Bridges, animal agriculture and a lot in between: A talk with Sen. Paul Thomas

In this episode, Host Emmery Mehlhoff visits with Senator Paul Thomas from Velva, N.D. Senator Thomas served in the North Dakota House of Representatives from 2021 - 2024 and was elected to the N.D. Senate last election. They discuss Senator Thomas’ new role on the appropriations committee, property tax reform, and legislation sponsored by Senator Thomas, including value-added agriculture and livestock bills. 

Join us for this episode. 

Read Senator Thomas’ bills:

SB 2150 - Corporate or limited liability company farming and ranching https://ndlegis.gov/assembly/69-2025/regular/bill-overview/bo2150.html?bill_year=2025&bill_number=2150

SB 2151 - A county and township bridge fund and a legacy earnings tax relief fund https://ndlegis.gov/assembly/69-2025/regular/bill-overview/bo2151.html

SB 2174 - Regulation of odors in an animal feeding operation and zoning authority over animal feeding operations in counties and townships https://ndlegis.gov/assembly/69-2025/regular/bill-overview/bo2174.html

SB 2177 - Animal agriculture facility infrastructure fund https://ndlegis.gov/assembly/69-2025/regular/bill-overview/bo2177.html

SB 2342 - Value-added milk processing facility incentive program https://ndlegis.gov/assembly/69-2025/regular/bill-overview/bo2342.html

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Contact us at emmery@ndfb.org

Transcript

[Straight Talk theme]

[00:11] Emmery: Welcome to Straight Talk with NDFB. I am your host Emmery Mehlhoff. Join me as we return to Bismarck for the 69th Legislative Assembly. We will be interviewing legislators as they make laws to impact agriculture and North Dakota. In this episode I visit with Senator Paul Thomas from District 6 in North Dakota. Senator Thomas has served in the House of Representatives. This session he has a new role and gives us his perspective as a new Senator serving on the Appropriations Committee. He shares with me his perspective on property tax reform and we dive deep into his value added agriculture bills and livestock legislation. Join us for this episode.

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[00:57] Emmery: Today I am visiting with Senator Paul Thomas. Why don't you just start out by telling us a little bit about yourself. We have visited on our podcast before, but remind our listeners who you are, where you come from and your history with Farm Bureau.

[01:13] Senator Thomas: Sure, yeah. And thanks Emory. Thanks for having me with you today. Appreciate it. Enjoy the visits. So my background is I grew up on a family farm in Karlsruhe, North Dakota, so north central North Dakota. And after school went on to NDSU and got a degree. Always had the intention eventually of returning home to the farm and taking that over, which my wife Karen and I did after having a short career doing a couple jobs and working in Bismarck and becoming more familiar with the legislative process through the jobs I had here in Bismarck and then also my work with commodity groups and knowing the value that general farm organizations and commodity groups really do for advancing agriculture policy and agriculture marketing, all of those things. 
And when my wife and I went back home to farm, we had a good friend that convinced us to go to the first YF&R Conference that we had ever been to and and loved it and became members of the Young Farmer and Rancher Committee and eventually served as chair of that. And as your listeners know, when you do that, you get to serve one year of your chairmanship also by serving on the Board of Directors with the North Dakota Farm Bureau. Through that involvement, was a county president and a county member for, well, still a county member, but not on the board, but active on our county board for a lot of years and then they raised our kids and kept farming and four years ago made a run for the North Dakota House of Representatives and served there for two sessions and, and then our sitting senator in our district decided not to run this session. 

So I threw my hat in the ring for the Senate and was elected. So now I am serving in the North Dakota Senate and kind of changing roles. People ask, how do you compare the the House to the Senate and I said the transition is fairly easy, definitely less people. So you have, I would say, I think just naturally because of less people, you have maybe more unity or maybe more community with everyone where with the House, you know, with twice as many people, you broke off into maybe thirds or what, whatever it may be. But you had different factions or some people use cliques. I think that gets used negatively. So I hate using that word. But you had different groups over there just because of the size and. But for me, the biggest transition is that this session being on appropriations versus policy committees. You know, there's a lot to learn when you start delving into the budgets, the financial part of it. You know, on policy, you're certainly still on the floor voting on those major budget bills, but you're really not getting into the weeds. And so it's definitely a big learning curve.

[04:08] Emmery: Yeah. And, you know, it's interesting. Very often people have to wait quite a while before they get put onto the Appropriations Committee. And obviously you had a history serving in the House of Representatives, but we're really excited from the agriculture perspective to have such a friend of agriculture and a friend of North Dakota Farm Bureau be put so quickly on the Appropriations Committee that is really important to have the voice of rural North Dakota sitting there. The appropriations, I mean, like you said, you go straight from policy writing our laws to spending our money.

[04:44] Senator Thomas: Yeah, yeah, right.

[04:45] Emmery: So, like, what. How has that been, And. And not only what has your experience been serving on that Appropriations Committee, but what's the financial outlook of North Dakota right now?

[04:55] Senator Thomas: To start there, to answer that question last, or maybe it was this week. So that's one thing when you're in legislative session, you lose track of not only days, but weeks, but a couple days ago it might have been. We did approve, both the House and Senate Appropriations Committee, approve a resolution to set our revenue. That was done recently. Like I said, it was a slight increase in the overall budget revenue that was approved by both the House and Senate Appropriations Committee and then adopted, you know, by the bodies. So that number, I believe, was about $19.6 billion, if I remember right. Very similar to what Governor Armstrong and Governor Burgum had used for their revenue budgets as well. So it's very similar number between all of those budget proposals. 

I think it's really important for everyone... There was a lot of numbers thrown around during the interim because of measures and people trying to understand budgets more. And I think one of the important things that needs to be roughly understood is about not quite $6 billion of that is revenue coming into the general fund. So the general fund is our normal tax collections like income tax, sales tax, excise tax, those normal revenues is the general fund. And then about $7 billion of that adds up to be federal funding coming into our state. 

The two main areas that we see that money come in are the health and human services budgets, you know, just to help fund our nursing homes or hospitals, you know, those mental health issues, you know, just the child welfare issues, you know, all of those. So, so that's a very significant part of our budget, but it's also a very significant part of federal dollars. 

And then the other big federal portion is the transportation. You know, we get a lot of federal money for our state. And in federal, which would be the interstate system that comes from thefederal government. And then the other third of our budget is kind of made up of fees. So if you think of like the North Dakota Game and Fish budget is all funded by selling of hunting and fishing licenses as well as money they get off of gun sales that comes through the federal. It gets collected federally and sent back, but it's all fees associated with something. Another thing would be like, you think of college tuition that shows up in the budget, although it doesn't come into the general fund and get paid back to the schools, but the universities are part of our budget and so that revenue that shows up as part of the budget. 

So it's the general fund budget that really is probably the most open to being worked on or where you can make the biggest changes in where the other, the fees and the federal are kind of tied to specific programs. And so that kind of gives the bigger picture. I think it's just important to understand that because sometimes we throw out big numbers. And when I was in policy and we'd come up with a good idea for agriculture or whatever and we'd be like, "Well, it'd be nice to, you know, put a million or 2 million in that and pilot that program and get it going. You know, what's, what's a million, what's 2 million? When we're talking 19 billion?" And now sitting on approps and you start understanding where all those buckets are broke down to and you start seeing the effect of maybe not just that 1 or 2 million, but there's a lot of 1 or 2 million or 100 million or a billion or you know, just very large numbers to the small ones. And when you start accumulating all of those small asks, it very quickly adds up to a hundred million or a couple hundred million. And so then it does have significant budget effects. So we all probably know that. But on the appropriations, you really see how that, how that can compound and really create problems and just keeping our regular budget going forward.

[08:49] Emmery: Property tax reform is the big topic this session and it's probably one of the most complex and involved conversations that is happening in the halls in Bismarck, obviously, because lots of different people have lots of different ideas about what that should look like and how are we going to pay for things, et cetera, et cetera. And what is your perspective on, on the process? Is that something that your committee is dealing with right now or is that something that you'll deal with after it goes through the policy committees?

[09:19] Senator Thomas: Property tax discussions, like you said, are definitely top of mind for I think most legislators, whether they're serving on the finance and tax and directly dealing with each and every bill, or if it's just communicating with those members on the finance and tax committee saying, you know, this is a high priority of mine. This is what I don't like seeing in this bill. This is what I like. So every legislator here, like you say, is talking about property tax directly, you know, right now, as it affects the appropriations. It doesn't. It's really going to come down to a finance and tax discussion. And then from the appropriation standpoint, I think there was a number put out by the leaders now that certainly affects appropriations because if you spend $600 million on property tax relief, that's $600 million less you're going to spend on state programs or state funded initiatives. So from that standpoint, it certainly is that discussion or that marker has been set out there.

For me personally on property tax discussions. I guess the one thing I would touch on is maybe the most talked about bill so far is the one introduced by Representative Nathe and kind of championed by Governor Armstrong. On the bill is also the leaders of both the Senate and House Finance and Tax committees as well as majority leaders. A couple concerns with that and I think I'm going to carry that through. Well, I know I'll carry that through with any tax discussions we have. Is first off, I think putting tax liability on property owners and putting some at zero while others not providing any change in their taxing or just getting them to a somewhat lesser of a level. The path to zero that was proposed by kind of Governor Armstrong over the next, I believe was 10 years and path to zero, I mean like that wouldn't be for every property owner, but I think it's up to like $4,000 per home

[11:21] Emmery: And this is for primary Residence. Correct. For primary residence, all property path to zero. But like everybody's primary home that they live in, the proposal is to eventually move them to like you said, zero taxes on that home. Or if it's more than, if it's more than $4,000, then they still have to pay some tax.

[11:42] Senator Thomas: Yeah. And so I'll just use my district for an example. So in District 6, all of Botineau, Renville and McHenry counties and then part of McLean and Ward county, my largest city in my district is Bottineau. Velva is the second largest. There's not a stoplight there. You know, we're definitely that class B rural, typical communities. And my whole district is that way. The $4,000, if we would get up to there for primary residence would quite, I would say a large majority of the homes, primary residence, homes to zero. And I'm not against people not paying, you know, if we could do that. Okay, now that's not a bad thing. 

Here, here's where the inequities come and here's where my major concern is for agriculture is if we follow that path and we put a 3% cap on local spending, local government spending, there's a couple things that I see as major problems. One is eventually when that homeowner is no longer paying any tax or their tax liability has been reduced to such a level, they're going to, I believe, they're going to make choices of that new hockey rink or that new addition to our school gymnasium or that new whatever. I'm going to use a homeowner example. I would gladly pay $1,000 a year now to have that benefit because I was used to paying $4,000. Now I'm paying nothing. And I would pay for that amenity. And so if we have those caps in place, agriculture and commercial property taxes would have increased a little bit each of those years, so there would have been no relief. And then we're going to start having these bond issue votes come forward and ag and commercial, at best, 25% of the voting population in those like school districts, for example, those voters are going to vote those projects in, most likely. And ag and commercial are going to carry that additional burden. Plus never having seen any of that relief. 

And I think we can just look at the history of property tax relief that has been provided by the state over the last 10 years. And we've seen local governments, they've seen the reduction in property taxes and then eventually built that all back in there. To me, that says a consumer of those services -- so us as a taxpayer -- are saying we're willing to spend up to some level of income on property tax to provide more services or more amenities or whatever that is.

 We have three sectors of property taxpayers, the commercial, the ag land, and the residential. If we give all that relief to the residential, where all the boats are, I feel we're going to just continue to see increased pressure on the other two sectors to carry that load. So that's a big fear of mine. I think that's not a path we want to go down. I don't believe putting people at zero tax liability is necessarily a good idea either. I think people should be paying for services they're receiving, you know, so I would certainly like to see at best, 75%, you know, that you have to pay 25% of your normal property tax liability or something like that. 

At the end of the day, agriculture is, has worked hard and has put in place a very good formula for ag property valuations. And you know, Farm Bureau worked on that many, many sessions ago and got a really good tax put in place. Some people say the benefit of not paying taxes on our rural homes or our infrastructure, that's on our farms, but, but we're also paying taxes across a lot of agriculture land and we're paying taxes to the center of the township roads. You know, there's, there's numerous cases of why those exemptions were put in place and why that formula is there and has kept... I hear from a lot of ag producers, a lot of landowners, and I don't necessarily hear that they're really saying the level that we're paying for our services is so exorbitant. But you have to treat us fairly because the system right now, even though they'll pick on these little things, we're still paying our fair share. You can't just look at, "Oh, you're not paying tax on your farm home exemption. So we only need to give the relief over to this other part." And so I think those are the, the points and the discussions that I continue to make with all of my counterparts in the Senate and some of those in the House too, obviously that I visit with a lot. 

And ultimately I just want to comment to one of the first comments you said there was the difficulties in addressing property tax. And I think it's very evident that the Senate and the House have tried addressing that. And the biggest challenge is, is just the simple fact the services are being provided locally, the revenue is being collected locally. And now they're asking for the solution to be to take money from somewhere else and give it to someone else. So essentially taking the concept that it's all the same money, which it isn't. The state collects its money from oil extraction tax, we collect our money from sales tax, income tax, and the locals collected from property tax. So we're taking money that's being collected from somewhere else and we're redistributing that to the property tax liability. And then we're saying, "Well, we're also going to put rules on you or restrictions on you or this because our pot's not unlimited. And if we continue to do this, we're going to have to shift that tax burden from someone to someone else." It almost becomes a redistribution of that tax liability rather than really truly relief because it's still coming from a tax source of some point. So, so, and that'll be, you know, certainly be a challenge of mine as I learn more and become more involved in the appropriations process is, where are areas that, rather than looking just from the revenue side, where areas that we can really look at the state services being provided or the state programs are being funded, are there areas that we can cut spending there and use that to provide more relief in that in the countryside? And I think that's where maybe the segue goes to some of my appropriation bills which I argue are truly property tax relief and also legacy projects. So.

[18:12] Emmery: So if I may just pop in here, two of your bills, actually, I think three that relate to this. The first one, Senate Bill 2151, that's regarding township funding bridges, touch on that one. And then 2177, Animal Facility Infrastructure Fund, and then Senate Bill 2342, which is a value added milk processing bill, I believe. So if you wanted to touch on those three, that'd be great.

[18:39] Senator Thomas: Sure, I'd love to. So 2151 is ask for appropriation of 100 million per biennium to be used for county bridges. So any bridge over 20ft in length in the road system is owned by the county. So it doesn't matter if that 20 foot length bridge is on a township road or a county road. So even though primarily a lot of those bridges are on township roads, if they're over 20ft, they're owned by the county. So I propose this bill last session as well in the House and we actually included it in the Legacy Fund streams bill that made it out of the House and was included in there and then ended up getting cut in the Senate.

[19:22] Emmery: And that's why you're over in the Senate now is to keep it in.

[19:25] Senator Thomas: That's right now. So. So that bill essentially addresses what, what I think is the most critical need we have in a role that government should be having a hand in, and that's infrastructure. As I stated in committee two days ago when I presented my budget request was, "I hate potholes. I hate washboards on my roads. I hate when they get slimy when it rains. But with all of those cases, I can make repairs to my equipment or I can get down that road or I can, I can still function, my business can still transport a good. It's not, it's not to the level I want. It's not, you know, ideal. But when that bridge is closed or that bridge is 8 ton, that absolutely shuts down my ability in, in a certain case to even access land, to even run cattle or to farm or do any of that." And as we see more and more situations where we're actually losing access to land, it's going to have an economic impact not just to that individual or to that political area. It's going to impact our entire state. So that's why I'm so passionate about that, that need that's out there. And the only way I truly believe that we're ever going to address it, it's one, it's over $1 billion in need we have over the next 10 years just to fix bridges. 

As far the state's involvement in that one other appropriation bill, that or the other two, let's just put them together, are kind of building off of last sessions work to really promote animal agriculture in North Dakota and change that conversation. We just, you know, it was a major effort we made last session to not only try and change some of the provisions to make it easier to be involved in animal agriculture, but also to change that conversation that having an animal agriculture facility is not only good for the person running it, it's good for the neighbors for being able to buy alfalfa or grains or silage or whatever that is, as well as producing, as we all know, a manure product that is almost invaluable in our production ag versus commercial fertilizers. 
So the two that I've done this session, one is a program that would help again, the local subdivisions if a large animal feeding operation was built within there. So essentially what it would do is, right now the equipment and the materials to build a facility are taxed at a 3% sales tax rate. There might even be some materials that aren't at the 3% that they're at the 5%. And so some of the numbers I've seen, we can see realistically a $20 million investment in materials to build one of these very large dairies. So if you look at that at just say, a 3% sales tax, that's actually $600,000 could be invested through this program. So essentially how the program works is, I think a lot of farmers could relate to this, the gasoline sales tax, that you can submit your receipts at the end of the year and get your sales tax that you paid on that gasoline because you didn't drive on a road. Well, how this would work is if you build right now, the way the language is, if you build a project that's over $150,000 in taxable materials, you would keep your receipts, you would submit those to the tax commissioner at the end of the year. The tax commissioner would then take whatever value that that was and take it out of the general fund and send it to the county of where your facility is built. It says the county should use that funds to improve the infrastructure that's around that building or that operation, as well as allocating it to the township, if that's what they decide to do to help them, you know, improve roads or whatever the case may be there. So ultimately, what we're doing there is trying to bridge a little bit of that gap, a little bit of the concerns we've heard of people saying, "Well, they're, you know, if they build this large dairy operation, they don't pay property tax just like the rest of us. Animal ag producers don't pay property tax on those facilities." And so this would be a way for the state saying, "We understand that, but this value of this operation is not only valuable to your local community, it's valuable to the state. And so we're willing to share or give that sales tax revenue back to the local community to be used locally."

[23:52] Emmery: And in that case, you're really not taking any extra from the general fund. You're really just taking the tax off of the materials that built the facility and then saying, "Okay, county, township, here is that sales tax. Improve the road around it now."

[24:07] Senator Thomas: And so, yeah, we have a fund that we created last year that also has some money in it for that first initial improvement. This one could be used to enhance that improvement. Or it's going to be set up that you could keep it for a maintenance purpose. You know, that you keep that to maintain that road in the future, since you don't have that regular property tax revenue there to keep that steady flow of money coming in to maintain that. So, yeah, I hope, I hope we get a positive reception. I had it in committee. It was heard, and a couple changes that the Finance and Tax Committee wanted to see with it, but I think we'll be okay. 

And then the other bill that we just introduced here last week, it's kind of patterned now for, if you want to say, an economic development collaboration that we did last session or had put out there for the company. The company ended up being the one that would have gotten the money was NextEra to build a fertilizer plant near Jamestown. So the state took a really different approach to that last session. We said, if you build that $2 billion fertilizer plant so we have a local supply of fertilizer within our state, at the end of the day, when that thing's up and running, we're going to give you $125 million. In my opinion, that program worked extremely well. NextEra came back this session just a couple weeks ago and said, "You know what? It just didn't work out. It wasn't feasible for us to do that. We're not going forward with that project." So the state had, it didn't cost the state a thing. And in the past, I think the example would have been NextEra would have came and said, "Can you help us look at this site? Can you give us $5 million to do a feasibility study to see if this really works?" And then. And I'm not saying all projects are this way, but we've seen some of these projects where first we help partner with the economic study, then we help partner with getting the site ready to build. And then we keep coming on, and then five, six years down the road, it's like, "Well, nope, it's not going to work." Well, then the state's got all that investment in there. 

So what I'm looking at with this is, it's a $10 million carrot, if you want to put it that way. And so essentially what the bill says is if somebody would build a milk processing facility somewhere in the state, the state would be willing to invest $10 million into that project. Again, once it's up and running and fully functional. I believe we set up a bar of 5 million fluid gallons or pounds of milk that would have to be produced within there, and then it caps it at 5% of project costs. So, you know, if it's a, if it's a $10 million plant, it's not going to get $10 million, it's going to get $500,000. You know, so there's a. Whatever the lesser 5% are up to $10 million is a cap on that. And so, so that's being driven from two ways. Number one is I don't have any insight and neither do any of my co sponsors of talk of a dairy that's specifically going to be able to use this or a dairy processor that's going to be able to use this. But we do know from what's happened over the interim with the closing of the processing here in Bismarck, especially our western half of our state, and they're trucking milk a tremendous distance and it's getting extremely difficult for them to stay in business. And if this little incentive helps someone try and address, you know, our lack of processing in this state, wherever it's going to be at in this state, you know, maybe that's hopefully produces that result. And so it's kind of, it's kind of just a hate to use the word, a teaser out there, but it's a carrot out there that, you know, that. That we want you here.

[27:54] Emmery: Do we have any processing left in North Dakota for milk or was that.

[27:58] Senator Thomas: We do not.

[27:59] Emmery: The last one. Yeah, yeah.

[28:00] Senator Thomas: And. And I attended a couple meetings that the Livestock Alliance had put on and some dairy producers were kind of had a working group working on it. And you know, one of the comments that just really surprised me there was that we don't even produce enough milk in our state for what we drink. And transportation, as us in the agriculture industry know, is one of the major costs we deal with. And so producers throughout North Dakota are dealing with, you know, just a tremendous trucking cost to get their product to a processing plant, which is really making it difficult for them to survive.

[28:34] Emmery: I want to now touch on your two other bills, Senate Bill 2150 and Senate Bill 2174. I think these are building on some of the work that you did last year regarding livestock development. So if you could just talk touch on those, that'd be great.

[28:50] Senator Thomas: All right. So, Emmery, I'm going to ask you to remind me what....

[28:54] Emmery: The corporate farming and the regulation of odors.

[28:58] Senator Thomas: Oh, okay. Yeah, we actually. Oh, I should know that because we heard both of them this morning in the House Ag Committee.

[29:05] Emmery: Sorry about that.

[29:06] Senator Thomas: There's a lot of numbers. You know, I'm an apprpriator now, so there's numbers all over the place.

[29:09] Emmery: So you, you obviously my husband always remembers bills because he usually had a cow with that number. And so I'll just be like, oh yeah, because he associates with the cow. So that moral of the story is if you have cows, you can remember your Legislature.

[29:22] Senator Thomas: Well, we never had over 60 cows in our cow calf operation. So I. But yeah, so. So one of those is last session we allowed for the investment from some, some corporate investment into family farms into North Dakota if it's directly related to just animal feeding operations on less than 160 acres. So that bill, the introduction of the bill I have this year is nothing but a few word cleanups within that bill. I kind of jokingly said in front of the committee today that there was seven pages there with maybe 20 word changes. And the original bill, I think was almost 40 pages long. So I think we did pretty darn good last session writing that bill. But secretary of state just had a few cleanup language issues there, so. So nothing substantive different with that bill. It was just a cleanup. 

The other bill though, that was definitely building off success we had last session and the discussions around zoning for animal feeding operations. And last session we created a model zoning task force that was met up at the North Dakota Department of Agriculture and general farm organizations, you know, like Farm Bureau, and then we also had Farmers Union and Stockman's and commodity groups. The counties were represented, the townships, the cities, and they all sat down with the ag commissioner and his staff and the Department of Environmental Quality and really took a harder look at where they could all agree on for changing our setback distances for animal feeding operations. One of the things we joke about, especially us that want to see those brought to maybe a more reasonable level is in North Dakota, we somehow zone by miles where every other state zones by feet. 

The committee did make recommendations to lessen that setback distance slightly. It wasn't any major changes. I think for very large operations, they went from two miles to a mile and three quarter. If you take a radius, I know, even a radius of 1 mile and you start drawing that circle. Even as remote as we are and as rural as we think we are in North Dakota, when you start drawing a one mile circle around every farmyard that's out in the country, you get pretty limited pretty quickly where an animal feeding operation can be permitted at. 

Now, obviously if you got your neighbors, you know, agreeing with it, the counties and townships can always make it less, which, you know, we certainly hope that they do. But that bill does put into place, you know, some actual zoning requirements. And also it becomes law while it is law now. But we need, we need counties and townships to adopt this model zoning ordinance so that private property rights are protected by those people that want to develop animal feeding operations. It seems like in the past there's been not consideration of everyone's private property rights. It's always been, "Well, I don't want it near me and this is my property. So that's the way it should be." And certainly respect that. And certainly we do need provisions in there that you are protected by your property, but you also can't exceed that or use that and start taking someone else's private property rights to put up a thousand head feed operation because it's two miles away from you. You know, they're just, we need to find that middle ground where it works for both private property interests. And we're hopefully getting to a point that, you know, people are encouraged and confident to build animal agriculture in North Dakota again.

[33:04] Emmery: Well, thank you again, Senator Thomas, for joining me on Straight Talk with NDFB. And thank you for being a champion for agriculture and our members of North Dakota Farm Bureau.

[33:14] Senator Thomas: Yeah, thank you for having me on, Emory. I enjoy the conversation.

[33:18] Emmery: We'll talk soon.

[33:19] Senator Thomas: All right, sounds good.

[33:20] Emmery: Bye.

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[33:32] Emmery: You've been listening to Straight Talk with NDFB. If you'd like to follow along this legislative session, visit us at ndfb.org and subscribe to our legislative front. As always, you can contact us at emmery@ndfb.org

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