Tag Archives: City of Dickinson North Dakota

Stark County Sheriff’s Ron VanDoorne Disciplined For Disorderly Conduct

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I just now read a June 6, 2018 Dickinson Press Newspaper article titled “School resource officer disciplined for disorderly conduct”.  This article starts off with “The school resource officer for the Stark County Sheriff’s Department, Ron VanDoorne, was involved in a disorderly conduct incident May 27 at his residence, where Dickinson Police responded to a frantic phone call that said VanDoorne was in the house with a gun.”

After reading this entire Dickinson Press Newspaper article, in essence what this article described, was that Ron VanDoorne had lost his temper after an incident happened in the kitchen of his home, where he was cooking dinner for his wife, adult kids, and grandchildren.  One of the young grandchildren got underfoot when Ron was cooking, which caused a big pot of boiling water to be spilled on himself, and a grandchild.

Not much detail is given in this article about what was said and done right when this happened in the kitchen, but someone made a “frantic” phone call to the Police, saying that Ron “had a gun”.  Ron walked to a nearby park to cool off.  When he returned home a short time later, the Dickinson Police were there.

Sheriff Terry Oestreich said, “Ron was walking back and there was four or five officers present and Ron was not in a good mood, he was very upset,”……”Yeah, he said some inappropriate things to the officers. He was handcuffed and he has apologized to me.”

Captain David Wilkie of the Dickinson police said VanDoorne had been “uncooperative” on that night, but confirmed there were no charges filed.

This incident is funny to me, and I will explain why.  In 2014, there was an advertisement for an opening with the City of Dickinson Police Department.  This job advertisement was hidden, it was not posted on the websites North Dakota Job Services, Monster.com, Careerbuilder.com, Indeed.com, or the Dickinson Press Newspaper classifieds.  I believe that this job opening was posted on the most obscure website possible, so that the only people who would know about it, were people who were personally told about it.

I applied for this opening with the City of Dickinson Police Department, and the application paperwork was very lengthy and time consuming.  After I had already turned in my completed application package, one day before the deadline, I received an e-mail stating that I needed to submit my high school transcripts, before the end of the following day, or my application would not be considered.

I believed that the City of Dickinson had not only hidden this job opening advertisement, but they waited until the last minute, the day before the deadline, to send me an e-mail requiring that I get my high school transcripts from Florida, where I had graduated more than twenty-five years ago.  Without receiving the required payment, a county archivist in Florida went to a warehouse, went through boxes of records to get my high school transcripts, scanned them, and faxed them to the UPS store in Dickinson, so that I would have them before the deadline.

I passed my three written tests for the Frontline National Law Enforcement Exam.  Then I was scheduled to have an interview before a panel with the City of Dickinson human resources person, and three City of Dickinson Police Officers.  I was doing O.K. at the interview, until Ron VanDoorne sunk me.

Ron VanDoorne asked me, “How do you feel about doing customer service?”  I said something like, “I can do customer service, I don’t mind doing customer service, but I understand that being a Police Officer, I would have to do a variety of things, customer service, patrol, responding to calls, writing reports, but that I wouldn’t be doing just one thing all day long, that is what I was looking forward to.”

Ron VanDoorne followed up by asking me if I did not want to do customer service, and I pictured in my mind sitting at a desk all day taking in customer complaints, and I replied that I wanted a job where I did a variety of things, that I didn’t want to do just one thing all day long.  I believed that this line of questioning by Ron VanDoorne, was what caused me to not be hired, because I did not want to do “customer service”.  Really, what a Police Officer is required to do, is be professional, courteous, and civil with everyone, it’s not exactly the same thing as customer service.

The truth is, no I don’t want to do customer service all day long, or I would have applied for a customer service job at a call center.  I should have seen that Ron VanDoorne was just looking to disqualify me anyway, that I should have seen this question for what it was.  It goes without saying, that a Police Officer is supposed to be professional, courteous, and civil at all times.

The hidden job advertisement, the last minute request for high school transcripts from twenty-five years ago, and being disqualified because I answered truthfully that I did not want to do “customer service” all day long, made me a little disgusted and angry with the City of Dickinson, and the City of Dickinson Police Department.

So yes, I think that it is funny that Ron VanDoorne had the Police called on him by his own family, that he got put in handcuffs, that he received disciplinary action, and that this was reported in the newspaper.  Maybe in addition to his required alcohol evaluation, he get some “customer service” counseling, because you can’t go losing your temper with the public and the Police like that.

To summarize for the readers who never agree with what I write, I think that it is funny that Ron VanDoorne got in trouble for blowing up at his family and the Police were called on him, after he disqualified me for potentially not being able to maintain a civil demeanor with people.

Everything That Happened In Dickinson Could Have Been Predicted

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In my previous post, I wrote about a WordPress website titled “A Brief History of Oil Production in North Dakota”.  I wrote that this website did not contain opinion or speculation from the website owner, the website presented a collection of relevant North Dakota newspaper articles from the past 65 years, which recorded events that had already happened.

In the website “A Brief History of Oil Production in North Dakota”, one of the things that it showed was that the oil boom in North Dakota from 1978 through 1984 was caused by the price of oil going higher, and the boom ended when the price of oil went back down.  I found some additional articles that explain, pretty much, that this has always happened, and this will always happen.

There is an economic forecaster named George Ure, who has a website titled “ruralpioneer.com”.  In this website, there are several guest articles written by a man “oilman2”.  Oilman2 describes that he has worked in the oil production industry for 45 years.  In one of his articles, he explains his belief on “Peak Oil”, that there has always been a finite amount of oil in the ground, the world is already half way through all the oil there is.  All the easy to get oil, has already been gotten.  Now oil companies are having to go after oil that is deeper and harder to get, like the oil in North Dakota.

Oilman2 explains that when the supply of oil on the market is low, the oil prices become high.  When the prices become high, it is worth it to the oil companies to go after the deeper oil, the oil that requires horizontal drilling and fracturing.  (You can read elsewhere, that many oil industry experts say, that there is no profit in producing North Dakota oil unless the price of oil is at least $80 per barrel.)  Oilman2 explains that as long as the price of oil remains high, deep oil and oil that requires fracturing will be produced.  However, once there is a large supply of oil on the market, the price of oil goes down, and oil companies stop production of the hard to get oil, like in North Dakota.

Starting in about 2014, OPEC was blamed for the low price of oil world-wide because they were producing a lot of oil and there was a large supply of oil on the market.  Here in North Dakota, there were some old-timers working as “lease operators” or “pumpers” that became aware that there was no place to send this North Dakota oil, all of the oil storage facilities in the United States were full.  There was an oversupply of oil in the United States.  So, the price of oil went down, it went down so low that it was not profitable for the oil companies to keep drilling deep wells, drilling horizontally, and fracturing.  About 80% of the drilling stopped in North Dakota.  Jobs went away, workers went away.

In my previous post, I questioned why Baker Hughes, Halliburton, Occidental, and the large property developers in Dickinson did not know that they were at the end of the boom to bust cycle.  There were plenty of newspaper articles describing exactly what happened in North Dakota during the oil boom of the late 1970s, with all the reasons and explanations.  Oilman2 is an example of someone who has worked in the oil production industry for more than forty years, who can explain to you that it is not mysterious when/why oil companies go to an area and start producing oil, and when/why they stop producing oil in an area.

I explained in probably at least four of my previous posts, that it was falsely reported in television news and newspapers that all kinds of people were moving to North Dakota and were making over $100,000 per year.  I have lived in North Dakota for over three years now, and I have only ever met two people who worked in the oil field who made nearly $100,000 per year.  I haven’t mentioned it yet, but there was also this widespread saying here in North Dakota, that this oil boom was going to last for the next twenty years.

If you have read maybe ten of my posts, you can probably detect a tone of anger in my writing.  I do have a lot of anger about how out-of-state workers were treated in North Dakota, particularly in regard to extremely high housing prices.  People were taken advantage of.  Thousands of people moved to western North Dakota because they thought they coud make “$100,000 per year”.  Hundreds and hundreds of people brought their wives and children to North Dakota, and bought houses because they heard and thought, “This boom is going to last for the next twenty years.”

I think that Continental Resources, Conoco Philips, Amarada Hess, Marathon Oil, Whiting, Tesoro Oil, Occidental, Baker Hughes, and Halliburton all knew what was going to happen, they just didn’t know the exact year of the bust.  These large corporations were happy with ABC, CBS, NBC, MSNBC, CNN, Fox News reporting about all the “$100,000 jobs”, millionaires, millionaires being created daily in North Dakota.  These large oil companies really like it when their new hire brings their wife and kids to some place like Williston or Dickinson, and buys a house, this shows that they are making a long-term commitment to be here.  These large oil companies don’t really care that they just let a bunch of workers go, and their $300,000 house, that they owe $250,000 on, is now worth about $150,000 if they could even find a buyer.

A Brief History of Oil Production in North Dakota

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I have stated several times that the purpose of this blog is to provide useful, truthful information about Dickinson, North Dakota, so that people from out-of-state will know what Dickinson is like, and so that people in Dickinson can see what other people think about Dickinson.  Later, one of the things that I was trying to accomplish with this blog, was to point out some of the bad things about Dickinson so that they might be changed.  Then, I just went ahead and started trying to change things myself by writing some blog posts such as “Helpful Advice to Women in Dickinson”, for instance.  I was trying to be helpful, I am trying to be helpful.

I found something that probably everybody in the United States should read, the WordPress website titled “A Brief History of Oil Production in North Dakota”.  I mean it, not just people in North Dakota, or people thinking about moving to North Dakota, everybody in the United States should read it.  The reason why I say this, is because this website explains the historical relationship between the demand for oil, the price of oil, the exploration for oil, and the production of oil in North Dakota.  The creator of this website collected the most insightful and accurate newspaper articles about oil production in North Dakota from the past 65 years.

“A Brief History of Oil Production in North Dakota” does not contain speculation, or opinions from the website creator, it presents articles from the past, that were recording what was happening at that time, or what had already happened in North Dakota.  There have been three different boom periods of oil production in North Dakota: the exploration and discovery boom in the 1950s, the oil price boom of the late 1970s, and the technology boom beginning about 2005.

The articles in the website explain at particular points in history, what the price of oil was, what oil exploration was going on, what oil production followed, the wealth that was created, the influx of people that occurred, and then the eventual decrease in oil production.  Again, I want to reiterate, the oil boom and bust occurred in North Dakota in the 1950s, then again in the late 1970s, this is completely documented by the newspaper articles in the WordPress website “A Brief History of Oil Production in North Dakota”.

The old newspaper articles state that the oil boom in North Dakota in the late 1970s came to an end because the price of oil dropped.  The oil prices are given through that time period.  Other old newspaper articles tell about the population of Dickinson, North Dakota going from 16,000 to 22,000, the struggle to build housing and infrastructure, and then the population going back to 16,000, leaving Dickinson with $25 million in debt.

I was surprised and amazed to see that the newspaper articles from the 1980s, that describe the boom and bust that occurred from about 1978 to 1984, describe almost exactly what happened here from 2005 to right now.  I didn’t know.  Nobody told me.  Who else knew?

I guess I am not the smartest person.  But how in the world did Halliburton, Baker Hughes, and Occidental build these huge buildings in Dickinson in 2012, and not know that they were at the end of the boom to bust cycle?  How did all of the large property developers that built about 1,000 new housing units in Dickinson in 2012, 2013, and 2014 not know that they were at the end of the boom to bust cycle?

I believe that I wrote somewhere in my blog, about being at the right place, at the right time, like Phoenix in the 1970s, or Tampa in the 1980s, where there was uninterrupted growth and expansion for the next thirty years.  Who knew?  I guess that there were some people that saw things clearly: warm climate, year-round activity, inexpensive property, easy to develop, vast amount of land available, no limit to expansion.  I thought that I would have liked to have arrived in Williston or Dickinson in about 2007, that would have been a great time to get here I thought.  After reading the website “A Brief History of Oil Production in North Dakota”, I realized that not only did you have to get to North Dakota at the right time, you would also have to have known when to get out.