Term Limits in North Dakota

0:00Good afternoon everyone. This is Carla Rose Hanson. I am guest hosting for Tyler Axnis on Afternoons Live today while he's out of town and we're having a lot of good conversations about a lot of good topics. And for the next hour we're actually going to talk about term limits. So when I'm not guest hosting I'm in the North Dakota House and the legislature that I serve in is now subject to term limits. And so we need to start thinking about how we adjust to those, how we maybe mitigate any potential negative impacts. So with me now to talk about that topic is former state senator Aaron Oban. Aaron, welcome to the show. Hi Carla. Should I call you representative Hanson? Oh please call me Carla. Yes. I mean it's hard to not use you by your well-deserved title but certainly we're friends too from our time serving together. So great to connect with you here Carla.

1:01It was great. Well Aaron after you left the state senate one of the things that you did was help the legislature study the impacts that term limits we're going to have on how we do our work. So as we think about how the legislature is structured or how we train new legislators or all the different timing that we how we manage our calendar if you will that that is potentially up for debate or up for changes as we think about the impacts of term limits. Can you first before we talk about the study that you did for the legislature on this topic can you remind our listeners about the actual term limit law that was passed in 2022? What it does exactly? Sure. So there was a ballot measure a constitutional measure in November of 2022

2:03which passed with I think it was 63-ish percent support of North Dakotans that created a term limits in our state constitution and what it essentially did was limit the amount of time in either legislative chamber to eight years of service. So you for example once term limits went into effect. So after that passed and term limits went into effect you now Carla can serve no more than eight years of service in the house and if you chose to then run for the Senate you could serve up to eight years in the Senate and then you are no longer allowed to serve in the legislature anymore. And so while there is turnover of legislators due to other factors for example I opted not to run for re-election there certainly are legislators who serve quite a bit longer than the eight years

3:06that now the constitution caps them at. So that is you know what those limitations are certainly you all as a body debated and passed what was proposing to be a change to those eight years but that was thrown out by the court and will not be on the ballot. So we are working for as long as we can tell with those eight years of service in each chamber in the legislature. That's right and really that's going to start impacting people very soon. The impact will start in 2028 that's the first round of people who will be affected and that includes me I'll be done with my service in the house because of term limits in two years and then two years after that it'll have the next round of people who are representing odd number districts they will have the first wave of impacts as well. So we're going to start seeing more turnover more new faces in the legislature for better for worse

4:09and and you did a study for the legislature to think about you know how we want to handle that. What what are the potential negative impacts that might happen by having so many new people so quickly and how we might want to adjust to them. So before we talk about what what recommendations you might have tell us about who did you talk to for the report what were the different populations and and were you surprised by what you learned when you when you talked to these different groups. Sure so the so the actual study Carla as you know the the legislature determines what sorts of issues get looked at get studied during an interim so in between those legislative sessions and the legislature provided funds that would that asked a consultant to do maybe a bit of a more thorough or wide cast it cast a wider net to get some insights from a variety of stakeholders

5:12and interests in in the way the legislature operates. So they put out this you know kind of RFP and I was a part of the team of folks who applied to study it and and really wanted to apply my experience and understanding of serving in the legislature. I have my own opinions about term limits but that's neither here nor there this this is a matter of fact we have term limits in place and as somebody who served I deeply care about the way the legislature operates and want it to to operate as best it can to serve the needs of North Dakota and so as a part of this study we we designed it in a few different phases. First we thought some input from legislators themselves like why did you want this study done what do you want coming out of it. Then we cast the net really wide and did a public survey and asked the public to give us some thoughts and input

6:14then we did we required we gave an opportunity to all individuals who participated in that public survey and it was a scientific scientific survey. We asked them you know would you like to have a deeper conversation about these issues and gave them an opportunity to then engage in some focus groups so that we could have deeper conversation than what a 10 minute survey allows and and then after that we sought input and had focused groups with state level associations and membership organizations you know some that have lobbyists and some that don't to get their thoughts and so we really wanted to be as inclusive as we could to get to get thoughts and input and and insight from a wide variety of folks. And all those entities are all those different types of populations are are affected by the legislature obviously legislators themselves are doing the work but the public is impacted by our decisions and the organizations that might have an opinion on

7:19a policy matter are coming to us as well so they all have a vested interest in making sure the legislature continues to do its job well. So were there any differences that surprised you from the opinions of like what the groups thought you know that come in front of the legislature lobbyists if you will what they thought versus what the public thought versus what legislators themselves thought did you did you see any significant differences? I mean there there were certainly pretty vast difference of opinions on certain things and I think some of that is based on having maybe a deeper experience in the legislative process than than others and so to some extent you know voters themselves the the general public were telling us we don't really care what you have to do to make changes to adapt to term limits we want term limits in place we don't care how hard

8:23that is on you figure it out right and while I while I wasn't necessarily surprised I think it was an important reminder that you know sometimes when you are serving in the legislature because you live in the weed of of the process and in policy and and appropriations decisions maybe you forget that the public doesn't really care about how it operates this is how they want it to work and you know it presents some challenges certainly and what we wanted to do was bring forward some practical ideas of what do you do now living within the term limits that the voters have made clear they are not changing their minds on that's right I mean it's true we do sometimes get into a bubble while we're doing our work because it's a it's a super intense time for 80 legislative days and

9:25sometimes we need to maybe lift our head up and recognize where you know what the public knows and and how they see it so and for better or worse the public doesn't know that inside you know how hard the work is either so marrying those two things is a bit of a challenge sometimes yes yeah so we're going to take a little break but when we get back I want to hear from you what the recommendations were on what we might change so we're going to take a break and we'll be back with Erin O'Bam hi everyone this is Carla Rose Hanson in for Tyler Exnes on afternoons live I am subbing for Tyler while he's out of town and we're having a lot of good conversations this afternoon and right now we're talking about term limits on the legislature and my guest today is Erin O'Bam she's a former state senator and she actually don't really deepen to the topic of how the legislature could adjust to term limits change the way it works to kind of mitigate any potential negative impacts and

10:33make sure that we're continuing to do a good job on behalf of the people so Erin as you did your study after you talked to the different groups that either come before the legislature or do the work themselves or the general public you and your team came up with some recommendations on what we might want to consider changing to make sure that we're as effective as possible as we start seeing a higher turnover in the legislature can you tell us a little bit about what some of these these recommendations are sure so let me start Carla like by if listeners will think about this in terms of so when you're elected the legislature you go to the legislature and that becomes your workplace and if you are an employer and you are losing so when we talked about when as term limits come into effect it's estimated that at least 34% of sitting legislators are going

11:39to be impacted in 2028 and 51% in 2030 if you are an employer and you're losing that kind of work force it pretty regularly you need to think about how do you stabilize this environment as much as possible knowing that you don't you don't even have the option to retain your workers your legislators for longer than eight years in each chamber so we kind of thought about it in that lens and we identified in in researching states that have had term limits in place for quite some time you know North Dakota is actually the first state in in many years that has adopted term limits some have actually gone away from them but we focused on kind of some major themes of the impacts that term limits will cause we know that it will cause a loss of institutional knowledge and experience we know that that there are concerns by some about how does this shift power and influence

12:41and does it shift power and influence away from the legislature to the legislature to lobbyists you know to the executive branch of government we talked about challenges in legislative capacity and the outcomes they they have when you have that loss of institutional knowledge and you're not thinking about maybe decisions that happened 10 years ago and why did they happen we talked about a revolving door of leadership and how that leadership will have less experience and really a challenge with recruiting recruiting candidates to serve in the legislature so those are like the five themes we kind of focused on in are there ways that we can again stabilize this workplace given there will be significant turnover of the folk serving so ultimately we we came up with a wide variety of recommendations some that are a heavier list some that would be

13:43maybe an easier change with with three major goals so we wanted to stabilize the assembly itself the legislative branch of government in terms of its schedule its structure and its operations we the goal number two was really to support the people who are serving support those legislators with staff and training and resources to make to give them the experience and the knowledge as quickly as possible and set them up for success maybe quicker than what we're able to do right now and the third goal was thinking about the broader public how do we connect the public with their legislators with the legislature so that they have a greater awareness and understanding of what the process is so that they have greater communication with their elected officials and that they see this as an opportunity for them north Dakota's legislature is a citizen legislature most people who serve in the legislature are either retired or have another job

14:48those two primarily it is a lot of work to be a good legislator I will say to be a good legislator is it is a lot of work and what we really heard from the public was we just we don't really see or hear from our legislators at all and maybe that part surprised me a little bit and so we we tried to come up with some recommendations of how we can maybe bridge that divide a little bit at a time where trust and elected officials is pretty tough anyway that's right and I love the concept of how we can better connect the public with their legislature because they're the legislators because a lot of people and you know everyone leaves very busy lives you know everyone's busy with their family and their work but not a lot of people know who their legislator is and they don't take the time to maybe track what we're doing it's it's even hard for us frankly to track what's going on because things move fast and there's a lot of details so I think that is

15:54a very very good goal you know one of the the topics that's been around for a long time even before term limits in annual sessions yes so do you think that annual sessions is a good answer not only to be more responsive in a fast-moving world but to maybe help all these new people who are coming into the job we did in our recommendations suggest moving to annual sessions and certainly that was debated every session that I served and I have to be honest Carla I I changed my position on on that after my first session I made it I didn't have any information one way or another to know you know by annual annual I don't know which it should be I will just support what we've always done and by by my second session I recognized the pace that the world moves is not the same as what

16:59it was when the North Dakota legislature decided it would only meet once every two years and the Constitution actually doesn't say it has to be every two years it just says it has to be 80 days 80 day a maximum of 80 days within a two-year period so certainly we we suggested and that was mostly because of what we heard from each one of those stakeholder groups with the exception maybe of lobbyists and association groups a desire to move to annual sessions yeah well Aaron thank you so much for explaining the study for us and giving us the rundown of what the recommendations could be I could talk about this all day with you so I appreciate your time and we're going to go to Ferb and Carla yep thanks a lot Aaron