Un-plain ways to reinvent the Plains
In the search for a new vision for vanishing heartland, rural towns consider digital hubs, wind farms, and a 'buffalo commons.'
WATFORD CITY, N.D. –
Seven years ago, this isolated oil and ranching community staked a claim to the digital frontier. It wired itself with advanced telecommunications, advertised on the Internet, and waited for droves of info-entrepreneurs to come and set up shop.
But a funny thing happened on the way to the future. The droves never came. And this hard-working community on the edge of the Badlands in Theodore Roosevelt National Park learned an important lesson.
Technology alone can't save the heartland. What it needs is a new vision, a new way of defining itself that can rally its residents, corral their energies, and appeal to the rest of America.
While even Watford City's most ardent promoters don't claim victory yet, the city is well on its way to diversifying into 21st-century industries. Its entrepreneurial residents can already boast of two high-speed Internet providers, four video-conference facilities, a cutting-edge Internet-savvy bank, several information-dependent service companies, and an e-pharmacist.
An e-pharmacist? More about him in a moment.
That's impressive for any town of 1,400 people, doubly so for an outpost three hours from the nearest city of 50,000 or more. And if Watford City can reinvent itself, then perhaps other towns in the reemerging frontier from North Dakota to Texas can find ways to transform themselves. Sparsely populated (fewer than six residents per square mile) and losing more people every year, this frontier is struggling to hold together its economy, its government services, and its social cohesiveness.
Admittedly, the few visionary ideas for its future sound a little grandiose:
• Incubator for advanced cybersociety.
• The Saudi Arabia of wind power.
• Safari capital of North America.
Many of these moves would require a cultural shift: away from bootstrap individualism and more toward regional cooperation. "The whole philosophy [is]: 'You've got to do it yourself,' " says Richard Rathge of the North Dakota State Data Center at North Dakota State University in Fargo. But "if we could develop a national or state policy that would facilitate interdependence, I think we'd see a great change."
Sometimes big change starts with the smallest push, as Watford City has discovered. When Gene Veeder returned here in the mid-1990s, he didn't know a T1 line from a T-bone steak. He'd only heard the term from a telemarketing firm that was considering relocating to the area. But since Mr. Veeder was the job-development guru for McKenzie County, whose mainstay oil and ranching industries had fallen on hard times, he decided to get informed.
The search led him to Ray Hintz, a local high school math teacher with a crazy idea. If he pirated some bandwidth from the school's T1 (a high-speed phone line), he could rig rooftop antennas to bring high-speed Internet service to local government offices at a fraction of the usual cost.
The school agreed to share its T1 line, hired Mr. Hintz to coordinate the project, and eventually hosted computer and Internet training courses for the community. The county commissioners came up with $20,000 for computer servers.
For a few years, the city ran its own Internet service for residents until private companies moved in to take over the job. By the time state economic-development officials came to town to push their own rural Internet strategy, they found Watford City was already gigabits ahead.
But the community quickly learned that most telecommuting professionals, who can live and work anywhere, preferred mountains or an ocean in their backyards. Fortunately, Watford City has charms of its own that keep current residents here - easy access to Roosevelt National Park and fine fishing and boating at Lake Sakakawea. And local entrepreneurs were eager to experiment with the new technology. The result is a town that has defied the rural stereotypes and become one of the most wired small towns in rural America.
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Even before the city embarked on its digital adventure, First International Bank and Trust was pushing the envelope. It moved to in-house check processing, took over six offices of a failed savings-and-loan, and bought two Arizona banks. To manage its far-flung empire, the bank invested heavily in information technology, including video-conferencing to conduct all-employee meetings and remote job interviews.
"It has allowed our business to grow despite the distances," says Stephen Stenehjem, president of the bank and grandson of the founder. Now, the company is upgrading its Web banking service to allow customers to view their checks online, front and back - a cutting-edge technology that few banks offer anywhere in the country.
Or consider Larry Larsen, local drugstore owner and soon to be the state's fifth e-pharmacist. Sure, he sells prescriptions over the Internet. But what really sets him apart is his use of Internet video. By placing a special camera in his second pharmacy, 50 miles away, he'll be able to monitor each step remotely as his employees fill out prescriptions. Then he and the customer can step into private rooms where they converse e-face to e-face, so to speak.
The system not only saves him from traveling back and forth, but it also means he can hire a less expensive pharmacy technician rather than having to recruit a full-time pharmacist, which is in short supply these days.
"The one thing that saved Watford City is that the people who came back were forward-thinking," he says. "It's that kind of 'we-can-do-it-ourselves' " attitude.
Even outsiders have picked up on the mood. "What's going to save the heartland is the attitude of the people," says Marc Dansereall, project manager of CrossUSA, a software developer and one of the handful of outside concerns that have moved into the area.
The hardships of the heartland frontier breed entrepreneurs. In fact, a quarter of the region's households include someone who's self-employed. That's double the national average, and a substantial part of that entrepreneurship flows from nonfarm activities.
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