Why is a company that was hired by North Dakota to conduct a study about North Dakota refusing to share its early information about North Dakota with North Dakota lawmakers?
That was the question asked by State Sen. Connie Triplett, D-Grand Forks, at an interim legislative committee meeting this week, and it’s a great one. That’s especially true given the subject of the study, which is nothing less than the future impacts of North Dakota’s oil and gas industry.
North Dakotans have an interest and a stake in every decimal point of such a study. Lawmakers are well within their rights to ask to see and even to comment on various drafts.
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Of course, maybe the lawmakers don’t want to interfere in the engineering firm’s internal procedures. After all, the outift - Bismarck-based KLJ - is a private company, not part of state government.
But that claim loses a lot of its force when you learn that KLJ is, in fact, sharing its draft assumptions with and soliciting comments from various others, including industry experts.
Just not with the interim legislative committee that had hired them to do the work.
“On the face of it, that’s ridiculous,” The Forum of Fargo-Moorhead editorialized.
“Legislators hired the company. Taxpayers pay the freight. Yet, of all things, KLJ seeks validation of its work from the industry that is the subject of the impact study.
“Somewhere in there is a fox-and-henhouse situation.”
Triplett spotted that seeming snub by KLJ and called out the company on it. Her colleagues on the committee should have joined in, insisting along with her that if “industry experts” are being allowed to vet KLJ’s draft assumptions, then the members of the Legislature’s interim Energy Development and Transmission Committee - experts all, in North Dakota politics as well as in their committee responsibilities - should be able to do the same.
Sadly, that didn’t happen, at least not to the extent Triplett was looking for. Instead, committee members let KLJ keep its draft assumptions out of the committee’s view for now.
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But Triplett was right to raise the issue. “This is our study,” as she declared. North Dakotans have an interest in securing the best possible analysis, and for that to happen, lawmakers can and should monitor the various steps.
North Dakota voters almost never fault lawmakers for insisting on “sunlight,” meaning more information. Kudos to Triplett for acting on that fact.
