Murphy’s Law Blog

December 17th was the final meeting for the new Transportation Coalition before the legislative session starts in less than three weeks. We heard from Senate Majority Leader Rich Wardner who presented slides explaining what he would like to do for infrastructure. Using bonding and leaving the General Fund alone, his proposal for using Legacy Fund earnings (not the...

This week saw an hour Zoom with testimony from two business leaders who have recently traversed our state and stressed that North Dakota’s #1 business issue is workforce shortage. It was the last time this coalition will meet before the session begins and the bill passed last time to help incentivize students to pick and pay for an education that would help them with...

Your NDSGA has been a part of the fairly new Workforce Development group out of the Greater North Dakota Chamber as they work to find solutions to our state’s need for workers. Today’s presenter was Katie Ralston who is the new leader of the Commerce Department’s Workforce Division and she explained in detail to the group what Commerce is attempting to do coming up in the...

There are only a few Legislative Interim committees still to officially end their studies and today marked the end of Agriculture and Transportation work. They covered three topics with the first being a pilot project for road trains whereby the committee okayed a bill draft that would continue to push for the establishment of a pilot project. Once this bill comes up for...

The most relevant part of Interim Taxation’s last interim meeting for Agriculture was about transportation. Several people testified on this topic including NDDOT Director Bill Panos and other DOT staff as well as Tim Horner and others from the Upper Great Plains Transportation Institute. NDDOT testified that we will suffer a dip in revenue from COVID-19 of around $21...

It had been since December of 2019 and in a different world when this Interim Legislative committee last met. Dealing with at least a few areas of interest to producers, here is the nitty gritty: SBARE Chair Mark Birdsall and NDSU Extension head Dr. Greg Lardy gave an update in which it was expressed that priority number one for the upcoming session is to hold onto the...

There is much more clarity when it comes to waste water/septic systems following recent hearings in Bismarck. Installers and regulators testified as well as counties. Everyone seems to want the state to set standards for how these systems are designed and installed and to license installers. Handling it would be the new split from the Health Dept. now titled Dept. of...

The ND Interim Legislative Commerce Committee met for the last time yesterday and covered several topics relevant to rural North Dakota and the Agricultural community. It was striking how much impact COVID-1919 has had on many of them – some positive, some negative. To begin, the ND University System testified to the progress of the ND Career Builders and Skilled Workforce...

Each year the Interim Energy Development and Transmission Committee visits the Grand Forks-based Energy and Environmental Research Center. This June it was virtual and our legislators were presented with some program updates. I listened in to see what might concern agriculture and there was plenty. One headache for farmers in the northern tier of counties is that there...

All Interim committees for our North Dakota Legislature have gone to meetings via phone, internet, etc. Not many have convened given the complexity and newness of the challenges bestowed upon us by the novel Coronavirus. While the Budget Section has met to vote on allowing (mostly) state agencies to spend money sent to us by the Federal government, monies directly given...

There have not been many assignments in February or March, but on the 12th I covered the very first Agricultural Conservation and Stewardship Roundtable followed by the Ag Coalition meeting in the ND Heritage Center. The first meeting was an attempt by the ND State Soil Conservation Districts to engage the representatives of commodity groups (the Ag Coalition) so as to not...

The recently formed Transportation Coalition met late last week and welcomed North Dakota’s new Department of Transportation Director, Bill Panos. He came from a similar position in Wyoming before our Governor tagged him a few months ago. Like most in the meeting, I had not heard him speak and shared the group’s unofficial opinion that his enthusiasm and background...

The Natural Resources Legislative Interim committee met again to discuss how to get the pilot program for testing out an app regarding posting lands for hunting up and running. The three counties have volunteered and been chosen for their geographical locations as well as their diversification in terms of how developed their GIS systems are. GIS stands for Geographical...

Back in December, the North Dakota Soybean Growers Association board was briefed on efforts by the Interim Legislative committee known as Commerce in regards to the drastically shrinking numbers of rural North Dakota grocery stores. This week the Commerce committee met to further discuss and search for solutions. Testifiers spoke of reasons for the decline which includes...