BISMARCK, N.D. – One more week to go to our halfway point, “Crossover.” We will then be looking at the bills passed in opposite chambers. A total of 1075 bills were introduced in this session with 353 bills passed in the House and 269 passed in the Senate. You can follow each bill by going to the government page ndlegis.gov and type in the year and number of the
bill. House bills have the enumeration of 1000 and the senate 2000.

You can also download the Legislative Daily APP to track bills. All committee hearings and the sessions are televised and are available to watch online and are videotaped and are available for viewing whenever you wish at the ndlegis.gov website. You can also submit written testimony, testify online, or come out and testify in front of the entire committee. If you are really interested in a bill, I would strongly recommend you take the time to drive to Bismarck and speak your piece in front of the committee hearing the bill. You can also send us an email or give us a call with your concerns. It really helps to get a heads up on a bill that is not in our committee. Most bills get a committee recommendation of Do Pass or Do Not Pass. Each
committee hears all the testimony, the pros and cons of each bill and makes their recommendations. Unless you have foreknowledge about the bill, you tend to take the committees recommendations, If it’s a split vote, they usually are debated on the floor.

House Bill 1095 that I presented passed the House with 84 votes that I presented to provide better protection for our students that are subjected to abuse or neglect. Currently the Schools are required to report suspected abuse or neglect but have no way of knowing if anything is being done by child protective services.

HB 1095 will establish a Liaison if the school desires that would be in contact with child protective services to help monitor a situation. Presently the schools only option is to continue filing reports if they noticed a continuing situation not knowing if their reports were being addressed or just sitting on a desk somewhere. If we could have passed this bill a few sessions ago it possibly could have saved the life of a 13 year old student from western North Dakota. In his situation, the school filed
several reports with no idea if anything was happening, the parent pulled the student from the school so they could no longer monitor the situation. If this bill would have been in place the school could have been in contact with child protective services and monitored the actions. The child was locked in a room by his mother and starved to death, weighing only 21 pounds at the time of his death. This bill will hopefully help prevent anything like this from happening again.

I presented HB 1275 for cities under a population of 10,000 to assist them with infrastructure to provide more access to natural gas. To drill a supply line under I-94 for natural gas is expected to cost around $330,000. There are 50 homes south of the interstate and several businesses that this one time funding could help supply cheap natural gas. The Energy and Natural Resources Committee gave it a unanimous Do Pass recommendation, however the Appropriations Committee
wasn’t so generous giving it a 20-3 Do Not Pass recommendation. The bill will be voted on Monday the 24 th . I understand that we cannot provide funding for everything, but I thought this would help a lot of people, not just in our area, but across the state, the request is for $5,000,000.

I had the privilege to bring HB 1143 authored by Representative Pyle to the floor, this bill is to help fund a New Facility for the Great Plains Food Bank which serves over 20% of the most needy people in the State. There are just too many Bills to start listing, it would probably be better for you to research and follow the bills of interest yourself. There have been many days of ten hours or more for some of us, especially the Appropriations Committee, we are really looking forward to Crossover to take a little break. I will continue to do my best to represent the people of District 24 to the best of my abilities. Thank you for the e-mails and feel free to keep in contact with me. dhkiefert@ndlegis.gov

District 24 Representative Dwight Kiefert