A LOT of people read Monday’s post about the North Dakota Public Service Commission and the Davis Refinery on The Prairie Blog and Unheralded.Fish, and I had a number of requests asking how they could get involved. Here’s how: Write a letter.

Elected officials react to public contact. Letters, e-mails, phone calls and attendance at meetings all influence their actions. The next action by the PSC regarding the Davis Refinery will be to decide if it wants to assume jurisdiction over the refinery and have PSC staff conduct a formal site evaluation to determine if the proposed site for the refinery falls within the guidelines given the commission by section 49-22.1-02 of the North Dakota Century Code.

You can send a letter to each of the commissioners, Chairman Randy Christmann, Brian Kroshus and Julie Fedorchak, at 600 E. Boulevard, Dept. 408, Bismarck, ND 58505-0480. It doesn’t need to be a long letter. It just needs to ask them to conduct a site compatibility review of the proposed site for the Davis Refinery. Maybe, if they know enough of us are concerned about the refinery near Theodore Roosevelt National Park, they will agree to do that.

Or you can send them an e-mail. Their e-mail addresses are:

• jfedorchak@nd.gov
• rchristmann@nd.gov
• bkroshus@nd.gov

Also, you can watch the agenda for the commission meetings and attend the meeting at which commissioners will make their decision. It’s not on the agenda for today’s regular commission meeting because Meridian Energy has asked for more time to respond to something or other, but it could come up as soon as the Oct. 10 meeting. You can check the agenda at the PSC website. There’s nothing posted there for the Oct. 10 meeting yet, but it should be in a few days. Keep checking.

You can also check here for any new items being added to the docket for the Dakota Resource Council and the Environmental Law and Policy Center’s request for the PSC to assume jurisdiction.

Please get involved. We need to stop this thing.

Oh, and one more thing. I have repeatedly, on this blog and through personal correspondence, asked Gov. Doug Burgum to intervene on behalf of the state of North Dakota, to sit down with the head of Meridian and talk, CEO to CEO, about moving this thing away from the park. There’s no good reason this can’t be located 10 or 20 miles east. There’s already a small refinery and a huge rail transload facility between Dickinson and South Heart that would make an excellent location for this refinery.

So send a letter to the governor, just a short one, asking him to get involved. There’s nothing he can do formally to stop this from happening, but he can certainly appeal to Meridian’s better angels, if they have any, and help the company find a way to move this to a better location.

I swear, if he lets this thing get built next to Theodore Roosevelt National Park without at least trying to get it moved, I’m going to find a way to put up a billboard beside the refinery that says “Welcome to Doug Burgum’s Refinery.” And I know something about billboards.