[applause] [applause] oh come on. Good morning. Thank you for that warm welcome and thank you for being in person all the people watching on line or listening remotely we say thank you for joining us for the 2024 state of the state. Youve all been thoroughly welcomed this morning but i want to give a special shout out to a few people in the course ive got to start with first Lady Catherine and her family members she spirit their sister julie and her cousin lisa and watching on line to the rest of our rest of our extended families and their sons joe and tom and her daughter jesse and their extended families. When you serve your family serves with you so i want to be sure to at this time thank them for all their support in the seven years in todays a special day because its jesses birthday and so we need on a one, two, three everybody to yell happy birthday jesse. It will be the Largest Group to ever yell her birthday at the same time. One, 23, happy birthday jesse [applause] way to go. You guys did fantastic. [applause] you saw her here on stage but to have such an outstanding partner in the tammy miller. Shes an asset for the state of north dakota and we have a historic year in terms of milestones in progress but her background in finance privatesector leadership is the ceo of a company with over 4000 people operating in 29 states you rarely get people like that delete the privatesector and the Lieutenant Governors made a huge difference to transform government. I want to give her womb were welcome. Say thank you for your great leadership. [applause] and kicking us off today after the great music we had and thank you for hosting us and seen a lot of clever ways to impress the legislature that we need more money for improvements. Pulling the plug as we were getting here i think president east end that was brilliant. And for legislators you may want to look at the lector back here. There probably are some upgrades that could be made but here we are at the auditoriums namesake. As you know this is the name, she was the second rough rider award winner in the state of north dakota and one of the states highest honor people in 1951. Her success is there success though its an honor to be in the stage and hollow named after one of our rough riders. The stark county commissioners the whole group fantastic job legislature kicking us off today senator david hogue are majority leader in our minority leaders youve all been recognized for thank you all for your important leadership in the course they are busy working in d. C. But i do want to say hello important are resisting this hoeven senator cramer and congressman armstrong three people in strong and powerful positions in d. C. They are good at their jobs as legislators and to help push back the federal government so lets say thanks right now. [applause] and we have our Supreme Court chief Justice Jensen and the other justices and districtwide justices. We have three great branches of government in our state and we werent allowed in time in seven years in office the demographics of retirement is the major reason that we have set a record. Ive had the honor of appointing 20 different district judges and Supreme Court judges. Sometimes you go back in history and sometimes the governor in 40 years in office might appoint two to four. We have done 20. The process has been an important one. Well talk about Behavior Health later but i want to share right now as part of appointing judges to get to interview 75 different people that have come up through the judicial system in one of the questions i always ask is how much of your job as a judge advocate in a prosecutor and defender working in her system and north dakota or in the privatesector working with criminal defense how much of your work would go away if we eliminate Behavioral Health and addiction. Ive never heard an answer. Think of what is the state and a nation in our judicial system dealing with the problems of something we can work to fix so keep that in the back of your mind when we are talking about Behavior Health. We do a nice job on the back in but i do want to say are administered yours also around third judicial area they were carefully behind the scene that they never get recognized. They run it efficiently and effectively. Lets say thank you to the frontline workers. [applause] since this is a day for reflection its the duty and honor and after a appoint them everyone calls them your honor. Due to legislative budget cuts in the Governors Office i ride all my own jolts. Thats all youre going to get. Dad jolts but i learned last week how do you know what a joke becomes a bad joke . It becomes apparent. [laughter] we are done here. [applause] we have a lot of gratitude for the toughest elected job and north dakota of any elected officials. We have great tribal chairs and Tribal Council spirit lake Standing Rock chairman janet of veteran Turtle Mountain chippewa leader chairman hill incredible folks and we have made so much progress together. One of our top on the objective has been state travel. The collaboration we have had historic tax revenue sharing which senator cook was in the service last friday. They came to his Prayer Service for the work that he did on making sure we had fairness and equity. The gaming contacts which we issued last year that had been going on for 20 years and agreement that improved our ability to respond and to work with the tribes on cybersecurity because their tribes are being attacked to ransomware through foreign entities. We look forward to building on all of the partners in the five tribal nations. I remind everyone guess they are enrolled members of tribes that are sovereign nations that every single one is a north dakota system and its our responsibility and duty to serve alongside with them. From the government to government stamp what i would say encourage all of you to join in our strengthening government to government relationships. Our tribal conference you are all invited every agency. I just want to say when we had federal partners to be a part of that they say this is the best government to government tribal state conference in the country. Dont miss it. Its coming up in june gill learned a lot and youll make great relationships. Theres Economic Opportunities as well. We are also grateful for the tremendous dedicated cabinet leaders that we have. Its so important when you are leading in the credit sometimes goes to the governor and Lieutenant Governor but you can get any of these things done unless you have people that are driving in the same direction. Its been an honor to work with these cabinet leaders of the haves and they have five he was joined in the last year who are looking forward to working with. Shes off to strong start in one of the commitments we have in 2024 from our office is we are digging in as hard as ever in a Strategic Planning process with all of you. Over 75 agencies will be there in the budget process that follows it. We are committed in delivering. Albeit delivering the budget address next december before the end of my term. We have three to 27 days left. We will be delivering the best budget the state is ever received and that means it will be better than the last one we did. We are super committed to that process to make sure you have the best starting point in the legislature to make Smart Investments to take their state forward. The director has been on the ground and running. This is a huge challenge. We have massive transportation things going on in want to tell him thank you for his collaboration and three new commissioners that started last week when it was an external player and two there were internal. The commissioners here the deputy of texas a much larger job in hhh says our Largest Agency in terms of budgets and People Affairs director bret hawke is taking over and congratulations to director kobe bryant. He has time here in new englund. He knows her system and hell be fantastic. Again for those by people lets give them a hand and say thank you. [applause] we have a small but mighty Governors Office team all told about 16 people. We we are not a big agency but we get a lot done because the people we have work aroundtheclock seven days a week. They are all amazing and everyone of them like me will be coasting to the finish line so getting ready for four things helping announce that arent even being announced today. We are going to keep driving our agenda forward. We did make story progress working with all of you tribes in the legislation and leaders and some the things we have accomplished are the longstanding practical issues and identified and implemented commonsense solutions. These are benefiting us. Some of you in this room do that. Take one that we didnt even talk about last year during the session because we solved it. Protecting over 25 of their health care 25 of our k12 students and the entire university of the state owns over 60 billion in Property Value protected was completely stalled and stopped by the state of for 53 reasons. They said heres a 53 seat reasons you cant get a permit. But we Work Together and got it done in salt it with the joint process with minnesota and its being billed and by 2027 we are going to have 250,000 people who dont have the worry about it anymore and that will help the Economic Growth continue in that market. Pension reform. Mike devore was appearing in its been tried and tried and it happened this year. 1. 9 billion we met the obligations completely about 53,000 current members and retirees. Now we have a 401 k style plan that will allow us and their leaders to recruit young people to work for the state of north dakota. Good job. [applause] the primary seatbelt has been tried since 2000. We lose more than 100 people every year to otter deaths are conjuring up a goal of saying theres no acceptable number other than zero. Its not like we got it down to 75 because 75 is still a son and a daughter and niece or nephew. One is to many of the work we can do with d. O. T. Human services and a lot of these are Impaired Driving issues but it took a legislator like dean rommel who helped to drive it and to have the courage to say with and we got a past. We are one of the last states to have a primary seatbelt law. Im a freedom of liberty guy but im also a guy that guess what theres nothing in the constitution that says you can drive could you have to have a license to be qualified and you need to not be impaired and you have to be qualified to do it. Its not like the right to vote. Thats something you apply for and you get the skill to that. If you want to be doing that you have to achieve something so good job. We got it done. Corporate farming we had the most outdated corporate farming laws in america. We killed Animal Agriculture and i mean killed. We are still doing and almost no sheep herds and the stated we had less, 12,000 dairy cattle in our state. We were importing milk and of the state. We had one north dakota entity running at darion oregon where they could do Animal Agriculture and they had 35,000 dairy in oregon. We and our whole state of 12,000 so i say we ran into the ground. We carved out and said Animal Agriculture we will protect family farming that the strongest protections for family farmers in the nation. Corporations can own land here and if you and i want to start a farm together and youre related to me, we couldnt start a farm together here so we have the tightest protections for family farmers. We can save our tradition and open up the door for cattle and since the law passed we have several, 12,000 dairy firms to want to build on our side of the river instead of the minnesota side or the celtic of the site. We are bringing cattle back which will save our communities. So thats fantastic in the course Interest Rates are super high right now. Guess what, we have smart leaders and a couple of years ago we said wow maybe we could borrow some money and take some of these big projects like the diversion like the minot floods the money that would flow into our spending like Water Infrastructure would compete with all the smaller sized megaprojects on the table. 680 milliondollar bonding package and 2021 to support infrastructure upgrades took advantage of historic low Interest Rates. That would not have happened without senator rich warden sitting in the front pushing through that bill. Thank you. [applause] this last year record 550 milliondollar income or Property Tax Relief with the prime sponsor whos always been a champion. He and i are completely alike. We still need to get north dakota down to zero income tax and well talk more about that later. Thank you craig for being such a strong proponent of lower taxes and her stay. Thats just a few of the things in aikido on and on. Other than that we have so much work to get them could be a big challenges that lie ahead in the biggest challenge we face in her state is the workforce. We have made significant headway last session to tackle one of the Biggest Barriers to workforce participation. The legislature came to understand the thing that was holding us back when we have 30,000 jobs open in our state in every restaurant in every manufacture and every farmer and certainly every oil company in the state does not have enough workers and we dont have enough teachers. We need to make sure we were investing in workforce infrastructure. What is the workforce infrastructure look like today . One of them as childcare. If you have too educated parents that are here are too educated parents want to move here we had the Legislature Last year that told me personally they finally got the spot or both of their kids were career folks living in south dakota and they would come home starting a family and they wanted to be close to their grandparents and they were coming back to their hometown. They couldnt find it childcare slots and so they move back home. We have made progress on childcare and housing. This will be another big lift. Thats not the governments job. Workforce infrastructure we have to create the incentives for the privatesector to bring n. To solve these problems. We have to continue to work as one across all of State Government to cabinet leaders are getting so good at right now. And what we have done on the drilling and waters usa and 20 rules that are currently being jammed by the federal government and i say rule of pages. You dont understand the amount of time and energy the ags office in our office and the land board, we are to defend sovereign state license board because these rules are trying to take the power of the state to move it towards unelected bureaucrats in d. C. We have got to keep fighting back on that and we will do that. We have made great progress in attracting Capitol Investment into our state and thats how we grow and investment investment in the workforce. We do that for the things we are doing right now reducing taxes cutting red tape. This Legislature Passed 50 added that 51 red tape reduction bills we sent them last year and thats fantastic and we are building healthy and vibrant community so we can compete against every other state. Every one of job titles i talked about if youre a teacher or nurse or work in manufacturing, if you can do anything even drive a combine if you can work there you can get a job anywhere in this country because they have jobs open in virtually every industry. We are in a competition like never before. Their 10 million jobs open in america, 10 million some people move to states because its warm. We have been quite sold that yet in our state but we had to compete in other ways but one of the ways we compete is on innovation or regulation. In our office we get together and innovation and not regulation. We need a rule to stop some person from from doing that and i say how bout have innovation so we never had to do it in the first place. We want to unleash her states full potential. Innovation in the forwardlooking. Renovation is looking. But you get a federal role in place by the time they get in pretty soon youre like whos going to monitor that to make sure that company is following that rule . The federal government as we have to stop this issue. We have a government and agent with a clipboard driving around Western North dakota trying to make sure that someone is following it and it takes the federal government eight years to go from an idea to implementation to enforcement . We have ripped through four evolutions of moores law with a computer chip that half the price and by the time you get out there and drive around in your pickup to do some monitoring we could be tracking all that electronically. Digitally and remotely. Satellite internet upload whatever you want data thats collected automatically thats accurate fast fast remote and. Data is collected by humans that the high cost in and inaccurate but the regulation not only when you make the rule but the downstream costs raises the cost of almost every product in america. Our state needs to hold high innovation not regulation of thats part of her past. Opportunities have never been greater. With ai and the power of natural language computing it is unbelievable what we can do to transform the way we think about it. Its a super exciting with to do a better job. One of the things that catherine and i learned this last year when we are traveling around the country sharing the amazing story of north dakota at such an honor to represent the state and the rest of the nation does not understand us. Its not like they dont understand us like they have never met anybody from her state before and probably because of our brand literally because we are in north dakota for the one thi