Housing prices, sales, and realty inquiries are increasing by double-digit percentages in some parts of the country. Spearfish honchos say part of the housing uptick in this fair city comes from North Dakota oilpatch workers buying and renting places within what passes as reasonable driving distance—300 miles—from the big economic action. Forgive me if I and my fellow $35K-per-year workers don't look all too eagerly on $80K-per-year Bakken oil workers competing with us for rental units.
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The local rumor mill has no basis for blaming the latest headline crime on the not-so-faraway oil boom, but our Belle Fourche neighbors are freaking out over a home robbery and rape last Tuesday:
Bill Mason, owner of the Buckstop on Fifth Avenue in Belle Fourche reported handgun, pepper spray and stun gun sales have gone up significantly this week.
"We're doing lots of medium and small handgun sales — packables and concealables. Thirty-eights and 9mms are going out the door very quickly," he said.
Buckstop received a shipment of pepper spray Thursday that sold out before it even made the shelves.
Lamphere reported concealed carry permit applications, which go through the Butte County Sheriff's Office, were 20 percent higher this week in comparison to the average week [Adam Hurlburt, "Belle on Alert," Black Hills Pioneer, 2012.04.14].
And here I thought everybody in Belle already had a gun.
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Whoever may be coming to town, Spearfish's leaders are working hard to make sure newcomers and visitors can find their way around town. The big "wayfinding" project has elicited the following sign options from design firm Merje:
...which designs use basic elements from signage Merje displays as part of its portfolio online, from work done for the Camden Waterfront in New Jersey.
The Spearfish City Council retained the Pennsylvania design firm back in January for $26,580. Price for building and installing the new signs remains to be determined.
Not that one should expect some extravagant design concept for clear, simple signs to tell folks where things are. But citizens may hope that $28,650 would also include sending a couple city guys with a ladder and a wrench to straighten out this sign at North and Rushmore for the Booth Hatchery:
I'm rather partial to the blue...
Wait, some clarification, please. Did they really spend $26k to get three thoroughly uninspired sign designs? Please tell me there's more to come for that amount..
I like the green one but "Downtown Spearfish" should be in the middle so the arrows go right left right.
Sounds like Downtown Spearfish is going to be a oil roughneck roadhouse festival before long. I just hope they don't come much farther south.
I'm not sure on the disposition of that money, Carter. Those three designs appear to have taken maybe an hour of pasting together elements from previous designs. Not too hard.
Grudz, you'd better hope those oil guys stay north... or I'm going to get priced out of this market and will have to move south. Then I'll end up being your next-door neighbor.
When do you folks think the boom will peak? I can sell my properties here at the top of the curve and then skedaddle to Texas before the bust takes place (and it will, my dear comrades, it will).
Wait, Stan: if the boom is going to surge south, we are nowhere near the peak. Belle Fourche and Spearfish will strain before peak sell time hits Lead-Deadwood.
How do I to get a 28 grand sign designing contract for my granddaughter? She'll be 4 next month.
Maybe offering to pay a years tuition at BHSU for a winning design from one of the students in the Art Department there would be a better use of the funds and come up with something a little more inspired.
Yeah, but Nick, we will only swing that deal for BHSU students if they promise to stay and design signs in South Dakota for five years after graduation.
LOL. You guys are only looking at the sign faces and the colors. Look at those nifty inrastrucure alternatives. The one on the right is especially clever with the one post in front and the other in back. The big bucks are in the details, boyz.
Which one did they choose, Cory? The one on the left seems the most "Spearfishy" to me, but it could be a touch to elegant for some of the cowboys up there.
The City Council is still looking over the designs and soliciting public input. Some folks in city government are really intense about Spearfish's signs.
Just guessing, but aren't there some design/ad firms in the Hills that are pretty good?
On behalf of Bill and the rest of the Black Hill marketing firms...what the heck was Spearfish thinking? Certainly they don't think that little of homegrown talent?
Of course, here in SD, experts are only good if they are from someplace else.
Bill, am I missing something on the branding aspect of these signs?
Jana. In the old days, Spearfish used to have a logo of a fish with a spear through it that, as a kid, I always thought was pretty cool. It made it pretty easy to know which town you were in at least.
Maybe those arrow on the signs are a spinoff of the spear? Now all they need is a little "fishier" looking typeface. I have some ideas, if they want to call me. LOL.
https://twitter.com/#!/cityofspearfish.
p.s. I especially like the way the artist drew the waves on the water in that old logo. Really nifty. ;^)
A little more serious (but not to much I hope) environmental design projects like this are kind of a specialty thing.
The primary function is to help people who don't already know where things are, find their way. So clarity becomes job #1.
The condensed, sans serif typeface chosen allows for a maximum of letters in a given space without having to change the point size. There really is a lot to it, typographically speaking, but branding-wise perhaps not so much, other than to pick an appropriate look that communicates well and to stick to it rigorously.
The key is to show people what directional signage in Spearfish looks like and if possible, to try to get others to conform to it.
No small task, and well worth the money.
Could just any Black Hills ad agency do it? No. Could our company? Yes, but it's not our core competency. They were probably smart to choose an expert who specializes in environmental graphics.
Note that the sign design is placed at the mouth of the Canyon at the intersection by the golf course: curious how that location was chosen.
Well that was refreshingly honest Bill.
Jana, I know. Shameful huh? What kind of an ad guy am I anyway? LOL.
Cory if you are planning on attending the Bakken Conference in Spearfish on May 1st, 2nd and 3rd I will see you there. It could be the tell all meeting of the year for you and for me.
Cory,
Think about this. If you gave up teaching for $35,000 and went to work in the Bakken Oil Fields you would make $80,000. It might be worth considering...
You would increase your pay substantially and would also likely make more than the average since you are very well educated and have strong leadership skills.
I could make a good deal more by going up there too, at least this year. But the Lord has called me to scribble, so scribble I shall.
Environmental graphics? BAH hogwash. Get a couple of guys with some big sturdy boards and paintbrushes out there and make signs. There is no science in making signs. And if there is, we don't want that kind of science in Spearfish or any other less high-brow part of South Dakota.
(I only tease my friend Bill so please don't send me another postcard.)
Stan, you and I could buy that coffee shack for sale next to the Chubby Chipmunk, turn it into a fully mobile lunch wagon, and haul it around the Bakken. We could strike it rich!
But seriously, Mike, what the heck would I do on the oilfield? I like driving skidsteer, but I'm far from a certified operator. It probably takes a burlier dude than I to crank those wrenches. And where the heck would my wife and daughter live? I'm not poor enough yet to spend a year of my life living away from my wife and daughter and making two four-hour drives across no-man's-land each week to see them on the weekend. (I met a guy this weekend who lives here in Spearfish but teaches in Marmarth, between Bowman and Baker on U.S. 12. He says housing that far south is too tight to find a decent place for himself and his wife. He thus drives three hours up on Sunday, lodges for the week while teaching, then drives back to his house here Friday night.)
"Environmental graphics"—interesting term... and great explanation of the basic design/font concepts! Thanks for the lesson, Bill!
Charlie, I'd love to blog the Bakken conference... but the conference is right in the middle of the school week! French conjugations call! (Ooo... but maybe I could convince my administration that I need to bring the kids over to translate the proceedings into French so we can extend South Dakota's oil and gas industry recruitment to French companies... now what's the French for hydrofracking, unsustainable, and ecological suicide?
But by gum, if you're here, we're doing supper or coffee or something one of those evenings. Bring your bicycle, and we'll ride up the canyon! :-D
"Booming oil production across a wide expanse of the Northern Plains is forcing law enforcement from the U.S. and Canada to gird for a spike in crimes ranging from drug trafficking and gun offenses to prostitution." @GFTribune.
Not even remotely like my idea of rewilding the West.
I somehow suspect we'll be hard-pressed to find South Dakota leaders who will pause to ask whether that oil money is worth all the trouble.