Schedule for Week of February 11th

Don't let the schedule fool you... Next week will be a very busy week. Committees will be spending most of their time conducting committee work and acting on bills that they have heard. We are hearing that floor sessions will be extended as well to get through the massive amount of bills yet to be acted on.
Please stay tuned to your email alerts from the NDACo Legislative Blog as we will use this as our avenue to send out Call to Action alerts on priority bills that will be up for floor votes.
Two bills of note are HB 1066, Operation Prairie Dog and HB 1380, which caps local budgets at 3% without a vote. Operation Prairie Dog has been referred to Appropriations. That hearing should take place Monday. We could see it on the floor late next week. HB 1380 will more than likely be on the floor Monday. Please encourage your House members to vote no on HB 1380. Look for more information on this bill in the next couple days.
A hearing was held to fund the entirety of the Statewide Infrastructure Radio Network. Public safety personnel testified with first hand examples to illustrate the importance of a reliable system along with the urgency of funding SIRN from start to finish this session. The $206 million project would fund the infrastructure for the system including towers, radio devices and core systems. Public safety entities would be provided a $1500 stipend / per radio under this bill. A .50 9-1-1 fee is currently be collected by every user to help fund a small portion of the project.
HB 1229, to remove two county publishing requirements failed by one vote Thursday. The bill sought to remove the listing of each individual expense from a requirement counties had to publish in the newspaper if they listed the expenditures on their website. The bill also included the removal of a requirement to list the official election results because by the time they are "official" they are "old" news.
Team County continues to monitor several other bills making their way out of committee and will continue to do so through next week.
Follow the link to view next week's schedule of hearings. The orange highlight indicates auditor related bills, the blue public safety related bills. https://drive.google.com/open?id=1jQDuo9Lic3X7H85jdqclVp65--Zq3qNw