Murphy’s Law 2024 | #1 Property Tax Confusion Studied
This year has seen no Interim committee action with direct pertinence to your organization until this second week of February. Both the Taxation Committee and the Tax Relief Advisory Committee are meeting on back-to-back days. The Taxation Committee has to: Study the provision of a property tax exemption for elevators, warehouses, and other farm structures classified as...
Murphy’s Law 2023 | #37 Natural Gas and a Township Survey
In their December meeting, the Energy Development and Transmission Committee heard testimony from many quarters on the discussion surrounding natural gas. Their interim study involves getting natural gas to underserved/unserved communities in our state. There has been money set aside for a couple years now incentivizing pipeline companies to build across the northern tier...
Murphy’s Law 2023 – #36 Irrigation Update
Dani Quissell, as Executive Director of the North Dakota Irrigation Association (NDIA), recently provided the Legislative Interim Committee called Water Topics with a review of the state of irrigation in our state. We have about 300,000 irrigated acres with the potential for 28,000,000 to be irrigated, according to Quissell. She went on to say that estimate depends on how...
Murphy’s Law 2023 #35 – Flood Insurance and Foreign Ownership
In their meeting last week, the ND Interim Agriculture and Natural Resources committee discussed the fact that about 332 political subdivisions – mostly cities and counties- have signed up for National Flood Insurance Program. This makes them eligible for subsidized flood insurance. What was discussed and was new to many is that there are many more polysubs which have not...
Murphy’s Law 2023 #34 – Special Session
It took lawmakers two and one-half days to complete their task of passing the contents of one bill which was considered by the ND Supreme Court to be too inclusive of different topics. They broke it into 14 and a few would be of interest to our state’s farmers. One was a confirmation of the emergency snow clearing bill which was amended to allow some political...
Murphy’s Law 2023 | #33
Greater North Dakota Chamber Policy Summit
Recently, the GNDC held their day-long discussion on the burning issues affecting our state’s businesses. By far and for the last few years at least, the biggest of these is the workforce shortage. It was the focus of each of the four major panels; Attracting Investment Strategies, Tourism from a Policy Standpoint, Utilizing Immigration as a Workforce Solution and...