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Sen. Tim Mathern (D-Fargo) discusses bonding, use of federal COVID relief money, redistriicting and the main budget issues left to be decided in the 2021 Legislative Session.
[Full Transcript]
Dave Thompson: This is Legislative Review on Prairie Public. I m Dave Thompson, we re on our radio service and also on our digital platforms. We re joined by Senator Tim Mathern. He s a Democrat from Fargo. Long-term member of the North Dakota Legislature. Senator, thank you for being here.
Dave: I d like to start by a discussion about your perceptions of how this session has gone, given the fact that it s been kind of a different session because of the pandemic.
Dave: What areas of the appropriations bills are you more in charge of? Maybe a subcommittee chair?
Sen. Poolman: Right, so I am subcommittee chair of the Career and Technical Education budget this half of our cycle. And so that s something we just passed out, a lot of interest relating to career and technical education. If you ll remember, the governor recommended that we do some bonding to build career and technical education centers across the state. There are certainly a lot of discussions surrounding that. And many more schools are offering career and technical education courses. So the version of the budget that we are hoping to pass out of the Senate tomorrow does have a $2.5 million increase in it because we are providing $1.5 million in direct reimbursements to schools who already have those programs and another million dollars is expected to be needed for the next biennium for programs that are just coming online, just not in existence yet. So those are imp
Sen. Heckaman: Exactly, yes. I know there are several communities around the state that have started their own local life theaters now and they ve been really well-received and they ve been so important to the communities.
Dave: I know COVID has been kind of an overarching subject of the session, given all the things that you had to do in order to allow social distancing, to wear masks, but I heard a lot about that today when the Senate, as we re recording this, has passed a bill 40 to seven to basically say, We re gonna call the legislature back into special session or have the governor call it back to the special session within 60 days after a disaster that s declared. And it looked to me like it was possibly a party line vote with the Democrats siding more with the governor. Am I correct?