Legislative Report: April 19, 2021

Appropriations is finishing up its committee and subcommittee work and should have all bills out by early next week. I have had several subcommittee meetings to bring recommendations to the full Appropriations committee and then to the Senate floor.

Senate Appropriations completed work on the bonding bill, which provides for infrastructure bonding and provides for over $680 million in authority for a variety of infrastructure bonded projects. We also completed work on the K-12 funding formula bill, along with the Department of Public Instruction budget, which contains the funding formula money. The funding formula bill has a 1% increase in per pupil payments for the next biennium. An amendment was approved to dedicate 70% of that new money for teacher compensation. We know the House will take that bill to the conference committee and I expect to serve on that conference committee.

We approved HB 1375, which is a tuition scholarship program for students taking dual credit courses while in high school. This program would allow high school students access to the state scholarship funds in order to help pay for the tuition for dual credit classes. Many of our high school students will benefit from this bill.

A few bills we voted on this week were HB 1129, which would provide for an income tax exclusion for social security benefits. This bill came with a Do Not Pass recommendation out of committee and appropriations, because the very people it is attempting to help most likely do not pay state income tax. This bill failed on a vote of 21 yes and 26 no.

HB 1191 is a bill I co-sponsored with Rep. Devlin. This bill would require reporting contributions for statewide and legislative elections. The bill would require multi-candidate political committees, who have dropped thousands of dollars into North Dakota elections/candidates, to have to report who they supported or opposed. This bill was supported by leadership from both parties but in the end, the Senate defeated this bill on a vote of 12 yes and 35 no votes. I was disappointed, because this takes transparency out of the election process and does not allow voters to see who is providing funding to either support or oppose candidates.

HB 1323, which is better known as the anti-mask bill, was voted on Wednesday in the Senate. An amendment was proposed and approved that made the bill a little better, but in the end, this bill removes the authority of the State Health Officer and any other elected official or agency head from declaring that masks should be worn to protect each other in case of another pandemic. This bill basically ties the hands of the State Health Officer, and that was my concern. However, for some comfort, this bill, as passed, does allow local political subdivisions, schools, businesses, etc., to impose a mask mandate. Also, this bill heads back to the House for their approval. They probably will not concur, so a conference committee will be appointed to continue to work on this issue.

HB 1358 was defeated this week. It would have used $20 million from the general fund to support an oil and gas tax revenue hedging fund to establish a committee to generate hedging strategies to offset any potential reductions to state oil and gas tax revenues. I opposed this bill, and, in the end, it was defeated. I don’t believe the N.D. government should be in the business of hedging your tax dollars.

Monday, we begin two floor sessions a day to vote on bills and resolutions. It sounds like we should be done by the April 23, but something may come along to change that date.