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Jim

Way More Than You Ever Wanted To Know About Sugar

It started with this coupon Lillian gave me a couple of weeks ago when I was on my way to the grocery store—75 cents off if you buy two, two-pound packages of C&H dark brown sugar. As often happens on really good deals, at Central Market in Bismarck, the store I regularly go to on Geezer Day (Thursday, when senior citizens get 5 per cent off), they didn’t have any of that, so I stuffed the coupon in my jacket pocket. The next time I went to Dan’s in Bismarck, I checked the sugar section, and sure enough, they didn’t have it either. But what struck me about the sugar section at Dan’s was this huge long shelf of Dan’s store-brand white sugar, Flavorite. And the conspicuous absence of the sugar I’ve been eating all my life, when I eat sugar, which these days isn’t often: Crystal Sugar, with its trademark round red,white and blue logo.

Well, I didn’t give that much thought until I went to a second Dan’s store a few days later, and once again went to look for dark brown sugar. Nope. But I again noticed the absence of Crystal Sugar. I was standing there puzzling over that when the store manager, who I know in passing, walked by and asked me if I needed help finding something. I asked about Crystal Sugar. He said they did not carry it, except once in a while when there’s a special promotion. Hadn’t had one of those for quite a while. I asked if the absence of Crystal from his shelves had anything to do with the labor dispute over in the Red River Valley. He said no, they just don’t carry it.

And so, over the next few weeks, as I shopped (I do most of the grocery shopping at our house) I looked at the sugar sections of Bismarck stores. Here’s what I found.

You can almost always buy Crystal sugar at Central Market, and sometimes at Cash Wise. Its price is generally competitive with other products on the shelves in those stores—a few cents more per pound in the four-pound package, a few cents less in the ten-pound package (more about those four-pound packages later).

Dan’s three Bismarck stores, Wal-Mart’s two Bismarck stores, and Target don’t carry Crystal Sugar.

You probably know about the management-labor dispute at Crystal. In August, management locked the doors on union workers after the workers and management failed to agree on a new contract. Subsequent attempts to reach agreement have failed. The dispute is now in its fifth month. Workers are sitting at home while the company has hired scabs to do the work the union members formerly did. There’s no end in sight.

Now, I’ve always been kind of a union supporter, ever since one of my teachers in junior high explained that it was the organized labor movement that gave us a middle class in America. Those men (mostly) who built Henry Ford’s cars earned a decent wage, enough to allow them to afford to buy one of Henry Ford’s cars. Voila, houses with garages for working families, a car in every garage, and sugar in every cupboard. And America became a great country. But that’s neither here nor there.

American Crystal Sugar is one of the largest employers in the Red River Valley—around 1.300 employees I think. It’s a cooperative, owned by the farmers who grow the sugar beets which make the sugar. It’s also one of the few large unionized companies in the Valley. And that’s been good for everyone—the farmers, the workers and the managers. Until now. I spoke this fall with one of those farmers, and asked him for his take on this dispute. He said he didn’t understand the workers not wanting to accept the company’s offer—after all, they make more than $50,000 a year and have good benefits. He’s a friend, and I didn’t want to get into an argument, so I didn’t ask him how much he made last year, or how he feels about his board paying some of the managers a million dollars a year. I just replied that I was glad the workers were getting a good wage and good benefits.

And I guess if all this was not going on, and if I was not generally sympathetic to the workers, I wouldn’t have even noticed the Crystal Sugar missing from the shelves. Or cared about it. But now that I do, I’ve decided to forego my 5 per cent discount on Thursdays at Central Market and start shopping at Dan’s. Just because, by chance or a good business decision, they don’t sell Crystal Sugar.

Normally, I’d probably patronize a business that chooses, when it has a choice, to sell a North Dakota-produced product rather than a company brand produced somewhere else. But right now, I guess I think the growers and the Crystal managers are wrong, and so I’m going to show my support for the workers, who are facing a bleak Christmas, having not had a paycheck for nearly 5 months, with this little gesture.

Oh, and about that four pound bag of sugar. We don’t eat much sugar at our house, so we don’t buy it often. And when we do, we buy the smallest bag available. Generally, that’s the 5-pound bag. Or used to be. We just grab a bag when the sugar bin in the cupboard gets low and throw it in the cart. But sometime in the last five years or so, when the price of raw sugar started going up, most of the sugar companies switched from 5-pound bags to 4-pound bags. There was no big announcement. And while they shrunk the package, they did not shrink the price. In essence, they dropped a 20 per cent price increase on us, and I, for one, (okay, I guess it’s possible I’m the only one, but I hardly think so) never really noticed. Until last week. I was comparing prices when I was checking to see which stores sold Crystal, and something wasn’t making sense. The price of the 10-pound bag was more than twice that of the 5-pound bag. And I couldn’t figure out why. Until I looked at a bag very carefully and realized that the traditional 5-pound bag now weighed only 4 pounds. So I made another quick trip around to the grocery stores to see if that was the case everywhere. Here’s what I found.

Wal-Mart sells a 5-pound bag of Great Value Sugar for $2.84, and a 4-pound bag of C&H for $2.82. So people like me who weren’t paying attention were grabbing the name brand, C&H, and saving two cents to boot. Except we were getting a pound less sugar.

Target sells 5-pound bags too. Market Pantry is $2.79, and C&H is $2.89. (C&H is one of the few companies that still packages both 4 and 5 pound bags, to accommodate their retailers.)

But Central Market sells only 4-pound bags: Our Family for $2.78 and Crystal for $2.99. Cash-Wise is also selling only 4-pound bags too: Valu Time for $2.68, Food Club for $2.88, C&H for $2.98 and Crystal for $3.18. Dan’s was the priciest, selling 4 pounds of Flavorite for $3.19.

I checked a couple websites, too, and I found an interesting little note from the folks at C&H from back in 2009:

As many of our fans have noticed, the price of sugar has recently increased. In an effort to alleviate some of the confusion and frustration about this change, we wanted to formally address it here. As you may be aware, the price of sugar on the world market has nearly doubled since the end of 2008. In order to offset our cost increases, we have had to increase our price per pound of sugar.

In order to keep the cost per bag of sugar down, many retailers converted their store brand product from a 5-pound to a 4-pound bag. In an effort to maintain affordability we decided to do the same with our C&H® brand sugar. The reduction in size, however, is not enough to offset the cost increase in the remaining four pounds of the product. That’s why you’re seeing the price go up and the size go down at the same time. We understand the frustration and we assure you we are doing everything we can to maintain the value and affordability that our consumers expect from our brand.

I just LOVE their logic in the first sentence of the second paragraph: We’re keeping the cost per bag down. Now THERE’S a company with a great public relations arm, and I LOVE good public relations campaigns. We’re keeping that bag of sugar affordable. Never mind that the bag has 20 per cent less sugar. The cost of the bag will stay the same. You’ll figure out later—or perhaps you won’t even realize it—that you’ll have to come back for another bag sooner than you would have otherwise.

Well, anyway, matters at hand. I prefer to shop at a locally-owned grocery store, so I generally bypass Target and Wal-Mart. And Cash-Wise is a long ways from my house, so I hardly ever go there. Besides I hate to bag my own groceries. And since now that I know Dan’s is the only one not selling Crystal, I guess I’ll just go there for a while. Even though their sugar is the most expensive.

See, I don’t need to buy sugar for a while. I just checked the pantry downstairs. There’s a 4-pound bag of Crystal down there. Been there a good long while I’d say, but no expiration date on the bag. And at the rate we use sugar—for baking, and not much else–I’m probably good for another year or so. I think, though, that I won’t open it until Crystal unlocks its doors to its workers and brings them back to work.

Oh, and there is one good side to that 4-pound bag versus the 5-pounder. Every time I buy one, I’m buying 20 per cent fewer calories. Gee, I’m surprised the C&H people didn’t put that in their press statement. Hmmm, maybe there’s a job waiting for me there . . .

Merry Christmas, from our house to yours. And now, I’m going to go eat a couple Christmas sugar cookies.

The Best Of Ardell Tharaldson

We said good-bye yesterday to a strong North Dakota voice at a remembrance service for Ardell Tharaldson. Cancer claimed my longtime friend last week, freeing him at last from a body that multiple sclerosis long ago confined to a wheelchair. But it never stilled his mind, which plotted and schemed scenarios for liberal takeovers of the universe until the day he died.

A better-than-amateur historian, and an incredible repository of information on North Dakota’s past, especially its political traditions and the Nonpartisan League, Ardell will leave the biggest void in our ability to remember our North Dakota past since the death of his friend, state historian Larry Remele, more than two decades ago.

What Ardell did leave us is a collection of anecdotes about his past, collected on a blog entitled Political Prairie Fire, the title a paean to his love of the Nonpartisan League. Yesterday at his memorial service, I read a few excerpts from his past blog entries. I’ll share some of them here. Because he was such a good writer and an interesting man, I encourage you to go to his blog and read more.

November 2007: About Norman Mailer

“I should write something about the passing of Norman Mailer. He certainly was one of the profound influences over me and my generation. Reading his 'Armies of the Night' or 'Miami and the Siege of Chicago' or watching him in the movie/documentary 'When We Were Kings' about Mohammed Ali fighting George Foreman in Zaire will lift your mind and heart.

“At the same time, like Bob Dylan, he would do some things that would make you shake your head and think “what in the hell is that guy doing?” Goodbye Norman, wherever you are."

April 2007: Kurt Vonnegut and the McGovern campaign

“Kurt Vonnegut died this week. I feel as though I should say something.

“Like millions of others, my college roommate and I went through a Vonnegut period when we both read everything published by him. Many of his ideas and words worked their way into our lexicon where they remain.

“I crossed Kurt Vonnegut’s path in Kentucky in 1972. I was working for George McGovern’s Presidential campaign national office in Washington. I was sent to Kentucky for a couple weeks. Kentucky was not a primary state so we had to attempt to organize delegate attendance to caucuses at the district level to get yourself elected as a McGovern delegate to the state convention.

“A group of college kids who were organizing for McGovern had a function at the college in a town the name of which I no longer remember. Vonnegut was the person who came to speak in support of McGovern. When he walked into the room he was one of those guys that you just felt there was something special about. I have only had this feeling of being in the presence of something special a couple of other times. Once when I met the Berrigan brothers and once when I met Cesar Chavez.

“I remember how tall he was and how he chain-smoked. As I think back, his talk is sadly and remarkably relevant. He spoke about how the leadership at the time was not interested so much in spreading democracy as they were in spreading colonial power.

“I learned about institutional power in that state. The Governor of the state was a Humphrey supporter (emphasis added). I’m driving all over Kentucky having tea and crumpets with the League of Women Voters in one town, talking about human redemption with a group of ministers in another town, college kids all over, and a few rural black supporters organized by the local small-town powerbroker who was usually the local mortician for the black community. So I’m driving all over the state doing these little things attempting to convince people to attend the caucuses and vote for McGovern delegates.

“The caucuses were scheduled over a noon hour, which in retrospect should have been an instruction to me (emphasis added again). In all events, I’m in whatever town I ended up in on the day of the caucus. I’m sitting at the meeting, hopeful that all my delegate attendance work pays off, when at noon state trucks, road graders, caterpillars, and an assortment of other kinds of state vehicles pull up. Hundreds of men walked into the caucus meeting. Everyone is asked to vote for their choice of delegates. All of these Kentucky state employees vote for a Humphrey slate. The McGovern people are flat wiped off the map in terms of electing any delegates. This takes about 20 minutes. As soon as it’s over the state employees climbed back into their vehicles and drove away for their lunch.

“That was that.”

August 2009: About Ted Kennedy

“No social thing that I felt was good happened in the past 40 years without Ted’s hand.”

February 2009: About Howard Zinn

“You lived a good life Howard and you taught me I was just taking up space, if I wasn’t trying to help people who needed it.”

Ardell worked on a couple of American Indian Movement cases in the 1970’s. In one of them he got Russell Means and Dickie Poor Bear acquitted by Judge Van Sickle. Here’s a bit of what he wrote about that in May, 2007.

“At night I usually sat in the bar with the A.I.M. guys. One night Dickie came up to me and asked for a 'chillum' which was Lakota for cigarette. I was smoking Marlboro Reds at the time. I gave him one. He said it was the only good trade the Indian ever made with the White Man–a liver for a lung.

“One day I was driving Russell back to the hotel after the trial. We passed concrete after concrete after concrete and fast food place after fast food place and one synthetic human construction after another. He looked at me and said 'And you think we should leave the reservation for this?'

“The last I heard about Poor Bear he was a cop in Porcupine South Dakota. Russell Means has gone on to an acting career. By the way he could never remember my name during the trial, so he simply called me ‘Little Custer.’”

April 2007: Working for Senator Burdick

“Decades ago I worked for United States Senator Quentin Burdick of North Dakota one summer in his Washington, DC, office. Many years before 9/11 and the Homeland Security Act. One of the “Summers of Love.”

“Back then the Capitol Hill cops were still under the patronage of Congress. The lawns around all of the Congressional office buildings were filled with young college kids with growing hair whose fathers were connected to a Congressman or Senator so they had a summer job wearing a cheesy police shirt, badge and shorts. One of the kids with a southern accent whose every day workplace was around a fountain was a guy you could always buy pot from.

“At this time the appointment of Postmasters in every city in America was under the patronage control of the United States Senate. A bill was introduced to take this power away from the United States Senate and put selection of Postmasters under Federal Civil Service control.

“The bill was sent to a subcommittee of which Senator Burdick was chairman. I went with the Senator for the floor action. During the floor debate Senator Burdick gave about as passionate of a speech as he was capable of giving, in which he railed against the bill for taking away Postmaster appointment patronage from the United States Senate.

“I remember Senator Burdick as being about the only vote against making the Postmasters job part of the Civil Service System.

“After the vote I rode back from the Senate floor with Senator Burdick to the office. We rode on the little trolley that connected the Capitol to the Old Senate Office Building. During the ride Burdick expressed satisfaction that at least we got the Postmaster appointments out of our hair. I expressed surprise, saying that it was big patronage power giving United States Senators the right to appoint Postmasters in every town in the United States, which I thought was a big deal.

“We rode on silently for a little while, then he said ‘Yeah, for each appointment, I made 1 friend and 10 enemies.’”

February 2008: Another McGovern Campaign Story

“In 1971, I went to work for the George McGovern for President campaign. Charlie Tighe persuaded me to manage the McGovern campaign in North Dakota for the fall election even though it would be a hopeless effort without much money. We did it because of our feelings about the war in Vietnam. Charles was the Lieutenant Governor during one of Bill Guy’s terms as Governor. He and his wife Dorothy did not have children and he loaned (gave) me money for college. I will always appreciate them for doing that.

“Phil Jackson was still playing for the New York Knicks at this time. He came to North Dakota for a few days to stump for McGovern. Dr. Levine had loaned the campaign the use of his old Volkswagen. His wife Beryl later went to law school and became a North Dakota Supreme Court judge. The Volkswagen’s battery did not work at first so we had to push and pop the clutch in order to start it. My friend Scott pushed and I drove to the Fargo airport to pick up Phil. We squished him in the back seat and drove him to the hotel. Along the way, he didn’t like what was on the radio so without moving, he reached the dashboard radio from the back seat and changed the station. I will always remember his arm slinking forward from the backseat between the front seats and grabbing the tuner knob on the radio. We got him some good smoke so he was happy even though he sometimes had to push.”

Basin Electric and Jim Grahl:

“I had my share of disagreements with Jim Grahl during my political activism and environmentalism in the early 70’s, to be sure. I was in his office one morning. He was complaining and expressing frustration. He told me I and other environmentalists made him feel like he was a track high hurdler. He said every time the bar is set up and he gets over it, we raise the bar. I told him he wants Basin Electric to receive special treatment from us because it’s a co-op but, sulfur dioxide coming out of a smokestack owned by a private utility or one owned by a public cooperative is just as toxic and dangerous to public health. He kicked me out of his office. As I was walking out, I went by the desk of his secretary, who was the sister of a friend of mine. She said that Jim didn’t do well with meetings held in the morning and said I should schedule any further meetings for afternoons.” (Note: This is a very short excerpt from a great piece on Basin Electric and the power cooperatives in North Dakota.)

Well, that’s just a sample of Ardell’s excellent writing. Ardell wrote Some Of The Best Things Ever Written About North Dakota. To read more---lots more—go to his blog, which will remain on the Internet for a while so folks can read more by—and about—this remarkable man.

Requiescant In Pace, my friend. We will miss you.

Who Owns YOUR Post Office?

Where I grew up, in Hettinger in southwestern North Dakota, the big brick Post Office building sat at the most prominent corner in town, the intersection of Main Street and U.S. Highway 12. Still does. A federal building, owned now by either the United States Government or the U.S. Postal Service—I’m not sure which. When I moved away, first to Dickinson, then Mandan, then Bismarck, it was the same. The Post office was, well, the Post Office. So I never gave much thought to who actually owned the Post Office.

Until lately, when there has been much talk of closing small town Post Offices (and not just small towns—in Bismarck there’s talk of closing the downtown Post Office in the Federal Building and moving it to the mail handling facility out on the Expressway, just down the road from the scrap iron yard) and stories are being written about towns like Grassy Butte and Mandaree losing their Post Offices.

Which got me to thinking, “What’s going to happen to all those Post Office buildings in all those small towns when they close them up?” Which led to “Hey, who owns those buildings, anyway?” So I started checking. What I found was pretty interesting.

Lawrence Magdovitz, a country lawyer in Clarksville, Mississippi, owns 850 post offices around the United States. John Hamilton, a dentist in Williston, North Dakota owns fewer than that, maybe a couple hundred, but still a lot. The two of them, plus a few other wise investors and a host of small town non-profits and local development organizations, probably own more post offices than the United States Postal Service. Huh?

That’s right. Because all over America, especially in small towns, the Postal Service has to rent property to house its United States Post Offices. In most small towns in North Dakota, as well as across the country, the Postal Service does not own a building. Instead it rents a building from a local owner.

Now the Postal Service is in big financial trouble. They’re running short of cash and may not be able to make some loan payments. The “B” word is floating in and out of news stories. Not that we will ever allow the Postal Service to go bankrupt, but some serious things are going to have to happen to keep our mail coming. You’ve read the stories. The Postal Service is looking at 3,500 small town Post Offices in the United States—76 of them in North Dakota—to see if they can justify keeping them open.

There’s a very nice man in Minneapolis named Pete Nowacki who gets paid to answer questions about the process here in the Midwest. He has a thankless job, but he does it with seriousness and aplomb. You can hear the sympathy in his voice for the people of Fingal, North Dakota, who might be told in the next few months that their post office is going away.

Pete told me recently that the process is underway across the state to look at the business being done at each of those 76 post offices, which will result in a determination of their future status. Each is getting personal attention. Each town will have public meetings at which community citizens can come forward and provide their input. Each town will go through a series of 30 and 60 day waiting periods while more public comments are sought. This is not a process being taken lightly by the Postal Service.

In the end, each of the 76 Post Offices being studied (out of a total of slightly more than 300 in the state) will receive an “Open” or “Close” determination. For those who receive the “Close” notice, another building will sit empty in another small North Dakota town. And it’s those buildings that caught my attention this fall. Because in North Dakota, the Postal Service rents about 295 of them. It rents all 76 of the buildings on the “hit list.” That’s 76 small-town landlords who are threatened with losing their occupants. Well, not quite that many, because a few folks own more than one. But not many. And in most of those towns, it’s going to be pretty tough to find someone who wants to rent—or buy—a used Post Office.

So I asked Pete who owns these Post Office buildings. He was kind enough to send me to a website that lists the owners of every Post Office in America, except those owned by the Government or the Postal Service itself.

Well, I learned, here in North Dakota, Dr. John Hamilton, the Williston dentist, owns 44 of them. Eleven of them, in Dodge, Fingal, Golden Valley, Kathryn, McGregor, Meckinock, Pettibone, Roseglen, Rutland, Sharton and Zap, are on the Postal Service’s list to be studied for closure. Magdovitz, the Mississippi Lawyer, owns 27 in North Dakota, with 10 threatened with closure.

I called Dr. Hamilton a few times, left messages and voice mails for him at his home, his office and on his cell phone, but he apparently doesn’t want to talk to me about this, because he never called back. Lawyer Magdovitz did, though, and it was a real treat. I could tell from our phone conversation he's just a good old boy, a country lawyer who one day happened to end up owning a building in which a Post Office was located, and saw the benefits of that, and, in 1980, started buying up buildings around the country which housed Post Offices. According to a little website for his real estate company, the Magdovitz Group, he owns 850 Post Office buildings in 42 states and Puerto Rico. Our phone conversation was brief, because he had someone on hold on another line, but I learned that he just started buying these buildings because they seemed like a good investment, and “because I don’t have any trouble collecting my rent.” He’s got a little staff that manages them for him, a toll-free maintenance hotline which local Postmasters can call when they have a problem with the building, a slug of local contractors who do the maintenance work, and a few Realtors who keep an eye out for properties about to come on the market for him. There are, apparently, Realtors who specialize in this kind of thing. I asked him what he thought about this plan to close a lot of the Post Offices in buildings he owns. He seemed unconcerned. “I’ve got good leases, and if they close, they have to pay the rent until the lease runs out,” he said. Most of the leases are for five years, he said.

Hamilton’s Post Office buildings are mostly in the Midwest. If the Postal Service follows through on its plan, he’ll lose about 25 per cent of his renters in North Dakota, and it looks like a similar number in other states.

While it’s fair to say that Hamilton and Magdovitz, and others like them, are making a nice tidy profit on their investments, it doesn’t appear that they are gouging the Postal Service. In Hamilton’s buildings, rents average about $8 per square foot per year, which doesn’t seem out of line for a small town in North Dakota. In Alexander, ND, for example, the Postal Service rents a 1,269 square foot building for $11,000 a year, at $8.67 per square foot. Over in Fingal, one of the Post Offices selected for closing, Hamilton gets $5,040 a year for a 502 square foot space, about 10 bucks a square foot. In Mekinock, the Post Office only occupies 355 square feet, and the Postal Service pays Hamilton $2,220 a year, or $6.25 per square foot. Looking for one you might recognize? Well, Hamilton owns that nice little brick building next to the Rough Riders Hotel in Medora, and rents it to the Postal Service for $8.12 per square foot per year, a total of $7,500 a year. Now that’s a bargain, I’d say. In all, Hamilton collects a little over $285,000 a year in rent from his North Dakota Post Offices. The Post Offices he owns on the target list are among the smallest in the state, so if all 11 Post Offices on the target list owned by Hamilton in North Dakota are closed, he stands to lose about $54,000 a year in rent. And probably without a lot of hope of finding a new tenant in most of those towns. I don’t know how good his leases are, or if he was as savvy as the country lawyer from Mississippi who claims his are “locked in.”

So who else owns the Post Offices targeted for closure in North Dakota? Well, the city governments of Granville, Hannaford, and Clifford, all towns whose Post Offices are on the hit list, own the Post Offices in their towns. Some other towns on the list: the Antler Rural Fire Department owns the Antler Post Office; in Cogswell, it’s the Cogswell Community Association; in Forest River, the Forest River Improvement Association; in Benedict, the American Legion Post. Those local owners are renting pretty cheap, it appears, to try to maintain postal services in their towns. But there is a sprinkling of out-of-state owners on the closure list too. In Egeland, the building is owned by the Nationwide Real Estate Company of Chicago, Illinois; in Columbus, it’s the Columbus Enterprise Group, of Portsmouth, Rhode Island; and in Bisbee, the Inga Westmeier Irrevocable Trust, of Sun City, Arizona. There are also owners of Post Offices on the target list here from Clinton, NC, Vail, CO, Indianapolis, IN, Fremont, CA, Tyler, TX, Woodbury, MN, Billings, MT, Memphis, TN, Lincoln, NE and Spearfish, SD and a smattering of local owners.

I’m not sure how the rents are negotiated, but the highest amounts per square foot I found being charged by private owners in North Dakota were Theodore and Shirley Mees getting $15.33 per square foot per year in Colfax, and the $14.74 per square foot Gordon Kessel was getting for his space in Amidon. The cheapest rent I found was just $360 per year---a nickel a square foot--that Dale Knutson was charging for his building over in Buchanan.

And so the process begins. Meetings have been held so far in Grassy Butte and Mandaree, that I know of, and decisions on closing them could come early next year. If you want to look at the list of who owns all the Post Offices in North Dakota—to see if one of your neighbors is a savvy investor, or to see who owns YOUR Post Office—you can go to the Postal Service’s website, here. It’s actually kind of a fun list, if you’re nosy like me. Meanwhile, here’s the list of Post Offices in North Dakota owned by Dr. Hamilton, with the annual rent being charged and the amount per square foot. The towns with an * are the ones being studied for closure.

Alexander: $11,000 ($8.67)

Ambrose: $4,500 ($6.82)

Belfield: $10,080 ($7.00)

Binford: $7,200, ($12.00)

Coleharbor: $5,616 ($6.61)

*Dodge: $3,600 ($8.22)

Dunn Center: $5,400 ($9.02)

Douglas: $4,390 (6.96)

Elgin: $9,828 ($7.00)

*Fingal: $5,040 ($10.04)

Fordville: $7,481 ($6.50)

Gladstone: $5,650 ($6.52)

Glenfield: $6,732 ($7.51)

*Golden Valley: $9,360 ($7.49)

Hurdsfield: $5,980 ($6.50)

*Kathryn: $6,000 ($7.95)

Keene: $2,800 ($6.41)

Killdeer: $8,035 ($6.22)

Lawton: $4,160 ($8.00)

Makoti: $6,216 (8.00)

Manning : $4,575 ($7.50)

McHenry: $6,000 ($6.52)

*McGregor: $4,380 ($6.52)

Medina: $5,160 ($5.64)

Medora : $7,500 ($8.12)

*Mekinock: $2,220 ($6.25)

Montpelier: $4,400 ($5.83)

New Town: $25,020 ($9.00)

*Pettibone: $4,404 ($7.00)

Pisek: $4,000 ($8.11)

Plaza: $7,164 ($8.00)

Reeder: $8,160 ($8.50)

*Roseglen: $3,600 ($7.50)

*Rutland: $4,933 ($6.50)

Sarles: $4,404 ($7.00)

*Sharon: $5,550 ($8.75)

Sheyenne: $7,894 ($7.15)

Stanton: $14,100 ($10.36)

Verona: $5,434 ($6.50)

Walhalla: $10,800 ($7.50)

Westhope: $10,500 ($7.87)

Ypsilanti: $4,500 ($7.99)

*Zap: $5,220 ($7.99)