BISMARCK — Supporters of Prairie Public can breathe a sigh of relief after a bill looking to defund the organization was voted down in the Senate on Monday.
House Bill 1255 would have banned any state money from directly or indirectly supporting public broadcasting.
The bill has been intensely debated in committee hearings and on the floor of both chambers. It received recommendations not to pass from the House Political Subdivisions Committee and House Appropriations Committee but passed on the House floor with a vote of 48-41. It received another recommendation not to pass from the Senate State and Local Government Committee and was finally shot down on the Senate floor in a 41-6 vote.
Supporters of the bill said it was time to end state funding for public broadcasting because of the political bent they believe has invaded its content, and because they think the rise of social media and streaming services has made the services provided by public broadcasting obsolete.
“I used to be a big fan of PBS,” Sen. Jeff Magrum, R-Hazelton, said during debate on the Senate floor. “But these last years, I have really been disappointed in their political agenda. You can't watch PBS ... It's just a continual barrage of this global warming, climate change, everybody's going to die type of thing. You know, it's just, I don't know why we would fund propaganda like that.”
Opponents of the bill said it would not end public broadcasting in North Dakota, but it would defund the programs that focus on local culture and content, forcing Prairie Public, the state’s only public broadcasting service, to use more national public broadcasting content.
“The national programming provided by the Federal Corporation for Public Broadcasting will not change with this bill,” Sen. Kristin Roers, R-Fargo, said on the Senate floor. “What will be affected is the local programming. The mobile buses that travel from school to school, providing educational resources so that your local school district doesn't need to purchase the materials — that would be affected. Other North Dakota-focused programming would be affected.”
Opponents also touted the educational resources provided by public broadcasting and said removing funding for it would impact the poorest residents of North Dakota who do not have alternative ways to access the content found in public broadcasting.
There was also discussion on the cash reserves Prairie Public holds — which one senator said was roughly $16 million, according to committee testimony — and the organization’s consideration of buying a bar to ensure it had a place to conduct charitable gambling. Supporters of the bill said this showed the organization could go without the funding provided by the state.
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“So they didn't ever buy the bar,” Roers said. “It was a site (where) they had the license for the charitable gaming and when that bar was going out of business, they wanted to at least have the opportunity to do their due diligence, which they did, and determined that that wasn't the right move for them.”
With the bill’s failure, there is no longer a ban on future funding, but as of now, no money is earmarked for Prairie Public in the state budget. When HB 1255 passed in the House, appropriators removed the organization’s funding from North Dakota's budget. That money has yet to be added back in, and one senator voted against the bill but encouraged the Senate Appropriations Committee to leave zero funding for Prairie Public.
“So I struggle with this because we say we want to fund certain things, roads and bridges, other things in our state, and yet we're not willing to stand up and say, ‘Hey, maybe this is not something that the state should fund,’” said Sen. Janne Myrdal, R-Edinburg. “I hope, if this bill goes down, that our appropriators, respectfully, would still keep that number at zero.”
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