Black Hills Corp. and CEO David Emery deserve congratulations on the terrific economic news they delivered to Rapid City last week.

The regional energy firm is catapulting itself into the utility big leagues with its acquistion of gas utilities and an electric company in Nebraska, Iowa, Kansas and Colorado that are currently owned by the Kansas City, Mo.-based Aquila.

Calling the aquistions "truly transformational," Emery said BHC will grow from its current 137,000 customers to more than 753,000.

That kind of customer-base growth translates into job growth for the company, of course, doubling the size of its workforce to more than 2,000. It will also have a transforming effect on the local job market in Rapid City. BHC plans to hire as many as 175 new workers at its Rapid City headquarters.

The really exciting thing is that many of those new Rapid City jobs will be in professional areas that come with professional-sized paychecks: Administration, accounting, treasury, risk, insurance, information technology, customer service, human resources, environmental, legal, regulatory and operations. The pay range will be from $35,000 to more than $100,000 per year. The average will be $65,000 to $70,000 per year plus benefits worth about half of the salary.

It's rare for 175 career-level jobs to open up in a city this size and we celebrate it as the great economic news that it is. The growth at BHC can help transform Rapid City from a low-wage town, where the average annual income is less than $30,000, into a much more attractive place to work.

Dakota Roots, a new program by the state Department of Labor, could help BHC find just the right people for those jobs. The job search program matches qualified people with South Dakota connections with appropriate openings in state businesses. About 1,400 former South Dakotans have registered with Dakota Roots to date, many of them the young, college-educated people who are forced to leave South Dakota to find employment.

High-paying jobs with a great corporate citizen of Rapid City coupled with an innovative job search program to help fill them. Sounds like a good match to us.