Goehring assembles litigation review committee

FARGO, N.D. - The North Dakota Department of Agriculture has approached state ag organizations and others to create an impact review committee to advise the commissioner on whether and how to spend $1.5 million per biennium to help fight against excessive federal regulation.

Doug Goehring, the state’s ag commissioner, says the NDDA has contacted organizations that were listed as supplying designees to the committee in the law, which passed in the 2015 session. The committee will be assembled in the next several weeks, he says. The new law goes into effect Aug. 1.

Goehring says the committee probably won’t get off the ground in time to weigh in on the Waters of the U.S. lawsuit. North Dakota Attorney General Wayne Stenehjem has taken the lead on a multi-state suit to stop the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s WOTUS proposal, calling it a “land and water grab.”

“If [Stenehjem] would require some more funds to continue on with the litigation concerning Waters of the U.S., he and I would certainly visit about that and I would put that before the impact review committee,” Goehring says.

The law includes attorneys general from 12 states, including Montana and South Dakota, but not Minnesota.

Goehring anticipates the new committee will be up and running in time to tackle things such as expansions of the Endangered Species Act.

“That is continuing to be a larger threat than anything else,” Goehring says.

Partnership Goehring says the only other state that has a similar type of litigation advisory committee is Texas, but that committee involves several agencies.

“This one is a little bit different animal, in that it would incorporate the private sector and those that are intimately affected,” Goehring says. “They’d bring a lot of resources to the table - information, knowledge - it’s a public-private partnership.”

The committee will study various environmental regulations that will have dramatic impacts and effects on agriculture, industry and the public.

“I see their role as research - working together with multiple entities to make sure that they can put together the best defensible case, or at least information, that can then be handed off for the attorney general, to pursue litigation.”

Goehring acknowledges the process of evaluating litigation over regulations seems ironic for a regulator.

“In some respects, if you have your regulator hat on, you’re looking at things you’re supposed to implement and enforce,” Goehring says.

In this role, he has to look at things from the viewpoint of a farmer or private citizen.

“That’s the hat I’m putting on and saying, ‘these things we need to be concerned about’ ” either as an overreach or because it will have some “very large, negative effect on agriculture, on society, on industry.”

In North Dakota, 90 percent of all of the land is owned, operated and managed by farmers and ranchers. The energy industry uses that land, so it’s important the two industries understand how endangered species laws or WOTUS affect each other. Municipalities and political subdivisions also need the information.

“They’re trying to build roads and sustain communities,” Goehring says.

Livestock On a separate track, Goehring is also trying to help organize a pro-livestock development coalition similar to entities that exist in Iowa and South Dakota. The group would work with municipalities, communities and producers, attending zoning and planning commission meetings.

Goehring says he expects his department to come back with a framework for creating the coalition in a few weeks. Such a coalition would have to be funded and supported by the ag community, but the ag department will offer “all kinds of human capital,” Goehring says.