Published: March 21, 2024
Greetings and welcome to the bullet point edition of the President’s Post. Here are a few of the things that we are tracking at ND United:
- The 2024 ND United Delegate Assembly will be held on Saturday, April 20 at the Gateway to Science Center in Bismarck. Every NDU local has at least one allotted delegate and it will be great to see you there. Note: NDU will pay mileage for one car per 4 delegates per local, and ½ of a double room at the Holiday Inn of Bismarck. The rooms are going fast so please contact your local president if you want to be part of this exciting event.
- If you have not already claimed your $500 property tax credit from the ND Tax Department, time is running out! To claim the credit, you must apply by March 31 of this year! There is no age or income limit so if you want to save $500 on your 2024 property taxes, giddy-up!
- Speaking of property taxes, signature gatherers continue to circulate petitions in an effort to get a constitutional measure on the November ballot to “eliminate” property taxes in North Dakota. Please sign the Decline to Sign pledge!
- You may not know it, but property taxes provide 30%-40% of your school district’s budget. Proponents of the measure would only shift the $1.3B obligation to the state for payment, and then not obligate the state to pay more than the amount of property tax collected in 2024. This bill will decimate local control and cause every political subdivision, including your school district, to go hat-in-hand to the legislature every two years and sing for its supper. This bad idea was trotted out in 2012 and defeated by a wide margin. No other state in the US has eliminated property taxes, though several have eliminated income taxes. Are there ways to improve property taxes? Absolutely, and they should be explored. Eliminating them all together, though, will create more problems than it solves and next week, I’ll do a deep dive into the matter.
- This week, I am off to Washington to chair a meeting of the NEA Foundation. The Foundation is doing wonderful things such as facilitating the development of Community Schools in the, which suffers from a dearth in philanthropic investment. Working with other philanthropies, teachers’ unions, and private enterprises, the NEA Foundation is helping to create strong schools and communities. In addition, the NEAF offers a wide variety of grants to educators across the nation. Sad fact: No one from ND applied for any NEAF grants last year. Let’s change that.
- On a related manner, I represented the NEA Foundation at a meeting two weeks ago of 20 philanthropic organizations devoted to investing in Native American communities across the country. The meeting was hosted jointly by Secretary of the Interior, Deb Haaland, and Education Secretary, Miguel Cardona. It was a great first meeting and we look forward to making a positive impact through our work in the near future. Stay tuned!
