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

Our guest on today's show is Governor Doug Burgum from the great state of North Dakota.

Governor Burgum, thanks for joining us today.

- John, fantastic to be with you.

- Well, as we get started, we always ask the people to tell a little bit about themselves, but most people know something about you.

Maybe you can tell us something we maybe a lot of folks don't know about you.

- Well, I'd say one thing that comes to mind is that two summers ago, my two sons and a nephew, we sailed from the as close as we could to the Montana border.

It was a dry summer, so we had to start at Lewis Clark State Park, east of Williston.

But we sailed from there to the South Dakota border.

Took us four days, sailed the first 44 hours through the night on Lake Sakakawea portage around Garrison Dam.

Had some calamities running aground on sandbars on the Missouri River and got down to Lake Oahe and wrapped her up about two days later.

But fantastic adventure here in North Dakota.

And a lot of people don't think of North Dakota as being an amazing sailing state, but it's we have a great, great wind resource here, not just for generating power, but also for sailing.

- Well, that sounds fantastic.

Next time, maybe I'll get an invitation, who knows?

Well, we're here today.

Let's start by talking about the recently completed legislative session.

Sort of what were your overall thoughts on the session?

- Well, I'd say overall very productive.

We got some big milestones achieved, things that people have been trying to get done for decades and decades in the state.

And so some really significant things, I'd start with the tax relief.

We're on a path becoming one of the zero income tax states and the largest, $515 million of tax relief across income tax and property tax.

Really significant.

Record investments in childcare, we've never been able to get a big childcare package through and of course childcare is workforce infrastructure today.

So that was really significant.

Pension reform at the state level.

One of the things that for taxpayers in North Dakota, one of the biggest financial overhangs we have is the unfunded liability and having an opportunity to move close that plan, protect all the current fantastic state team members that are in that plan, but offer new people that are being hired a portable, like private sector 401 type, incentive package is gonna help us recruit new team members to work at the state of North Dakota, protect the taxpayers and protect the employees that are part of that program.

So pension reform has been on the docket for three decades, finally got that over the finish line.

And then of course, because of the financial strength of the state of North Dakota, some really important capital projects that are occurring across our correction system, across higher education, infrastructure across the state, water, road infrastructure, what we're doing on behavioral health, criminal justice reform.

You go across the board, this was a Hallmark milestone session.

And again, I want to thank all the legislators for their hard work across both parties.

Everybody did some amazing work and we got a lot of things accomplished for the citizens of North Dakota.

- Well, I'm gonna take some time probably to ask you about specifics of some of those.

What role does your office play once you submit a budget?

I mean, how involved are you in the session?

- Well, we are, you know, we're right here.

We're steps away from the legislative chambers and our policy team and ourselves, Lieutenant Governor Tammy Miller, all of us are every day engaged, hosting, hosted dozens of events with legislature, both, you know, here in our offices, receptions at the governor's residence.

So very engaged in working with them to try to find solutions.

And really in many ways we're here fighting for what we put in the executive budget.

The executive budget in our administration comes from a new process, which we started three sessions ago, which is we felt that strategy should drive budgets, not budget striving strategy and trying to change the culture of the state of North Dakota where we say, "Hey, we should be focusing on outputs."

What are we doing for the citizens?

Is enrollment up?

Is in education results higher?

Is our healthcare getting better?

Are roads getting safer?

Those are the outcomes as opposed to just fighting over the inputs, which is how big is the budget for healthcare in K-12 and higher ed?

And so with our strategic planning process, we feel we've really delivered to the legislature the best product they've ever received at the outset, which is a executive budget where we've already cut billions of dollars of requests.

We've already cut hundreds of FTE requests or new hire requests.

And we've really prioritized those things that have the highest return on investment for taxpayers in the budget we give the legislature.

And there's of course been some friction 'cause the legislature has once again just started in the last three sessions.

But they don't take our budget as a starting point.

They use what was two years ago as the starting point.

And we think that can lead to some differences.

And again, we've got this budget with the legislature comes in with higher amounts of spending that we had recommended in our executive budget.

So again, there's some healthy debate that goes on.

But again, we think that we from the executive branch we're your question, we're very, very engaged in trying to achieve the objectives that represent all the thought and work that the executive branch agencies have worked on and understand as the priorities to deliver the best services for the citizens in the state.

- Okay, well, Governor, you talked, you led with your overall thoughts on the session with the the tax plan, I think.

So what was your view and maybe a little bit more on the tax plan that was passed?

- Well we, it was, like I said, historic in size and provides relief for both income tax and property tax.

And in the way the form of property tax, it's delivered directly to those that are over 65 to the home expansion of the homestead tax credit and then a direct broader for people up to a $500 credit against your tax bill for primary resident.

On the income tax front, our goal was to get to the lowest flat tax in the nation.

We didn't quite get there.

We've got a plan that has reduces it from down to three brackets, but I like the bottom bracket, it's zero.

So now we have a lot of North Dakotans that will pay zero income tax.

And then we have two brackets in, one in the middle and one in the high end.

And those brackets are at the lowest, the majority of the people will be paying 1.95% income tax in North Dakota.

I mean the majority of the filers, the majority of the income tax will come from the high end payers as it always does at a 2.5%.

But those are the lowest in of the of the 41 states that still charge income tax, those are the lowest rates in the country.

So we think it's a competitive advantage to help recruit people here.

But our goal is eventually to just eliminate income tax in North Dakota.

There's nine states that don't have income tax, including three that we compete directly with for labor, which is Alaska, Wyoming, and Texas, which are also big energy producing states.

And of course, South Dakota, our neighbor to the south has zero income tax.

So it's a competitive environment right now and we're moving in the right direction.

We didn't get as far as we'd like to see on income tax reduction.

- Okay, and you talk about workforce.

Unemployment low, but what are the concerns over workforce development and finding enough workers and for jobs in the state?

Was enough done on this or is there more to do?

- There's more to do and this is a bit of a missed opportunity in our budget.

We had close to $70 million in initiatives around workforce.

We ended up passing about 30 million of those through the legislature and a number of 'em were cut.

We have, we're tied in the nation for the nation's lowest unemployment right now, 2.1%.

There could be 30, 35,000 jobs available in our state.

So there's plenty of work to be achieved there.

But we have to address it through a number of things.

You know, some of it is we did achieve the getting through the dollars for the current technical education centers going across the state, about 70 million that are gonna be between higher ed, K-12, and local private industry to really focus on on getting the training for the jobs that we need in North Dakota.

We had a small automation plan that was approved, not as large as what we like in terms of tax credits because part of it is if you're short of labor, one of the things you can do today is buy the equipment that allows, instead of trying to find 10 welders, can we train some, train one person to run a robotic welder.

In North Dakota we're always gonna be short of workforce and us leading the nation in automation like we have with unmanned aerial systems up at University of North Dakota and the Grand Sky Project.

We got good dollars in for that.

We got dollars for autonomous agriculture.

But we've gotta have autonomous in all, value added ag, value added energy, value added manufacturing.

That's one of the ways we're gonna solve the workforce is just be smart about how we use automation in North Dakota.

- Well we're covering a lot of subjects today, so what about your opinions on the new women's prison facility that will be built near Mandan?

- Well, long overdue and very exciting that that's happening.

There was been a discussion for over two decades that we needed a new women's facility and they were planning to build one 20 years ago.

And at the very last minute an idea came up and say, "Hey, let's use the abandoned St. Mary's High school in New England, which was designed as a Catholic, some residential high school in New England.

I had friends that I went to college with that went there that had great athletic traditions, great school, but it was, it was an old high school that got converted into a facility.

The state didn't own it.

The state was renting it from a set of counties and locals, that local political subdivision that own it.

It's been a problem for 20 years.

Not the staff that's there is fantastic and not the residents, but we just didn't have a facility.

And when you think about the facility you need and the supports you need when if you're someone who's incarcerated in the North Dakota Women's Prison, there's a very high likelihood that you were a victim before you conducted a criminal act.

And there's almost a certainty that you are someone who's got a substance abuse disorder along the way and there's a very likely high likelihood that you might also have children.

And some of them are actually pregnant when they're there.

Well then we're in a community that's got essentially no healthcare services.

We got a responsibility as a state.

So moving them closer to a market that has got the healthcare facilities.

We're also under threat from the federal government because we've got a fantastic new correction system here in Bismarck for men.

It's got libraries, it's got pharmacy, it's got an infirmary it's got doctor and dental services.

None of these things that we were able to provide at that.

So we had a real, if you want to call it like Title IX, but we had a real difference from the in the eyes of the federal government or the services we were offering women to men.

And so when we think about this system, you have to think of it really like a healthcare facility with security is really what we're doing 'cause it's really the majority of the people are in recovery and we're trying to, our job and it's corrections and rehabilitation.

We're trying to make people better neighbors, not just better prisoners.

And so the focus has to be a shift on that.

And when we do that, that's the smart thing to do for taxpayers because the real cost of corrections is when people come back and come back and come back and they get stuck in that criminal justice system.

And part of what we need to do is make sure that we, particularly right now with this, we just talked about workforce.

I mean this is a an opportunity for people to be contributing members of the society and in the community and for both the men and the women.

And so we've gotta focus more on the re-entry and more on workforce as part of that.

- Well, let's turn to some of the vetoes that you made.

Can maybe, can you go through 'em and tell us why you vetoed certain bills?

- Well, the first thing I should say is the we signed the vast majority and then close to 99% of the bills that came through here we signed.

And of course in a in a world with where we've got a kind of super, super majority legislature, there's a lot of bills that get to my desk that have passed unanimously or near unanimously.

So the, if you look across the 50 states and say, "What's the power of governors to be able to veto?"

I think there's might be a view that "hey, you know, governors can just...

decide."

But that really only is the case if you've got a legislature that's split, perhaps like our federal legislature is where they don't, they can't agree they can't pass stuff or that passes narrowly or one party trying to counsel the other.

But here we have a lot of things that and some of it in great legislation and some of it I did disagree with.

And generally, the principles that we're applying when we're vetoing is saying, is really, if we believe in about, in having freedom and liberty in North Dakota, if we agree to that we should have local control.

And whether that's the school district, the city, and sometimes these are local control and sometimes it's like, hey, can't the condo association figure this out?

I mean we end up in North Dakota with such access to our legislators.

There's a lot of bills that get introduced here that might have a single constituent where they came to the, they came to their legislature as opposed to going to the library board or going to the city commission or going to some other location, the park board and saying, "Hey, let's get a law passed 'cause there's something upset about," and then in North Dakota, people may not also know that every bill gets heard on the floor.

You can't kill a bill in committee in North Dakota.

So I think seven, 800 bills got introduced.

A number of 'em did get killed by the opposite chambers on the floors of those two legislators.

But some of them come through and if I think there's overreach in terms of either cutting into what are the rights and responsibilities of parents, of school districts, of city commissions, then that's when we, that's when we get the veto pen out and if they've passed with a super majority, then we really gotta work to try to sustain those vetoes because that means we've gotta get people to change their minds about how they voted on it in the first place.

But we limited very few, but we had good success so far where we vetoed seven and five of them were sustained.

- Well, can you talk about your reaction to sustaining those a vetoes?

- Well I think it's... obviously, we put a lot of time and thought into crafting the veto messages because we're really trying to anchor it not in anything that might even be my personal opinion.

It's about really trying to protect the framework of government we have in North Dakota, which is, there's a balance of power between the different chambers.

But there also needs to be a balance of power between the state and the local.

And so, if we're focused on limited government and being conservatives in that mind where freedom and liberty matters, then that's gonna be our guiding principle.

But when we can sustain a veto that's a obviously feels good for us 'cause we feel like we're able to convince the majority of the legislatures or at least convince enough of them that they ought to be able to agree with us that this is an issue that could be handled elsewhere.

- You know, a couple of bills that you did sign got a lot of press, the bill outlawing gender reaffirming care for minors and then the six week abortion ban.

Obviously, everyone wasn't pleased with these bills.

Can you talk about maybe each one of them and why you signed them?

- I think on gender affirming care was for this year, obviously, a hot topic here and across the nation.

And yet, it was interesting because there aren't any, there aren't any health facilities in North Dakota that provide or offer surgery on minors in North Dakota.

So we were talking about something in theory versus reality on from the surgery standpoint.

And there are things where this debate said, "what about parents' rights and parents' choices?"

But we have laws in North Dakota where we have a law that says minors aren't supposed to drink alcohol.

They're not supposed to take drugs.

They're not supposed to smoke cigarettes.

And just because they have their parents' permission doesn't mean that that's legal for them to drink, smoke, or take drugs.

And so I think the legislature said, "Hey, there's a lot of unknowns out here in terms of the long-term effects it might have on people for these for gender altering surgeries."

And so let's just say they're not available for people under 18 in North Dakota.

That's what the bill is.

And, and I think that again, it's controversial.

People say, "Hey, we're not, and maybe not we're welcoming."

I think we would say we're welcoming and compassionate for all North Dakotans and I think those of us that are that understand that there's a lot of nuance in this issue.

We understand families and parents that are affected by it.

It's a complex emotional issue.

A lot of that testimony, very personal here.

But in the end of the day, I think it's just common sense to say that from a surgery standpoint, this can wait till after people are 18.

- And what about the six month, six week abortion ban?

- Well I think as you know, John, North Dakota had passed a law in 2007, which is was known as a trigger law, which was then to go in effect after Roe v. Wade was overturned.

And when that, when Roe v. Wade was overturned, then that law became and went into effect.

And that law, I think even our own very pro-life legislature understood, was gonna be challenged in courts.

It is being challenged in courts.

And so I think they were trying to say, "hey, as a pro-life state and a pro-life legislature, can we actually reduce some of the aspects of the trigger bill to have it be more able to sustain a court challenge?"

And so the, while that bill is restrictive, it is a pro-life with exceptions bill, it's actually less restrictive than what was in law with the trigger bill that's being challenged challenged right now.

- Mm hm.

What about you recently signed a bill about gender pronouns in schools?

- Well, I vetoed one earlier, which I had nicknamed "the pronoun police bill" because it did go a step too far.

The one that was signed this week was very clear that schools can neither mandate or restrict the use of these rules.

And so it really was a bill that reaffirmed the first or the free speech first amendment rights for teachers and students and parents.

And so in many ways that the title of that bill got some attention, but if someone read that, it basically just affirms that we can't restrict or deny people from using language that are creating these rules.

And so in the end of the day, I think it was the it was the part of the first bill that I was comfortable with 'cause it reaffirmed first first amendment speech rights, but it was not something that went too far.

The prior one that I vetoed, I'm certain would've been challenged in court and probably would've won.

- Well, changing subjects again.

What about how were, what's your feelings on the higher education budget that was approved?

- Well, our higher education budget was strongly supportive of higher education on the education part, the difference between that and the bill that I've just recently signed for higher ed is there's a lot of buildings.

And of course, you could always say, "hey we need new buildings, our buildings are old, they were built 67 years ago, we need new buildings."

And so there's again, because of the good fortune of our state, the strength of oil prices, the strength of our economy, there was the capital for us to be able to do this.

It's remarkable that we're able to pay cash for hundreds of millions of dollars of higher ed buildings across the state, on top of ones that were approved last year during the special session.

So there's, between those two, there's over $400 million of new construction going on our universities.

But that's not the challenge.

I mean that's exciting as ribbon cuttings, great facilities for research and engineering, but the challenge is students.

I mean we are in a competitive world when you've got almost zero functional unemployment and somebody can go get a 12 or 16 week certificate in computer science or some other thing and get paid the same as someone who's got a four year college degree.

That's real competition for our universities.

So now that we've got the buildings that are in the budget, people are gonna be excited, they're gonna be happy.

I would just, yeah, ask all alumni, all everybody involved in higher education is we've gotta get focused on how do we make sure that we've got an offering that people are willing to pay for.

There is a tuition freeze in this bill, which the legislature mandated, but the revenue to the higher ed is still the same, which means the taxpayer, the students aren't gonna pay more for tuition.

The taxpayers in North Dakota are picking up a $45 million tab to help cover the cost at higher ed.

So we can't keep insulating higher education from market forces and if students aren't willing to pay the tuition to go to school there, that's probably a market signal that maybe we need to change the product we're offering.

So, it's a, we have a lot of capital dollars, a lot of support, support for increases in raises for teachers and professors across K-12 and higher ed.

But education's got some work to do on making sure that we're delivering the product that people are willing to pay for.

- Mm hm, and what about state retirement, employees retirement fund, a little bit more about what happened there and how you feel about it?

- Well, I feel great about it 'cause this is something when we came in here we said, "wow, there's a huge liability facing all the taxpayers in the state trying to cover the retirement, a defined benefit plan for the state employees."

And while we have a lot of state employees, that number is pretty small compared to the rest of the state of North Dakota.

And so it's like, this was something where the plan was not actuarially sound.

What was being paid in wasn't enough to cover what was being paid out, so taxpayer dollars had to cover the difference.

So closing that plan and doing that effective now is the right thing to do for the state team members.

It's the right thing to do for the taxpayers.

So we're excited that that got was closed and we think that the new plan is gonna help us.

We've got a lot of baby boomers are retiring right now, and so there's a lot of new hires coming and the fact that we can get those new hires into state government coming into the new portable 401K plan is gonna help us with recruiting and recruiting just like every employer right now, recruiting is tough.

So this is gonna give us some advantages of getting out and recruiting, recruiting people to come to work for the state of North Dakota.

- Yeah, and with the state having so much money in its coffers, would a direct tax rebate to citizens make sense?

- Well, I think the what we were advocating for was stop collecting taxes.

Like, let's get income taxes to zero versus... we tried tax credits the last two years, but those are things that legislature can take away.

They come retroactively.

I mean, you pay your taxes in and then you get the credit back at the end and we're just like, let's just stop collecting taxes like nine other states.

And that's where we want to continue to drive for.

It doesn't require any overhead.

We don't have to send citizens don't have to send checks in, we don't have to send checks back.

Let's just let the hardworking North Dakotans keep their income-earned dollars in their pockets.

- Governor, we are running out of time.

How confident are you in the future of the state and what's the biggest challenges that we face?

- Well, I, super confident in the future of North Dakota, but interestingly, some of the biggest challenges we face because we're an ag state and an energy state, turns out that the Biden administration right now has got their sight set on trying to kill anything related to fossil fuels, and between waters of the USA and a number of other things that they're doing is really, intentionally or not, it's definitely intentional against fossil fuels that there's a war on those.

There's also a, in many ways, an attack on agriculture as we do in North Dakota.

So that's a challenge for us.

And of course for my standpoint, none of this makes sense because if you cared about the global environment, you'd want to have every, every electron and every ounce of oil and gas, natural gas, propane, you'd want to have all of that made in the US because we do it cleaner and better than anyone else.

And I think North Dakota does it as good or better than anyone else in the nation.

And so if you really cared about the environment, you'd want to have all of that energy produced here.

But we're in an environment where we've got our administration going to foreign adversaries, asking them to produce more energy.

I mean, I'm talking Venezuela, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, we've got the whole idea that we're gonna restrict our energy industry is part of the reason why Putin invaded Ukraine.

Because he basically knew that he had all the Western Europe dependent on him.

And now Putin has become China's gas station.

So, you know, it's a very simple thing.

If we want to have a global, stable world and a strong US economy, then we need to produce energy for ourselves and for our allies, and we're not, we're not doing that.

And so, and that part I think, I feel positive about North Dakota.

I'm more nervous about the future of the planet because how we use, how we do land use, how we do energy development affects our economy, affects inflation and affects global stability.

And we're on the wrong track on that right now.

- Governor, unfortunately, we are out of time, but if people want more information, we're where can they go?

- Well, absolutely, we'd love to have 'em come to the nd.gov, the governor's website, learn more about all the legislation that was passed and all the initiatives we're working on.

But John, thank you for taking the time and thanks for you and everybody at "Prairie Public" for the great work you do and keeping the citizens in North Dakota informed.

- Thank you, Governor.

- Thank you.

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

And as always, thanks for watching.

(soft upbeat music) - [Voiceover] Funded by the members of "Prairie Public."