(buoyant music) - This is North Dakota Legislative Review on "Prairie Public."

I am Dave Thompson.

Thanks for being here.

Our guest is Senator Kristin Roers of Fargo.

Senator, thanks for being here.

- You're welcome.

I'm glad to be here.

- Now I wanted to talk to you about, you are on two of the most interesting committees in the legislature, I believe.

You are chairman of the State and Local Government, and then you serve on the Human Services Committee.

- Yeah, so I'm a registered nurse in my day job.

And so I knew right away, when I ran for the legislature, that I would end up on the Human Services Committee, and I was just fine with that.

I enjoy getting to be the healthcare subject matter expert on that committee, and then, State and Local Government, I kind of fell in to.

When I first came into the legislature, I was on the committee, called Government and Veterans Affairs, or GVA.

And when we created a workforce committee, we had to combine two committees.

And so political subs and the government of Government and Veterans Affairs came together and became the State and Local Government Committee, and I became the chair of that in the first year that it started, which would've been last session.

And so this is my second session chairing that committee.

- Now that committee, you've had a bunch of interesting bills, concerning voting and politics, correct?

- Yep, so we have a lot less election bills this session than we did last session.

I think we did a lot of good fixes last session, so this year has kind of been a little bit more tweaks, but we still have a couple more election bills left to get wrapped up.

So campaign finance reform came through us and is over in the house right now.

So depending upon what they do with amendments, it sounds like they have some pretty substantive amendments.

And then on our side, we have the Secretary of State's Election Cleanup Bill, but what we just realized in the last week was President Trump came out with an executive order, and there's one big change that we're gonna need to make to our election laws to come in line with that election order, or with that executive order, and what that is, is we currently state that your mail-in ballot needs to be postmarked before election day.

The executive order says it needs to be received by the end of polls on election day.

And so we'll need to change our state law on that.

And so we'll have to find a way to make that happen, to make sure that we're keeping in line with the federal law.

- Okay, is that gonna be a major discussion?

- I don't think it's gonna be a huge discussion.

We found out that it's about, in the last election, it was only about 400 ballots that came in after election day, which is like 0.01% of the ballots that were cast in the '24 election.

So I don't think it's gonna be a huge change in practice for people, but I think it will be a nice cleanup.

It'll actually bring us into alignment with the states that we touch.

- Now correct me if I'm wrong, one of your committee looked at the approval of voting bill for Fargo, correct?

- Yep, so those are still sitting in my committee.

We still have to work on that because there's two bills that are dealing with that, one is the one that bans approval voting and rank choice voting, and that would be for all political subs, including Fargo, which currently has it, is the way it's written right now.

The other bill, so I think that one's 1257, 1307 is the other bill we have, and that one actually just says, regardless of the topic, state law is how we set election law.

And so no longer would it be allowed at the home rule charter level to change election law.

And so those two could be complimentary or conflicting, depending upon how you look at it.

So we have to be able to look at 'em both at the same time and kind of make sure that if we are gonna pass them that they mesh, or if we're not gonna pass them, then it won't matter whether they mesh or not.

- Well, let me ask you about that second bill about, you know, it should be state in control of elections.

Do you agree with that?

- I probably wouldn't have last session, but as I've looked at some of the examples that have happened where there's been some exceptions given, I'm leaning a little bit more towards it than I had, if you'd have asked me about it at the beginning of session.

You look back at, there was a Fargo dome vote that happened, and Fargo used their own process for you to attest that you were a citizen, or instead of using the guidelines that are set forth of who's a qualified elector and how you prove that you're a qualified elector.

And so things like that are actually things that concern me more than approval voting or ranked choice voting.

I think that there's some consistency that really needs to be there, regardless of who's running the election and what the issue is on the ballot.

- So do you personally have a problem with Fargo's approval voting, or rank choice?

- Well, rank choice voting, there's a couple problems with it.

The biggest one is the software that we have that does the counting cannot actually do approval voting because it can only read dots, and that's not how you can do rank choice voting.

And so we would need to get new election equipment, or hand count anything, if we were to do rank choice voting.

So I'm actually opposed to having rank choice voting in any way.

We've got a great system in North Dakota, and part of the reason it's great is 'cause it's uniform.

Approval voting, I can argue both sides of that.

I don't love it.

I think that it is a little confusing to describe to someone that you can vote for as many people as you want, but only a certain number of people can win.

And so I like kind of the one vote is you get to vote for however many people can possibly win.

And so I like that.

My hesitation comes in from the fact that the people of Fargo did vote to approve approval voting, and is it the state's responsibility to remove that if the people voted for it?

I can be convinced of both ways on that so far.

- So yeah, you have more discussions on that.

- Yes, a lot more discussion to come.

- You did have a couple bills, I think they were in your committee.

One was dealing with the primary, and how it's set up, and who can run and who can't run in a primary, or whether or not you need to have signatures, even if you're going to a district convention.

How do you feel about those issues?

- I was actually a co-sponsor on representative Nathe's bill that would've said that if you get the endorsement, it's a letter of recommendation, it is not automatic ballot access.

I've seen how varied the convention process can be, whether it be at the state level or the local level, across the state.

And even from year to year, the process has changed so dramatically that I don't think that letter of endorsement, means the same, depending upon where you're from.

And so I think if you, you know, a legislative seat, I think you need like 176 or 167, something like that, signatures to get on the ballot.

And if you can't get that, that's a concern to me.

Maybe you shouldn't be running.

And so I have a lot more trust in people who go out and meet their voters first.

- And of course, you know, some of this was going back to the state convention in Fargo, which was, shall I say, interesting?

- I was there and yes, interesting is one word you can use for it.

- (chuckles) Yes.

And I know that there's been some discussions about, you know, skipping a state convention process, and just going to a primary.

- And that's people's choice right now.

They have done it, they can do it.

I think that bill that didn't pass the house would have said the state convention doesn't get you automatic ballot access, regardless of the position you're running for.

I think the statewide, it is harder.

The signature threshold is higher, but you also are running a bigger race.

And so again, if you only have support in one community, maybe you aren't the ideal candidate for a statewide position.

- Well, let's shift gears and go back to your other committee.

One of the big discussions that's still, I think ongoing, is what's going to happen with the state hospital?

- Yeah.

- Where do you stand on that?

- Well, we are in dire need of a new state hospital, and I hope that we can build it right the first time.

I think we've proven with some other projects that when you try to scale back, you wish you would've done the whole thing the first time.

I worked for a large hospital in Fargo, and when we built that, we ended up having to scale back, but we also thought we had built it to at least our five or 10 year projections, and within 18 months we were full.

And so there was a belief that healthcare was gonna move out of the inpatient setting and into the outpatient setting in a much faster way than we're actually seeing, and we're actually seeing trends go in the opposite direction, both with population growth and just the sickness of the people we have in our state.

Behavioral health is no different.

And so we're having more and more people who are seriously mentally ill, and need the state hospital.

We notice it at our hospital, when we can't get someone to the state hospital because they're full.

And so it just becomes this kind of backlog, after backlog, after backlog, and so people are staying in settings where they're not getting the care that they need.

Even though they might be safe, they're not getting the care that could help them get better faster.

- Yeah, there's a professional care that can be rendered at a state hospital.

- Yeah, and we really struggle 'cause the state hospital has some people who are there that there's nowhere for them to discharge to.

They don't need state hospital level of care anymore, but because of the person's background, their criminal history, their psychiatric issues, they can't be accepted into, say a nursing home, and so because that patient can't leave, then the person who's acutely ill in a hospital can't get to the state hospital and get access to those services.

And so it just becomes this kind of hamster wheel that we're running on right now.

- Senator Mathern proposed the idea of having regional centers, kind of like many state hospitals there.

- I think we kind of need a both and.

I think the immediate need is the big state hospital.

You need that centralized care.

You can be more efficient when you have one hospital that has a larger footprint, than you can with four smaller versions, because you need a certain level of certain things that you can't share when they're in four different locations.

And if you were all in one location, you might have a resource that could be shared a little bit more easily.

So I'm in favor of building the state hospital right the first time, but still focusing on how do we do maybe some intermediate level care at the regional level?

- Is that a workforce issue?

- It's a little bit of workforce and it's a little bit of an appropriations issue.

So it all costs money no matter what you do, but you also have to have workforce.

Right now, Jamestown has the workforce in Jamestown to be able to run the state hospital.

And in fact, if they can build a new hospital, they can take more patients with the same staff load, because the efficiency of the building will be so much better.

But when you move into those regional sites, we would have to bring in additional psychiatrists, psychologists, and nurses.

- Now talk about location of the Jamestown State Hospital, the new state hospital.

It's moving away from the correctional center now, right?

- Yep, so the map I saw is essentially across the highway, and it'll actually have kind of a buffer there.

You won't even see the correctional facility anymore.

So it won't feel like it's a detention center anymore, like it does right now, a little bit.

- Did you notice, you have the budget right now, or does the Senate?

- I believe the Senate has the budget in Senator Dever's committee.

- Okay.

There was just one thing that was added to, I think it was in the house, where they added a line to rent some of the Jamestown hospital space to a theme park in Jamestown, which is interesting.

- [Kristin Roers] I had not seen that yet.

(laughs) - I told Senator Lee about that, and I think she was surprised too.

It came out of the last day- - I haven't heard about that yet, so that'll be interesting to see if that makes it through the senate process.

- And since we're on human services, has your committee getting a handle on what federal reduction in funding's going to be?

- Our committee hasn't.

I think there are a few people who have had some meetings with the Department of Health and Human Services to try and start to get a handle on that.

But I think a lot of the federal reductions are, right now, either theoretical or future.

Some of them are, this is a grant that has already been granted and we're not doing any more of it.

Some of it is, you're already midway through the grant, are you gonna get the remainder of your payment?

And we don't know the answers to all of those questions yet.

I think part of that is still to be determined.

I think as you hear different reports, depending upon who the source is, you get a different answer.

- Yeah, trying to find out what is truth and what is just talk on social media is- - Yeah, what speculation is.

It's really difficult.

- So that brings another question.

There's been talk a lot about annual sessions again this year.

- [Kristin Roers] Yes, we just moved it out committee today.

- And how did you vote on it?

- It came out as with a do pass, it was five, one out of my committee, so- - And this is the one that is... Is it- - Representative Bailes.

- Okay.

Bailes.

- And it's intentionally vague.

So we applied an amendment to it, so you probably haven't even seen it in its current version.

It just says the legislature shall meet annually, and the rules will be set by legislative management.

And so it's a little bit more complicated than that, but not quite as complicated as it had been.

Just knowing that there are so many variables in the process to move from the process that we've had forever to a new process, and so if you set too much in statute, it might be too complicated to execute, and this gives some flexibility and some discretion to legislative management to figure out how they think it'll work best.

- And of course the argument to having annual sessions is that the budget has become much more complicated, and the relationship with some federal agencies has become more complicated.

It gives the legislature some, I don't wanna put it, wiggle room, but some authority to make some changes as need be.

- Yeah, I think it allows us to be a little bit more responsive.

So things change at a much faster pace than they have.

Every year, it's an exponentially faster speed that things are changing, and whether it be oil prices, or commodity prices, or federal support, that type of stuff, we have to be able to be responsive.

And right now, that's a struggle when you're trying to anticipate what might happen in the next two years and how things might go.

I grew up in South Dakota, so I actually am used to annual sessions.

And so the bill sponsor actually brought with him the Senate majority leader from South Dakota to testify on the bill, just to tell us, "Here's how we do it.

It doesn't mean you have to do it the exact same way, but here's one way that we've made it work in 80 days," but doing it 40, and they do 38 and 38, and that way they have a little bit of wiggle room there.

One thing that's kind of interesting that they do is they have a veto day.

So they are there for, it's about eight or nine weeks, and then they go home for about three weeks, and come back, so that if the governor vetoed any of the last bills that came through, then they have the opportunity to actually respond to that without having to be called into some sort of a special session.

And I don't know that any governor would call you into special session to respond to a veto.

- Respond to a veto, however, a previous governor, talking about education funding, and funding for teachers, did do a veto and called a special session.

- Oh really?

- But that goes back a few years.

Governor Hoeven went over- - Okay, that might have been a little before my time, or just right as I moved to North Dakota, so... - So there's opportunities there, you know, and it's a kind of a reality check in a way.

- Part of the conversation that we had today in committee was, does having annual sessions make it easier or harder for different demographics to be able to run for the legislature?

We don't have a lot of W2 earners, like I am, people who have a boss that they have to ask permission to be gone for four months every other year.

And it's interesting, 'cause you'll have some people stand up on the floor and say, "I think it's easier for people to get away from work one time for a longer period of time, and then be done with it, and go back to work for 20 months, and then come back here for four months."

And then you have other people stand up and say, "No, it's actually easier to be gone for two months because I can kind of limp along at my work and not have to have everybody cover my work, and do it once a year."

And so we don't know what the answer is.

I prefer to do it as annual sessions.

I think that would be easier in my job to be able to do that, 'cause right now, I do have to just hand off my work.

I joke that it's like taking a maternity leave every other year.

You have all of the labor, but you don't get a baby at the end, so.

- So it is gonna be kind of interesting.

I think that's gonna be an interesting discussion toward the end of the session, is it going to be biannual or it's gonna be annual?

- It will be.

It has passed in the house before.

It has not passed in the Senate before.

So we shall see if anything's different now.

- Now I'm going to change to something totally different.

As we record this today, the Senate took up property taxes.

- Yes we did.

- And it was a kind of an interesting discussion, but there were a lot of amendments that were made that kind of at odds with what the governor was proposing.

So what's your take on that?

- I was opposed to the amendments.

I did vote against them today.

I understand the rationale for them.

I just don't necessarily agree, completely, with them.

I think that we have spent a lot of time in the media and in session talking about 1550, and then it was 1450.

So to go to 1250 seemed like the optics were not good.

At the very least, the optics were not good on that.

But then on top of that, to add a max of 75% of your tax liability, but also, which this is part of the bill, whether it had the amendments or not, it doesn't count any school mail levies, any special assessments, that kind of stuff, that were voted on at the local level or assessed simply at the local level, like specials.

And so when now all of a sudden you think you're getting 1550, and now it's 1250, but it's 75% of 1250, but it also doesn't include those things, all of a sudden when you get six or $700, it doesn't feel like you got what you were promised.

And so I just felt like it chipped away at the promise that we made at the beginning of session, but I also understand that the governor does not get to write, nor pass legislation.

He only gets to sign what shows up at the end.

And so he will receive something.

We shall see what it looks like in the end.

And we also know that this is the end of the second period.

This is not the end of the game.

There's an entire period left of this.

- I use the hockey analogy a lot.

- Absolutely.

- Because conference committees are a third period.

- Exactly, people think it's two halves, but it's three periods.

- Oh no, it's three periods.

- Absolutely.

- So that one's probably going to a conference committee.

- It absolutely is, yep.

So it passed the floor amended, and I have no doubt that the house will choose to not concur and create a conference committee.

- So were you expecting more toward the governor's plan, or liking the governor's plan a little bit better?

- I would've thought that the vote was a little closer to even than I think it was 31, 16 was the vote.

But I think, also, there are a lot of people who understand that this is not the end.

And so we're saying, let's get it to conference committee, let's have that conversation there and figure out where are the differences that we need to work out.

- So besides property taxes, what do you think could be the, an old old friend of mine in the legislature used call 'em wet bundles.

- Okay.

- You know, things that could slow up adjournment, or may be contentious conference committees.

Anything in your viewpoint?

- Right now campaign finance is seeming to be a little wet bundled.

The house has a very different view than the way the Senate sent it.

And so we'll end up in conference committee on that.

I haven't seen what their final amendments look like to know how different it ended up.

I know the conversation started very different, but that doesn't mean that that's how their amendments will end up.

So we'll see how that one ends up.

But I think from my committee, that'll probably be the one.

I think there's another one in human services that is on parental rights in the medical exam room space.

That one is really hot right now, like just really, really heightened emotions about it.

There are people who say, you shouldn't be able to ask me to leave the the exam room with my child.

I should not have to leave them with you when I don't know what you're gonna talk to them about.

And there are others who say, if you suspect abuse, how can you ever ask the child about abuse if their abuser is standing over them?

And that's a balance that is really difficult, because I think the challenge is that a lot of times people think that the opposite side of the coin of parental rights is government overreach, and not child protection.

Those are the opposite sides of the coin.

And that's hard because you don't wanna give up parental rights, but you still have to protect the most vulnerable children.

- And that's the argument I hear is government overreach.

I hear that a lot.

And that's not only in patient child relationships, that's also going into school boards, and things like that.

There was that bill, I think it was defeated, about more parental control over what their kids are learning in school.

- Yeah, I don't know a lot about that one.

I think you're right, I think I saw that it was defeated, but that was one where I got about an inch deep on that one (chuckles) 'cause I, you know, you can only go a mile deep on a certain number of 'em before you run out of brain space and time.

- That's absolutely right, and we should mention that.

You know, dealt with a record number of bills.

I mean it was funny that the Senate sent to the house about 500 bills, and the house sent about a thousand bills?

- (laughs) It wasn't quite that bad, but it felt like it.

I think the number that they sent us in the second period is the number we started with in the first period.

We sent them, you know, 100 less than that.

So they have a little bit more time on their hands than we do right now, and being in state and local governments, we ended up both the first and second period with the second most bill of any committee, but half the number of days of the week, as the number one committee.

- Peak committee, you only have two.

- Yep.

So judiciary, each period got the highest number of bills, and I was second, and they have three days, I have about a day and a half a week.

- Now the house was debating, speaking of judiciary, the house was debating the thing about mandatory minimum sentencing.

Senate is already taken care- - Correct.

Yep.

So that did pass, I did vote against it.

And not because I think that people should, you know, violent criminals should be getting out of prison early, or anything, but there were a couple concerns I had with the way that it was written, and one of them was how long do you have to be in prison before you're allowed to start working towards good behavior?

And if you don't incentivize good behavior early, will you have a detrimental effect from that?

And then the second is, just simply, a space issue.

We are already full, and so if we're gonna say that people need to stay longer, who isn't getting into prison, that should be?

There's always a downstream effect, and nobody could quite define for me how we were gonna deal with that.

- And there's a lot of conflicting information on that.

Is it going to be better for recidivism to put people in transition centers, or to keep them behind bars?

I think that's gonna be a huge discussion going forward.

- I think that part of the challenge is nobody knows the answer to that question.

And so because of that, you're trying to make a decision based on what you want it to be, not what it actually, you know it will be.

So it's wishful thinking, but making laws based on it, and that isn't a negative comment about the bill because you could wish it either way on this bill, but because we don't really have solid data that tells us, yes, this is the outcome we're gonna get, it's hard to make that decision just based on hypotheticals and what you want it to be.

- Absolutely.

Well we got a couple minutes left.

I have to get in to one of my favorite bills of the session, you introduced, and that was the Blackout License Plate Bill.

It was one of the simplest bills I did.

I had a constituent from Horace reach out to me and say, "Hey, I found out that to get a new type of license plate, you have to put a bill in."

And I reached out to DOT, and they confirmed that's true, you can't just create a new license plate without having legislation for it.

So I said, "Well, let me get it drafted and then maybe I'll find somebody from the Transportation Committee that would be willing to be the prime sponsor on this.

I have plenty of bills, I don't need to be the one.

And then I started working on it a little bit, and an article came out, I think it was in the forum, that Minnesota's plates were about a year old.

In their first year, it was like 250,000 vehicles, got those blackout plates.

And I was like, "Well nevermind, maybe I'll do this.

This sounds like fun."

I get to do a lot of weighty issues, like patients who don't have anyone to speak for them in the hospital, and so this one was a nice light touch one.

So that was fun to do.

So that was passed.

It is going to conference committee, but it's just because they want to tweak a couple little things.

Both the House and the Senate are very supportive of the bill.

- I was just saying a conference committee for that one?

- Yeah, the house had changed the fee, which was fine.

They actually reduced the fee on it, but then all of a sudden, someone came in and said, "Wait, the pioneer plates, can we have those in the black as well?"

And then there were some design issues that people wanted to make sure that they could adjust.

- So you gotta have a bill like that.

- Yeah, if you don't have one light one, this job is pretty heavy and it can weigh you down after a while.

So nice light thing.

- I'm gonna go to a quick speed round.

Number one, signing that when?

- Early, early, early morning on the 30th is my guess.

- Okay, give you a few days left in case you have to come back.

And one other thing, are you gonna be back in for a special session do you think?

- Hmm.

I think probably.

- Okay.

- Well thank you for your time.

Appreciate it.

- Thank you.

Our guest, Fargo Senator Kristin Roers who chairs the Senate State and Local Committee, and also is on appro... Appropriations, you're on Human Services.

For "Prairie Public," I'm Dave Thompson.

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