Boomtown's Taxable Sales Surge 30%; Locals Did Not See A Bust -- From The Williston Wire -- September 24, 2017

Williston Economic Development received a Gold Excellence in Economic Developent Award for its Open for Business Media Folder, a project in the category of Video/Multimedia Promotion from the International Economic Development Council. The honor was presented an awards ceremony in Toronto, Ontario, Canada.

Williston, Williams County 2Q17 taxable purchases jump 30 percent.

Sales taxes don't represent the total economic picture, but are a good indicator since they track the physical movement of goods and services. North Dakota figures for the second quarter show that Williston's economy has turned a corner - a scoop for the people who sat in on the Williston Area Chamber of Commerce's Eggs and Issues with State Tax Commissioner Ryan Rauschenberger on Friday morning.

"This is not public yet," Rauschenberger told the gathering. "We were working on a statewide report for the second quarter of 2017 and we pulled out some Williston specific data just for this presentation."

The data shows a jump of $83 million in sales taxes for the second quarter year over year. Sales taxes in the second quarter 2016 were $263.7 million and $347.3 million for the same period this year.

Williston finds calm after frantic years. Locals disagree with those who say the Bakken went from boom to bust. It went from boom to over-drive, but steady. From The Grand Forks Herald:

Like many who now live in Williston, Krause is a transplant, brought to northwest North Dakota by the promise of lucrative work in a hot economic landscape.

Today, some two years after plunging oil prices slowed the frantic pace of life in the state's Oil Patch, she's part of a new class of business owners taking root in what many in town describe as a city transformed, a place that's now striving to capitalize on mineral wealth while fostering a more family-friendly community.

Krause, who is originally from Milwaukee, never worked in the oil field, but she did spend two of her five years in town as a journalist at the local newspaper, the Williston Herald. She says that work introduced her to people from other parts of the country who had flocked to the patch seeking new prospects much as she had.

Over time, she says she "felt I started to embody all those hopes and dreams of what brought them here, to bring them to stay, and what they wanted it to be."

The idea for an art studio and store gradually took root, led her to approach the Williston Economic Development office and resulted in the store she operates today.

Dreams aside, she cites continually rising local birth rates and public school enrollments as among the tangible factors that encouraged her to open. Looking back, she doesn't think her shop would have been viable in Williston as it was at her arrival during the boom.

"I guess back then it was a large male population that worked an obscene amount of hours," Krause said. "Their time off would have been spent sleeping or maybe at a bar, so I don't think this place would have survived, not until the population switched out from them to the workers who decided to stay and bring up their families and their wives."

The booms of a cyclical commodity such as oil and gas are typically followed by a corresponding bust. That term is used to describe current conditions in the Patch by those elsewhere in North Dakota, including on the peripheries of the main producing region. In Williston, though, the label is subject to debate.

"I can't say it was a bust, not by any means," said Kim Wenko, the owner of clothing boutique Mode located a few doors down from Krause's shop.

Wenko has lived in Williston for about nine years, and admits readily that her knowledge of the place is influenced in part by her marriage to the city's head of economic development, Shawn Wenko, as well as by the fact that her partner in the store is a member of the City Commission. Still, her assessment of overall economic conditions is largely driven by her personal experience in a town she says has grown dramatically over her near-decade of residency.

"When I moved here, you could eat out at Applebee's," and that was about it, Wenko says. "Now there's like 15 new restaurants" and counting.

Tarren Rehak, a lifelong Willistonian and a local schoolteacher, was shopping in the boutique that day—and, coincidentally, had worked at that Applebee's when she was younger. She quickly backed up Wenko's description of the gains made during the boom and, thus far, how much of them had stuck.

"I still have 29 kindergarteners. It's the biggest class size I've ever had," Rehak said.