Lawmakers Finish First Half | Video

Jessica Roose | 2/28/2013

The House got to work completing the rest of the agenda. They had 12 bills left to discuss and vote on today. The Senate only had two. With only two bills on the agenda, the Senate only met for about 30 minutes this morning. The House, on the other hand, had to stay in session for over three hours.

On the final day before crossover, lawmakers in the House still had a lot to get done, including passing their K-12 funding formula.

"Not only are we supporting students across the state with this new formula, but the state is in this manner taking on a larger role," said Representative Mark Sanford (R) from Grand Forks.

The bill, along with House Bill 1198, will give about a billion dollars of funding to the K-12 education system for the biennium.

"Yesterday we spoke about on the floor about some of the big dynamic changes that this state is going through. This bill is a response to those changes. This is a dynamic response for our growing needs in higher education. We are putting more money than ever in K through 12 and as a result of that we see historic savings for our property tax owners of North Dakota," said Representative Mike Nathe (R) from Bismarck.

The bill passed with an overwhelming majority of the vote, as did another that deals with the expenses for the Department of Public Instruction.

"We gave her the flexibility to have a pool of $2.5 million to fund various initiatives that she has in the budget and the flexibility we felt was needed since she is still working on finding efficiencies and doing some studies to find out what she may have available," said Representative David Monson (R) from Osnabrock.

Other lawmakers didn`t have as much luck with bills they hoped to move on to the Senate, including one to give 80 percent of oil and gas taxes collected back to the oil impacted communities.

Lawmakers will be taking a short break and will be back to the capitol on Wednesday.

COMMENT ON THIS STORY

BACK TO NEWS | BACK TO BISMARCK STORIES