701-566-9300It is Friday and because the House had almost one hundred bills to act on, it was scheduled until 4:30 p.m. when they usually leave for the trip home around 2 p.m. I was ready to listen until the wee hours, but by golly, the powers that be hung it up at 2:02 p.m. anyway. TGIF, I guess. This morning, the full House Appropriations committee sent HB1431 out with a Do Pass Recommendation. This is the smaller-than-original-but-biggest-now bonding bill and it has the Ag Products Development Center/Northern Crops Institute still in it for $50 million! Now the hope is once on the House floor calendar, they will pass it over to the Senate.
HB1324 is yet another attempt to change Quick Take – a type of eminent domain used by public entities to make things like infrastructure work for the public good. Water Resource Districts use it for the farmer’s good in the form of building drains. Often contentious, people have complained enough so that in 2017, the Legislature added time and other rights for protesters to the procedure. So much so that we nicknamed it Medium Take. We had to defeated assaults on it in 2019 session (I typify the procedure of how the law deals those disaffected as a dispute resolution protocol) and it popped up again today and was heard in House Political Subdivisions. We stayed out of it this time as Cities, Airports and Counties came in to oppose. PolySubs took no action.
Also in water, Senate Agriculture officially voted a Do Pass for SB2208 as a study. For now, it has a committee of over 15 folks who will attempt during the interim to try to settle many water issues.
HB1431 is the tiling bill and it is undergoing some amendments. Both houses now have two weeks to pass their bills over to the other as the end of February is the two day break known as Crossover. That will be Legislative Day 37, so the second so-called half will have to be quite a bit shorter, and it usually is, because each house has killed some bills leaving less work.
You may recall that with about two weeks to go, the Legislature enters a third period in which changes to the bills which have passed both houses are reconciled in Conference Committees. Of the 80 days allowed, they would like to reserve a few because it is the once in a decade year for redistricting. Please look up your district reps and senator and email and or call them if you are not already familiar with them. Trust me – they will remember what you have to say.
