maddock.
I'm here to talk a little bit about the Maddock Opera House, which is kind of a great example of reinvigorating the American West.
And through arts and culture and through a lot of community grit and ingenuity, and it's not the only shining example in North Dakota, we actually have several.
And I guess what I would say is that that's kind of a North Dakota trait.
Do good work, put your head down, and do more good work.
But I think one thing we're really fortunate here is that everybody shares ideas.
So I think that when groups like this get their start and make their way forward, they can call on many, many other colleagues in the field across the state.
We're going to look at the opportunity that presented itself, what was needed in terms of the connectivity of the community.
We're going to look at the community in particular, And then we've got a little laundry list of lessons learned and advice.
And that's actually pretty important because I think that, again, we're going to try to share information with you and then hopefully you can take this back to your own communities and see what can get started there.
So without further ado, I'm going to introduce Leland Hagen, who is on the end there.
Rachel Markstad, who's in the middle.
She would be in the middle, wouldn't she?
And then we have also Paul Beckstrom.
So the three of them are going to discuss what the Maddock Opera House Association is and how it came to be.
So let's talk about the Opera House a little bit.
There's the old one.
It was opened as a...
Retail on the first floor, Opera House on the second, it's 50 by 90. It's a pretty solid brick structure.
It was well-built, but it had kind of fallen into disrepair.
The roof had leaked for about 10 years, 12 years, after the hardware store, and it closed down.
There was a lot of people that wanted it to be just leveled.
And so some of us got together and said, well, what can we do here?
And our first objective was to save the building.
But in May of 2009, we got together and watched a video put out by Prairie Public.
And they featured ten cities in North Dakota that had restored a building or tried to.
And I don't remember.
Two or three of them had failed.
But they drove a point home to us very hard.
You can't fix up an old building for the sake of fixing up an old building.
It's got to have a real purpose.
And they all said the same thing.
What for?
We got organized.
We formed a non-profit corporation.
We chose 10 to 12 board members.
12, I guess, we ended up with at first.
We took a look at the volunteer pool, and we have a big volunteer pool in Maddock, even though it's small.
We looked at funding of donations and grants, what the building could earn as a revenue stream.
And we looked at fundraising activities.
And like every project, we had a little luck.
And you usually need it.
And about a year after we first worked on the roof, or had that first meeting in 2009, we got an anonymous $230,000 gift.
And for a small town, that's a lot of money.
Yes!
All right, Rachel, why don't you talk a little bit about the events when you started to do events in the Opera House?
Originally, we hadn't planned to do any events in the Opera House until it was completed and beautiful, but I think it was actually Lee that suggested we have a rustic version of some kind of show in the summer of, or the fall of, 2011. Opposite from what we were afraid happening, and we were afraid people weren't going to come because it was not finished, it wasn't pretty, I think we had close to 300 people.
And many of the people who attended were people who grew up in Madigan and had never been up in the Opera House because it had been closed so many years.
So that was our big opening.
I think these are all on your handout, but I'll just review them.
Some of the things that we've learned and a little advice.
Determine and emphasize the function of the building.
We admit we kind of started out that we maybe didn't know exactly what we wanted to do with the Opera House.
We knew we wanted to save it.
But we found out as we determined what we needed and what we wanted that more people got on board and supported us when they knew that we actually had a vision.
Analyze funding and operation financing, form committees, and stay in close touch with your committees.
We found that to be really vital.
Have regular board meetings.
Oh my, we met every week for a large portion of the time.
Now I think we're maybe two to three weeks in between.
Now that we're up and operating, we're finding that we have a whole new phase and a whole new set of circumstances to deal with.
Screen board members.
And by that, we found that not everyone is board material in that they can get along and deal with each other.
Getting along on this board was really important.
We encountered some difficulties, but in general, we had to think long and hard before we approached people to be on our board, and that has made a big difference.
Face up to disagreements and disputes and solve formally if necessary.
And I don't think there would be a project anywhere, anytime that doesn't face that.
But that's something else we've had to deal with.
Prohibit individual actions.
Sometimes when you have a large board like we do, people can go rogue and kind of want to do their own thing.
And we've always tried to be careful about that so that everyone is in agreement and knows what's going on.
Get a good treasure.
That would be Paul Backstrom.
I thought you said a good treasure.
We're working on that.
We have Paul now, but we're still working on it.
He's done a fabulous job.
We've had so many accounts to keep track of.
He's just done a fantastic job.
This is important, we found.
Be transparent with finances, all decisions and reasons, with all members and everyone.
Because, of course, the rumor mill runs wild, in a small town especially.
So we've been trying to be transparent as we possibly could be, and feel we've done a pretty good job with that.
Keep it moving.
We've often said if you're not moving forward, you're not sitting still, you're really moving backward.
So that's our challenge is to always keep trying to move forward.
What are we going to do?
What do we want to do next?
What do we want to be next?
So that's something that you need to think about.
Avoid good enough and continually improve.
Best of all, preach the joy of volunteering.
The reward of helping others is not recognition and praise from others.
It is the pleasure derived from doing good deeds, especially without recognition.
And I think that's been one of the most enjoyable things for me and a lot of other people I've gotten to know through this project.
And in summary, we've received over $700,000 in donations, over $300,000 in grants, and substantial income from events, gaming, and rent.
Capital cost in the building is about $1,300,000, and right now our only debt is $165,000 to USDA. Income easily covers the monthly payment of about $1,200 per month.
We have continuing needs, and we are planning solutions.
So we still have upcoming hurdles.
We realize that, but that's part of the process of growing.
Over 30 people have served on our 11-person board over the 10 years since we started in 2009, and all but one or two have left gracefully and with thanks from all.
Our present board is made up of about half mature folks and half young, talented, energetic, and enthusiastic people.
And the most important thing is that we all enjoy ourselves immensely.
Jim Ogsbury had some final closing thoughts for attendees at the workshop.
I've been at this gig for about seven years now, and so I've sat through a lot of workshops, a lot of roundtables, a lot of forums.
And for my money, I think this is just about the most exciting, informative, educational, interesting day I've ever had at WGA. So I want to thank everybody who's participated.
So where do we go from here?
Well, we continue the workshop series next in Santa Fe on November 4th and 5th, and then we'll go to Post Falls, Idaho on December 3rd.
We'll also announce additional workshops.
We'll announce a webinar series.
We'll publish a report on findings of the initiative, and we'll release that report in connection with the annual meeting in Medora next June.
But that's not the end.
That's not the end of the initiative.
That's just the end of the beginning.
Because what this initiative produces will inform gubernatorial policy and WGA activity in this space for years to come.
If you're interested in hearing more speakers from the Reimagining the Rural West workshop in Fargo, check out the Western Governors Association's YouTube page.
They've archived the live stream from the entire workshop.
The Western Governors Association will be launching a podcast to explore this initiative.
They'll have episodes that dig into the challenges and opportunities facing the West and will feature expert guests to shed light on the future of rural communities.
Keep an eye out at westgov.org.
Thanks to the WGA for their work on this initiative and for organizing this event.
Thanks as well to our audio producer, Alicia Jolliffe, for putting this episode together.
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