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

Coming up a little bit later in the show, we'll talk with Republican House Appropriations Chair, Don Vigesaa, from Cooperstown.

But first joining me now is House Minority Leader, Josh Boschee.

Josh, thanks for joining us today.

- Great to be here.

- Well, as we get started, we always ask, tell the folks a little bit about yourself and your background.

- Yeah.

Well, first of all, I grew up in Minot, but Fargo is home.

I represent North Fargo and downtown Fargo in the state legislature.

Just wrapped up my 10th year in the legislature and, you know, sell real estate when I'm not running back and forth from Bismarck and enjoy living in North Dakota and everything that comes with that.

- Yeah, we were talking coming on, I don't know how you sell real estate while you're in session, but anyway, that's another story I guess for another time.

Talk a bit in general, I guess, about the session from the Democratics perspective.

How did y'all feel about it?

- Yeah, well, first of all, it was a session that started out with opportunity.

We had some record surpluses because of significant revenue increases and then carryover from pandemic era funding from the federal government.

So opportunities were ahead.

But, you know, I think as most North Dakotans woke up every day and shook their head at the different headlines of bills that they, that we were being considered.

It was a frustrating session.

There was a lot of distraction bills, a lot of conversations around things that impacted a small population of North Dakotans.

So we had to get through that in order to get the final package done.

And in the end, while we were able to defeat the number of the bad bills, you know, the governor vetoed a number of them, a few slipped through, we still were able to get a good, solid budget and hopefully a strong pathway for North Dakota moving forward.

- Yeah.

Well, was your party, were they happy with the tax plan, how it ultimately was adopted or not?

- Yeah, the tax plan was something our caucus we deliberated quite a bit about because there was things in there that we liked and there were things in there that we didn't like.

You know, at the beginning of session, there was a variety of issues, and the senate primarily took the position around property tax relief.

The house was very adamant about income tax relief, but I think as most viewers and listeners understand, not many people are concerned about their income taxes in North Dakota.

So our caucus was really focused on property tax and, you know, the final package that got passed with strong support from our caucus in the end includes property tax relief.

And starting in 2024, everyone's primary residence is gonna have a $500 credit from the state of North Dakota on there on top of expanding homestead tax credit for those that are 65 and older to be able to help reduce that impact of increasing property taxes.

The bulk of the bill did include income taxes, but because of the pressure our caucus put on the majority party, we were able to see that where it no longer was taking off the top income tiers.

That was the original plan that actually took off the bottom tier.

So more lower and middle income North Dakotans got relief over those of us at the top of the bracket.

- Okay.

Turn to what about state employee retirement plans?

What happened there and what are your thoughts on this?

- Yeah, I'm glad you asked because the defined benefit, defined contribution conversation was certainly something I think most North Dakotas aren't paying attention to, but probably has one of the most significant impacts to not only this upcoming budget, but years to come.

House majority leader, Mike Lefor, was adamant about making sure that we closed the defined benefit plan, also known as a pension for state employees because of the, I'll call it the sins of the previous legislators, legislatures in which we did not fully fund that plan and put it on a track of solvency, it does have a 1.9 billion underfunded status.

And so there was two different plans presented.

Majority Leader Mike Lefor brought forward a plan that would close the defined benefit plan and move all public employees starting January 1st, 2025 that are new hires over to a defined contribution, or a 401k plan.

I was a co-sponsor of Senator Sean Cleary out of Bismarck's plan, which would've said, we need to fund the defined benefit, keep it open, let's provide people a choice so they can choose whether they want to go into a 401k or a pension plan when they're hired.

And then of course, both plans had significant cash infusions from some of our excess revenues that we have on hand.

Ultimately, the decision was made in a very narrow margin to close the defined benefit plan.

And starting in 2025 new employees in the state system, as well as political subdivisions will no longer have the option of a pension.

They'll all be 401k retirement plans.

- Yeah.

Okay.

What ultimately happened with the plan to build a new prison for women near Mandan?

- Yeah, so it's, that's been a conversation for probably nearly a decade in terms of how do we make sure that our female people who are incarcerated have better access to healthcare services and are closer to their families?

So that is actually moving forward.

We move forward with, it was over $100 million investment that was in the Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation budget.

So folks in Mandan will start seeing south of their dirt moving and we'll start moving folks in once that building is planned and finalized.

A lot of the discussion on the house floor was about the expense of the building, which certainly it is, but with, you know, that over $100 million benchmark, people think, well what kind of prison is it gonna be?

And it's really built off of some of the European model in which, you know, prisons are places where people need to live and we wanna rehabilitate them.

So it's not as much of it being just a giant facility where people are locked up, but how can, especially for female prisoners, their families integrate with them.

How can they make sure that there are, for those that are low risk offenders, maybe, their children stay with them for a period of time or they have access to come and go in a different way than they currently do in southwest North Dakota.

- Okay.

We're covering a lot of different territory here.

So what about workforce development and retention?

Was enough done on this or not?

- You know, even though that was a conversation going in that everyone was focused on, there really wasn't a comprehensive package brought forward by the majority party.

Well, and even the minority party, I should say, you know, there's a lot of shotgunned ideas and so some of the successes that came out of that, I sponsored two pieces of legislation that have to do with expanding opportunities for apprenticeships as an opportunity for people to learn skilled trades and go into those careers.

We saw the creation of, in the reopening of an Office of Legal Immigration, in which we'll be able to help employers through the Department of Commerce bring immigrants over, people with certain skillsets, to work for them, whether they're teachers, or doctors, or people in small businesses.

Employers can come to that office and get the resources they need to help people immigrate here legally.

Beyond that, then there was investments in our state tribal colleges as well as the new American community with some specific workforce grants there, and then of course childcare, which is the workforce that helps all other workforce throughout the state.

We did, we're able to continue funding programs that we used COVID dollars outta the special session, which includes increasing who qualifies for childcare assistance.

So anyone watching or listening, I encourage you to go to the Department of Health and Human Services website and see if you qualify.

There are tens of thousands of North Dakota families who don't realize they qualify for childcare assistance because we increased that threshold so highly.

So it's an opportunity for more folks to get more resources to benefit their family need, as far as childcare.

- Okay.

What about Governor Burgum's vetoes?

I think there were quite a few this year.

I don't know how it compared, but can you talk about these?

- Yeah, no, if I recall correctly, I think he's at seven vetoes for this session and he has about 15 more days to veto anything else.

I think there's 40 remaining bills when we left Bismarck and you know, there the charts that people put out that those seven aren't any higher than on the average.

So it certainly, they were around a lot of those culture war bills, those things that were related to strong overreach of the government telling whether it was teachers, what they can do in the classroom, telling libraries and librarians what they can and can't do when they already have policies in place.

And so, I mean, I think it was nice to see the fact that we have a Republican governor stand up to a Republican super majority for that overreach and then our party's role in helping sustain that with the majority of the majority party.

- Yeah.

Can you speak to maybe two specific bills here the governor signed that your caucus may not be happy with.

First, the bill making it illegal for gender affirming care for minors?

- Yeah, the most concerning about that bill is that first of all, surgeries on minors as far as gender or sex reassignment surgery does not happen in the state of North Dakota.

Doctors testified to that.

They've testified that they wouldn't do that for folks who are under the age of 18.

But the primary concern with that is that there is medically based sound practice of hormone treatments and helping young people who are transitioning or thinking differently about their gender to receive the care that they need under the practice of their trusted healthcare provider.

And of course with permission from their parents.

That'll no longer be an option for those young people in North Dakota.

And the concern with that is that those young people not getting that gender affirming care leads to higher suicidality or attempts.

And that's certainly a concern that we have and we wish the governor would've listened more closely to the doctors on that concern.

- And then the signing of the bill banning abortion at six weeks.

Can you speak to this as well?

- Yeah.

The primary concerns with that is, you know, if listeners and viewers remember, we already had two different sections of law that related to abortion and had different triggers when, if Roe was ever overturned and they were in conflict with each other, so we were supposed to go in and fix that conflict.

The challenge is we actually made it more restrictive and that's what's unfortunate currently, or under previous law until recently, the mental health of the mother was a primary concern in which a doctor would be able to, if they needed to perform an abortion pre viability, so before a fetus or a baby is able to be born.

But that was taken away and that was intentionally taken away by folks like Senator Janne Myrdal and others who are really advocating for more restrictive healthcare, or abortion care in North Dakota.

So it just means that we're gonna have more doctors who have to send their patients out of state to get the care they need.

And I think, again, not listening to doctors who are there telling us day in and day out of what the reality is, it's not that this is an elective procedure that they run into, it's the emergency situations that they're concerned about.

- You know what we always hear about the state having a lot of money in reserves.

If there is this much money in reserves, where would you have liked it to be used or maybe used for, I guess?

- We'd certainly advocated much more for a stronger investment in childcare, specifically in stabilization funding.

That was one of the childcare proposals that got cut and left off the table.

But the fact that we know that, again, using pandemic money, we were able to help stabilize childcare providers, which essentially meant they received direct payment for being open to increase their workforce was an important factor.

And we heard that from providers.

There are providers throughout the state who have classrooms that are empty because they can't hire the teachers and they don't have the funds available to hire those teachers and expand capacity.

So we would've put approximately $100 million more towards childcare stabilization.

- Yeah.

So what will be your message to voters as you're back in Fargo, I guess, and meeting with your constituents, you know, so what's important do you think, to let your voters know?

- Well, I think first and foremost, we were able to accomplish quite a few things.

But that voters need to remember that pain and that feeling they had every day when they'd read the news about, again, the distractions and the obnoxious pieces of legislation that we were forced to spend time on instead of the priorities that they sent us there for.

And so when they're voting, to really take the time to get to know who are these legislative candidates, not just a specific political party or someone that you know, what are, how did they vote?

What were the bills they advanced, did they advanced bills that met your priorities or were they bills that were from out-of-state national interests who were just trying to make noise and cause challenges?

So I'm hopeful that North Dakotans will be a little bit more attentive in state legislative races in the future and as we move forward, especially as we live in a time of term limits now.

- Josh, we're really out of time, but, are you already setting priorities for 2025 or just clean up going on for the ending of the session?

- You know, we're gonna rest a little bit, but certainly there's a lot of things in the interim that we're gonna study and continue to monitor specifically around childcare and investment, behavioral health.

So those will be some of the priorities going forward, but hopefully we'll be able to measure and have better data when we come back next time.

- If people do want more information, where would you ask 'em to go?

- Yeah, I encourage everyone to go to the legislative website, which is nd.legis so short for legis, .gov.

- Okay, Josh, thanks so much for joining us and we want you to stay tuned.

Next up is the House Appropriations Chair, Don Vigesaa.

(soft music) Welcome back.

My guest joining me now is House Appropriations Chair, representative Don Vigesaa from Cooperstown, representative Vigesaa, thanks for joining us today.

- My pleasure to be here.

Thanks for having me.

- Tell the folks a little bit about yourself, maybe your background, where you're from originally.

- Well I'm Don Vigesaa from Cooperstown and myself and my family owned a auto dealership in Cooperstown for, we had it for 59 years in our family.

It was a Chrysler, Dodge, Jeep, and Ram truck dealer.

Sold the dealership in the end of 2019.

So I am retired now, but had a good business there and our customer base was like family, you know, that's how it is in a small community.

- Well we are here to talk about the session, the session's finally over.

In your view, what were some of the key accomplishments that happened during the session?

- Well, it was a very interesting session.

We had a lot of very interesting and important issues before us.

I think one of the major things was redefining and the pension plan, you know, we're on a defined benefit plan currently we made the switch to a defined contribution plan.

I think that was pretty significant.

We had a lot of excess revenue at the beginning of the session, so we had a lot of requests to spend that revenue.

You know, we had started the session with approximately $2.5 billion of revenue above and beyond our forecast.

So we had a lot of requests for capital projects, new initiatives.

And so we, I think we did well.

We ended with an ending fund balance, didn't have to do any bonding or borrowing.

We were able to pay cash for the capital project.

So I think we did a lot of great things.

- Well, let's get into more specifics of some of these things, if we can.

What form of tax relief, you know, will take place and when will citizens see this?

- Yeah, that was, that was probably the major issue that we had to discuss and it took a long time to settle on a plan.

There were competing plans between income tax reduction and, you know, property tax reduction.

So it ended up with kind of a three-pronged approach.

There'll be $358 million worth of income tax relief, $103 million worth of property tax relief.

And then another $53 million of expanded homestead tax credit.

In the income tax, the lower bracket, which is probably about a $44,000 single filer income, up to a $74,000 married file jointly return, they will pay zero state income tax and then the next bracket up, they'll pay 1.95% of their income.

That's all the way up to a single filer of about 225,000.

And then above and beyond that, then it'll be a 2.5 rate.

So very, very good income tax rates, very low.

- You mentioned employee retirement, a lot of things went on with that, ultimately, what was decided and what does that mean?

- Well, we're gonna switch from an employee defined benefit, which is a pension.

We're gonna move to a defined contribution, which is similar to a 401k.

This will not affect any of the current employees.

Everybody that's currently employed or hired during this next year will be on the defined benefit plan.

But after that, we will switch.

There was a 1.9 billion deficit right now in our pension plan.

And so to adequately address that, we really needed to switch away from that and go to a defined contribution.

And I think the younger employees like the portability of a defined contribution or a 401k, the state will be infusing $219 million in this upcoming biennium to keep that pension plan whole and we'll continue to fund that in the years coming.

- Okay.

Again, trying to cover a lot of different subjects, workforce development and retention, big issue before employers across the state.

Did enough get done on this during the session or not?

- John, I think we did some really, really good things.

28 and a half million dollars in the Commerce Department budget to address that.

A couple of interesting ones that I felt were kind of direction the state must take is we have $2.5 million going towards the development of the Office of Legal Immigration, where we're looking at bringing in people that are legally immigrants coming to North Dakota.

We've heard that Ukrainians would love to come to North Dakota and work in the oil patch, and they're highly educated, highly trained, and we can put them to immediate work.

Also, we put forth an initiative for workforce development for New Americans, which I know in the eastern part of the state there's a lot of new Americans, we wanna put them to work.

- Okay.

Turning to the governor's vetoes, he had some various vetoes, some were sustained, some were overridden.

Can you talk about those?

- Well, I think he's vetoed seven so far.

Five, I believe have been overridden.

He's got until May 19th to address the rest of the bills that he has to sign.

So he may do some more.

I wasn't surprised at some of the vetoes.

I think some of them were with regard to social issues that I felt he probably would veto, he vetoed the 80 mile an hour speed limit.

I don't, I guess he just doesn't want us to drive fast, but, so we know the veto power is within his right, and we overrode, some we did not.

- Okay.

You know, the democratic side, I understand, wasn't happy with everything that was passed in legislature.

So, devil's advocate question here, what's your answer to those on the other side of the aisle who complained that legislation was anti-LGBTQ, -pro-book-censorship, and may have demonstrated in their opinion some legislative overreach?

- Well, in my opinion, we did discuss things that probably didn't need to be before us.

We have a, probably a newer group of legislators that were elected that really took social issues as their main thrust.

And so we discussed issues that I don't know belonged in the legislature or not.

So I agree that some of those were probably going a little bit too far and you know, we have to give some people some decisions on their own and not have the government tell 'em how to live their lives.

But nonetheless, they were before us, we had to take the votes and of course they didn't all turn out the way all of us liked at some point, but the governor vetoed a couple of those items and going forward we'll have to see how it plays out.

But yeah, difficult issues, for sure, for all of us to vote on.

- What about childcare?

Childcare's a priority, I think, for the state and for, you know, for people who work who have children.

What got accomplished in that arena?

- This was a really big issue.

We allocated $65.6 million towards that initiative.

Probably the three main things there are that people that currently are eligible for assistance for childcare, lower income families, now basically through this new initiative, will basic, I think the, it's 30% of the state median income, which is about a $30,000 income, that and below, they basically will not have to pay for any childcare.

The state will pay all of it.

The next level was that we had for providers that get assistance for caring for toddlers and infants are gonna get greater assistance.

And then we also came up with an innovative employer match.

So if an employer wants to pay towards childcare for their employees, the state will match those dollars.

- Okay.

Yeah.

Changing subjects again pretty quick.

What about human services budgeting?

What kind of priorities got funded there?

What was looked at there?

- You know, on the human services budget, that is just getting to be a really large budget, it is a $5.3 billion budget.

Of course a lot of that is federal money, but the increase in that budget alone this time was 858 million.

Just the increase was 858 million.

So we are just looking at trying to control some of the costs.

You know, we can do that by adjusting the inflaters that we give providers, nursing home, the large hospitals, critical access hospitals, Medicaid and Medicaid expansion are the big expenses for the state of North Dakota.

And so we've put together a task force that's gonna work with all the different entities to try to see how we can control some of our human services costs.

And we know that North Dakota has gained over 100,000 people in the last 10 years.

So we have more people to care for.

The budget is just getting large and with that kind of an expenditure, we need to take a closer look.

- What about higher education?

What about that budget, how it moved forward and how do you view the current health of our colleges and universities in the state?

- You know, we did a great amount of work for them.

Number one, tuition freeze for the next two years.

So tuitions are gonna hold equal.

That was a $47 million expense by the state.

We felt that that was necessary to compete with our border state when it comes to recruiting students.

We did $300 million worth of capital projects and the most significant in my mind was Waldron Hall on the campus of NDSU, that's where all the ag research is done.

We've granted them 87 million to build a new facility.

And then we also held harmless because of enrollment droppings at some universities, we held all the universities harmless will make sure that they're funded at at least 96% of what they received last time.

So I think we did a great, great bunch of work for higher ed.

- Well, it sounds like it, you know, we talk about in North Dakota, the Republicans hold a huge majority.

Is it difficult governing such a huge majority or not?

- Yes.

It is, you know, out of, we had 82 out of the 94 members in the house and when you have 82 members you're gonna have, you're gonna have varying degrees of conservatism, moderates, some on the more liberal side.

We get along great, but we all have little different looks on things and so, it is difficult to try to get a unified approach to our legislation.

And I'd say for the most part we did great this time.

Yes, we have our disagreements and our discussions, but at the end of the day, I think we all came together and put forward a really good product for the state of North Dakota and its citizens.

- Yeah.

As the session's over, as we just talked about, you're kind of getting to go home now, what are you telling your voters and you know, about what the importance of this session was?

- Well, I think we touched a lot of different areas, really, everybody, like the human services budget, that touches every human being in North Dakota.

Higher ed, K12, I mean, we did so much for everybody in this and we didn't mention that, you know, we're also gonna build a new women's correctional facility in Mandan.

I mean, we did some really great things, paid cash for all of these capital projects.

And I think some of the initiatives, I didn't mention on the K-12 we did eventually the house made sure that we spent $6 million on free lunches for families that are under the 200% of poverty level.

So we finally got that accomplished.

It kind of had an interesting journey through the session, but we did get that accomplished for those families.

- Well, we are just about out of time really, but are you already looking forward looking towards 2025?

For priorities, do you have any, or how's that going?

- You know, Senator Bekkedahl and myself were first time chairman of appropriations and our budget was near a record budget.

This time we, our general fund budget was 6.1 million or billion, excuse me, and 19.7 billion overall, I think we're both looking at trying to hold the line a little bit better next time.

You know, with all that excess revenue, we had a lot of things that we could accomplish this time.

But I think next time we're gonna say, you know, let's just take a closer look at the numbers and try to be a little more conservative.

- Well, we are out of time.

If people want more information, where would you send them?

- Well, just go to the North Dakota website, North Dakota legislature.

I think if you just Google that, you'll get a great website with all the information, all the bills, everything is there.

Yeah.

- Don, thanks for joining us today.

- It was great to be with you today.

Thank you.

- Well, that's all we have on Prairie Pulse this week.

And as always, thanks for watching.

(upbeat music) - [Narrator] Funded by the members of Prairie Public.