Gov. Doug Burgum is praising the tax relief and workforce legislation that came out of the recently ended 2023 session.

Burgum shared his thoughts on the session Tuesday after signing the final 45 bills that remained on his desk. The Legislature sent 590 bills to the governor, and Burgum signed 583 of them, vetoing seven in their entirety and one partially.

The Legislature spent more than Burgum had proposed in its passage of a $19.6 billion budget. The previous record total budget was $17.8 billion, appropriated for the current biennium.

Burgum said the biggest difference between the executive and legislative budgets is his budget included maintenance at colleges and universities but almost no money for new construction. The Legislature approved $300 million to $400 million for construction.

“The real challenge of higher ed right now is the fixed cost structure of all those campuses,” Burgum said. He noted that maintenance cost comes at a time when distance learners and dual credit high school students can account for 20-30% of an institution’s enrollment.

The tuition freeze approved for the upcoming biennium also resulted in $45 million going into the higher education formula to help cover the reduced income to the schools. That subsidy insulates the institutions from market forces and offers no motivation to do things better, Burgum said.

“I’m a huge supporter of higher ed, but my support lies in that we’ve got to become more innovative and more competitive with our offerings and our programs to reach more people,” he said. “We’re going to have definitely improved facilities, but that doesn’t necessarily correlate to higher education success in terms of enrollment.”

Burgum was pleased with efforts outside of higher education to grow the workforce, including $68 million for construction of 13 career academies, $2 million for skilled workforce training, $1 million for internships, $2 million for New American workforce training grants and allowing use of the state scholarship for apprenticeship programs. The Legislature also appropriated $66 million to support and expand childcare services in the state to enable people to go to work.

The Legislature invested $12 million to expand Find the Good Life, an initiative to attract talent from outside the state. Workforce enhancement included $12.5 million to support local and regional efforts.

Burgum said many of the workforce efforts need to be locally driven.

“We don’t think there’s a one size fits all,” he said. “We have to have some of this being driven out of local economic development in conjunction with local companies and local communities.”

His regret is there was no money set aside to address the shortage of oilfield workers.

“That’s a place where we thought there was a lot of leverage, because if we had more oilfield workers who are actually here working on drilling rigs and fracking crews, we’d have more oil production,” Burgum said. “The number of rigs running continues to slowly come up, but it’s not where it should be at these prices. When we talk to anyone in the industry, they always refer back to workforce.”

Going forward, as a result of the legislative session, Burgum sees progress toward a new women’s correctional center in Mandan to replace the New England facility. He plans another round of public input on ways to reduce red tape beyond the more than 400 antiquated or unnecessary regulations changed or eliminated. He expects animal agriculture to take off, with dairies in Minnesota already looking at North Dakota.

“We’re going to start seeing capital flowing back into the state toward animal agriculture, which is great for our rural communities,” he said. “Real capital investment in rural North Dakota is something we’ve been missing for a long time.”

Legislation you might have missed:

– $30 million from the North Dakota Pipeline Authority to partner with private industry to build natural gas infrastructure from western North Dakota to benefit communities along U.S. Highway 2.

– Tuition freeze for higher education students.

– Sales tax exemption for diapers.

– State employee raises of 6% the first year of the biennium and 4% the second year, along with $82 million in equity funding to bring some positions closer in line with the overall market.