(upbeat music) - Hello and welcome to Prairie Pulse.

Well, we're proud today to have as our guest on the show the governor of the great state of North Dakota, Doug Burgum.

Governor Burgum, thanks for joining us today.

- Well, thank you, John.

Grateful to be with you and grateful for all the great work that Prairie Public does and grateful for all your viewers that support public television.

- Well, thank you, sir.

As we get started, we do this with everybody.

Tell the folks a little bit about yourself and your background.

- Well, that's simple.

I grew up near here, Arthur, North Dakota, and loved growing up on the prairie.

My grandparents started the grain elevator in Arthur.

So that was the family business, still is, celebrating 115 years of that business from 1906 till today.

And from there, went to NDSU, then went to graduate school at Stanford.

My dad had passed away when I was a freshman in high school, ended up in 1983, literally taking a loan out against the 160 acres I had.

So I literally bet the farm to provide the seed capital for a little software company called Great Plains.

And after 14 years later, it was an overnight success story and went on a great time as a public company.

Got acquired by Microsoft, stayed there for seven years, left Microsoft and was back here in Fargo and started a couple more companies.

Kilbourne Group focused on saving historic buildings in downtown and Arthur Ventures, which was focused on investing in passionate, young software companies.

And did that until 2016 when I ran for office for the first time.

- Well, yeah, the first time really, I guess, in politics, wasn't it then?

- It probably shows sometimes, too.

- So we're here today.

Maybe mainly to focus on different subjects, but the recent special session that you had and some other issues.

But let's discuss what passed, I guess, last session starting with the $350 income tax credit for North Dakotans.

Can you tell us about that?

- This was a, a great piece of legislation because North Dakota, because we've been working closely with the legislature because we've done fiscally conservative budgeting, and because we kept our economy open and growing during the pandemic, we finished this last year at the end of June with a $1.1 billion surplus, if you will, ahead of what we had projected in the ending balance for the end of the year.

About 400 million of that was unspoken for, and so we proposed and worked with the legislature to pass legislation, to provide a credit.

So about close to 500,000 North Dakotans will get income tax relief.

About 300,000 filers that are filing a single get to the $350 a credit and filing jointly it's up to $700 for a married couple filing jointly.

But really felt this is important to put dollars back in the pockets of hard-working North Dakotans that kept on working during the pandemic.

And so that's for two years, that credit.

For 2021 and 2022.

So this year, if you're working and you had income tax in North Dakota, if it's less than $350, it's gonna be zero, you'll pay zero tax this year.

And if it was over that, you'll get that credit on your tax bill.

- Well, you talked a little bit about the better than forecast ending fund balance.

Can you go in a little bit more detail why was that the case?

- Well, it was a number of factors.

One is, of course you have to, if it's a forecast, if you start out with a conservative forecast, that helps you come in with revenues higher than forecast.

Secondly, we very wisely last year, when we had the first wave of coronavirus relief funds, the CRF funds that came into the state, some states had to use that to cover budget shortfalls.

We didn't have a budget shortfall.

So we were able to use those according to the federal guidelines, to actually pay for state expenses, pay for highway patrol salaries, pay for correction salaries, pay for other things related to the health pandemic.

And so with that, we essentially accumulated the savings, which then helped us that plus, again, sales tax and other tax revenues coming in ahead of forecast produced this second largest surplus in the history of the state, 1.1 billion.

And we were able to take about 210 million of that and turn that into tax savings for North Dakotans.

- Yeah, sure.

What about vaccine mandates?

There was a bill passed restricting mandates.

What's the bill about and why is it passed?

I know there's been some things in the courts in other states already, but can you talk about ours?

- Oh, sure.

And I'm talking about the federal ones first, there was three attempts by the Biden administration to mandate vaccines.

One was for private companies greater than a hundred employees.

The second one had to do with the centers for Medicaid and Medicare, which was a mandate for health workers.

And the third one had to do with federal contractors.

As of this week, all three of those have been shot down in the federal courts.

And as a state, we believe it was an overreach, the federal government to be trying to mandate vaccines.

We do believe that vaccines are the best defense against COVID and we support those.

But in our state, federal government telling people what to do probably creates the opposite result in terms of vaccine hesitancy.

And so we're strongly opposed to those.

And we supported the attorney general in his work to fight those and those are going down.

The state legislature during the special session did pass a bill in North Dakota, which then would ban state government or local governments from putting vaccine mandates on their local or state employees.

But it continues to allow businesses, private businesses, whatever industry they're in, if they choose to want to have that for their employees, that's up to the business to be able to do that as long as they provide the appropriate exceptions for medical, religious, moral, philosophical, and other ways to avoid that.

'Cause it's, again, I think the right way to achieve the health outcomes for our general population is through education and for people to really understand.

And I would just add that even, as of yesterday, there was 60 people in ICU at Sanford between Fargo and Bismark.

One of our many hospitals and health organizations that are working very hard across our state to serve all of our people, but of the 60 people in ICU yesterday in North Dakota, 58 of them were un-vaccinated.

And so again, vaccinations can save lives and keep you from serious health outcomes.

- Okay, so I think I heard you say in all that, do you believe president Biden's mandate for companies over a hundred will be thrown out in the courts?

- Yes.

- So you think that will hold up and continue then?

Well, let's talk about another bill that was talked about and passed.

Banning the teaching of critical race theory.

First off, with that in North Dakota schools.

Can you tell us in your words, what is critical race theory?

- Well, critical race theory has been around since the 1960s, but I'd say that in the usage today, it's just become a lightning rod for a lot of things.

And so the bill that was actually passed was fairly straightforward, which had basically said that local, we have 175 local school districts and that the local school district school boards can decide what's taught in their schools and what they should teach should be fact-based.

And that's, again, very simple, the bill's about two paragraphs long, available online for people to read.

And I think it supports the principle that we believe in North Dakota, is that parents should be the primary arbiters of kids' education.

Those parents are represented through the local school boards and local school boards can drive those decisions.

- Okay.

What about the bill that excludes social security benefits and income tax?

- Well, that's one of my favorite ones that got passed during the special session, which is in addition to the tax relief that we talked about earlier, 350 for individuals and $700 for couples filing jointly.

In addition to that, permanently, we've eliminated the North Dakota income tax on social security benefits for seniors.

So there's about 20,000 seniors in North Dakota that were paying income tax on their social security benefits.

And this isn't right when they've already paid tax on that a couple of times to actually create their social security account before it gets paid out.

So we're pleased that we've joined a number of other states that have eliminated that completely.

And we hope that that'll help people continue living in North Dakota and not have to move to someplace else to avoid their social security taxes being taxed or social security benefits as being taxed.

- As a citizen, thank you.

Let's discuss another measure.

Well, you've talked about this a little bit, the 1.1 billion that you received in federal aid for coronavirus, and you talked about a little bit.

Let's go into more detail about what else is being funded in that, because of that package.

- We had a billion last year, which again, the coronavirus relief funds, which was administered a year ago.

In the special session there was about 1.1 billion again that came from the, what we call the ARPA or the American Relief Act.

And so with the ARPA funds, those dollars went to help support infrastructure, education, healthcare, a number of great projects.

And these were things that are gonna help citizens today.

And they're gonna help for generations to come.

There's about $423 million of that funding was appropriated last spring by the legislature that was anticipating federal funds.

So the first traunch of the billion, if you will, went towards stuff that had already been appropriated, the special session then really took a focus on the remaining 700 million.

And again, that was spread across a number of things, but some key infrastructure projects.

One of those included $150 million as a match for what may be a billion dollar, west to east natural gas pipeline, North Dakota is a huge oil producer.

As people know we're also becoming even a much larger natural gas producer, but that natural gas was being shipped out of state and wasn't available for industry or communities to use here.

And because of that announcement, the timing of that announcement in the special session helped land a $750 million project.

Largest value added ag project in the history of Grand Forks County.

A corn wet-milling plant is gonna be coming to Grand Forks County.

And part of the reason it's coming is they know that natural gas infrastructure is coming across the state, otherwise they were gonna select a site in Iowa and use North Dakota (mumbles) and gas in Iowa because they had a site next to a natural gas line down there.

And they'd been using Iowa corn and North Dakota natural gas with this piece of infrastructure, they're gonna use North Dakota corn and North Dakota natural gas and that's great for all citizens.

- You kind of talked around it here, there you go.

There's gonna be a pipeline to carry that natural gas from the state's oil fields to the eastern part of the state.

Can you tell us a little more about that?

- We have a number of pipelines in our state that take our natural gas and they just ship it out of here.

And heads down, heads to Chicago.

It heads down to Kansas, it heads to the Gulf Coast and we have an opportunity to use more of that natural gas here.

And whether it's providing the heat for a process like the corn wet-milling plant that's coming to Grand Forks or whether the new announced ADM soybean crush plant in Jamestown, which was announced early this year for those industrial purposes.

But it can also go to communities.

It also, natural gas, of course, if it's processed, can be turned into fertilizer, turned into propane and we don't have enough propane in our state.

We produce all this gas, we ship it out and then we ship propane back when we need to dry grain in the fall.

We ship natural gas out, they turn it into anhydrous ammonia, and we have to ship it back for our farmers to use that fertilizer.

So we just have to do more value added to our energy products.

And then that allows us to do more value added to our ag products.

That creates jobs, that helps our tax base, diversifies our economy and makes North Dakota farmers and producers less dependent on some of these international price wars that we get caught up in.

If we can be taking some of those products, whether it's natural gas or soybeans or corn and adding more value to them right here.

- When you meet with other governors across the country, are they envious of North Dakota?

What kind of conversations do y'all have?

- Well, I think it's a great time to be a North Dakotan and we have so much to be grateful for, in part, because we've just been blessed with the riches, whether it's our natural resources, the amount of clean water we have, the clean air we have, the incredible soil we have, and the geology that we have, that's produced all this oil and gas.

And then now in that same geology, we have an opportunity to do carbon storage.

We can do carbon sequestration, and we have the ability to store all of the nation's CO2 for the next 50 years if people could get it here.

252 billion tons stored 7,000 feet underground in a 300 foot band of sandstone.

And that's driving a lot of investment.

There's over $25 billion of identified projects that are interested in coming to North Dakota because of the natural resources we have, because of our ability to be able to do carbon storage here.

When you talk to other governors and they see that our businesses are open, our kids are in school.

We've got a surplus in revenues versus a deficit.

Our rainy day fund, we never had to touch it during the pandemic, $750 million legacy fund, which most states don't have is now topping $8 billion.

The balance sheet in North Dakota has never been stronger.

Our financial position has never been better.

And the opportunities we have for the future have never been more challenged.

And I'd say, but the one thing that we do have a challenge, like every state is workforce, because there's more jobs available in this country than there are people willing or able or trained to step up to them.

And another reason why in the special session, we put a lot of dollars towards workforce and we put a lot of dollars towards career academies, which is $80 million towards career academies, which will be built across the state and in partnership with local school districts and with local businesses to work on setting our young people up for successful careers in all the amazing jobs that are coming in this new digital era in North Dakota.

- Let's turn to another subject that came up this year.

Redistricting, how about that?

And what ended up happening in the special session?

- Well, every 10 years by law in our country, the state legislators in every state gather to figure out what are the districts for where local, that your state representatives and senators are gonna be elected from.

In North Dakota from 1930 to 2010, we had a situation in redistricting where our state was actually losing population.

We were the only state in the nation in 2005 that had fewer people in 2005 than we had in 1930.

So we were an unusual thing, but now we've reversed that trend in the last decade, North Dakota was the fourth fastest growing state in the nation by percentage.

A hundred thousand plus people added to our state and the redistricting process is making sure that every district, regardless of its geographic size, has about the same number of people.

So when you add, if you're gonna keep our 47 districts that we have in the state, keep the number at 47, you had 100,000 people, that means each district had to add about 2,000 people.

So each district went from about 14,500 to 16,500.

And in places like Cass County, where you added 35,000 people just in Cass County alone, that means you got to find a way to have two more districts in Cass County, that each have that 16,500 population.

So that redistrict process went on for over the past year run entirely by the legislature.

They were open, they were transparent.

They had meetings across the state in the end, the plan that they proposed passed by wide margins in both the senate and the house with support from both parties.

And so say kudos to the team that did that.

It's always a complex problem, but for me, the joyful part was that we are a state that was actually growing again.

And so it was nice to be solving that problem versus the shrinking problem.

- Okay.

You talked about unemployment here, but let's talk a little bit more about the state's unemployment rate and how certain businesses definitely are still struggling to find workers, probably a lot in the service industry.

- Yeah, absolutely.

We're fortunate that going into the pandemic, we were among the states that had the lowest unemployment and coming out of it, we're among the states that have the lowest unemployment, but we have so many jobs available in our state.

Officially at North Dakota Job Service, which is one place where we track them.

The job openings there are up about 40% versus pre-pandemic.

I think they're tracking about 18,000 job postings.

We know from talking to employers every day, if you're a hospital and you need a hundred nurses, you don't post a hundred nursing jobs, you post five, and then you just keep hiring.

So we know the 18,000 dramatically understates the number of actual positions that are open in the state.

So we conservatively estimate that it is over 30,000 jobs available in our state.

So that means if every high school senior and every college graduate, all took a job in North Dakota, we'd still have jobs open.

So we've got to keep working on job training, we have to work on making sure that we're attracting and continuing to get young families to move to our state.

Part of the good news of long-term is from 2010 to 2020, our state actually became younger.

And part of the reason it became younger was fewer young people were moving away.

So more families are here.

Our birth rate now is among the highest of any state in the nation.

So longterm, that's good for our demographics.

And it's great for grandparents that want to be close to their grandkids, that there's job opportunities here, but we have work to do in addition to those career academies we talked about, which are joint ventures between high schools, colleges, and the private sector.

And again, 80 million going to that, there'll be 80 million from the private sector matching those.

But in addition to that, we also passed legislation support childcare.

'Cause one of the ways to get more people back in the workforce is to make sure that we've got a robust child care infrastructure in our state and then also again, workforce training to get people skilled up, to take all these interesting new jobs that are being created here.

- Well, I know that certain businesses have closed down, others have opened, but do you believe worker shortage constitutes sort of a new normal in the post-pandemic world or not?

- Well, I think it was a new normal, pandemic or not.

We were starting to head into this sort of chronic workforce shortage, in part because we had great job creation in our nation.

Some of the best ever in recent years, but also demographically, baby boomers are retiring.

And baby boomers had high workforce participation.

Some of the younger generation, less likely to take a job and join a company and stay there for 40 years.

More mobility in the workforce, more mobility in terms of where they work and more ability for people in North Dakota to live here but they're working for a company that's in another state or in another state and other part of the country, maybe another part of the world.

And so the remote working also creates opportunities and challenges.

I think it creates opportunities for North Dakotans to have all kinds of careers working remotely, but living here in the communities they love and close to the amenities and the outdoors and the great things that we offer.

But it also creates challenges because somebody that can get maybe picked off from a job by a higher paying job someplace else, they don't have to leave their house, their community, their church, they can stay right here.

So competition for workforce is the new normal.

- Governor, hindsight, Monday morning quarterback.

However you want to look at it, looking back, are there things that could have been done differently?

From your vantage point, during the height of the pandemic.

- When you said Monday morning quarterbacking, I flinched a little bit 'cause I was hoping you weren't gonna ask me about Sunday's Viking's game.

That would be a little painful to talk about, talk about here.

But on the pandemic, we approached the pandemic very consistently, which is we want to be data-driven.

And we knew, and we approached it with a lot of curiosity in the sense that every day we were asking, even right up through today, asking more and more questions.

Today we're asking lots of questions about, what does the Omicron variant mean?

There's new information.

So you can't have a fixed point of view about the best approach because the challenge that we're up against is that the virus is ever changing.

And so we have to continue to stay fresh and stay curious.

We also have to have the humility that things that maybe we thought 18 months ago didn't turn out, now that we've got 18 months and data on hundreds of millions or billions of people from around the world that the data's changed.

And so we have to have the humility to say, "Hey, we have to keep modifying and improving and doing this one day at a time," but I just want to put a shout out through this whole thing.

I mean, our frontline healthcare workers, whether it's in public health or whether they work in our nursing homes, whether they work in our hospitals and our clinics, some of these folks have worked themselves to exhaustion.

Some of them, a few of them have actually lost their lives to this pandemic.

And we just have the greatest appreciation for them.

And of course our North Dakota National Guard was enormously helpful doing testing, whether it was in our nursing homes across the state, or whether it was in the vaccine rollout.

It turned out to be the largest national guard deployment in the history of the state, including the '97 flood, the 2009 floods, all the other things that have gone on in the past where the national guard has been always there, always ready and always there and supporting their neighbors.

But they were all so fantastic.

So big shout out to all of them, but grateful to the people that helped North Dakota come through this in the way we have.

- So governor, what message do you have to North Dakotans about getting vaccinated?

- Well, I think the message there is talk to your doctor, that's the person you trust for your medical advice.

And I think that visiting with your local physician is the right place, they've got all the information.

There's a reason why north of 95% of doctors in America are vaccinated, is because they understand the data.

They understand the risks.

And I say, just, talk to your doctor.

The good news is that for, we've got over 80% of the people 65 and older in North Dakota are vaccinated.

And that's a plus but it breaks my heart when I see the deaths reported.

Even on a day like today And I see so many people that are passing away that are un-vaccinated.

When that likely could have been prevented.

- Governor, got less than a minute left.

Just personal question.

What was the biggest adjustment you had to make from moving from the private to the public sector?

- Well, I think that politicians get asked that a lot, but the good news is that I had always been in operating roles.

I was a CEO, I was a chairman of the businesses that I was involved in over my 35 years in the business career.

And the governor's job is not, you're not a senator, you're not a representative, it's an operating role.

And we have a lot of operating things, whether it's from, getting the roads plowed, to people getting their driver's license online to game and fish, to operating our parks.

There are so many things that are just really about operations.

And one of the things that we, I certainly learned quickly was that the state had very much under invested in the digital infrastructure, the IT infrastructure needed to support and serve customers well, serve our citizens.

If you're a rancher in North Dakota, in Western North Dakota, and you're 90 minutes from a service center, you're buying stuff online and UPS is delivering it, and you're used to one click purchasing.

We've got long ways to go to make sure that we're giving our taxpayers the same customer experience that they're receiving from the private sector.

- All right, well, governor, if people want more information, where can they go?

- Well, that's easy.

governor.nd.gov is our website for our office.

Lots of great information out there with links to everything else.

But again, John, thanks for having us on and thanks for all the great work you and your team do to get great information out to the people in North Dakota.

- Thank you for what you do for North Dakota.

So thank you for joining us today.

Well, that's all we have on Prairie Pulse this week, and as always, thanks for watching.

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