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Port: More than a quarter of North Dakota's general fund is now spent bailing out local governments

Some local leaders say it's hypocritical to cap local spending when statewide spending has increased, yet more than a quarter of the general fund is now dedicated to buying down property taxes.

Screenshot 2025-01-27 093917.png
City of Minot alderman Mike Blessum testifies against House Bill 1176, legislation introduced by Rep. Mike Nathe, R-Bismarck, which carries Gov. Kelly Armstrong's plan to eliminate property taxes on primary residences.
Screenshot from legislative video stream

MINOT — Revolutions, both large and small, are a staple of human history.

It's remarkable how often revolutionaries and activists, once they seize power, become almost indiscernible from the people they fought to replace.

"As a flood spreads wider and wider, the water becomes shallower and dirtier," Franz Kafka once told Czech poet and memoirist Gustav Janouch. "The revolution evaporates, and leaves behind only the slime of a new bureaucracy."

Mike Blessum is a populist activist based in Minot who has made it his business to exorcise moderate, centrist elements from the North Dakota Republican Party. He came up with a facile ideological rating system for legislative votes that punished Republicans serving in the Legislature for voting the same way on bills as Democrats, regardless of the merits of the bill itself. When I wrote, critically, of a fundraising scheme used to direct local party money away from moderate incumbent Republicans, Blessum responded with a haughty letter to the editor defending the supposedly "conservative" insurgency he's a part of.

"We aren’t going anywhere," he exclaimed.

Blessum was also among the orchestrators of an effort to block delegates, including House Majority Leader Mike Lefor, at the North Dakota Republican Party's state convention last year.

In an unfortunate error of judgment on the part of Minot voters, Blessum has since been elected to the city council, a position from which this self-styled capital-t, capital-c, True Conservative is now, ironically enough, railing against caps on local spending.

Blessum has testified in opposition to House Bill 1176, which carries Gov. Kelly Armstrong's property tax plan and includes a 3% cap on local budgets. On the Minot City Council, Blessum voted in favor of a resolution opposing the caps.

Now that he wields the power of the purse, this supposedly small-government insurgent chafes at restrictions on his ability to spend.

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Meet the new boss. Same as the old boss. It's noteworthy that Blessum and Rep. Mike Nathe, a Bismarck Republican and sponsor of HB 1176, were once involved in an ugly altercation at a Bismarck restaurant. Nathe said Blessum had been harassing a woman from his legislative district when he intervened. Blessum, for his part, accused Nathe of threatening him.

Ironically, in his incarnation as a conservative activist out to stick it to legislative profligates in Bismarck, Blessum is also behind legislation aimed at capping state spending at 3%. That's House Bill 1502, and Rep. Christina Wolff introduced it, but on Saturday, Jan. 25, at a forum sponsored by the Minot Chamber of Commerce, Wolff admitted that it was introduced at Blessum's behest.

Wolff has not responded to my inquiries, but her comments at the forum were relayed to me by a half-dozen attendees who found Blessum's involvement hypocritical, to say the least.

Blessum's involvement in proposing a cap on state spending isn't surprising given his ideological preening and posturing. He publicly advocated for a similar cap during the 2023 session. It's just that, in the context of his opposition to a cap on the spending over which he has authority, he looks dishonest, if I might put it bluntly.

Or maybe just arrogant? Blessum, like many activists who succeed in getting elected to public office, suffers from a common weakness: an inability to admit that they don't know what they don't know.

Adding to the irony of spend-happy local officials who want caps on state spending but not local spending (Fargo City Commissioner Dave Piepkorn is also among these) is that much of the growth in state budgets in recent biennia has been driven by legislative efforts to counter run-away local spending.

From 2007 through the 2023-2025 biennium, which ends in June, the Legislature has spent roughly $8.8 billion on local governments trying to reduce property taxes, including a takeover of social services and a large portion of K-12 spending.

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Lawmakers spent more than $1.6 billion on local governments for property tax relief in the current biennium alone.

That's more than 26% of general fund spending.

Local government leaders, like Blessum and Piepkorn, gobbled that money up even as property taxes continued to spiral. Now they whinge about statewide spending, forgetting that a not-negligible percentage of the the state budget tied up in protecting citizens from local spending increases.

This is another problem Armstrong says his plan aims to fix. During an interview about his property tax plan  on the Plain Talk podcast,  Armstrong talked about his frustration, as a member of Congress, with how much of federal spending is locked into non-discretionary spending before a single vote is even cast on a budget.

The governor sees a similar problem in the state budget. Property tax buydowns have inflated the state budget, and that spending has become politically untouchable. If it's cut, property taxes spike. Armstrong seeks to transfer existing property tax relief funding out of the general fund and to Legacy Fund earnings, with those earnings, over time, taking over the property tax bills for the primary residences of most citizens.

That's a good idea, but it only works if it's coupled with some controls on local spending, which people like Blessum and Piepkorn oppose.

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