Legislative Report: April 17, 2023

It’s day 61. We continue to work through all the bills that have been heard in committee. Of the 397 bills introduced in the Senate, we still have 38 to take action on in our chamber, and the House has 81.

This week the conference committee process began. As the House looks at Senate bills and the Senate looks at House bills, if there were any changes on either side, a conference committee could be formed to air out those differences. There are three members from the House Committee and three members from the Senate Committee. Usually compromise is reached relatively quickly, but sometimes numerous meetings are necessary. The most difficult ones relate to spending; they almost always take multiple meetings.

Regarding the budget, we are still around $900 million towards the negative in balancing the budget. Many spending ideas will need to be narrowed down before we leave, and we have to balance the budget to adjourn.

One of the ideas that is still moving forward is to provide $60 million to help develop more natural gas for our rural areas. This number is somewhat lower than we started with, but it takes a different approach in helping to incentivize more natural gas buildout in our state. There is still hope that a natural gas pipeline could be built to Grand Forks and possibly a trunkline down Highway 52 to serve those many communities. Not sure what the final bill will look like.

Until next time.