North Dakota Senate Report





The first period of the 66th legislative session came to a conclusion this past Wednesday.

Other than the bills that have already failed to pass in either chamber, all bills are still a work-in-progress.

Remaining budgets will still be subject to change and will remain so until we decide on a final budget in March. Remaining policy bills are still subject to debate and change.

During the first period we have kept our budget estimations on the low side so as to not have to cut them when the budget is finalized.

As always education is a top priority. K-12 education will receive an increase in per-pupil payments. For the 2017-19 biennium, per-pupil payment was $9,646. Moving forward the per-pupil payments will be $9,839 for the first year of the biennium and $10,134 for the second year.

Our total Department of Public Instruction (DPI) budget of 1.2 billion dollars is almost equal to the total value of our wheat crop in North Dakota.

We have supported inflationary increases for our state employees of 2% for the first year and 3% for the second year as well as maintaining full health care coverage.

The inflationary increases are the same increases that we are proposing to give to long-term care as well as developmentally disabled (DD) providers.

The Social Services redesign program in which the state is assuming the cost of social services from the counties will eliminate the 20-mill authority counties have used in the past for social services, thus creating permanent property tax relief at the local level.

We are looking forward to a short break and will be back to work on Feb. 27th. Hopefully spring will come sooner that later.



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