In North Dakota, when the politicians are writing budgets, they aren’t spending money they have. They’re spending money revenue forecasts predict they’ll have. The lawmakers and various executive branch leaders are, as I write this, down in Bismarck beginning the work of hashing out how to appropriate a two-year budget that will exceed $14 billion…
Shocker: After Lawmakers Shut Them Down, BreatheND Gave Employees a Massive Golden Parachute
The Center for Tobacco Prevention and Control – you know them from their preachy, ubiquitous advertising as “BreatheND” – was an anti-tobacco state agency shut down by lawmakers earlier this year. Shut down because, as I wrote back in February, the agency wasn’t so much a public health initiative but a jobs program for political…
Elections, Not Political Deal Making, Should Earn Democrats Control of Committees
North Dakota Democrats hold just 22 seats out of 141 in the state Legislature. Because of this, during the regular legislative session, Democrats chair no committees. In fact, they don’t really have enough elected members of the Legislature to even cover all committee assignments. That’s as it should be. If Democrats want to control committees…
Is the Fight to Keep BreatheND About Public Health or Big Salaries for Bureaucrats?
North Dakota needs to find ways to save money. In his final budget address to the Legislature in December former Governor Jack Dalrymple proposed eliminating the Center for Tobacco Prevention and Control. You know them as BreatheND, purveyors of those obnoxious and pervasive anti-smoking ads. Yesterday Governor Doug Burgum proposed his own tweaks to Dalrymple’s…
Credit The Legislature, Not UND, For Protecting Fraternity Students
“UND deserves great credit for choosing not to launch its own investigation of the Lambda Chi Alpha fraternity,” writes the Grand Forks Herald editorial board today. “In making that choice, the university accepted conclusions made by the local and university police, made a judgment for a fraternity over a reported member of an historically oppressed minority group…
State Lawmaker: Student Due Process Bill Likely Protected Fraternity From Overzealous Administration
Elsewhere on SAB today University of North Dakota student Joe Price, who is also the current president of that school’s chapter of the Lambda Chi Alpha fraternity, writes about what he and his fraternity brothers experienced when they were falsely accused of a “hate crime” by a homosexual man. His descriptions are harrowing. “Local media jumped…
House Majority Leader Al Carlson Makes Himself Look Petty
North Dakota is a thoroughly Republican state, and it’s pretty much always been that way. Since North Dakota gained statehood in 1889 Democrats have controlled the state House for a grand total of just four years, and the state Senate for just ten years. Of course, partisan definitions get a little fuzzy in North Dakota’s…
Video: North Dakota Senate Says No To Income Tax Cuts
If you want to understand how concerned state lawmakers are with falling tax revenues thanks to lagging oil production, tracking the path of the income tax issues is a good way to illustrate it. The process started in the state House with one proposal calling for the elimination of the income tax, an $820 million…
Senate Approves Some Tough Budget Medicine For The ND University System
In yet another sign of just how far the North Dakota University System has fallen in the eyes of lawmakers the state Senate today largely backed the House version of HB1003, the university system budget. SAB readers will remember that when the House passed this budget the reductions in funding growth from Governor Jack Dalrymple’s…
Student Body President: UND Tried To Hide Tuition Hikes From Legislature
If there is one area of policy that causes more rancor in the increasingly cold relationship between the Legislature and the North Dakota University System it is tuition. Many of the actions lawmakers have taken in recent years, up to and including an effort to take the control over tuition away from the universities, is…