Murphy’s Law Blog

Hey, Happy New Year! The committee came together to discuss blending a couple of Century Code (CC) chapters that contain discrepancies. That portion of the task before them seems to be moving along fine and will probably be a stand-alone bill next year. Then they launched into a wide ranging conversation which some thought went way “into the weeds,” to...

The program started out with an explanation of the water permitting process from Chris Bader from the Department of Water Resources. He apologized up front for saying “State Water Commission,”  the agency he has worked for his entire career because, as mentioned in a couple previous blogs, it is now called the Department of Water...

This committee first met in the summer and this, their second meeting, took half a day. There were only three outside presenters, the first being Senator Cramer who joined via computer. He spoke of WOTUS issues and was happy that EPA folks had come out to visit North Dakota to learn firsthand what is happening. Then the new and first director of the Department of Water...

Today was unique, the Chairman of the Water Topics committee, Rep. Jim Schmidt, had invited all nine of the State Water Commissioners to sit with the 20 legislative committee members for their daylong meeting. While I rarely attend this committee, it made sense to because of so many people present and the agenda’s wide-ranging presentations. Especially, in the light of it...

In my father’s opinion, it was nuts to take out a loan to go on vacation. I agree with that and it was the analogy used yesterday when discussing the water budget and funding with the Legislature’s water guru, Representative Jim Schmidt. He would like to build a reserve fund for water so that projects can use cash. If I understood him correctly, he would use...

The first Agriculture and Energy summit was held at the Fargo Radisson on Tuesday, November 9 in the afternoon. Hosted by the Commerce Department, it was taking a stab at getting players together looking for synergies seeing as, and I quote the ND Commerce Dept.’s Josh Teigen – “70% of North Dakota’s GDP is related to oil and soil.” Gotta nice ring to it, does it...

One could say that any infrastructure improvement is a positive for Agricultural value added projects let alone farming itself. Be it a crush plant, the recently discussed wet corn plant, a livestock facility or whatever, they need some or all of the water, roads, pipelines, rail and power mix. During this special session we have been working to bring many of these...

This special session is still going but I left Bismarck on Thursday because those issues central to agriculture were resolved and to what I see as a satisfactory end. From ARPA dollars that this session was to distribute, at least $200 million must be used for highway roads and bridges. $24.6 million is designated for grants to counties for their bridge projects based on...

The State Board of Agricultural Research and Education (SBARE) has been around for almost 25 years and has several stated goals you can read on their website, but it is about Ag research and getting those results applied to help producers and their communities. They hold listening sessions for several days around the state to help them prioritize needs so that they can...

The Senate and House Appropriations committees spent Tuesday, Wednesday and part of Thursday this week in Bismarck to draft a bill which is intended to spend the approximately $1.1 billion dollars which came to North Dakota via the American Rescue Plan Act. $317 million of this money had been appropriated earlier this spring in the regular session with the rest waiting...

The regular session ended half a year ago and this Interim Committee just met for the first time. They are tasked with a couple of studies and to receive the usual reports. One of the studies is of the North Dakota Beef Commission, including its operations and the selection of its commission members. There was a kerfuffle during the last session about this but the bill...

Last year, the NDSGA joined with other agriculture groups, contractors, cities, counties and townships, engineering firms, the Greater ND Chamber (GNDC), ND Motor Carriers and others to form the ND Transportation Coalition. The goal was to work together for bettering our state’s transportation infrastructure by advocating for sustainable/dependable funding. We found some...

She was in an orange t-shirt leaning up against the hotel wall and dragging on a cigarette when she asked “Are you with those farmers in there?” I told her I was and she said “Thank you for what you do. You feed us.” The event was the North Dakota Livestock Alliance’s (NDLA) PIG, Diversifying for Profitability gathering at the Fargo Holiday Inn this week. With Minnesota...

This past Friday, NDSU renamed its greenhouse complex after Jack Dalrymple. It was to honor the support he gave as a longtime legislator, Lieutenant Governor and Governor towards agricultural research throughout that institution. I write briefly about this today to let you know that the benefits of Ag research were touted often to those assembled. Jack himself stated that...

This committee usually goes to the Energy and Environmental Research Center (EERC) every other year or so to see what they have come up with. The EERC is housed on the University of North Dakota campus in Grand Forks and has been in existence since 1951. They have done a lot lately on coal, oil and gas research to further the technologies in the Bakken. Successes in those...

Legislative Management – a select group of legislators – selected four major topics to be studied for this newly invented interim committee. Topic 1 – Was to merge a couple sections of the Century Code which are largely complimentary but contain enough differences so that it would be wise to get it together. One was written in 1955 and the other in 1981. Both...

This year the title was Water, Roads and Agriculture Working Together and it was held in Grand Forks. Much of the full day was spent educating Water Resource District (WRD) managers about what happened in this previous legislative session. Senator Mark Weber was the lone legislator in attendance as the water related bills were discussed along with the bonding and...

When I last wrote you the first part of May, I mentioned $10 million for townships. Now that the math has been done ($10 million divided by the number of Congressional Townships) it comes out to slightly over $6,000 per township. That money will be released by the State Treasurer on August 1, 2021. Also, your township will be receiving $214 per mile of road maintained. No...

On Friday, April 30, shortly after midnight, Senator Holmberg finished explaining HB1015 – the OMB budget bill with the many riders attached. It passed unanimously and the 67th session ended. While a lot was going on these past two days, to me the most significant measure for rural ND and Agriculture was millions of dollars for township roads. As Holmberg quipped in his...

This morning, Day 74 of the 67th Legislative session, saw subsurface water management (tiling) pass unanimously on the Senate floor. The issue that had held it up was notification to water boards on projects less than 80 acres. The conference committee settled on a two year period of trying it out – called a Sunset provision – so that next session, if they liked the data...