North Dakota’s War On Private Enterprise
Protecting the state-financed Western Area Water Supply continues to have a negative impact on taxpaying private businesses.
The long saga of the Republican-endorsed state-run Western Area Water Supply (WAWS) has been a colorful one. It was a well-intended program designed to make it easier to get water to communities in the Bakken, but it quickly became more focused on acquiring political influence than actually serving the people. That influence has resulted in a bloated, over-built spiderweb of pipelines that make fracking easier for some companies but most of all pad the pockets of one specific engineering firm.
In 2013, the legislative backers of the WAWS project tried to be clever and create what I called then “Soviet-style Exclusionary Zones” which, if it had passed, would have made it illegal for private enterprise to sell industrial water to oil companies for fracking purposes. This plan was approved by the State Senate, but defeated by the House.).
Also in 2013, Republicans attempted to create an entirely new type of tax called the “Water Extraction Tax” of 11.5% to match the total tax on oil production and extraction. (The state was saved from this plan by the fact that a majority House Democrats voted against it.)
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