GRAND FORKS — The lawmaker who filed the most open records requests through the state Legislature’s research service doesn’t believe his record requests should be available to the public.
Reached by the Grand Forks Herald on Wednesday, Rep. Jim Kasper said he wished the nine records requests that Legislative Council made on his behalf had not been publicly accessible.
“When I’m doing things as a representative for certain people or certain organizations or even on my own behalf, those things should be confidential, and they’re not,” said Kasper, R-Fargo.
As part of Sunshine Week, a 20-year-old national initiative highlighting the importance of open government and open records, the Herald filed an open records request with Legislative Council to see which lawmakers use the legislative research service to file records requests.
Lawmakers use the research service to request information and, less often, public records as part of their official duties, said Legislative Council Director Jon Bjornson.
“If (a particular lawmaker) said ‘How much funding have we put into various state agencies for a particular activity?’ we would do a general survey of various agencies for ‘How much do you use that thing?’ That’s information,” Bjornson said.
“But if (that lawmaker) said, ‘Give me a copy of all the contracts that the state has with ice cream parlors’ … that would be the records request, because it would be for a specific type of record,” he added.
Legislative Council has been required by law to keep a record of lawmakers’ public records requests, though not their general information requests, since 2015.
As part of a Sunshine Week project, the Herald filed its own open-records request for the public records sought by lawmakers from May 1, 2023, to Feb. 20, 2025.
Six lawmakers used Legislative Council to request records during that time. Aside from Kasper, no other lawmaker filed more than one request through the research service over the same period.
Kasper declined to comment on any of his record requests, which were filed between August 2023 and December 2024.
Four of his nine requests were directed at Fargo Public Schools and its response to laws passed during the 2023 session that placed new restrictions on transgender students.
In May 2023, Gov. Doug Burgum
signed into law HB 1522,
which bars transgender students from using school restrooms that align with their gender identity and says schools cannot use those students’ preferred pronouns.
Kasper, who successfully pushed for another bill barring residents from changing their sex on their birth certificate, was among those who supported HB 1522.
Fargo Superintendent Rupak Gandhi later
told the Fargo School Board
he would prioritize policies affirming trans students’ identities over following the state law.
In his records requests, filed that August, Kasper sought records including training materials related to trans students for Fargo Public Schools faculty; correspondence between administrators and the district’s general counsel; and “recorded thought processes or mental impressions” of Gandhi’s decision to defy the new law.
Later, in June 2024, Kasper sought information on the Bioscience Association of North Dakota, whose chief operating officer, fellow Rep. Emily O’Brien, has
come under scrutiny
for allegedly backing bills that financially benefited the company.
In August, he also sought correspondence between North Dakota Superintendent of Public Instruction Kirsten Baesler and members of the education nonprofit the Hunt Institute, which the state has paid to consult on its teacher retention and school choice task force.
Despite Kasper’s stated distaste for having his own records made public, he asked Legislative Council in December to provide him documentation of any records the research service had given to longtime Republican political operative Pat Finken.
Finken had announced his retirement a month earlier.
Incidentally, O’Brien, R-Grand Forks, also asked Legislative Council for a list of open records requests made by other members of the Legislature, in August.
She did not respond to a Herald request for comment.
Jack McDonald, the North Dakota Newspaper Association’s attorney and a specialist in transparency laws, declined to comment directly on Kasper’s position.
“Legislators are not exempt from standard open meetings, open records laws, and most of them take great pains to follow the open records law and open meetings laws,” he said. “When you ask the Legislative Council to make a request for you, I don’t believe that’s releasing any great confidential information.”
McDonald did note that lawmakers’ correspondence with their constituents is considered confidential under state law.
Four other lawmakers — Sen. Scott Meyer, R-Grand Forks; and Reps. Eric Murphy, R-Grand Forks; Dennis Nehring, R-Williston; and Scott Wagner, R-Fargo — also filed open records requests via Legislative Council.
Murphy sought a contract between the state-run Northern Plains UAS Test Site and its private partner, Thales, while Nehring sought information on Williston Basin School District’s request to the Department of Public Instruction to build another school.
Neither responded to requests for comment.
Meyer sought emails from North Dakota Game and Fish that mentioned hunting company QR Posts and its co-founders. He told the Herald he’d filed the request on behalf of the company’s founders.
Wagner filed and rescinded a records request listed for information on a “Burlington Drive property.”
He explained to the Herald that he’d actually been seeking details on the deletion of former Attorney General Wayne Stenjehem’s emails, but the request had been mistakenly entered as dealing with
a related controversy.
Stenehjem’s emails were deleted by his staff shortly after his death in 2022
but later recovered.
Federal investigators obtained the emails as part of a criminal investigation into former state Sen. Ray Holmberg, who has pleaded guilty to traveling abroad to sexually abuse a child.
Wagner and Meyer both spoke positively about the state’s transparency laws, with Meyer saying the broadcast of committee meetings had improved constituents’ engagement with the political process.
Wagner said he is sensitive to following the state’s transparency laws after spending 12 years as a Cass County commissioner.
“I take the Sunshine laws in North Dakota very seriously,” he said. “I think they’re important, and that they should be adhered to.”
