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Thursday, December 22, 2011 ■ Covering the Williston Basin ■ Volume 1, Issue 6


An old school American eatery


LAUREN DONOVAN/Tribune


Kim and Roxy’s Biscuits and BBQ diner near Killdeer stands out in a bright red coat of paint. The hay bales all around it are intended to block the worst of the winter snow and wind.


Roadside diner feeds masses, sparks nostalgia


By LAUREN DONOVAN Bismarck Tribune


KILLDEER — Jeff Robbins of Flori- da offers his belly as solid evidence that the food at Kim and Roxy’s Biscuits and BBQ is really good. “Do I look like you need any more


explanation?” he asked, polishing off the last few bites of a tasty-looking breakfast burrito, stuffed with scrambled egg and melted cheese. Besides Robbins’ good-humored belly


look soft and moist, having been spared that who-knows-how-long dehydrating, rubberizing time under a convenience store food warmer. This is real food, the real deal, served


out of a brightly painted food stand two miles west of Killdeer on U.S. Highway 200.


rub, the other surprising thing about the whole situation is the appearance of the scrambled eggs still on his plate. They


Life in a


four-bit room Oil driver, artist, uses driving time to imagine his next creation — 4


Resources oil well that had a fracture treatment blowout last year and is now part of an Environmental Protection Agency study to see if fracking contami- nates groundwater. A natural gas fl are announces that both gas and oil are now being pro-


Right across the road is the Denbury duced.


Roxy’s is located, is a water depot where tanker trucks fi ll up before heading out to a rig site, hauling millions of gallons of water needed for fracking an oil well. The water depot is operated by Larry


On the other side, where Kim and


Pavlenko, who’s leasing the land for the little red food stand. He made it his busi- ness to kindly surround the whole thing with a horseshoe of one-ton hay bales to keep the snow and wind at a reasonable distance and velocity. The windbreak will start to disappear,


unfortunately, when he starts feeding his cows in earnest.


Congress moves


toward standoff Social security payroll tax increase and pipeline decision on hold — 10


Continued on page 7


N.D. 1st, 4th in


By BRIAN GEHRING Bismarck Tribune


new credits to its growing resume when it comes to the economy. A recent Forbes magazine special re-


North Dakota can add a couple of


port ranked North Dakota fourth in the nation for business climate. And the state is fi rst in competitive


economic surveys


growth, according to Area Development Online, a labor market trend and region- al economic development Web-based publication. Kurt Badenhausen, a senior editor for


Forbes, compiled the magazine’s listing for its sixth annual look at states’ econo- mies. Utah was a repeat winner at No. 1,


Virginia was ranked second, North Car- olina third and Colorado fi fth. The survey ranked states’ economies


in six areas. Those areas and the state’s ranking are: business cost (North Dakota ranked 4th), labor supply (ranked 24th), regulatory environment (21), economic climate (4), growth prospects (11) and quality of life (21). North Dakota ranked fi fth in jobs


with a forecast fi ve-year growth rate of 2.6 percent, total employment of 392,000 and an unemployment rate of 3.5 per- cent, according to Forbes. In the Area Development Online piece, editor Joshua Wright used “shift


Continued on page 7 US auctions


offshore tracts First auction of offshore petroleum leases since oil spill disaster in 2010 — 11


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