WILLISTON, N.D. (AP) - Tom Rolfstad would barely get the words “Williston” and “North Dakota” out of his mouth and the person whose hand he was shaking turned away to find someone more interesting in the room.
North Dakota? Williston? Yawn.
Well, those days are gone.
Hundreds now pack far-away, banquet-sized meeting rooms to hear him talk. He is a go-to man from the Bakken oil formation and everyone with money to invest, or an idea to sell, wants a piece of it.
But Rolfstad, 62, won’t have those eager moneyed audiences anymore, at least not as executive director of Williston’s Economic Development. This self-effacing and funny guy retired at the end of October, the Bismarck Tribune (https://bit.ly/1yRR7J4 ) reported.
He started the job back in 1990 when Williston, and just about every other community in North Dakota, desperately needed a friend to lead the way out of declining population, schools closing and the outmigration of the next generation.
The town had decided to tax itself 1 cent to pay off debt from the ’80s oil bust and use some to try to stimulate growth. He’d been working at the state Economic Development Commission in Bismarck, feeling like his rise in position only put him further from where the deals were being made.
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“Things were pretty dead,” he recalls of that return to his hometown. Paradoxically, as he says that, he’s sitting near a stack of shovels from ceremonial groundbreakings that mark the start of everything from a $75 million recreation center to a half-dozen new housing subdivisions, retail strip malls, downtown renaissance development and the list goes on.
Back in the day, one of those shovels would have been huge; today, in Williston, they’re piling up like at a hardware store with entrepreneurs and developers crowding the scene.
The town is absolutely booming, but this is not growth done the old, hard way, by hatching ideas, working regionally and raising money to get the deal done.
Oil had already slipped through Williston’s fingers so the plan was to work with what was at hand.
To start, he worked to fill the 50 buildings vacated when the oil rigs pulled up practically overnight with small businesses, manufacturing starts and entrepreneurs.
Next, there was a focus on agriculture and a trip for more than 100 people from the region to look at irrigation in the river valleys of Washington.
“We wanted to do a lot more with agriculture than we’d been doing. The biggest revolution was pulse crops and suddenly producers were getting income off all acres, not half, and we were building processing plants,” he said.
Hazen banker Chuck Stroup, a former head of the state Economic Development Office under Gov. Ed Schafer, remembers Rolfstad during those years. “There were times with Tom when he’d be scratching his head, asking, ’What can I do?’” Stroup said.
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That irrigation field trip opened the region’s eyes and forever changed the dynamics of agriculture there. More than 200,000 acres are under irrigation and growth continues.
Williston Economic Development, strange now for an office focused on managing the fastest growing micropolitan in the country, has a patent on a specialized potato, a yellow-fleshed russet, called the Mon-Dak.
Then there was tourism and a look not far upriver, where historical forts Union and Buford were in need of being dusted off and brought into modern times.
Last - and this one really sets off a tinge of ’90s deja vu - was the telemarketing wave, when even fairly low-paying jobs working the phone lines conducting surveys and the like were valuable in town.
“We did a lot to put things in place, not knowing there would be a boom,” Rolfstad said.
And then the Bakken exploded and instead of merely having oil in hand again, Williston was hanging onto a tiger by its tail.
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Rolfstad buttons up his suit jacket and walks out of his downtown office on a sunny October afternoon.
The day is grand and so the work at hand; streets being torn up, water and sewer lines being replaced and a four-story building set to occupy a prominent corner of Main Street.
There are several interesting restaurants downtown, retail anchors like Vanity, Maurice’s and JC Penney, a first-class bookstore and a coffeehouse
Rolfstad said there’s opportunity for Williston to have the same urban flair as Fargo. “Fargo did it in 10 years. With the money here, we could do it in less, maybe five,” he said.
Rolfstad knows everybody in the stores and greets them like the friends they are or have become, like Tim Ritter, the jewelry store owner he’s known all his life, and Jenny Ho, owner of Basil, a new sushi bar next door to city hall.
Ho said she knows Rolfstad as part of a city-service culture that made remodeling the building and opening a business pain-free.
“There was no stress over it,” Ho said.
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While Rolfstad still has an audience, he’s got a few things to say to North Dakota that speak volumes to the handwringing stress of the ’90s. As the kids say, that stress is so yesterday.
“What I see today is that people with (master’s business degrees), if they put together a business plan and there’s a management plan, they can get whatever money they need. The people in North Dakota don’t realize the level of equity out there,” and the level of interest in investing it here, Rolfstad said. “I don’t think North Dakota realizes we’ve got the bully pulpit. We can get into any door in the country, if not the world.”
That’s good news because the Bakken is like a rock dropped into still water; its economic ripples go much further than the drill holes.
But even with that reassurance, a career developer’s work is never truly done and Rolfstad leans in to make his final point. Jobs are one thing, sustainable communities quite another.
“We’ve got to cool this place up. We’re still going to have to do something to attract people to live here. The millennials - we have to get in their eyes and look out. What’s the ’Wow!’ factor? We have to make winter like an extreme sport,” he said.
In no small part due to Rolfstad, Williston is already a “wow,” a town that never gave up on itself, up or down, bust or boom and is gradually morphing into what it will be one day.
“I grew up with this. It’s our story,” he said.
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Information from: Bismarck Tribune, https://www.bismarcktribune.com
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