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InFocus with gubernatorial candidate Paul Sorum

Written by: Matt Bunk

Paul Sorum is an architect and contractor from Fargo who says he decided to become active in North Dakota politics a few years ago because President Obama’s financial reform policies “basically destroyed my business.”

After a failed run for the U.S. Senate in 2010, Sorum is now taking aim at the Governor’s Office. He is running against Gov. Jack Dalrymple to gain the Republican nomination.

(Photo by Matt Bunk) Paul Sorum, one of the founders of the North Dakota Tea Party Caucus, is seeking the Republican nomination for governor.

Sorum says he is the only true conservative running for governor. He supports Measure 2 to eliminate local property taxes. He says state spending is wildly out of control. And he says the current leadership of the state has created more problems than solutions.

He sat down with the Great Plains Examiner last month to lay out his political agenda and address what he sees are the biggest challenges for North Dakota.

You were one of the founding members of the North Dakota Tea Party Caucus. Are you still a involved with the Tea Party?

No. When I launched my campaign, I effectively resigned from that. I was a founding member, but as a practical matter when you are running a campaign you don’t have time to do that. And I let them know that back in June or July. They published it now to clarify things with the public. Effectively they have been running the operation without me since last summer.

Tell me about your past involvement with the Republican Party. Have you participated on the grassroots, district-level of the party’s structure?

Absolutely. During the past two years, I have really traveled the state extensively to meet with small groups, town-hall meetings, or one-on-one with political organizations. I just answered questions and talked to people about their concerns, and it’s been a very long road. It’s a tough fight but a good one.

The big push there is first to listen to people. I want to be educated by people because they know what the issues are that affect them most, they know what the solutions are. And when they learn how conservative policies can help solve their problems, they are very enthused.

Unfortunately, it’s always about money in a political campaign –

No, no. It isn’t about money.

Well, yeah, it kind of is.

When it comes to the (state Republican Party) Convention, it’s about getting your delegates there, and that’s a fact because we are a caucus state. Now if you go to the state convention and we have a possible 1,700 or 1,730 delegates there and probably we could safely expect about 1,600 in this case, that means you have to get 51 percent of those delegates to vote for you. And we have been very proactive in our grassroots effort and identifying who those people are that are motived to become a delegate.

We have a database that is second to none – a conservative database that allows us to reach out to these people. We are getting them to these district conventions, so they can apply and become delegates. If we get our delegates there then we win the nomination. It’s that simple.

Does it cost money? It costs some money but not that much.

So tell me what it’s like to run against someone within your party who is an incumbent.

He is not an incumbent. He was not elected.

We have an unprecedented crisis going on in western North Dakota, and I’ve talked to some experts who say our oil industry is probably nine or 10 months away from being regulated out of existence because of the absolute calamity and challenges that people are going through. The challenges and problems are severe and they are caused by lack of leadership here in Bismarck.

We have road problems, traffic problems, crime problems, water problems, sewage problems, housing problems, education problems, and the list goes on. And there has been no leadership and no plan to facilitate and fortify this oil industry. If we did have a plan, and I do have a plan, and if we follow that plan not only will we have prosperity from the oil but that prosperity will benefit everybody instead of just a handful of people and government.

We’ve talked a little bit in the past about your tour of western North Dakota. So tell me what you think needs to be done out there to get things going on the right track?

We need properly financed infrastructure, which hasn’t been done for a long time. That’s a statewide problem. We need to take an inventory annually of our infrastructure statewide, and we need to finance it with long term financing, not one-time grants which are always two or four years too late and too little.

If we finance it properly, with long term financing, then it could be paid for as it is being used and cause the economy to grow. And we are doing it exactly backwards.

Why do we have this grant program? Why don’t we have a plan where we finance what is obviously needed? And why don’t we do it ahead of where the oil drilling is going to happen? There has been no planning. There has been no financial savvy applied to these issues.

In fact, everyone says how great our state is doing financially, but other than high oil tax revenues we are doing very poorly with the state financially. We have one of the highest levels of debt and liabilities per person of any state in the country. It’s inexcusable. We have the highest tax burden on business of any state in the country except for Alaska, and that’s unacceptable. And it’s from a lack of leadership.

So are you saying our economy isn’t doing well, or is it just the state’s financial policies that are a problem?

Our economy is doing well, but it’s not because of leadership, it’s in spite of it.

First, we need to make our state competitive with other states. Instead of being 49th in terms of how competitive we for business, we need to be number one, number two or somewhere in the top 10 at least, given the fact that we have this bountiful natural resource that we can draw from to create prosperity.

Secondly, we need to use state resources much more wisely. We have almost $1 billion a year in pork-barrel spending right here, just special-interest spending. We need to eliminate that and focus spending on the essentials of government, the essential functions of government that are under-funded while we are obsessively spending on special-interest groups. We need to stop that.

Every decision should be about how to protect taxpayers’ rights, how to protect the constitutional rights of these people and make sure injustice isn’t being done.

The money in the Legacy Fund is not benefitting anybody in this state. That tax money should be back in people’s pockets if they are not going to do anything beneficial. I believe we should lend money from the Legacy Fund to infrastructure projects where it can be paid back over a long period of time with interest so we have yet a larger pool of money for infrastructure in the future.

Wouldn’t we need a constitutional change to do what you are talking about, in terms of lending from the Legacy Fund?

No.

Are you sure? Because I think that money is tied up constitutionally.

I’m not talking about spending the interest or spending the principle. I’m talking about lending it as an investment so the Legacy Fund will grow. We have to do that, and they are not doing it, and therefore it’s losing value. They are destroying taxpayers’ property by not investing it properly.

What’s the difference between lending it to an infrastructure project – let’s say by buying bonds from a political subdivision – what’s the difference between that or investing it in the stock market? The only difference is that North Dakota is a better place to invest money.

When you say we are spending about $1 billion on special-interest groups and projects, can you give me an example of the most egregious of those things?

We are spending tens of millions of dollars every year through our Commerce Department with financial handouts to multi-million-dollar corporations that don’t need the money. Why are we giving millions of dollars to companies that the annual salary of their CEO is higher than $6 million? It’s obscene.

When I am struggling to pay my property tax, the state is giving out tens of millions of dollars to private businesses. That’s unconstitutional in our state and that’s obscene. Most of these companies either leave the state or go bankrupt within a few years of receiving that state money anyway. It should never be allowed.

Are you talking about tax incentives to these companies?

Just giving cash to companies. We give cash. Millions and millions of dollars – just cash – for companies to locate here or start up here. It’s illegal in my opinion, according to our constitution, but they’ve been doing it for a long time now.

So the state is just handing out money?

Yes, Yes. Get the pork report from the North Dakota Policy Council.

They are spending over $200 million a year to subsidize out-of-state tuition at our state university system. While 100 percent of those students if they do graduate – most don’t – but if they do graduate, they leave the state immediately. There is no benefit to people in North Dakota to subsidize out-of-state students to the tune of $200 million per year when we can’t even bond for infrastructure in western North Dakota or fix our farm-to-market roads. It’s an injustice of epic proportion.

Tell me about your position on Measure 2.

We have enough tax revenues from other sources that we don’t need it (property tax) and it’s escalating out of control. And it’s preventing people from owning a home. And it’s preventing us from being competitive for businesses with other states.

You have to ask yourself in the middle of a national economic crisis as severe as this one is: Should the state be in the business of making people homeless?

One argument I’ve heard is that reducing taxes might be a good idea, but the property tax is something that’s going to benefit local government organizations, the local school districts, so why is that particular tax so important to eliminate?

There is no local control of property tax today. Everything is set by state law. Assessed rates are a formula, so what the mill levies are going to be is set in state law. How the money is going to be spent is set in state law.

Homeowners have no control over the ownership of their home. If you own a home and you owe, say $200 in back taxes after more than 3 years they will auction your house out from under you. If you have $200,000 in equity and you owe $200 dollars in taxes, they will pay off the $200 in the sale of your home and they will keep the $200,000 dollars in equity and you will get nothing. You will be out homeless and in debt.

If we get rid of it then what we will be able to do is have a constitutional mandate that the Legislature fully fund the essential parts of government at the local level.

The people who are opposed to Measure 2 are saying they will lose control over the government’s ability to collect property taxes. Measure 2 will give control to property owners. So when they say they are going to lose local control they are talking about government’s control, not taxpayers’ control.

When you say the state controls property tax rates – I know that there are a lot of different guidelines that the state sets – but city and county government and school district actually set the rates within those guidelines.

No, no. Special assessments are different then property taxes. So we are talking property taxes. And I think your question is about how your assessor determines the value of your property. It’s set – it’s a formula set in state statute. It’s a state law. The assessor has no control of that. There is no wiggle room there.

I’m talking about the mill levy, which is something that can go up or down based on local governments’ decisions.

In theory, yes. In practice no. A political subdivision, they have a range in state law – there is a low end and a high end – and if you are pretty much at the high end of your mill levy or you decide to lower it, then the Legislature will just lower state aid as a punishment. That’s how they control that aspect, so there is very little control as to the mill-levy range too.

If you become the Republican candidate for governor, what is the political platform you will run on?

I believe that at the moment, and for quite a while, that state government hasn’t been working to the benefit of the people of this state – whether it’s flooding issues, infrastructure issues, making the state more business friendly.

The rate of spending is obscene. They have increase spending in this state 135 percent since year 2000. While they haven’t gone massively in debt, they are in debt and they have liabilities. But our salaries haven’t gone up that much, our average incomes haven’t gone up that much and the cost of living hasn’t really gone up all that much.

We need to limit the control of government and government’s spending. We need to make government programs work. There has been no performance testing to any particular government agency when it comes to progress. We just decide how much we are going to increase it over last year.

We need to improve education. Only one in four of our high school graduates is adequately prepared for college. And our higher education system is obviously a mess. We have seen one scandal after another coming out of our higher ed system.

I think the biggest thing is getting a governor who believes in the U.S. Constitution.

The head of the EPA has said that the goal is to regulate coal-fired power plants out of existence by making their rates so expensive that nobody can afford it. That is a direct assault on the security and the wellbeing of people in this state. We need to have a discussion with the EPA. Let’s say “Look, EPA, the Constitution does not give you the authority to regulate anything in our state and that goes for Game and Fish, that goes for the Corps of Engineers.” They don’t own things in our state. We make the decisions of what goes on in our state and what happens with our resources and how these things are regulated.

You’ve mentioned problems with our public education system, so what specifically you would do to fix the problems?

I think part of the problem is that the state has created a bigger and bigger K-12 machine that is not focused on results. I am a parent. I am a product of our K-12 system. But I am a parent who ended up homeschooling his two oldest kids after a few of years of public education.

The problem is we need to make the teachers accountable to parents. And there is a number of simple ways to do that. If teachers are accountable to parents and the students are the customer, we are going to get much better quality in our education system.

We need to accommodate more than just classroom learning. We need to accommodate various learning styles. The classroom setting isn’t the way to go. We need to have other forms of learning available to K-12 and higher education. Other schools are doing that and we are behind in that area and we could easily fix it.

What about the business environment. You mentioned we rank 49th in some respect. What are we doing badly in the business climate and what do we need to do to change that?

First of all we need to take away some of the punitive programs. A study that was conducted on Measure 2 shows that in the first year of abolishing property taxes we would create 12,000 new private sector jobs and other tax revenues will increase $65 million.

The people who are opposed to Measure 2 don’t want to admit that property tax abatements are the single-biggest incentives given for economic development to get businesses locally in our communities. Why don’t we just get rid of it altogether if we don’t need the revenue. What’s wrong with that?

Do you think our corporate income tax rate is part of the problem?

It’s part of the problem, but there are other things that could make it a lot more business friendly. For example, there is no option to self-insure or privately insure when it comes to workers compensation in our state. We are one of four states that forces people to use a government-run workers comp insurance program. If we want to be competitive, we have to follow the lead of most other states and say, “Look, you have three options. You can go with the state insurance, you can get private insurance or self-insurance.”

Our state is doing relatively well when it comes to the economy. That bodes well for people who are already holding office. How do you get your message out that we could be doing better when people keep hearing how well we are doing with the leadership we have?

Well, the oil tax revenue is not a result of our leadership in this state, it’s in spite of it. In the western part of the state, for every one person that supports the status quo in Bismarck there are probably 1,000 who are very angry with some good reasons for it. And there isn’t overwhelming support for this governor. He has to be replaced or everything we have in this state is in jeopardy financially.

-Matt Bunk is publisher of the Great Plains Examiner.

 

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