Say Anything Blog

This June voters of Grand Forks County will be asked to approve an home rule charter giving the county more powers.  If you’ve been reading my past work on Grand Forks County you will know that I believe (and am willing to back it up) that they are a most dysfunctional organization.  Because of that I tend to not want to give them any more power.

Still the subject is a bit complicated.  Are their any benefits to the taxpayer?  The North Dakota Farm Bureau has weighed in:

“The proposed Grand Forks County Home Rule Charter just doesn’t measure up,” Grand Forks County Farm Bureau President Paul Galegher said. “If the voters of Grand Forks County adopt the proposed Home Rule Charter on the June ballot, it is very likely that the next step will be a county sales tax…

“We see a lot of problems with the proposed charter, specifically language that would give the county commissioners the ability to consolidate mill levies without a vote of the people,” Galegher said. “They would no longer need to fund the original intended use, and in many cases, these designated funds were approved by a vote of the people. Consolidating mill levies allows commissioners to supersede the will of the original taxpayers’ vote.”

Galegher said the proposed Home Rule Charter would grant the county commissioners authority to levy and collect new taxes, such as property taxes, sales and use taxes, gross receipt taxes, motor vehicle fuels and special fuels taxes, motor vehicle registration fees and more.

“We already pay federal and state gasoline taxes,” he said. “Why should we open the door to paying yet another gas tax — this time a county tax? Why is the ability to levy these taxes even in the charter at all? How many times to do we have to pay taxes on the same products and services? It’s time to stop these local taxes that just don’t measure up.”

I think that’s a very strong statement and a lot of great reasons to continue my opposition to the measure.  The Herald gave a proponent of Home Rule a chance to present the other side.

“They say it would be abused. The county has not levied to the maximum,” he said. “The County Commission has been very frugal in their dealings with property taxes .?.?. There’s no reason to fear this home rule.”

That’s a quote by Lloyd Omdahl, former Lieutenant Governor of North Dakota, contributing columnist for the Grand Forks Herald (I think he’s still active), retired UND professor and chaired the home rule committee for the county.  He’s a very prominent person and a strong supporter for the charter.

But really with all of those credentials can anyone take him serious.  He’s said that the county has been VERY frugal.  That’s absolutely wrong.  From 1997 to 2006 county property taxes nearly doubled at the same time the county actually lost population (that’s a 72% increases adjusting for inflation!).  That was before the jail fiasco when the county commission jacked up property taxes last year to cover their mistake.  By the way the (.?.?) in the quote was in the Herald article.  Maybe somebody there thought it was a remarkable statement as well.

The county is now in second place for property tax bills after the school.  They passed Grand Forks city last year. 

Clearly nobody can be taken seriously when they say that the county has been frugal with our property taxes.  They’ve been spending irresponsibly.  In fact every time I post on the county I challenge anyone to point out where the county has rolled back some recent spending increases in order to pay for part of the jail.  The voters need to tell the county commission to do everything they can to pay for their mistakes and quit acting like they have a blank check. 

Here’s some previous work I’ve done on the subject with links to go back to older works. 

The Bismarck Tribune reports today about staffers leaving the Duane Sand campaign.  Of course, Say Anything readers knew all about that 10 days ago.

A while back we were posting on Say Anything about Sioux Manufacturing, a company owned by Fort Totten’s Spirit Lake Sioux Tribe, which settled a lawsuit with the federal government over millions of dollars worth of Kevlar-armored helmets for our troops.

The helmets were of an insufficient quality (the Kevlar weave was not done to standard), and so the company was forced to pay $2 million back to the federal government.  A mere slap on the wrist given that the contract to manufacture these helmets was around $70 million.  But what’s worse is despite the fact that personnel at Sioux Manufacturing knew the helmets were faulty and sent them off to be used by our troops in combat anyway, the company still got a $74 million contract to replace the faulty helmets they originally made with new helmets.

Now comes news that the Department of Justice is investigating this turn of events.

16 May 2008 - Washington, DC – Earlier this year, in light of evidence that Sioux Manufacturing, a company that makes Kevlar helmets, has been outfitting our nation’s troops with substandard Kevlar helmets, Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) sent a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request to the Department of Defense asking for all records related to Sioux Manufacturing. In response, CREW has received a letter from the DoD Inspector General’s office stating that there is an ongoing investigation into the matter.

This past February, it was reported that Sioux Manufacturing had agreed to pay $2 million to settle a lawsuit alleging that the company had shortchanged the armor in up to 2.2 million helmets for the military, including helmets used by American troops in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The Department of Defense, aware of both the problem with Sioux’s helmets and the company’s efforts to cover it up, awarded another contract to Sioux a mere 12 days before the lawsuit was settled.

I hope part of this investigation centers on Senator Byron Dorgan, chairman of the Senate’s Indian Affairs committee.  Dorgan is no stranger to securing government contracts for companies in his home state, and given his cozy relationship with the Indian communities in North Dakota I wouldn’t be at all surprised to see his fingerprints all over this.

I’m late to the party on this one but...

December 14, 2007

Dear UND Campus Community:

I am pleased to announce that beginning in the fall of 2008, spouses and dependents of University of North Dakota benefitted faculty and staff will be eligible for a 50% tuition waiver.  This initiative will benefit many of our dedicated faculty and staff.

Charles E. Kupchella
President

There is nothing unusual or unfair about a business giving a discount to it’s employees.  It’s a way to reward your workers without costing a bunch of money as well as a way to get the team to buy into the services the company (or organization) is producing.

However I think given the tuition increases we’ve seen in recent years this is the wrong policy at the wrong time.

For those of you that have noticed tuition has skyrocketed at the University of North Dakota.  (And at other state schools as well).  I guess everyone’s got a theory on who’s most to blame.  It’s true that some of the earlier tuition rises were because of state budget cuts.  However the last legislative session opened up the pocketbook and tuition STILL went up.  The Univeristy plans to double law school tuition, because they can.  The State Board of Higher Education is asking for a 50% increase in funding next year (on top of the 20% they got last year) and said they’d try to control tuition increases. 

The problem of skyrocketing tuition isn’t just happening here in the state, but I think we’re hurting as much as anyone.

This is why I think that cutting a break to the faculty and staff is the wrong thing to do.  If we’re going to somehow reign in spending and tuition hikes it’s going to be twice as hard when the faculty and staff are immune to most of the problem.  It’s not an unreasonable thought to imagine that Kupchella instituted this break because he was tired of hearing people on the inside of the university complain about how much college is costing them.

North Dakota’s faculty probably isn’t as bad as most places but I don’t think they have a clue about what life is like in the real world.  They need to understand what it’s like to have an 8-6 job where they work 250 days a year.  They need to know that they aren’t entitled to a raise because some schlump in New York makes more money than they do.  They need to know that it’s not about what it says on your degree, it’s about what you produce.  The need to realize that their good fortune works out to someone elses’s bad fortune when it comes to money from the state.

This new policy by The University of North Dakota is just adding another floor to the Ivory Tower.  If we can’t all live up there than why should anyone?

I had an opportunity to meet with Scott Hennen last night who is busy touring the state and getting his syndicated radio network in place.  He told me about a big announcement he has scheduled for next week on Monday.

I can’t spill the beans just yet, but let me put it this way: Conservatives in the Red River Valley are going to be very, very happy.

North Dakota ranks 4th,(page 12) behind Alaska, Wyoming and Maine in taxes paid by businesses as a percentage of Gross State Product.

I think you have to take that with a grain of salt since I would assume oil tax revenues are somewhat swamping the data.  Even so I think it’s just one more bit of evidence that North Dakota is overtaxed.  Too bad the greedy state politicians want to keep their grubby hands on everyone of our dollars that they can. 

The Council on State Taxation has released its 2008 Business Tax Burden Study.  You can view the whole report here.

Perhaps the most interesting aspect for North Dakotans is the fact that our state had the third highest percentage of growth in business tax revenues in the nation since 2002.  In 2002 the state collected approximately $1 billion in taxes (sales, property, etc.).  In 2007 the state collected $1.7 billion in taxes, representing a 63.8% rate of growth.

During that same time period over all tax revenue growth in the state was 53.7%, and growth in business tax revenues represented 67.9% of that growth.  Meaning that the majority of the surplus the state is enjoying is coming from taxes paid by businesses.

Now, given that North Dakota’s treasurer has announced a record-setting balance in the state treasury and that the state already spends tens of millions of dollars on “economic development” schemes to “create jobs”, isn’t it high time we gave the state’s businesses a tax break so that they can expand operations and create more jobs?

Seems to me like North Dakota is ripe for tax cuts.  What’s baffling is why nobody in North Dakota seems to be talking about significant tax relief.

I’m looking at you, Republicans.

He’s fixed it, that is, if you think that suspending oil deliveries to the strategic oil reserve will have any impact at all on the overall oil market.  Which, of course, it won’t.

Even if the strategic oil reserve wasn’t market neutral in that it releases as much oil into the markets as it takes in, the 70,000 barrels/day of oil put in the reserve represents less than 1/2 of 1% (0.35% to be exact) of the approximately 20,000,000 barrels per day America consumes.

Meanwhile, Dorgan and his fellow Democrats killed off a measure that would allow the exploitation of oil reserves in Alaska that are expected to be plentiful enough to replace oil obtained from Saudi Arabia for the two decades.

So well done Byron Dorgan.  You’ve accomplished absolutely nothing.

More by the Whistler

Rob beat me to this story.  Big surprise unlike Rob I actually work sometimes.  What I was going to add was that ANWR could be delivering one million barrels a day.  Bill Clinton vetoed a bill to develop in in 1995 (with Dorgan’s support) So Dorgan thinks that the Strategic Oil Reserve’s 70,000 barrels is a problem but we could be/should be getting 14 times more oil than that.  What a hypocrite.

So rich, in fact, that the state has never before had as much as it does now in the treasury.

Bismarck, ND – State Treasurer Kelly Schmidt announced today that the State Treasury currently has a record balance of $1 billion. 

“The current balance is a reflection of the strong economic growth that North Dakota is currently experiencing,” Schmidt said. “My role as treasurer is to take advantage of our state’s strong fiscal position and invest these dollars to maximize our returns.”

The investments recently purchased total $168 million and will be invested for just over 200 days. This will generate in excess of $1.3 million in interest income for the State of North Dakota’s Treasury. This biennium, interest to the general fund is more than $16.5 million which is a $10 million increase from the same period last biennium.

Given this record-setting treasury balance, can anyone in the state up to and including “Republican” Governor John Hoeven (who is currently opposing all new tax relief initiatives) really continue to argue that significant tax cuts aren’t in order?

The state has plenty of money.  North Dakotans, on the other hand, are unhappy about their overall tax burden.  So why not lighten that burden?

North Dakota’s Senators spend a lot of time talking about high gas prices.  Especially Senator Dorgan.  They talk about what a terrible impact those high prices have on this country’s citizens.  Particularly North Dakotans who live in rural places which require lots of on-the-road time and have nothing in terms of public transportation.

So when an amendment came forward in the Senate to allow expanded domestic production of oil, something that would increase supply and decrease prices, you’d think these two public servants would jump at the opportunity, right?  Well such an opportunity presented itself today in the form of Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell’s amendment to allow expanded domestic exploration for oil in places like the Alaska National Wildlife Refuge.  What did Senators Dorgan and Conrad do?

They voted against it.  Evidence of their “nay” votes will be here as soon as the Senate website is updated.

What’s astonishing is that Senator Dorgan has come out in favor of drilling for oil in the backyard of North Dakotans living around the Bakken formation, but not in favor of drilling for oil in a remote and little-visited bit of frozen tundra north of the arctic circle.

Why is one ok, but the other bad?  And why does Senator Dorgan think its ok to play politics with national energy policy?

From the North Dakota Policy Council:

Despite having a much smaller population, the Bismarck School District has more enrolled students than Fargo.  However, the Fargo School District spent over $16 million more in 2006-07.

Sounds like people in Fargo need to start asking some serious questions of their school administrators.

Private enterprise seeking largess from the government has become so pervasive in North Dakota that both private business owners and politicians have taken to completely ignoring the law when it’s inconvenient for them.

Ed Schafer is on the front cover of the Washington Times today saying, in his roll as the US Sec. of Agriculture, that ethanol isn’t contributing to the global food problem:

I love Ed Schafer, but he’s flat-out wrong on this.

Food, like any other product, exists in a market and is susceptible to the forces of supply and demand.  By diverting food crops to energy production we’ve reduced the overall quantity of food crops available for human consumption and also reduced the amount of land available to produce food.

Now, we can argue about fuel crops coming from lands that weren’t used for food crops previously and about other things such as weather impact the global food market, but the simple truth is that diverting food crops to fuel production has a significant impact on the global food market.  Even if you could argue that the crops used for fuel were all new crops not taken away from existing food supplies so that the market impact was neutral (and I’m not convinced that such an argument can be made) the fact remains that fuel crops are taking up more land that could have been used to expand production to meet supply shortages.

For faithful supports of ethanol to deny this is for them to deny reality itself.

I think it would do the biofuel industry well to admit that, long term, trying to meet rising energy demand by converting the food we eat to fuel is a boondoggle and that future biofuel efforts should be focused on using raw materials that aren’t food.

According to things I’m hearing from people in the know it seems as though it might be.

Before launching a campaign against incumbent Democrat Representative Earl Pomeroy Duane Sand was the regional director for the North Dakota chapter of American’s for Prosperity.  In that capacity he began an initiated measure movement which would cut individual state income tax rates by 50% and corporate tax rates by 15%.  I was asked to be a member of the sponsoring committee on that measure and I agreed and have supported signature-collection efforts across the state.

After beginning this push, Sand decided that he also wanted to run for the House of Representatives.  I, personally, felt this decision was a mistake.  I felt Duane should have focused on guiding the initiated measure through the signature-collecting process and through the state-wide vote before moving on to bigger and better things.  After all, there was (and still is) no other serious challenge to Pomeroy on the horizon meaning that Sand would have more than likely been free to run against Earl in 2010. 

I expressed this concern to people involved with AFP and the initiated measure and they shared my concerns, though ultimately the decision laid with Duane and he was not to be deterred.  Now it appears as though I was right.  Duane’s decision to mount a campaign on the entrenched Pomeroy before completing the initiated measure process is turning out to be a mistake.

Since late 2007 Duane has lost four people who worked for him.  He lost a campaign manager in 2007, an employee at the ND chapter of Americans for Prosperity, and now he’s lost both a campaign communications director and a second campaign manager.  Steve Lautte and Greg Merkel, the director and manager respectively, resigned from Duane’s campaign last week though this news has yet to hit the pages and airwaves of the North Dakota media.

None of the people who stopped working for Duane will speak ill of him, choosing instead to maintain a professional silence, but I’m guessing that they left because Duane (who has a reputation for being something of a bull in a china closet) has become increasingly difficult to work for.  I’d also be willing to bet that they left because of concerns about the initiated measure failing.  Without the initiated measure Duane’s campaign is dead in the water.

Does the initiated measure still have a chance to be on the ballot?  I think it does, and I think North Dakotans are still thirsty for tax relief what with the state running massive budget surpluses and the resurgence of the oil industry (which is driving most of those tax revenues) being as bright and hopeful as ever.

Personally, I remain committed to seeing the initiated measure to cut income taxes on the ballot come election time.  If it makes it to the ballot, when it makes it to the ballot, it may be the most important measure for North Dakotans to decide on because this state is at a key junction, economically, and could be set on fire with a bit of meaningful tax relief.  I also remain committed to seeing the liberal Earl Pomeroy cast from office, but given the type leadership put on display by Sand over the last several months I’m not at all convinced he’s the man to do it.

Conservatives in North Dakota are in danger of seeing an ambitious measure to cut taxes go up in flames, as well as having the firmly-entrenched Democrat House incumbent facing a relative non-entity.  Which is something that would leave that incumbent free to dump his millions gained from out-of-state liberal interests into local campaigns.  Which, in turn, will make races across the state tough for Republicans.

All of that will be Duane Sand’s doing if he doesn’t get things back on track.

This is a glowing, if rather brief, analysis of Ed Schafer’s career from US News & World Report.

I’m happy to see one of North Dakota’s own go to Washington and find success.  And, unlike Senators Byron Dorgan and Kent Conrad who don’t even live in North Dakota any more in any meaningful sense, I have little doubt that once Schafer’s time as Ag. Secretary is through he’ll return to his home state once again.