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Port: Burgum roasts lawmakers with veto message, saying they ought to follow law on transparent votes - INFORUM

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MINOT, N.D. — The North Dakota Legislature has been breaking the law. Specifically, a law requiring every vote taken by a governing body in North Dakota to be recorded.

Section 44-04-21 of the Century Code states: "Unless otherwise specifically provided by law, all votes of whatever kind taken at any public meeting governed by the provisions of Section 44-04-19 must be open, public votes, and all nonprocedural votes must be recorded roll call votes, with the votes of each member being made public at the open meeting."

If you follow the procedural intricacies of the Legislature closely, you know they haven't been following this law. House Bill 1463, as amended, sought to change the law to legalize what the Legislature has already been doing.

“The amendment basically allows the Legislature, by rule, to change the way or to legalize the way that the Legislature deals with amendments," Rep. Todd Porter, a Republican from Mandan, said in testimony before the House Political Subdivisions Committee .

"So in committees, some committees do a voice vote on amendments, some committees do a roll call on amendments," he continued. "If the voice vote is unanimous on an amendment, it’s deemed passed and checked off on the box on the roll call sheet that all members voted in favor. If during that same motion on that amendment that there’s one opposition, then the roll call is taken. That practice is not currently allowed under the Century Code even though it’s a very common practice in the Legislature. By passing this bill and adding Subsection 3, that would allow the Legislature to make the rules on how amendments are adopted to bills.”

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The Legislature passed the bill almost unanimously, by an 87-3 vote in the House and a 44-2 vote in the Senate. But Gov. Burgum has now vetoed the bill, saying in his veto message to lawmakers that they ought to change their practices to follow the law instead of changing the law to match their practices.

"Floor testimony on House Bill 1463 stated the Legislature currently is in violation of this law because not all amendments receive a recorded roll call vote," he wrote. "However, rather than simply comply with the law, the Legislature has opted to change the law to suit its current practices."

"House Bill 1463 would allow the Legislature to adopt far-reaching amendments affecting the central policy of fiscal impact of a bill without affording the public the accountability of a recorded roll call vote. If enacted, this bill would deny the public the transparency essential to good government."

As a case in point illustrating some of what Burgum is talking about, consider House Bill 1288. This is a somewhat high-profile bill, prompted by a scandal involving a state lawmaker getting a sweetheart deal as the new landlord for some of the attorney general's staff. As written, the bill would have brought new transparency requirements to lawmakers who do business with the state.

Yet in the Senate, the bill was amended to add a significant reworking of the state's bidding process for contractors. The amendment represents some dramatic changes to the law that don't seem, to this observer, to be related to the original purpose of the bill.

At a conference committee meeting between House and Senate lawmakers tasked with hammering out the differences between each chamber's version of the bill, the room was packed with lobbyists and other members of the public who wanted to testify on this amendment.

Only, they couldn't, as the video of the video shows, because the public hearings on the bill are over.

The law Burgum is citing, and that the Legislature has been breaking, doesn't stop lawmakers from slipping major amendments into bills late in the legislative process. But it at least ensures that there's a public record of how lawmakers vote on those amendments.

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I'm not sure that's too much to ask of our Legislature.

The bill may well go forward anyway, though. As I noted, it passed each chamber in landslide majorities, signaling more than enough support for a supermajority vote to override Burgum's veto.

Opinion by Rob Port
Rob Port is a news reporter, columnist, and podcast host for the Forum News Service. He has an extensive background in investigations and public records. He has covered political events in North Dakota and the upper Midwest for two decades. Reach him at rport@forumcomm.com. Click here to subscribe to his Plain Talk podcast.

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