Official Newspaper of Eddy County since 1883
Official Newspaper of Eddy County since 1883
Sorted by date Results 176 - 200 of 202
Following the lead of the North Dakota Department of Transportation in announcing the start of seasonal road restrictions, the Eddy County commissioners declared at their meeting on Tuesday, March 20, that road restrictions will also go into effect on Eddy County roads March 26. Motorists are encouraged to check the load restriction map daily, as restrictions may change quickly due to weather conditions. The 2018 load restrictions map is available online at http://www.dot.nd.gov/travelinfo....
"I walked today where Jesus walked, in days of long ago. I wandered down each path He knew with reverent step and slow." The lyrics to this song came to mind as I sat in Paul Backstrom's office at Precision Ag Results in Maddock, watching him scroll through pictures of his recent trip to Israel. He and his wife Donna were part of a group of 19 people who traveled from their small church in Esmond and their partner church, Bethel Free Church in Devils Lake. They flew out of Winnipeg on March 2 an...
The news is playing in the background as I am writing this column, and I looked up with interest as they talked about it being World Down Syndrome Day. What a coincidence, that’s exactly what I had planned on talking about today! The mother in the news clip said that she had been participating in a random act of kindness campaign to bring Down syndrome to people’s minds. She is also trying increase inclusion of people with Down’s syndrome and dispel popular myths. World Down Syndrome Day began...
The Community Ambulance Service of New Rockford, represented by manager Tim Schmeets and vice president Sandy O’Connor, requested the permission of the Eddy County commissioners to place on the ballot a request for a funding increase for Emergency Medical Services (EMS) during the 2018 election. According to North Dakota Century Code, county voters can approve up to 10 mills for EMS. “Upon a majority of qualified electors of the county voting on the question. A taxing district that levies a spe...
Nine-year-old Jacob Sogge of New Rockford was recently diagnosed with a Type 2 Chiari malformation. His father, Wayne Sogge, says the condition is a growth or protrusion from the cerebellum down to the top part of his neck. Although it is a condition that he has likely had since birth, the growth has gotten longer and wider and is cutting off the fluid to his brain. This is causing both balance and speech issues for Jacob, along with headaches. Walking has become difficult for Jacob as he has...
Ten-year-old Evan Vargo had a few questions for the kids at summer camp who thought it was funny to bully a certain girl. “She had autism,” Evan said. “They called her ‘slowpoke.’ They called her ‘dumb girl.’” Evan, who was bullied himself once on a school bus, walked up to the group and asked: “Could we stop? How would you feel if people were making fun of you?” Taking those steps was “a little bit scary,” said Evan, of Andover, Minn. “They might punch you or say something mean. But when...
Scrolling through Facebook seems to go much faster for me than it used to. Mostly because I see more posts of things that Facebook thinks I need to see and fewer posts from friends that I want to see, but somehow miss. Of course, I shift the blame to Facebook’s algorithms and not my own inattention. To keep from missing the important things I WANT to see, I log in a couple of times a day and scroll quickly through the ads. As I was scrolling through way too many non-friend related posts, I s...
Imagine, if you will, that you're a high school sophomore with a burning desire for adventure, a need to see the world and learn how other people in that world live their lives on a daily basis and you decide to do a foreign exchange year. Then, imagine that choice would mean you had to repeat your eleventh year when you returned home. What would your choice be? That's exactly the situation that Klara Marxen found herself in. Marxen, who normally says she is from Hamburg, Germany, because...
The Eddy County Commission received a letter from APEX Engineering Group, regarding the roadway improvement proposal on US 281, N Jct. 15 through the city of Sheyenne, which is a distance of 18.86 miles. This roadway improvement is expected to be constructed during the 2020 construction season. The proposal includes a major rehabilitation full depth reclamation with widening to extend the service life and provide operational improvement to the roadway. The proposal includes some rip rap...
“On August 21, 2015, in what seemed like the blink of an eye, three childhood friends from Sacramento performed an extraordinary feat of heroism aboard a passenger train in France,” the television host read from an article in the New York Times. “In directing The 15:17 to Paris, the challenge for Clint Eastwood was to turn this relatively brief encounter into a compelling 90-minute narrative. To do so, he recruited those same three men, none of whom had any formal acting training, to play themse...
I’ve always loved the Winter Olympics. The figure skating was always my favorite, though. They glided so gracefully on the ice, in costumes that were unbelievably glamorous. It was one of those things that you always dreamed of being, without having any clue the amount of work the athletes put in. My own dreams were dashed at the local ice rink when I realized those jumps were not as easy as they looked, and that ice was HARD. My mom always made “parties” out of the figure skating events, which...
Letters of invitation were mailed to county and state officials for a special meeting of the Tri-County Social Service Board on Monday, February 5, regarding the possibility of forming a District of Eddy, Foster and Wells County Social Services. Auditors, commissioners and social service board members from all three counties gathered with the Tri-County board along with District 23 Senator Joan Heckaman and District 29 Representative Chet Pollert. Steve Reiser, the director of Dakota Central...
Doug Skadburg and Chris Skadburg informed the commissioners about Oak Creek and culvert problems on County Road 16 at their meeting on February 8. The state water board shows that the culverts are a little lower than the elevation of the spillway, so the water is forced to build up. It’s an assessed drain. As soon as it goes down, they open the gates and the water spreads out and doesn’t go anywhere. The Skadburgs have met with the water board regarding this issue, which they clarified is a dif...
I’m not sure how I feel about Valentines Day these days. Sometimes I like the idea and other times, it annoys me that, yet another holiday has been commercialized to the point that Valentines Day has. Some people believe Valentines Day began as a Christian holiday when one of the several Saint Valentines sent a love letter from prison and signed it from “Your Valentine.” Others believe the holiday is pagan, derived from a festival in February anticipating spring and celebrating fertility. No mat...
A pediatric cancer ward is hardly the place you’d think magical birthday parties happen, but magic did happen there one day, at a four-year-old girl’s surprise birthday party. She squealed when her favorite Disney character, Elsa, from the movie, Frozen arrived. The little girl and Elsa broke into song and were jubilantly singing, Let It Go, when they were joined by four other Disney princesses. Elsa’s sister Anna, Ariel, Jasmine and Snow White all arrived to make a magical moment created by vol...
Deputy Ward Hilger officially reported for duty with the Eddy County Sheriff's Department on December 18, after completing 12 weeks of training in Bismarck at the Law Enforcement Training Academy to attain the appropriate law enforcement licensure. The academy training combines classroom and hands-on training with practical scenarios. Hilger says that he has always been interested in law enforcement as a career. He grew up on a cattle ranch in Montana but had pursued other interests when he got...
This job of mine isn’t easy sometimes. I’ve been looking all week for a “good in things” story to tell and was getting a little nervous when Thursday morning came, and I still didn’t have anything. Thursday is the day we go to press, you know. I did get a chance to do some photography when the weather conditions left us with beautifully frosted trees. I kept forgetting to change the settings on the camera, though, and was switching from close-ups to landscapes. That didn’t work out so well for...
North Dakota Game and Fish District Game Warden James Myhre attended the Eddy County Commission meeting on Tuesday, January 16, to discuss Warsing Dam management options. He informed commissioners about ordinances already in place for fish and wildlife areas through Title 30 of the North Dakota Administrative Code with Game and Fish. Myhre told the commissioners that he’s had discussions with the biologist who manages Warsing Dam, and Game and Fish will work with the commissioners on get...
We close out the 2017 Year in Review with the last three months of local news in the October, November and December issues of the New Rockford Transcript. October The Tri-County Social Service Board acted on the employee grievance filed by former Interim Director Kimberly Larson against the Eddy County Social Service Board. The former Dakota Roadhouse restaurant took a short trip to its new home across from the Bird Dawg Café. The building is slated to become home to an expanded NAPA Aut...
I wasn’t going to do it. As fun as that Vikings win was on Sunday, it just didn’t have that “good in things” feel. Until I heard this. In what’s been tabbed the Minnesota Miracle, the Vikings won in a combination of some pretty awesome athletic talent by Stefon Diggs, and a big stroke of luck. However, a sports talk show I was listening to said the true test would be their next game. He said that’s the game when the Vikings historically ‘choke.’ If they win that one, though, they will b...
The weather took most of North Dakota by surprise in 2017. The year started with deep snow and blizzards. But the heavy snowfall came to an abrupt halt and by spring there was growing concern about a lack of precipitation throughout most of the state. President Donald Trump signed an executive order to advance the Dakota Access Pipeline. Protests had started at the pipeline in early 2016 in Morton County. It was then stalled by President Barack Obama late in the year. Protesters were ord...
The clock radio went off way too early this morning. We have weird schedules at our house. I’ll rephrase that; I keep a weird schedule. Sometimes I am a night owl and stay up really late and sometimes I’m an early morning riser, getting up to write at 4:30 a.m. After climbing into bed at 2:45 this morning, that 5 a.m. alarm was brutal. Not my alarm, by the way. I got interested in what they were saying when I heard the mention of fog in our area. See, a friend who lives in the souther...
Sheriff Paul Lies delivered the 2017 year-end sheriff's department report to the Eddy County Commission on Tuesday, January 2. Vehicular accidents reported in Eddy County are up over 50 percent compared to 2016, and the department is investigating why several accidents have taken place at the intersection of Second Avenue South and Fifth Street in New Rockford. Lies explained the electronic citation process. All officers have computers and internet access in their squad cars, so the entir...
The United States started 2017 with the Presidential inauguration of Donald Trump as it's 45th President. A large protest followed the next day with many denouncing him as President. The nation experienced the first total eclipse of the sun in nearly 100 years that stretched from one coast to the other. NFL players knelt during the national anthem, the largest shooting in American history occurred in Las Vegas and #Me Too became an eye-opener to the country and brought feminism issues and s...
I shared a cartoon on Facebook last night…it shared my frame of mind just perfectly. Two little mice (I think they’re mice) are sitting on the numbers 2 and 0 looking forward to where the numbers 1 and 18 would appear. One mouse is kneeling with gardening tools around him on the ground. Another mouse standing behind him asks, “Why so optimistic about 2018? What do you think it will bring? Everything seems so messed up.” To which the other mouse replied, “I think it will bring flowers....
