Plain Talk With Rob Port

Wayne Stenehjem has served the State of North Dakota in elected office for more than 40 years, from his stint in the Legislature starting in the mid-1970s to two decades serving as Attorney General. Now, he's calling it a career, announcing that he'll step down once his current four-year term is up. Stenehjem joined this episode of Plain Talk to discuss it. To say that his career was consequential for our state would be an understatement. In the Legislature, where he served with two of his brothers, Alan and Bob, something he believes to be unprecedented in America's legislative bodies, he had a hand in creating the open records and meetings law state government operates under today. He pushed for a uniform court system, moving it beyond an antiquated system that saw different areas of North Dakota served by different sorts of courts. When he became Attorney General in 2000, the State of North Dakota didn't even have a crime lab to handle evidence like fingerprints and DNA. But it wasn't all serious business.