Public Service Commissioner Jill Kringstad didn't attend the North Dakota Republican Party's state convention, alongside every other statewide Republican incumbent. Thus, she doesn't have the party's endorsement, but neither does her opponent, Chris Olson.

She was appointed to her job by Gov. Kelly Armstrong, and has his backing, and told us, during a live recording of Plain Talk at the Blue Rider bar in Minot, that beingon the campaign trail for the first time, she's enjoying talking to the voters.

"Just to meet them and hear them and hear them talk about how they're saying, you know, we're telling our friends, we're telling our families."

Data centers have been a hot topic this election cycle. Kringstad said the PSC is already involved in ensuring that those power-hungry developments don't drive up rates when they pull electricity from utilities regulated by the PSC, but that ultimately she's a regulator. The state probably needs some new laws for data centers, and the PSC doesn't make laws.

"We're not here setting policy. What we're doing is we're operating within the confines of the laws and the rules that are passed by the legislature," she said, noting that there's an ongoing interim study about the issue, and that she expects a lot of debate over data centers during legislative session next year.

We live in very polarized time, but Kringstad also acknowledged during the interview that she has some bipartisanship in her family. The candidate said she's been involved in Republican politics since she was nine years old, when her parents were helping out with then-Gov. John Hoeven's campaign, but her sister is a district chair for the North Dakota Democratic-NPL.

"We have different views on politics and that's ok," Kringstad said. "We don't discuss everything, but the things that we do discuss, we have very substantive back and forth discussions that are respectful and we always walk away and say, 'Okay, you have your opinion. I have mine. I just see things differently and I love you anyway.'"

Also on this episode, Minot Mayor Mark Jantzer talked with me and co-host Chad Oban about how his community is handling a new budgeting reality after the legislature imposed a 3% cap on spending growth as a part of sweeping property tax reform.

He explained that to manage the budget under these constraints, the city of Minot has primarily relied on utilizing its reserves to reduce property taxes over the last two budgets, but he warned that this is "not sustainable," and said that by 2027 the city would have to make cuts and find new revenues.

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Rep. Dawson Holle, a Republican from District 31, is involved in a four-way race for two House seats. He, along with fellow House incumbent Rep. Karen Rohr, didn't receive the NDGOP's convention endorsement. Many of the NDGOP's incumbents haven't been endorsed amid a rift in the party between traditionally conservative Republicans and a populist faction that wants to take Nort Dakota in a different direction.

Holle says his losing the endorsement had as much to do with gamesmanship and geography as the intent of voters.

"I think that there's a lot of things that go on behind the scene that often time people don't see see when it comes to a district as big as mine," Holle told us on this episode of Plain Talk (District 31 encompasses all or parts of four counties).

"Our district meeting was on a Wednesday at 7:00 at night," he continued. "The weather was okay, but it was an hour and a half drive from my house, and trying to get supporters there is a hard time."

Still Holle, who was, at 18 years old, the youngest person elected to the Legislature in state history, says he's not changing how he approaches the race amid intra party turbulence. "Affordability is hurting everyone," he said. "No matter what aspect or what industry you're in -- from farming where we've seen a lot of the costs have risen astronomically across the board, to it's just a single mom with three kids that just is trying to pay your bills -- affordability is really the breadandbut issue."

Also on this episode, Josh Askvig, state director for the AARP, talked with me and guest co-host Megan Indvik about the prevelance of older voters in North Dakota's primary elections, as well as some of the generational friction between so-called "boomers" and younger generations, and the common ground these voters can find with one another.

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"It's hard to do enhanced oil recovery," Charles Gorecki said during a Plain Talk podcast interview from the Williston Basin Petroleum Conference.

Gorecki is the head of the Energy & Environmental Research Center at the Univeresity of North Dakota. That organization conducts exploratory research explicitly driven by North Dakota's industrial and environmental needs. Stuff like how to reduce flaring, how to build safer pipelines and how to enhance oil recovery.

The theme of the conference, which brings together all the major players in North Dakota's oil and gas industry, was "cracking the code," which is a reference to on-going efforts for enhanced oil recovery. Something that could perhaps set off a second oil boom, and prolong the oil and gas industry's prodigious contributions to North Dakota's economic prosperity and tax revenues.

Gorecki said there are many promising paths to enhanced oil recovery, but using captured carbon emissions to unlock more oil from wells is one of the most promising. The problem? We don't have enough of it.

"I've talked about CO2 being the thing that we need in massive quantities, hundreds of billions of tons to really unlock the Bakken," he told us.

"For context, our coal fire power plants in the state of North Dakota produce annually about 30 million tons of CO2," he continued. "So it would take all the coal fire power plant CO2 emissions captured times three or more to really enhance that recovery to have what we would consider basically volumetrically a second boom in the Bakken."

But getting that carbon to North Dakota has proven politically fraught. Opposition to a carbon pipeline proposed by Summit Carbon Solutions has caused that project to be rerouted to Wyoming, and while some of that outcome had to do with Summit's aggressive and ham-handed approach to landowners, there's no question that there's a noisy and organized movement against carbon pipelines in general.

Gorecki told us "there's a lot of misinformation" about the issue. "We transport things in a number of different ways in this country. We transport them by truck, by train, by pipeline," he said. "And by far the safest way to transport large amounts of of liquids and gases is in pipelines."

Also on this episode, me and guest co-host Alison Ritter talked about the controversies around data centers, and carbon pipelines, and whether too many in the public are taking North Dakota's economic prosperity for granted.

If you want to participate in Plain Talk, just give us a call or text at 701-587-3141. It's super easy — leave your message, tell us your name and where you're from, and we might feature it on an upcoming episode. To subscribe to Plain Talk, search for the show wherever you get your podcasts or use one of the links below.

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Recently-appointed Department of Energy Undersecretary Kyle Haustveit says that when people talk about transitioning on energy sources, they aren't talking about reality.

"We've never transitioned from any fuel source in the world in the history of mankind," he said on this episode of Plain Talk, recording with us from the Williston Basin Petroleum Conference in Bismarck. "We consume more wood and dung or biomass today than we ever have before. Same with coal, oil, natural gas, nuclear, wind, solar, geothermal."

"The charts are all up and to the right," he added.

Going forward, we need to start by asking what we need from our energy? Is it low prices? Low carbon intensity?

"What do you have available in your region? How do we prioritize responsible development to maintain affordable, reliable, secure energy for the people that need it most?" he said we should be asking.

Also, he says we need to grow to meet new demands for power. "For years, it's been far too easy to stop things and far too hard to start building things," he said, crediting President Donald Trump's administration with changing some of that.

Also on this episode, Supreme Court Justice Jerod Tufte and Cass County State's Attorney Kim Hegvik join to celebrate North Dakota's drug courts or, to use the new terminology, treatment courts. These are specialized proceedings in the criminal justice system that still prioritize accountability for crimes, but also focus on helping people solve problems. They were called drug courts because they started out focusing on addiction, though these days there are lots of different types, including some specializing in the specific issues veterans might face.

"Right now we run most of these at close to capacity, and so we have a pretty good population of people that have shown that they are high-risk, high need," Justice Tufte said. "So these aren't the lowest level, first-time offenders. These are people that by and large would be incarcerated if they weren't in a drug drug court or a treatment court program."

Hegvik and Tufte said the treatment courts save the state money by keeping offenders out of jail, and they also reduce recidivism.

If you want to participate in Plain Talk, just give us a call or text at 701-587-3141. It's super easy — leave your message, tell us your name and where you're from, and we might feature it on an upcoming episode. To subscribe to Plain Talk, search for the show wherever you get your podcasts or use one of the links below.

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In this replay episode of Plain Talk, Rob and Chad speak with former North Dakota lawmaker Hamida Dakane about comments from President Donald Trump targeting the Somali community and the impact those remarks had across North Dakota and Minnesota.

Dakane shares why the comments felt deeply personal, how children in immigrant families responded, and why she believes her community will continue moving forward despite the rhetoric surrounding immigration and identity.

A former Fargo-area legislator and the first Black woman and first Muslim elected to the North Dakota Legislature, Dakane also reflects on her journey to North Dakota, the support she's found here, and why she still believes strongly in the region and its people.

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While Rob and Chad are out this week, we're revisiting one of the most talked-about interviews from the show — Fargo attorney Jay Greenwood's deep dive into the shocking wrongful arrest of Tennessee grandmother Angela Lipps.

Lipps was arrested at gunpoint and jailed for months after Fargo Police used AI facial recognition technology to identify her as a suspect in a North Dakota bank fraud case. The problem? Evidence later showed she was in Tennessee at the time the crimes were committed.

In this replay, Greenwood walks through how the case unfolded, why he believes law enforcement failed at multiple stages of the investigation, and what this incident says about the growing use of artificial intelligence in policing and criminal investigations.

"It's just the best-case scenario for the Fargo PD is a nightmare," Greenwood says, describing the fallout from the case and the legal questions that remain unanswered.

The episode also includes discussion on North Dakota's ongoing debate over data centers in coal country, plus listener feedback and commentary from guest co-host Jessica Bell.

State Sen. Ryan Braunberger joined this episode of Plain Talk to discuss his run for North Dakota Secretary of State, election integrity, campaign finance transparency, redistricting, and the growing distrust many Americans have in public institutions.

"I think we do a good job of running our elections," Braunberger said. "What I think the Secretary of State office could do better at is showing the receipts that we do good."

Braunberger said North Dakota's elections are secure, but argued the state needs to do a better job educating the public on how elections actually work, including canvassing, vote counting, and voter ID verification. "Many politicians say elections are fine," he said, "but we don't tell them why they're secure and how they're secure."

The conversation also covered campaign finance reporting, voter ID laws, redistricting fights, ballot measure transparency, and the challenge of maintaining trust in elections during a time of intense political division. Braunberger said he supports stronger enforcement of campaign finance laws and even suggested candidates who refuse to pay fines could potentially be barred from future ballots.

Also on this episode, Rob Port and guest co-host Erin Oban discuss Measure 1 on the June ballot, voter ID access in rural communities, the lawsuit over North Dakota's political "false statements" law, and the growing challenge of balancing free speech with misinformation online.

If you want to participate in Plain Talk, just give us a call or text at 701-587-3141. It's super easy — leave your message, tell us your name and where you're from, and we might feature it on an upcoming episode.

Our education is in decline. Lawmakers and other education leaders are lying about the use of Common Core curriculae. In fact, some of them intentionally want our schools and students to fail.

That's what Charles Tuttle, a candidate for Superintendent of Public Schools, had to say on this episode of Plain Talk.

"We've got a a major decline in our educational system. The direction hasn't changed," he claimed.

"I think it's intentional," he continued, going on to say that he thinks "we've got a some that said when common core came in that they were going to dumb our kids down."

Somewhat paradoxically, Tuttle said that school districts are spending too much money, but also that the state isn't investing enough. "We have the money. The state is not poor when it comes to money," he said. "So there should be no reason why we cannot fund every school in North Dakota. It says right in the constitution, the legislative assembly shall provide for a uniform system of free public schools throughout the state."

He pointed to the school lunch debt that some schools carry as an example of something that should be the state's responsibility. So does that mean he supports a ballot measure that will likely appear on the November ballot to have the state cover the costs of school meals? Not necessarily. "The problem I have with that...is it goes in the constitution," he said, noting that the measure would be an amendment to the state constituiton and not statute.

Also on this episode, me and guest co-host Erin Oban talk about Measure 1 on the June ballot, which would implement a single-subject requirement for constituitonal amendments proposed by ballot measure or the Legislature, and the controversy around the arrest of polarizing political organizer Jerol Gohrick, who is facing two felony counts of terrorizing after an altercation with a work crew operating on his land.

If you want to participate in Plain Talk, just give us a call or text at 701-587-3141. It's super easy — leave your message, tell us your name and where you're from, and we might feature it on an upcoming episode. To subscribe to Plain Talk, search for the show wherever you get your podcasts or use one of the links below.

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