Time To Do Something Positive

Kevin Cramer and I have been friends for more than 30 years. Surprised to read that?  Well, as Paul Harvey used to say, here’s “the rest of the story.”

Our friendship began at a chance meeting at the back of the bar in Peacock Alley, in the old Patterson Hotel in downtown Bismarck. It was late in 1992, shortly after the 1992 election, in which Kevin, as chairman of the North Dakota Republican Party, had engineered Ed Schafer’s election as Governor of North Dakota, and not long after I had resigned as North Dakota Tourism Director, which I did to save a new Governor from having to tell me it was time to go. I had been Tourism Director for about 7 1/2 years, after having a hand in electing Schafer’s predecessor, George Sinner, in 1984.

Kevin had been executive director of the North Dakota Republican Party as a youngster, the same job I held in the Democratic-NPL Party during the Sinner campaign and his subsequent election. But a year or so earlier, he had moved up to party chairman while still retaining his executive director job, becoming both the first, I think, paid state party chairman, and also, at the time, the youngest state party chairman in the country, just barely 30 years old.

Kevin and I hardly knew each other back then, but as we met that evening—I recall I was just leaving and he was just coming in—we stopped, shook hands, and I said something like “Okay, I got Sinner elected and I got to be Tourism Director. You got Schafer elected, so it’s your turn. It’s a pretty good job.”

Kevin smiled and said something noncommittal, but within a year, as his term as GOP Chairman expired, he took the Tourism Director job for Ed Schafer. It was, I think, his first government job, and he would go on to be a “government employee” for most of the next 30 years. Yeah, Kevin’s a real conservative, but for most of his adult life his income has been from our tax dollars.  

I voted for him a few times because we were friends. The last time was when he ran for Congress in 2012. He had been serving on the North Dakota Public Service Commission since 2003, when he was appointed by then-Governor John Hoeven, now his Senate colleague, following the resignation of Leo Reinbold, who used his advancing Parkinson’s Disease, as I recall, as his excuse for resigning, but who had  been mentioned numerous times as a lecher who had accosted young women in Capitol elevators, and the Republican Party needed him gone.

I remember talking with Kevin back in 2003 to congratulate him on his appointment to the PSC, and he said something like, “Jim, this was the easiest appointment John will ever have to make,” referring to his years of service to the Republican Party—he felt he deserved the appointment.

He won an election for the first time the next year to the PSC, got elected again in 2010, and then took over Rick Berg’s seat in Congress after the 2012 election. You know the rest of the story.

Anyway, I voted for him in that first Congressional race in 2012, after telling him, “You’ll do a lot less damage as one of 435 in Congress than as one of three on the PSC.” We both laughed.

Okay, I got off on a tangent there. The real reason I started writing this is because of a letter I sent to Kevin today. I haven’t been in the habit of writing to my Senators and Congressmen because, as I said to someone the other day, they all know me and it would be a waste of my time and theirs, because, generally, I disagree with a lot of what they do, and what I would say to them in a letter would have little impact on how they behave in Washington, and they’d just say “There goes Fuglie on a rant again.”

Actually, I do have a half-ass friendship with John Hoeven, at least in passing. We bump into each other once in a while and exchange friendly greetings. I remember one time early on in his time as a Senator, I was parked in the Arrowhead Plaza parking lot on a summer day with the windows down, talking to Senator Kent Conrad on the phone, and Hoeven pulled into the parking spot next to mine. He got out of the care, looked over at me, and said, “Hi, Jim.”

 I looked up, saw him, and said, “Hi, Senator. I’ve got Kent Conrad on the phone. Anything you want to say to him?”

“Just say hi,” he responded.

I guess I thought I was a pretty cool guy, sitting in a parking lot talking to two U.S. Senators at the same time!

But back to the letter. It’s about the America The Beautiful Act, S 1547, also known as the  “Reuauthorization of the National Parks and Public Land Legacy Restoration Fund.”

It’s a Big F***ing Deal!

It’s the bill that will continue to provide funds, mostly from oil and gas leases from offshore oil wells, for our national parks and forests and other public lands.

For the past five years, we’ve been getting money from that fund, as part of the Great American Outdoors Act, of which Kevin was also a sponsor back in 2020, to do things like finishing paving the loop road through the South Unit of Theodore Roosevelt National Park. It’s basically the money we’ve always known as the Land and Water Conservation Fund. It has provided funds for deferred maintenance projects, like roads, trails, dams and visitor centers all over the country.

It was signed into law almost exactly five years ago, on August 5, 2020, by then-President Donald Trump (yes, you read that right—but 14 of the 59 co-sponsors that year were Republicans, so Trump had little choice) and has provided $1.3 billion per year for public lands projects.

Federal agencies benefiting from the fund have included the National Park Service, the Forest Service, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, the Bureau of Land Management, and the Bureau of Indian Education. (Interestingly, most of those agencies are now under the purview of another former North Dakota Governor, U.S. Interior Secretary Doug Burgum.)

The funding is scheduled to run out at the end of this fiscal year, which I think is September 30, so the new act Kevin is co-sponsoring is to replace that, and make sure the money keeps flowing. More importantly it has bipartisan support—besides Kevin, it has 12 more Republicans and 10 Democrats as co-sponsors. So it should pass easily. We need to hope Burgum tells Trump to sign it again this year.     

Here’s the letter I sent to Senator Cramer.

August 7, 2025
Dear Senator Cramer,
Thank you for sponsoring the America The Beautiful Act (S. 1547, I think). I saw your name listed with Senator Daines right way when this was introduced, and I was happy.
You and I both know, from our past lives, how important Theodore Roosevelt National Park is to North Dakota, both to its people and our economy.
The Legacy Restoration Fund, a key component of the soon-to-expire Great American Outdoors Act, has provided the funds to fix the loop road in the South Unit (although it took long enough!). As I understand it, that fund is now a key component of your new bill. We’ve got a lot more to do at TRNP. We’ll need those funds.
So thanks again, Kevin. Please encourage John and Julie to support this too. I will do that, but you have a lot more clout than I do.
Best Wishes,
Jim Fuglie

If you want to help get this thing passed, you can write to our delegation on their nifty online contact pages, Senator Cramer here, Senator Hoeven here, and Representative Fedorchak here.

Thanks for helping. America is Beautiful in the Great Outdoors.