543: 'Where are the dollars invested?'

The Legacy Fund was launched in 2010 when North Dakota voters approved a legislatively-initiated constitutional amendment to create it. Now, thanks to the share of oil tax revenues it receives, as well as the investment returns its generated, it sits with a balance of about $10.7 billion.

And it's become something of a political football. It can seem as though we are endlessly debating how the fund is invested and what we should do with the fund and its earnings.

On this episode of Plain Talk, a couple of Republican lawmakers from District 12, in the Jamestown area, talked about legislation they'd like to see passed during the 2025 session which, they feel, would help inform those debates. Because one of the biggest problems of the Legacy Fund is that we don't know how a lot of the money is invested. Rep. Mitch Ostlie, and Rep. Bernie Satrom, estimate that about $3.1 billion of the fund's investments are opaque to public scrutiny.

"Where are the dollars invested?" Rep. Ostlie asked.

Their proposal is called the Legacy Fund Transparency Act, and it's pretty simple. It would require that the State Investment Board list the Legacy Fund's investments in a public way. Perhaps on the SIB's website.

The lawmakers feel this would not only help inform debates over what we should be doing with the Legacy Fund, but also help us identify problematic investments, like when the fund was invested in Russian bonds. "We were literally funding the Russian government," Rep. Satrom said.

The lawmakers were also somewhat critical of the current members of the State Investment Board, which includes among its number elected officials like Lt. Gov. Tammy Miller, Treasurer Thomas Beadle, Rep. Glenn Bosch, and Sen. Jerry Klein.

"This has just been incredibly hands off," Rep. Satrom said.

"We were able to find out...that we were in Russian bonds," he continued at another point in the interview. "Couldn't they see? They're just trusting the experts and not having common sense."

Also on this episode, Chad Oban and I discuss what are probably the most important legislative races in the North Dakota, in Districts 10, 24, and 46, and we also talk about U.S. House candidate Trygve Hammer's recent criticisms of his opponent Julie Fedorchak.

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