Senate Tax heard Senate Bill 295, a bill to repeal the oil and gas “tax holiday” sponsored by Senator Christine Kaufmann (D-Helena) this morning.

Several turned out to testify in opposition of the measure which would kill the oil and gas production incentive passed by the legislature over a decade ago. The incentive, which lasts only the first 12-18 of production, was created to spur economic growth in Montana.

Proponents of SB 295 included the Montana Conservation Voters, Montana Environmental Information Center, and the Northern Plains Resource Council. The chief argument for the bill was that incentives are no longer necessary, and that production taxes are needed to cover the cost of production impacts. Opponents of the bill, however, believe that repealing the incentive would directly impact production and Montana’s economy.

“Exploration in the Bakken is occurring only because of the tax holiday,” said John Alke, opposing the bill on behalf of Fidelity Exploration and Production Company. Alke explained that wells across the border will produce three to four times the volume of those in Montana. “If you eliminate the tax holiday you will not affect the tax burden, but determine where companies will drill for oil.”

Testifying against the bill was Dave Galt for the Montana Petroleum Association who presented information showing a decline in recent production. Montana’s rig count is down to 12, representing a 31.6% drop since last year. Meanwhile, North Dakota’s rig count is more than 175 as of this week.

Also opposing SB 295 was the Montana Contractors Association, Northern Montana Oil & Gas Association, Montana Taxpayers Association, Montana Association of Oil, Gas & Coal Counties, the Montana Chamber of Commerce, and several oil and gas employers.

“Tax breaks exist to create jobs,” explained Nancy Schlepp of the Montana Taxpayers Association. Oil and gas projects have created nearly 30,000 jobs statewide, from Sidney to Kalispell, from oilfield employment, to construction, to retail and hospitality.

“These companies are generating a lot of tax dollars in a log of other ways,” said Webb Brown, President of the Montana Chamber of Commerce. Oil and gas companies paid more than 200 million last year in taxes to fund government programs and local schools, while property taxes paid by the Billings refineries represented one fourth of all property taxes paid in the city. Since 1999, when the production incentive was created, the state has collected over a billion dollars from oil and gas companies.

Bob Gilbert of the Montana Assoc. of Oil, Gas and Coal Counties presented impassioned testimony.  “Let us in Eastern Montana survive,” exclaimed Gilbert. “A skeptic would say this bill is designed to slow down or stop production of oil and gas in Montana; and I’m a skeptic.”

Retreived 3-5-2013. The Montana Petroleum Association, Inc.  A voluntary, non-profit trade association, serving a membership of oil and natural gas producers, gathering and pipeline companies, petroleum refiners, service providers and consultants.

BILLINGS – Area farmers and ranchers will learn how to save the family farm for the next generation at a farm and ranch meeting hosted by Rocky Mountain College, March 20, 2013, from 7:30 a.m. – 12:00 noon, in the Great Room of Prescott Hall.

“The speakers at this meeting are addressing issues that are very important to farmers and ranchers in Montana and Wyoming. The topics are relevant to our everyday lives,” said Sam’s Club Manager and landowner Cody Mitchell, who is also a sponsor for the event.

Dr. Marsha Goetting will speak about the legal implications of passing down the family farm or ranch. Dr. Goetting is a professor with the Montana State University Extension and an economics specialist. She has presented more than 800 workshops reaching more than 25,000 Montanans with her financial and estate planning information. Dr. Goetting has authored over 76 MontGuides and bulletins and has received national, regional, and state awards for her financial management and estate planning programs.

Andy Lohse, a 2008 RMC graduate, now working with RDO Equipment will address the technological advantages of using GPS in farm equipment; Darla Rhodes of the Billings Farm Services Agency will discuss the implications of the extension of the previous Farm Bill; and Carrie La Seur, an attorney with Baumstark Braaten, who will advise about handling land and mineral rights dealing with, but not limited to, the Bakken Oil Formation.

This event is organized by RMC’s Enactus Students In Free Enterprise. The cost for the event is $35 for those who register ahead of time, and $40 for registration at the door. To register, please visit the web site FARM.Rocky.edu.
Breakfast will be included, and there will be plenty of door prizes. Sponsors include: Sam’s Club, Rocky Mountain College, RDO Equipment, MasterLube, Town & Country, Grains of Montana, Shipton’s Big R, Scheels, and Montana Seed, Grain and Chemical.
For more information, email RMCFarmMeeting@gmail.com or call 406.633.5518.

ROCKY MOUNTAIN COLLEGE TO HOST FARM AND RANCH EVENT
Contact: Kimberly Ferguson, (Project Manager) / 406.633.5518 / RMCFarmMeeting@gmail.com

Bob McTeer, Contributor
A former Dallas Fed president, I cover the economy.

The direct way fracking can reduce the budget is by stimulating economic activity and thus tax revenues. This is obvious.

This piece is about another, less obvious, less intuitive, indirect way fracking can reduce the budget deficit. It is based on the fact that the sum of the budget deficit, the capital inflow to finance the trade deficit, and the difference between domestic saving and domestic investment equals zero. If you expand or shrink any of these three imbalances, it puts pressure on the others to expand or shrink to maintain the net zero balance.

As fracking expands domestic oil and gas production, it likely will reduce U.S. demand for energy imports and shrink our trade deficit. This reduces the net capital inflow required to finance the trade deficit. The reduced capital inflow will tend to reduce the gaps between domestic investment and saving and government expenditures and tax revenue—the deficit in question.

Let me back up and elaborate. Income minus consumption gives us saving, by definition. Income minus consumption also gives us investment, since investment represents output not consumed. Therefore, taking consumption out of the equation, total saving must equal total investment.

National saving is composed of personal saving, business saving, and government saving, i.e. an excess of tax revenue over expenditures. Personal saving, as we know, is low but positive these days. Business saving is moderately positive. However, net negative government saving (the budget deficit) overwhelms the others and make total national saving negative. Since we invest more than we save domestically, the saving deficit must be made up by importing foreign saving in the form of the capital inflow that finances the trade deficit. (See the postscript for a further explanation of this.

Therefore, I repeat, these three variables—the investment saving imbalance, the government spending-taxing imbalance and the inverse of the export-import imbalance are linked together (they total zero) and are mutually determined. Other things equal, the reduction in the trade deficit due to fracking will reduce imported capital and put pressure on investment relative to saving and government spending relative to taxing. At least some of the correction is likely to lead to a smaller budget deficit.

Got it?

P.S. In a closed economy with no government, income will adjust to make saving and investment equal in equilibrium. Introducing, government spending and taxing, the two injections into the income stream (other than consumption) will be investment and government spending while the two leakages will be saving and taxing. Therefore, the sum of the injections will equal the sum of the leakages in equilibrium, although there is no requirement for a separate balance of taxing and spending and saving and investment. Introducing foreign trade, exports become a third injection while imports become a third leakage. In equilibrium, investment plus government spending plus exports will equal saving plus taxes plus imports. In our recent past, the excess of government spending over taxes requires a net capital inflow (to finance the excess of imports over exports) to finance the excess of domestic investment over saving. If fracking reduces the excess of imports over exports the other two imbalances must adjust, thus putting downward pressure on the budget deficit.

Retrieved 3-4-2013. Forbes.

Pump prices:

A fractional story.

The biggest single component of retail gasoline prices is the cost of the raw material used to produce the gasoline – crude oil. That price has been between $80 and $120 a barrel, depending on the type of crude oil purchased. With crude oil at these prices a standard 42 gallon barrel translates to $1.90 to $2.85 a gallon at the pump. Excise taxes add another 49 cents a gallon on average nationwide. So the price for gasoline is already at $2.40 or more per gallon even before adding the cost of refining, transporting, and selling the gasoline at retail outlets. Crude oil costs account for about 68 percent of what people are paying at the pump. Excise taxes average 13 percent. That leaves just 19 percent for the refiners, distributors, and retailers.

http://www.api.org/policy-and-issues/policy-items/jobs/energizing-america.aspx

Every year the popularity of online video is increasing, doesn’t matter the platform (tablet, smartphone, smart TV, or computer) or the length (while short videos are still most popular, there is a huge potential for long form video) by all measures, popularity heading straight up with no indication of slowing down anytime soon. In fact, the popularity of online video increasing so much that there are more advertisers who want to place ads in videos than there are videos to place the ads on. If you’re not planning on using video yet this year, here are 6 reasons why you will (or should) use video in 2013:

“User Curated Content Networks” Love Video

You can read “user curated content networks” as Pinterest right now, but Pinterest is just the first network of its kind, not the last. Pinterest users are adding more than just photos to their boards now and video is right up there with photos now in popularity. Now that brands and companies can have their own Pinterest accounts and boards (officially), using video to not only profile your company but to show off products, how tos, and demos is a great way to leverage user curated social sharing. Keep in mind, sites like Pinterest often let users cross-post to Facebook, so when your content is pinned on one network, it often jumps to other networks as well.

SEO

According to Marketing Profs, Google and YouTube aren’t just favoring sites that have video, but also sites and publishers who have videos that are watched more and watched longer:

Google and YouTube are always changing their search algorithms for video (and for everything else), seeking the best ways to present information that searchers will find relevant. In October, YouTube announced that it would rank videos based on “watch time,” giving prominence to videos that are watched for a longer stretch of time than those viewed for a few seconds.
-Via Marketing Profs

Creating a video that people watch all the way to the end can be tricky, but videos in the 3–5 minute range are the most watched videos and videos between 30–60 seconds have the best completion rates (watching the entire video).

More Than Just YouTube: Newsletters and Other Material

Vimeo and YouTube are the two leading sites for publishing your videos and both have excellent options for embedding your videos in places other than just your website. How about a video intro in your next e-newslettter? Providers like MailChimp make embedding videos as easy as copy and paste. Not a bad way to engage newsletter subscribers right off the bat.

eCommerce: Videos Help Sell More Stuff

Telling people about something is one thing. Showing them a picture is another. Showing a video of something is class of its own. Having video as part of your ecommerce strategy has shown to increase sales over 90% compared to not having video.

Product Videos Are Engaging and Sharable

When you see a product demonstrated in a video it makes more of an impact than if you just show a picture alone. Tied in with Pinterest-like sites and ecommerce, using video to show your product or service can have a tremendous impact on customers and clients. Don’t relegate “products” to just physical items either, think about a short video profiling your business as a “product video” as well. Engage and connect with people by telling them more than what words and pictures alone can say.

Mobile Video is Exploding

As mobile networks are getting faster and devices are getting more powerful, people are watching more and more video on their mobile devices. Almost 60% of all mobile data traffic in 2012 was for video and mobile comprised 13% of all Internet traffic last year…and it’s still growing. The amount of video consumed on “non-PC devices” grew 6 times from Q4 2011 to Q4 2012.

Bonus: It’s More Affordable

Maybe the biggest reason you’ll start using video this year is that it’s more affordable than ever. Don’t relegate having a video to the “nice to have” list, put it at the top of the “need to have” list in your marketing plans. Learn more about SoMedia’s ScalableVideo and VideoBuilder services and how they can help you use video in all the ways above, and save you money too.

Photo from Flickr by jsawkins.

What Opportunity Looks Like: Big Mountain meets the Bakken

“The Bakken has definitely been a huge help and a huge source of revenue to us.”

For many Montanans the Bakken boom has provided a plethora of opportunities. For the Gearhart family of Whitefish, the growth in the oil patch has meant growth in their family-owned business, Big Mountain Glass (BMG).

The company, owned by Chris and Kathy Gearheart, has been in Montana for 41 years and has provided commercial glazing on projects such as the Metra in Billings, the new UM Native American Studies Center in Missoula, the Marcus Daly Memorial Hospital in Hamilton, and the Whitefish Emergency Service Center, to name a few. BMG has twelve full time employees, including son and MSU graduate Scott Gearhart. Scott’s the Commercial Project Manager for the company. Scott’s wife is a full time nurse, and works part time at Big Mountain Glass as well. They also have a seven year old daughter.

With a degree in Construction and Engineering Technology from Bozeman, Scott explained that working for the family business was always part of the plan, saying that it only took a few years of working outside of Montana to realize it was where he wanted to return to work and raise his family.

Before the downturn in the local economy, says Scott, Big Mountain had twenty one full time employees. With the recent resurgence of job opportunities in North Dakota and Eastern Montana, however, he said, “The Bakken has definitely been a huge help and a huge source of revenue to us.”

The first Bakken project for Big Mountain Glass started three years ago. The Gearharts’ business has done everything from small glass instillation projects for schools, strip malls, and NAPA stores in Watford City and around Williston, to a couple of large scale projects in Dickinson and Bismarck.

“We were actually sought out to bid the penitentiary expansion job in Bismarck,” said Scott. Big Mountain not only bid the job, they won it. “This is a major project of over a million dollars in glass,” said Scott. Some of the other large scale projects they’ve worked on include housing complexes for Halliburton. Big Mountain is also waiting to hear back on a medical clinic job they bid recently in Dickinson.

Scott explains that compared to Montana, there is such a shortage of contractors bidding jobs in North Dakota that there’s almost no competition. New contractors are moving into North Dakota with no subcontractor base. The growth is outpacing the workforce, creating job opportunities for contractors, truckers, builders, skilled laborers, small businesses, and many others far beyond North Dakota.

Estimating revenue from the Bakken alone, Scott says oil patch projects account for 15% of his family’s business. Luckily for Scott, he only has to leave the Flathead about once every four months to check on jobs in North Dakota to make sure things are running smoothly. For Scott’s younger brother Tyler, however, the story is quite different.

Tyler Gearhart, like his brother, graduated from MSU in Bozeman where he lives today. He received his degree in Marketing and Entrepreneurship and now works as a MWD Field Technician for The Directional Drilling Company. He was recommended for the position by his uncle, who Tyler says has worked in the oil fields for the better part of two decades. Tyler’s main responsibilities include assembling tools for down hole monitoring, setting up surface gear, and taking surveys. Like most true blue Montanans, the Gearhart brothers spend their free time outdoors fishing and skiing (pictured above).
“It was always a goal of mine to stay in Montana after college,” said Tyler, who describes the worse part of his job as the long periods away from home. He says the best thing about his job is the people.

“Don’t make assumptions about what goes on in the oilfields,” said Tyler, “Come out and experience things before you jump to conclusions.”

Retrieved 27 February 2013. The Montana Petroleum Report. For more information contact: Jessica Sena, 590-8675

By CHIP BROWN Published: January 31, 2013

Long before the full frenzy of the boom, you could see its harbingers at the Mountrail County courthouse in Stanley, N.D. Geologists had pored over core samples and log signatures and had made their educated guesses, and now it was the hour of the “landmen,” the men and women whose job was to dig through courthouse books for the often-tangled history of mineral title and surface rights.

Apart from a few fanatics who sometimes turned up at midnight, the landmen would begin arriving at the courthouse around 6 a.m. In the dead of winter, it would still be dark and often 20 or 30 below zero, and because the courthouse didn’t open until 7:30, the landmen would leave their briefcases outside the entrance, on the steps, in the order they arrived. And then they would go back to their cars and trucks to wait with the engines running, their faces wreathed in coffee steam. Sometimes there were more than 20 briefcases filed on the courthouse steps. The former landman who told me this — Brent Brannan, now director of the North Dakota Oil and Gas Research Program — said he sometimes thought he could see the whole boom in that one image, briefcases waiting for the day to start, and it killed him a little that he never took a picture.

For many years North Dakota has been a frontier — not the classic 19th-century kind based on American avarice and the lure of opportunity in unsettled lands, but the kind that comes afterward, when a place has been stripped bare or just forgotten because it was a hard garden that no one wanted too much to begin with, and now it has reverted to the wilderness that widens around dying towns. In a way, of course, this kind of frontier is as much a state of mind as an actual place, a melancholy mood you can’t shake as you drive all day in a raw spring rain with nothing but fence posts and featureless cattle range for company thinking, Is this all there is? until finally you get out at some windswept intersection and gratefully fall on the fellowship of a dog-faced bar with a jukebox of songs about people on their way to somewhere else.

All of which may explain the shock of coming around a bend and suddenly finding a derrick illuminated at night, or a gas flare framed by stars, or dozens of neatly ranked trailers in a “man camp,” or a vast yard of drill pipe, or a herd of water trucks, or tracts of almost-finished single-family homes with Tyvek paper flapping in the wind of what just yesterday was a wheat field. North Dakota has had oil booms before but never one so big, never one that rivaled the land rush precipitated more than a century ago by the transcontinental railroads, never one that so radically changed the subtext of the Dakota frontier from the Bitter Past That Was to the Better Future That May Yet Be.

It’s hard to think of what oil hasn’t done to life in the small communities of western North Dakota, good and bad. It has minted millionaires, paid off mortgages, created businesses; it has raised rents, stressed roads, vexed planners and overwhelmed schools; it has polluted streams, spoiled fields and boosted crime. It has confounded kids running lemonade stands: 50 cents a cup but your customer has only hundreds in his payday wallet. Oil has financed multimillion-dollar recreation centers and new hospital wings. It has fitted highways with passing lanes and rumble strips. It has forced McDonald’s to offer bonuses and brought job seekers from all over the country — truck drivers, frack hands, pipe fitters, teachers, manicurists, strippers. It has ginned up an unreleased reality show called “Boomtown Girls,” which follows the lives of “five bold and brave sisters” in the formerly drowsy farm center of Williston, N.D. Williston, whose population has tripled in the past 10 years, lies in the middle of the 150,000-square-mile Williston Basin, a depression in the crust of the earth that geologists now believe contains one of the largest oil fields in the world.

In the fall of 2011 in Crosby, N.D., Continental Resources, the oil company with the most acreage leased in the basin, erected a self-congratulatory granite monument celebrating its work in the so-called Bakken Formation, the Williston Basin rocks that, as Continental put it, ushered in “a new era in the American oil industry.” The number of rigs drilling new wells in North Dakota’s part of the basin reached a record 218 last May. It has now leveled off at around 200, as thousands of wells have been completed under deadline pressure to secure expiring mineral leases. Many thousands more will be spudded in the next two years as the boom moves from discovery to production and crews drill “infill” wells, complete pipelines, fortify roads, enlarge refineries and build natural-gas pumping stations and oil-loading train yards.

North Dakota’s last oil boom, 30 years ago, collapsed so quickly when prices crashed that workers in the small city of Dickinson left the coffee in their cups when they quit their trailers. Apostles of “Bakken gold” insist that what’s different this time is that this time is different, the history of frontier avarice notwithstanding. This is the boom that is going to change everything without the remorse and misgivings that have marked the aftermath of so many past orgies of resource extraction. This is the boom that won’t leave the land trashed, won’t destroy communities, won’t afflict the state with the so-called Dutch Disease in which natural-resource development and the sugar rush of fast cash paradoxically make other parts of the economy less competitive and more difficult to sustain. This is the boom being managed by local people certain they know how to look after their interests and safeguard the land they live on. This is the Big One that North Dakota has been waiting for for more than a century. [… read more.]

Retrieved: 7 February 2013. The NY Times. Original Story here: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/03/magazine/north-dakota-went-boom.html?_r=1&

Industry Clips from the Montana Petroleum Association, Inc.

Study of state’s renewable‐power mandate has support of environmentalists, utility companies (Jan. 17, Helena IR)Utility companies and environmental groups alike Thursday spoke in favor of a proposed legislative study of Montana’s nearly 8‐year‐old mandate for utilities to produce renewable power, saying it’s time to evaluate its impacts on industry, consumers and the state.

Sen. Alan Olson, R‐Roundup, the sponsor of Senate Joint Resolution 6, which calls for the study, said there’s been much discussion about the mandate, pro and con, since it began. A legislative study over the next 18 months can help “make a determination, one way or the other” on its effects, he said. It will “give us a firm, good grasp on where we’ve been and where we’re going,” Olson said.

Montana’s Unemployment Rate Falls, Flathead’s Ticks Up (Jan. 18, Flathead Beacon)Northwest Montana continues to have some of the highest jobless rates in the state, with Lincoln County leading
the way at 14.8 percent, followed by Sanders County at 14.1 percent. (A link within the article pulls up a report showing the lowest unemployment rate in Eastern Montana)

DRIESSEN: Obama’s wishful thinking on green energy (Jan. 18, Washington Times) Fracking translates into competitive advantages and more jobs, economic productivity and tax revenues. IHS Global Insight calculates that this revolutionary technology has already created 1.7 million new jobs, pumped hundreds of billions of dollars into the U.S. economy and generated more than $60 billion in federal, state and local tax receipts during 2012 alone. By 2035, it could create another 2 million jobs, rejuvenate American manufacturing, inject more than $5 trillion in cumulative capital expenditures into the U.S. economy, and generate $2.5 trillion in additional government revenues.

Obama’s Second‐Term Energy And Climate Agenda Taking Shape (Jan. 18, Huffington Post)The natural gas boom “puts the administration in an interesting position. They can be aggressive and look at natural gas for the possibilities it brings, or they can bow to the environmental community, which is not interested in more natural gas drilling,” said Frank Maisano, a Washington spokesman for a range of energy producers from coal to wind. The emergence of cheap, plentiful natural gas in particular poses a dilemma for Obama, who supports gas development as a cleaner alternative to fossil fuels that trigger global warming.

‘FrackNation’ documentary exposing the truth about fracking in the U.S. set for release next week (Jan. 18, Red Alert Politics)McAleer considers fracking to be a human rights issue more than anything else. That is why he focuses on the human aspects of fracking, such as the hardships that many farmers face financially if they aren’t allowed to lease out their land to oil companies. According to McAleer, there is a “mass movement for fracking” more so than there is a mass movement against it.

The inaugural Rocky Mountain Oil & Gas Awards will be held in Denver on Tuesday 12 March 2013 at the Grand Hyatt Hotel.

The senior industry executives judging the Oil & Gas Awards have had a busy December reviewing almost 300 entries from around 200 different companies and casting their votes.

The awards celebrate the achievements of upstream & midstream companies, service providers and suppliers, twinned with the industry’s commitment to H&S, Environmental Stewardship and Corporate Social Responsibility.

Congratulations to the following companies that have been voted as finalists in the 2012 Rocky Mountain Oil & Gas Awards:

• A&W Water Service, Inc.
• AbTech Industries, Inc.
• Ames Savage Water Solutions
• Antea Group
• Aon Corporation
• Aqua-Pure Ventures
• BeneTerra
• Black Hills Exploration and Production, Inc.
• Bonanza Creek Energy, Inc.
• Bradsby Group
• Brady Trucking, Inc.
• Burleson LLP
• Carrizo Oil & Gas, Inc.
• Cobra Manufacturing & Sales LLC
• Coldsweep Inc.
• Davis Graham & Stubbs LLP
• Davis & Davis Company
• ECO AFS
• Ecocion, Inc.
• Encana Corporation
• Enviro Voraxial® Technology, Inc.
• Frank Henry Equipment USA, LLC
• FTS International
• Gold Spur Trucking
• Herbrick Agency
• High Sierra Energy, LP
• Honeywell Analytics
• IMA, Inc.
• KLJ
• Marquis Alliance Energy Group
• McPherson & McVey
• Nexus Staffing Solutions, LLC
• ONEOK, Inc.
• Precision Placement Services, Inc.
• Produced Water Solutions, Inc.
• PTI Group USA
• QEP Resources, Inc.
• Questar Pipeline Company
• Ryckman Creek Resources, LLC
• Savage
• Spartan Engineering Inc.
• Stellar Recruitment
• Target Logistics
• TaxOps LLC
• TEEMCO, LLC
• TETRA Technologies, Inc.
• Vacuworx® Global
• Venoco, Inc.
• Westcon, Inc.
• Zavanna, LLC

The winners will be announced at the Rocky Mountain Oil & Gas Awards gala dinner ceremony at the Grand Hyatt Hotel in Denver on Tuesday 12 March.

The list of all finalist companies can be found at www.oilandgasawards.com as well as information about table bookings for each gala event. For information on sponsorship opportunities and to reserve your table for what will be a fantastic night of celebration please call Marc Bridgen on +1 (210) 591 8475 or email marc@oilandgasawards.com.

by North Dakota Housing & Finance Agency

The Industrial Commission of North Dakota has reported that more than 600 private investors have successfully capitalized the $15 million state Housing Incentive Fund (HIF).

“Thanks to North Dakota citizens and our business community, the Housing Incentive Fund is fully capitalized and available to move forward on affordable housing projects in western North Dakota and across the state,” members of the Industrial Commission said in a joint statement. “With legislative approval, we will continue to utilize the Housing Incentive Fund to encourage even greater affordable housing development.”

The Industrial Commission, consisting of Governor Jack Dalrymple as chairman, Agriculture Commissioner Doug Goehring and Attorney General Wayne Stenehjem, oversees the North Dakota Housing Finance Agency, which administers HIF.

Created by the 2011 Legislature, HIF is used to develop affordable multifamily housing. Contributors to the fund receive a dollar-for-dollar state income tax credit for their contributions. Dollars given can be targeted to a specific project or community.

Ninety percent of the contributions were by individuals who contributed an average of $10,021. The largest corporate supporter was Marathon Oil Co., contributing $3 million. Gate City Bank contributed $1.25 million, the most by a financial institution.

“Developer interest in the program was strong from the start, with all of the available financing spoken for in less than a year,” said Mike Anderson, NDHFA executive director.

NDHFA has conditionally committed HIF dollars to 26 projects to create 739 new units in Beach, Belfield, Bowman, Crosby, Devils Lake, Dickinson, Grand Forks, Kenmare, Killdeer, Kulm, Mandan, Minot, Parshall, Ray, Watford City and Williston. Total construction cost for the projects is $104 million.

“Our greatest challenge was getting the word to taxpayers that they could direct their tax dollars to affordable housing development,” said Anderson. “We are grateful for assistance from our housing partners, business groups and the media in reaching this goal.”

Governor Dalrymple has proposed transferring $30 million from the state general fund for direct investment in HIF for the 2013-15 biennium. An additional $20 million in tax credits would bring the total fund to $50 million. The proposed legislation has been pre-filed as House Bill 1029.

For more information on HIF, contact NDHFA at (701) 328-8080, (800) 292-8621 orwww.ndhousingincentivefund.org.

Posted on 1/3/2013. Retrieved January 10, 2013.