(upbeat music) - Hello and welcome to Prairie Pulse.

You know, coming up a little bit later in the show, we'll see an artifact spotlight on the history of the Fargo Moorhead Bridges.

But first, joining me now is our guest, Rudie Martinson, from the North Dakota Hospitality Association.

Rudie, thanks for joining us today.

- Thank you for having me.

- Rudie, as we get started, tell the folks a little bit about yourself and maybe your background.

- Sure, absolutely.

I am originally from here in North Dakota.

Born in Williston in the western part of the state.

Grew up in Bismarck, and then made it out here to east Fargo, in order to attend NDSU, and that's kind of where I landed ever since then.

And then the Hospitality Association is a statewide organization, so I still manage to make it around to the rest of the state and see our many members and customers around the entirety of the state.

- Well, there you go.

You mentioned, yeah, so tell me a little bit more.

What is the North Dakota Hospitality Association, and what does it do?

- Sure.

We are the trade association that represents the restaurant, lodging, and retail beverage sectors of North Dakota's tourism industry.

So the association has existed in one form or another since the mid-50's.

At one time, it was three separate organizations.

We've now merged all into one over the last couple of decades, but again, we represent the interests of businesses that operate within that restaurant or lodging or bar and liquor store sector of the industry.

- Okay.

Well, we asked you here today partly, and mostly to discuss the impact of COVID that's had on bars, restaurants, and hotels, along with staffing issues.

Can you just start us off with discussing the impact COVID has had on these industries?

- Sure, absolutely.

Happy to do so.

I don't think, everyone sort of intuitively knows that the hospitality industry, in particular, was especially impacted by COVID, both locally here within our state and around the country.

And in particular, that's at least in part because of the fact that we're one of the few industries, and the only one or one of the very few in North Dakota, anyway, that was directly impacted by executive order.

And by that, I mean, not every industry was told that you can't operate in the way that you traditionally have.

You need to curtail your operations or restrict your hours or stop doing in-house dining, for example.

So in a lot of cases, it was a very much overnight way that we had to restructure how we do business in terms of, you're told that, you know, on a Thursday afternoon that come Monday you're not gonna be allowed to have in-serve dining anymore, for example.

So now, we as an industry had to figure out, on a very very rapid basis, and this isn't just in North Dakota, it's around the country that this happened, mostly at the state level, but had to figure out, okay, so how do we continue to operate our business in a carryout only type of environment, for example, and how do we, in places that are based upon in-house dining, who've maybe never done carryout before, how do we restructure our business to continue to cater to our customers and maintain our ability to earn their loyalty and manage to still do that under this new business environment.

And so, that led into a lot of creative thinking on the part of industry workers, owners, operators.

It led to some interesting supply chain issues.

One of the things.

And that's now become sort of standard language throughout every industry, right?

Everyone has issues recruiting help or workers, their workforce.

Everyone has issues with their supply chain.

We were sort of in many ways the canaries in the coal mine for that sort of leading edge of that problem.

I remember at one point when the whole world had sort of gone takeout only overnight, I had an operator call me and say, "You know, we're gonna have problems sourcing enough takeout containers."

And my initial reaction to that particular person was well, here are some suppliers you can potentially call, and she said to me, "No, I don't mean we in our business, I mean we as an industry are gonna have a problem sourcing takeout containers."

So on the front end, it was a lot of unique challenges to overcome in that way, and then on the backend, in the recovery from that initial situation, I hope that we are.

Maybe it's taking a little longer than we all had hoped, but I'd like to think that we are in a period of recovery or return to normalcy here, but there's a lot of adapting back to the original.

What does it feel like to go back to the original business model?

- Well, and you're right.

We hope we're moving in the right direction, and definitely has lasted longer than anybody thought it would in the initial wave.

But in the past year or so, how many restaurants, bars, do you think have closed in the state?

- You know, I don't have an exact number on that.

There have been, because every market's different, and it's kind of a moving target to hit, when a restaurant closes, is it because of the pandemic or is it because of other factors that may have been involved in the marketplace or in their internal operations or what have you, but there have been some estimates nationwide, and again, other states were closed or curtailed in their operations for longer than North Dakota was in many cases, although any period of saying you have to completely change how you operate your business is painful, obviously.

There are places that are designed to run on 80 to 90 percent occupancy that are getting 20 percent of their previous business when they had to go takeout only.

I want to circle back to hotels on that particular point as well, but before I do that, I've seen estimates nationwide that it could be as many as one in three restaurants will not reopen after the COVID-19 pandemic.

So in North Dakota, I think we're faring slightly better than that, but I don't have a specific number.

- Well, but currently, it seems like many establishments, they're having a hard time staying open with their formerly regular hours, probably due to staffing, I don't know.

Can you talk about that a little bit?

- Well, some of it is- That has been an interesting aspect of the recovery from the whole COVID-19 situation is that staffing has been one particularly acute problem, and that's not just in the hospitality industry.

It's medical industry, any industry you talk about.

My wife is a nurse, so I also think of immediately, of the nursing shortage that North Dakota has been dealing with for a long time, but has only been made more acute recently.

Of course, the staffing problem is one that jumps immediately to mind.

I referenced supply chain problems earlier, so even when you do go into your favorite restaurant that you've been waiting to go to for the last year and a half or maybe you've been there several times over that period of time, but you may notice that the menu is a little more curtailed in some cases than it was before, and again, we're as an industry, working towards bringing that back to normalcy as well, but yeah, I mean there are a lot of folks who are having to operate on limited hours or closing two days a week when they used to only be closed one day a week, or you know, the 24 hour restaurant is a thing that has, is a lot less common than it was previous to this situation.

So all of that, you know again, we're working very diligently to return things to normal, but there is some catching up that needs to take place after a major impact event like we've had.

- Absolutely, but to talk about the staffing shortage, in a lot of industries, of course we're concentrating on bars, restaurants, hotels.

- [Rudie] Sure.

- What's fueling that staffing shortage, do you think?

- I think there's a number of different things, and there are a number of different things by the way, that the industry is doing in order to kind of incentivize people to come back, and you know I've heard everything from increasing wages, they're adding benefits that weren't there before, to other tertiary perks that aren't necessarily your standard benefits, your paid time off, your healthcare, your that kind of thing, but other perks that can be offered uniquely through a hospitality perspective.

So we are working to sort of change that paradigm and incentivize people to come back and work for us again.

The one other thing I wanted to touch on was the hotel side of the hospitality industry because I think that people think hospitality, and they intuitively think, bars, restaurants, that kind of thing, and bars and restaurants have taken some of the focus from the public conversation about this specifically because they were the segment of the industry that was specifically told, "You have to change your operation or you have to close or you have to do, you have to do things differently."

The hotel aspect of the industry is a unique case on that because that didn't particularly happen with the hotel industry, you know, there was never an executive order that says hotels have to do x thing differently.

What we did instead was we, as a society, stopped doing all the things that drive the hotel business, and by that I mean, business travel was curtailed.

We stopped having concerts and sporting events, and the Canadian border was closed.

All of those things that drive revenue into the hotel industry stopped happening for a long period of time, and so, it wasn't so much that hotels were told "You can't operate anymore," it's that everything else that brings money into that type of business was canceled.

- Well actually, you mentioned Canadian, can you talk about not having Canadian visitors with the border closed, how it impacted that hospitality industry in North Dakota and sort of northwest Minnesota?

- Absolutely, and that's tremendously impactful for the travel and tourism industry in North Dakota, which obviously hospitality is a key part, but, excuse me, I had seen a statistic from the North Dakota Department of Tourism late last year, and it's obviously the partnership between governments, the Canadian border is beginning to reopen now, which helps to alleviate that problem, but you still have well over a year where it was closed.

You know, hundreds of thousands of individual trips into North Dakota that just aren't happening.

It's felt across all kinds of communities.

I mean, the folks in Minot talk about it, the folks in Grand Forks talk about it.

Even down here in Fargo, the impact is significantly felt, and we miss our Canadian travelers and hope that they get back into the habit of visiting here in North Dakota again very soon.

- So what are you hearing?

What's the status on the border opening up?

- You know I talked with someone from the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation last week about this, and it's beginning to reopen to leisure travel.

There is, obviously some proof of vaccination requirements that come along with that for Canadians that enter the U.S. and particularly after they've been in the U.S. and are trying to reenter Canada.

Obviously, I think everyone's doing their best to accommodate the new rules and the newer world we live in, and we just hope that again, our doors are open in the hospitality industry, and we look forward to seeing our Canadian folks come back down, and we'll do everything that we can to ensure that you have a safe and happy and productive trip down in North Dakota.

- Absolutely.

Does the vaccination writ in North Dakota, does it concern you at all in terms of how it can impact businesses?

- I think everyone needs to make their own personal decision for themselves and their families in terms of their unique individual medical circumstances.

Again, businesses also have that consideration to take, and we have said this throughout the entire pandemic is that within the hospitality industry, whether it's lodging, whether it's food service, whether it's beverage service, you know, we're already an industry that is, spends a lot of time and energy and resources on not making people sick, right?

If you're serving food, if you're serving drinks, if you're doing any of those things, already you have devoted a great deal of energy into keeping people safe and healthy, and that has only increased.

That diligence has only increased throughout the pandemic, so we feel pretty good about our ability to keep our guests and customers safe and healthy.

- What's your message to a consumer who might go out for a drive at eight PM and stop at their favorite drive-through or whatever, and of course it's not open?

- Sure.

Sure.

I have a lot of empathy for that consumer.

I've been that consumer, in fact.

The core message is bear with us, right?

We're working on it.

We're working on getting back to normal just as everyone is, and we'll get there again just as soon as we can, and just bear with us, and we did receive a great deal of support and loyalty, and we appreciate it from our long-term customers and even new customers that developed during the pandemic.

When operations were different.

When things were mostly takeout or carryout-based, or delivery-based.

There's a lot of loyalty that went on, and a lot of places even managed to find some new customers during that time period.

And so, again appreciate that, and bear with us as we continue to try and return all of our lives to normal.

- You know, what is the traffic like in bars and restaurants?

Are people coming back, dining out more, is it slowly?

And does it differ between the bigger cities and the rural areas?

- Sure.

Obviously, every individual marketplace is different.

Anecdotally, and I don't have any data to back this up, but anecdotally, from what I hear, is that the rural areas where it's the hometown place and the bar and restaurant are often the same business in some of those smaller towns, and it's a tight knit community, and folks are comfortable with each other, things seem to be returning largely to normal in those circumstances.

In bigger cities, there are some folks who maintain some hesitancy about it, and I understand that.

And that's again, why we continue to provide and maintain, I think some of those, delivery, the third party food delivery services, the carryout options or curbside to go that developed for a lot of places during the pandemic that maybe hadn't necessarily done that before.

I don't think those are going away anytime in the near future.

I think that we have learned a new business model.

There's a new customer segment that we can cater to in that way, and for those folks that maybe are still a little hesitant, they're worried about going back to a dine-in environment, we understand that.

We continue to be committed to providing those options and part of the new normal might just be places that hadn't necessarily used that as part of their business model in the past will do so going forward.

- Yeah, can you talk just a little bit about the financial incentives that were available during COVID, and are they still available?

- Sure.

So, without going into too much boring detail, there's a couple of different categories of that.

There's basically federal programs that came through on that topic, and that's the major ones that you've heard of, the Paycheck Protection Plan, or PPP as people know it, EIDL, which are emergency impact disaster loans through the Small Business Administration.

A lot of those were just business or small business oriented aid programs, generally speaking, and not specific to the hospitality industry.

Now, the federal government did put some money into what they call the Restaurant Recovery Fund, and that was again, specific to the restaurant industry, less related to the lodging and retail beverage side of the industry, but there was some money that came through through that.

And also, at the state level, there are a number of different programs that the state did, mostly using federal funds that came down as part of the federal Cares Act dollars, the Coronavirus Impact Relief, and so between those, there were some low interest loan programs through the Bank of North Dakota, but there are some granting programs, and then specifically there were a couple of rounds of what they called HERG, which was Hospitality Economic Resiliency Grant, so there was some funding that was dedicated specifically to the hospitality industry out of recognition of the fact that the hospitality industry was most heavily impacted by an executive order that said you have to do business differently.

And we are appreciative of those efforts, I mean, obviously, the damage is not yet fully healed within the industry, which is why we ask our consumers to continue supporting us, our customers, our neighbors, our friends to continue supporting us as an industry, and also the government as well, to recognize the fact that the impact of this industry is not done yet.

It's still gonna require some recovery time and some recovery dollars.

- Well that said, thinking out long term, how optimistic are you for the hospitality industry?

- Well, I'm very optimistic.

I think that we will recover and come back, potentially even stronger than we had in the past or before.

The question is how long of a timeline is it gonna be, you know, and so yeah, that's why we continue to seek the support of our friends and neighbors and of our friends in the policy-making parts of the government and all of that.

But yes, I think we will build back and stronger, stronger than we were in the past.

It's just gonna take a lot of sweat equity.

- Well and you're right.

Looking back, do you think the restrictions on bars and restaurants were appropriate in North Dakota?

Of course, hindsight's easy.

- Sure.

Although on this particular question, hindsight's not as easy as it is in a lot of other cases, but I know that Governor Burgum has made the point, and I think he's right about it, that in terms of responses that other states took to the pandemic in that situation, I think North Dakota did it's level best to be the least restrictive that it could possibly be, and we do appreciate that.

I think that we were willing at the time to do whatever it took to preserve public safety, but we are fortunate of the fact that that restriction was as short as it could possibly be.

- Sure, well we're about out of time, so if people do want more information, where can they go?

- We can be reached at nd, as in North Dakota, hospitality.com or reach out to me directly at 701-527-7692.

- Rudie, thanks so much for joining us.

- Thank you.

- Stay tuned for more.

(gentle music) In this Artifact Spotlight, Mark Peihl of the Historical and Cultural Society of Clay County in Moorhead, Minnesota informs us about the history behind two of the bridges that connected Fargo and Moorhead.

- Hi, I'm Mark Peihl.

I'm the archivist for the Historical and Cultural Society of Clay County, and we're here in the Hjemkomst Center of Moorhead, Minnesota, and this is my Artifact Spotlight.

Well, today I want to talk about bridges here in Fargo Moorhead.

It always takes about 10 or 15 years to get a bridge built between Fargo and Moorhead, it always has.

The same was true back in the old days, you've got two cities, two states, the federal government is involved, and people argue about who's gonna build, and who's gonna pay for 'em and maintain 'em.

Same true in the 19th century.

In 1872, the first bridge crossed the river.

The railroad, of course.

The Northern Pacific Railway was built.

And for about 10 years after that, the two cities, Fargo and Moorhead, argued about whether to build a wagon bridge on the north side of the downtowns or one on the south side of the downtowns.

And finally in 1883, they compromised, instead of building one decent bridge, they build two lousy bridges, tried to save money that way, it didn't pay off.

I've got some artifacts out here that were remnants from the south bridge, the south bridge is where the main avenue bridge is today between Fargo and Moorhead.

The second bridge was called the North Bridge, and that ran from what's now NP Avenue in Fargo to the northeast up to where American Crystal Sugar has her downtown headquarters, just south of the Hjemkomst Center where we are.

And by the turn of the century, both of these bridges were really falling apart and had to get rebuilt.

They weren't built for modern traffic.

Eventually they became so dangerous, actually to cross it, even pedestrians were blocked from crossing the bridges.

The Main Avenue bridge where these came from, the south bridge, was torn down in 1936.

A fellow named A.W.

Bauman, who was actually the president of our historical society back in those days, managed to get a hold of the parts from the Main Avenue bridge, and donated them to our museum in 1936.

And the first artifact is this bridge plaque right here, and it says "Milwaukee Bridge and Ironworks."

That was the company that was in charge of building the south bridge, the Main Avenue bridge, the date on it is 1883.

There were two of these plaques, one at either end of the bridge, high up above the bridge.

And in 1883, steamboats were still operating out of Fargo Moorhead.

The steamboats had pretty tall smokestacks, and the army corps of engineers required that all of the bridges be able to turn out of the way in order to allow these steamboats to pass.

1883 was a big bridge building near both the north and the south bridge were built, and both railroad bridges, the Northern Pacific and the Great Northern Railway bridges were rebuilt in those years, 1883 and 1884, so all of them had to turn to allow a steamboat to pass.

These improvements cost each of them 10,000 dollars.

In 1883 dollars, that's a lot of money today.

And the way that they operated, each of the bridges was built on a round central pier, and the main structure of the bridge actually literally balanced on top of that round concrete structure, and at the very top of that structure was basically a lazy Susan, a turntable.

And there was mechanism for turning that bridge.

When a steamboat wanted to cross the path of the bridge, in order to get the bridge out of the way, a local policeman or a bridge tender would come out with a key, and we have one here.

This one is from the Main Avenue bridge right here.

It has a socket on the far end over here.

This would have a wooden bar going across the top of it, so it's kind of T-shaped.

And a bridge tender or local policeman would insert this key, the bottom end of that key, down through a hole in the deck and engage this gear right here, and this pinion gear right here would engage with a rat gear that ran around the very top of the bridge footing, and the bridge tender would turn this key, and that would in turn, turn this pinion gear, and it would run around the rat gear and very slowly, that bridge would turn out of it's way to allow the steamboat to pass.

And when they were done, they would turn it back, of course, the wagons could continue going across the bridge.

When they were first built and first installed, the Moorhead Daily News reported that they were so well-balanced, that a small child would have no trouble turning the bridge, but I've never seen a photograph of a Fargo Moorhead bridge turned to allow a steamboat to pass.

They were only used for just a few years.

They were installed in 1883 1884, by the spring of 1888, railroads had put the steamboats out of business.

It was so much faster and so much easier to move materials and people by rail than it was by the steamboat.

The steamboats couldn't compete.

In the spring of 1888, they all moved to Grand Forks, and they never really came back to Fargo Moorhead, so these things were probably only used a few dozen times, and these artifacts are just a couple of the items, thousands and thousands of artifacts, that we have here at the Historical and Cultural Society of Clay County.

In some cases, in our storage areas, some pieces out on display, and come on down.

Check 'em out.

We'd love to have you visit our museum.

(upbeat music) - Well, that's all we have this week on Prairie Pulse.

And as always, thanks for watching.

(gentle music) - [Woman] Funded by the Minnesota Arts and Cultural Heritage fund with money from the vote of the people of Minnesota on November 4th, 2008.

And by the members of Prairie Public.