The progress of Prairie Sky Breads has been a topic of commentary on The Minot Voice in the past. Their example is one we — in government particularly — should take note of. Often, we politicians and bureaucrats get so wrapped up in our notions of ‘job creation’ and the accompanying economic development jargon like
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In prior writings, I have described our country as “The Divided States of America”. No matter who is elected President in 2020, I am skeptical of that person’s capacity to unite the American public. It seems that the left and the right are tugging their respective political parties into positions which label compromise and basic
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Editor’s note: An earlier version of this was incorrectly attributed to Josh Wolsky. This has been updated to reflect the correct author, Jim Maxson. If there are more thankless jobs than being on the Minot City Council or being Minot’s Mayor, I have no idea what they may be. The present administration inherited some pre-existing
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Would you like to be less reliant on your car? Should I assume you even have a car? After all, they are expensive. Those are odd questions to ask in an article titled about local grocery stores, but they’re at the heart of the question that asks why our neighborhood grocery stores disappeared. Minot used
Read & Share sourced from: Strong Towns
Whether for predatory profit or political persuasion and power, the high ideals that gave rise to the Internet are being increasingly eroded. What do we do about it? Is there a way to turn this extraordinary tool toward outcomes that push us forward? Read more on where we need to direct the Internet from this
Read & Share sourced from: Quartz
It’s one of those things that most of us take for granted — being able to go where we want, when we want, without logistics planning or concerns about how we’re going to get there. I’m talking about not having to worry about barriers like sets of stairs, steps, curbs, irregular thresholds, or the countless
Read & Share sourced from: Strong Towns
North Dakota’s population has both grown and shifted over the past 10 years, and when the dust settles following the 2020 count, the political landscape will look different. Rob Port with Say Anything Blog has speculation on where it seems likely more political power is moving to.
Read & Share sourced from: Say Anything Blog.com
Equal and available parking for all the cars in all the places all the time! I don’t remember the street protest and social activism that secured this ‘right’ for us, but there’s no doubt that the wheels of government drove us straight to our current state of parking utopia. Through on-street parking in front of
Read & Share sourced from: City Observatory
If you were running a business and your customer base went from 70% of the population to 50% of the population, what would you do? That’s the environment churches find themselves in over the past 20 years. Lloyd Omdahl writing an opinion piece for Forum Communications has more on the topic.
Read & Share sourced from: InForum
Property taxes — we all hate them. Naturally, as a result of our disdain, we seek to remove that which we don’t like. This attitude is prevalent in North Dakota. In the past, we’ve voted down initiated measures that sought to eliminate property tax; in the recently closed legislative session, the House killed a bill
Read & Share sourced from: Los Angeles Times
In sixteen years, benefits paid out by the Social Security Administration will exceed generated surpluses. The options of the federal government at that time will be to reduce payments to the retired and/or disabled, increase payroll taxes on employers, employees or both, raise the cap on taxable wages, increase the age of retirement, or all
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Loss. It’s a big part of Minot’s story — our story — in recent years. The flood took homes and retirements and schools and lives. Yes, lives. Though the official statistics don’t count them, we all know of someone who was lost due to the exhaustion and stress of the clean-up and rebuild. The rapid
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We all hate them, but what happens if we get rid of property tax? Jeremy Jackson, an Associate Professor of Agribusiness and Applied Economics at NDSU shares his thoughts in the letter linked below. A quick review of his position: property tax carries fewer negative impacts into the larger economy than another popular tax —
Read & Share sourced from: InForum
If you’ve been following The Minot Voice recently, you may have noticed a thread focusing on the idea of ‘place’ and its larger significance in our lives. It’s a lesser-researched topic (certainly in the realm of smaller cities), but the findings that are emerging suggest there are larger patterns in the world around us and
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You often hear veteran anglers and biologists refer to the current status of North Dakota’s fisheries as “the good old days.” Of course, that’s a general reference and each individual water is unique. Some are doing better than others and at the moment one of those “better” waters is Lake Sakakawea. North Dakota Game and
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It’s always dangerous casting an opinion on a wide swath of America. And few are wider than what might be described as ‘rural’. Still, economist and New York Times columnist Paul Krugman takes a crack at it. Perhaps he shouldn’t lump us all together, but not everything he writes should be discounted, either. Here’s the
Read & Share sourced from: New York Times