Murphy’s Law Blog

Last week I was in Bismarck to cover interim committees (see #42 for Ag) and on Wednesday it was the first meeting for Natural Resources. Its directives for next year or so include: 1. Study whether state and local level regulation of high-level radioactive waste disposal is consistent with applicable federal regulations and to ensure ND has proper input into federal...

Early last week, the interim Agriculture Committee spent the morning listening to Karl Rockeman, director of water quality at the state Dept. of Health give a presentation on nutrient management. For this presentation, nutrient meant both nitrogen and phosphorous. Based on 2009 numbers, of our state’s 168 lakes and reservoirs, 47 were judged to be impaired or threatened due...

Right now, the Superintendent of Williston Public Schools is testifying in front of the ND Legislature’s Energy Development and Transmission Committee as they have traveled to the Bakken oil field for hearings. The committee wants to see what is happening with the money North Dakota has sent out to the West and Williston is their first stop. In months to come, the committee...

On July 25 the NDSGA held their first of two golf tournaments for 2017. This one was at the Jamestown Country Club on a beautiful day which had just a spit of rain at the beginning. Most of the growers were saying they would pay double golfing fees if the tournament was rained out as the reports from nearly everyone outside of the Red River Valley was hoping for moisture....

EPA Tour On the last Wednesday of June I joined eight members of the Environmental Protection Agency (7 from DC, one from the regional office in Denver), Rep. Mike Howe of Casselton, staffers and members of ND Corn, ND Grain Growers, ND Soybean Growers, Senator Heitkamp’s representative, Farmer’s Union rep and maybe a few others on a tour of the central region of the Red...

A Quick Canadian Trip Monday I drove up to Winnipeg against a north wind for the annual International Legislator’s Forum. This is a gathering which includes select lawmakers from Minnesota, South Dakota, North Dakota and Manitoba. Originally it was about managing flood waters but lately has expanded to transportation, sex trafficking, invasive species and other topics. The...

Last week we had an hour or so at the Clemens/Ericson farm outside of Wimbledon. The idea was to gather interested growers in the shop and discuss what happened in the ND Legislature concerning agricultural issues. We did have 10 or so producers show up at 8 in the morning and besides a short presentation from Scott Rising and me, it was mostly answering questions about a...

Okay, here it is one week after the session ended and there has been a change brought on by the Governor. He vetoed the $10,000 that was going to go to every township outside of the oil producing counties. You may recall that it was to arrive August 1st but for one year only and the money was to have come from the Strategic Investment and Improvements fund as well as the...

Today is the 77th Legislative Day of this session. There were at least 2 other days that everyone worked but were not counted due to a sleight of hand in technical parliamentary rules. In other words, it would be right up against the 80 day limit were if straightforward. Anyway, this looks like the last day. I just walked out on discussion of the last of 19 amendments that...

The SWC (State Water Commission budget, HB1020) was pretty much settled Monday in Conference Committee about 5 p.m. They need to approve the settled language after it is typed up by attorneys this morning. Rural Water was put in its own bucket or category of funding which presumably makes them happy. The big deal is that the Red River Water Supply Project appears to be on...

The bill that dealt with NDSU Research and Extension has been contentious in the area of the Extension Service Soil Conservation committee because the House saw an administrative position as too rich for the function. They removed $213,000 for that and the conference committee put back all but $21,788 of that just minutes ago this Friday afternoon. The Senate had taken out...

Township road money is a bone of contention in bill SB2013 which is the budget for Trust Lands. Oil country townships get 3 percent of the oil extraction tax in their county. Another 3 percent of the extraction tax is pooled from the nine biggest oil producing counties and then distributed per township in those counties depending on maintained miles. Of course, most...

Bills and the ideas that spawn them begin to pop up in unlikely places when legislative sessions get to the later stages such as we are now in. These are ideas championed by lawmakers who will not give up, the ones that keep watchers hoping and hopping. There are supposed standards for germane-ness, like that an item introduced as an amendment onto a budget bill should be...

The House killed SB2263 the other day. That was the Senate tiling bill. HB1390 is on the way to the governor and the tiling equipment should be ready to roll. Friday morning in the Conference Committee that deals with the DOT budget, an amendment was approved that deals with the highway maintenance sites that were to be consolidated. There are eight sections to the...

A big part of the whole scheme with making laws is relationships. Lawmaker to Lawmaker, Lobbyist to Lawmaker and Lobbyist to Lobbyist are amongst them. Throw in those from the Executive branch and staff and pretty soon there are a lot of people to know and get along with if one is determined to be friendly. Not all take that path, but generally it is acknowledged that one...

This is the week leading up to Easter and the Capitol natives are getting restless. It’s horse to the barn kind of stuff about wanting to go home. Everyone wants to know when we are getting out and no one knows. But enough of that and on to the budgets that matter to growers around our state. The DOT budget (2012) had their first conference committee this morning and...

Tiling bills look like they are about to be resolved as the chairman of the House Ag committee has decided to concur with the Senate treatment of HB1390. They will then kill SB2263 on the House floor. Amongst the major differences between 1390 and current law is that Water Resource District board members must undergo a course on water management each of their 3 year terms,...

This morning I sat in on the first conference committee of the session. Usually they last half an hour and this one went 10 minutes over before they agreed to try later. ANYWAY, it was a bill (HB1339, which I had not previously followed but probably should have) that came in which would have dropped the threshold percentage to appeal an assessed water project from 25...

Late on Friday afternoon in House Appropriations, a motion was made by Representative Streyle to eliminate any reference to SBARE, (State Board of Agricultural Research and Education) which is chaired by Mike Beltz of Hillsboro. SBARE was established by the Legislature in 1997 to be responsible for policy and budgeting for the ND Ag Experiment Station and later for NDSU...

You may recall that the last couple of sessions the Legislature “bought back” 12 percent of county budgets to take the pressure off of property taxes. Last session we worked hard to make it a bill that would fund the state mandated part of social services that are delivered by the counties. It failed even though the Governor was pushing it, so the buyback continued. This...