Committee hears guardianship overhaul that would move program to judiciary, adds investigators and staff; budget decision delayed

The Appropriations - Education and Environment Division on Thursday heard detailed budget and implementation briefings for Senate Bill 2029, the guardianship bill that would move guardianship programs from the Department of Human Services to a new Office of Guardianship under the judiciary and create new investigative and administrative positions. Committee members agreed to delay final budget action until the policy committee can explain the policy choices behind the bill.

Why it matters: SB 2029 would change which branch administers guardianship services, shift multiple funding lines and add staff and investigators to oversee guardianships statewide. That would alter agency budgets and staffing, increase several line items that have been underfunded, and create new statewide investigative authority for suspected criminal conduct in guardianship cases.

Sally, a judiciary staff member who briefed the committee, said the bills budget language consolidates existing, scattered funding and would create an Office of Guardianship and Conservatorship under the Supreme Court. Her explanation to the panel outlined several specific funding changes: the Aging Services Divisions guardianship establishment fund would rise from a current biennial level of $423,000 to about $1,550,000; the per-case establishment payment cap would be raised from $3,000 to $5,000; and other line items that have been running out of money would be increased to cover so-called "ghost funding" the agencies have been using via interdepartmental transfers.

Sally also described contract and rate changes: Catholic Charities corporate guardianship contract rates would increase slightly to cover a wait list of 42 people; the PASS program payment would rise from $17 to $18 per day; and the guardianship monitoring program in the Supreme Court would expand to include a proposed office with five full-time equivalent positions (FTEs).

Lonnie Grabowski, director of the Bureau of Criminal Investigation in the Office of the Attorney General, told the committee that the bill assigns primary authority to BCI to investigate criminal cases related to guardianship. He said courts and the Guardianship Association of North Dakota provided rough case estimates of about 24 cases per year (47 per biennium) under the current process, and that allowing members of the public to submit complaints could increase that workload. "These cases are going to be a high level financially based crime," Grabowski said, and they will require substantial time and investigative capacity.

Grabowski explained that the request for four additional BCI agents and one assistant attorney general in the bill responds to projected investigative volume and the geographic need to place investigators in major population centers. He said much of the investigative work now goes to local political subdivisions, which may deprioritize these financially complex guardianship matters.

Committee questions focused on how funding would move between agencies and whether the judiciary budget request reflects the full fiscal impact of SB 2029. Committee members asked whether the increases would change how services are administered; Sally and other staff confirmed the proposal would move administration and funding into the new Office of Guardianship under the judiciary.

No formal appropriation vote was taken on SB 2029. Several senators on the appropriations panel said they were not prepared to act on the dollar figures until members of the policy committee who developed the bill explain the policy choices. The panel agreed to delay additional work on the budget items tied to SB 2029 and asked policy committee members to appear at a future meeting.

The committee also reviewed the judiciary base budget more broadly. Committee members discussed restoring a roughly $13,000 judges' retirement adjustment that had been removed from an executive budget comparison, including one-time funding requests such as $758,000 for a case-management migration to cloud hosting and proposed increases to judicial salary footnotes. The panel reached consensus on including the retirement adjustment, the cloud-migration one-time funding, and an across-the-board judicial salary increase to 7 percent for presiding and other supreme court justices in the Senate version of the budget language under consideration.

The panel's next step on these judiciary-related appropriation items is to reconvene when policy committee sponsors can address the groups remaining substantive questions about SB 2029.