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Merry Christmas! Enjoy your hot chocolate, pick up all the wrapping paper and boxes... then come see the new Madville Times!
Madison Central School District held the first of its scheduled early-voting sessions this week. One local basketball fan reports that, contrary to the spirit of the 24th Amendment, to vote at Tuesday night's boys' basketball game, one had to buy a five-dollar ticket for admission to the game.
According to my correspondent, the polling station was located in the concession area in the middle school lunchroom. During games, the only way to access that area is through the northwest entrance to the middle school, where the ticket table for the game was located. There was no sign at the ticket table announcing that voting was being conducted on the premises, and my correspondent received no advice at the ticket table that one could enter to vote without buying a ticket. The only public notice of the active polling came at halftime, when the PA announcer, Mike Materese, told the crowd that they could go vote for the MHS renovation project in the lunchroom.
The polling station was managed by Monica Campbell, executive director of the Madison Central Education Foundation, which stands to gain new office space in the renovated high school if the bond issue passes.
Now I'm having trouble pinning this down in statute, since our district seems to be winging it on election law on this early-voting scheme. But if election day rules apply to early-voting sessions, publishing a schedule of early-voting sites online and in the newspaper isn't enough. Let us turn to SDCL 12-14-14:
On election day a sign, with a minimum size of eleven inches by seventeen inches, shall be conspicuously displayed outside of the entrance to any building in which a polling place is located to clearly identify the building as a polling place.
As a public service, the U.S. Navy demonstrates how distracted driving can put your vehicle in the lake. The vehicles: two MH-60R Seahawks. The lake: Tahoe. The damage: $506,000. The distraction: taking photos for Facebook.
Helicopter, semi, Prius: when you're in the pilot's seat, you have a job to do. Keep it out of the lake and the ditches: just drive!
[Sponsor Mary Kenyon did not pay for this post... but she won't mind if you visit her website!]
Florida's Republican Governor-Elect Rick Scott is cutting jobs in the Office of Drug Control created by former Governor Jeb Bush. South Dakota's Republican Governor-Elect Dennis Daugaard inherits from his predecessor a proposal to cut meth treatment programs.
I'll invite Mr. Newland to expound further. For now I'll just note that we could probably save a lot more in law enforcement and incracertation costs by legalizing marijuana. At least that's what televangelist Pat Robertson thinks.
Some statistics of interest, Web and otherwise:
The Congressional redistricting that will arise from the 2010 Census won't help Dems, but I figured that, since South Dakota's already as low as it can go in House representation, there's not much to get excited about.
Then one of my favorite Ohioan transplants sends me this depressing Christmas note: Ohio will lose two Representatives, and one may be my man Dennis Kucinich!
Ohio's population grew by 183,000 people over the last decade to 11.5 million, but it wasn't enough to keep up with fast-growing states in the South.
Ohio has 18 congressional districts that now will drop to 16.
...In November, Democrats lost five out of 10 U.S. House seats they currently hold in Ohio. The remaining five are tightly packed into an area that stretches from Toledo through Cleveland and into Youngstown.
...Among the Ohio Democrats in Congress who could face losing their districts are Cleveland's Dennis Kucinich and Betty Sutton, who represents Lorain and Elyria, plus suburban Cleveland and the Akron area.
Both are in areas that have lost population in the last decade ["Ohio Loses 2 Seats in Congress, Sutton and Kucinich May Go," AP via Morning Journal, 2010.12.21].
What's that under my tree? Christmas bills! Yahoo! Start your RSS engines: the first pieces of legislation to be proposed in the 2011 session of the South Dakota State Legislature are in the e-hopper.
First in from the State House: two bills on the agricultural productivity tax (you know, the quasi-income tax now imposed on farmers in place of plain old property tax). House Bill 1001 changes shall to may in a couple spots (ah ha! So shall and may do mean different things!) and allows the folks in charge of this tax to incorporate more data in the calculations. HB 1002 clarifies the need for documentation and the kinds of data the director of equalization can use to assess taxes on ag land.
HB 1003 empowers the Interim Rules Review Committee to revert rules that impose "unreasonable" costs on local governments and school districts. If I'm reading the law right, the interim committee already has the power to revert rules for other reasons. But I wonder if this change will resurrect debates over costs that are better settled during session by the full body.
The Senate is a bit slower out of the blocks, with a couple of style and form changes. Senate Bill 3 has a little more substance: it clamps down on the use of South Dakota's state seal. Section specifies that the state seal may not be used for the following:
Small but deadly: Senate Bill 3 would ban use of the state seal in political campaign literature.Nothing in this Act prohibits the reproduction of the state seal for illustrative purposes by the news media if the reproduction by the news media is incidental to the publication or the broadcast. Nothing in this Act prohibits a characterization of the state seal from being used in political cartoons.
I see the Madison Central School District has posted a list of absentee voting opportunities. Permit me to post the schedule hear in clean and simple text to spare you the trouble of clicking on the school's needlessly bandwidthy PDF:
| Date | Event | Location | Time |
| 12/20 | Middle School band/choir concert | High School Auditorium | 7:00 p.m. |
| 12/21 | Boys basketball | Cafeteria | 4:45 p.m. |
| 1/7 | Girls basketball | Cafeteria | 4:45 p.m. |
| 1/10 | Boys basketball | DSU Fieldhouse | 4:45 p.m. |
| 1/12 | Open voting | Elementary Commons | 12:45 p.m. |
| 1/13 | Girls basketball | DSU Fieldhouse | 5:00 p.m. |
| 1/15 | Gymnastics | Cafeteria | Noon |
| 1/17 | Forum | Cafeteria | 7:00 p.m. after Forum |
| 1/18 | Open voting | Elementary Commons | 3:00 p.m.-6:00 p.m. |
| 1/20 | Boys basketball | DSU Fieldhouse | 5:00 p.m. |
| 1/21 | Wrestling (Madison Square Garden) | Cafeteria | 6:00 p.m. |
| 1/25 | Forum | Cafeteria | 7:00 p.m. after Forum |
If Madville Times readers have anything to say about, the school will have a hard time passing its bond issue. In the latest Madville Times poll, I asked "How will you vote on Madison's $16.98 million new gym/high school renovation bond issue?" Your responses over the past week:
Yes | 73 (44%) |
No | 74 (45%) |
Still thinking | 16 (9%) |
Last year Basin Electric said it was "re-evaluating the timeline" for its NextGen coal-fired power plant near Selby. Looks like the re-evaluating is over: NextGen is nixed.
From today's Federal Register:
DEPARTMENT OF ENERGY
Western Area Power Administration
Notice of Cancellation of Environmental Impact Statement for the Proposed NextGen Project Near Selby, Walworth County, SD (DOE/EIS-0401)
AGENCY: Western Area Power Administration, DOE.
ACTION: Cancellation of Environmental Impact Statement.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
SUMMARY: The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE), Western Area Power Administration (Western) is issuing this notice to advise the public that it is cancelling the preparation of an environmental impact statement (EIS) under the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) on an interconnection request by the Basin Electric Power Cooperative (BEPC). BEPC proposed to design, construct, operate, and maintain a 500- to 700-megawatt base load, coal-fired generation facility near Selby, Walworth County, South Dakota, and interconnect it with Western's transmission system, thus triggering a NEPA review of Western's action to allow the interconnection. BEPC has notified Western it is suspending further action on its proposed project [Timothy J. Meeks, Administrator, FR Doc. 2010-32121 Filed 12-21-10; 8:45 am, BILLING CODE 6450-01-P].
I may complain about the paucity of local media, but Madison Daily Leader publisher Jon Hunter contends South Dakota's newspaper market has more players than most places. In his Monday editorial, our man Hunter congratulates the Garretson Gazette and the Native Sun News on ascending to the noble ranks of "legal newspapers" (i.e., getting to publish legal notices from local government entitites, the convenient racket that the newspaper association uses to protect its market share from innovators who would save tax dollars by publishing meeting minutes and new ordinances online).
In the process, Hunter notes that "There are now 119 weekly and 11 daily newspapers in South Dakota, the most per capita of any state in the nation."
Given our new official population of 814,000, that's one daily for every 74,000 South Dakotans. Turn the number another way, that's 13.5 daily newspapers per million population. According to data from the World Association of Newspapers and News Publishers, that gives us press coverage almost as good as Switzerland (which has 14.0 dailies per million). Of the 25 countries with higher daily-per-million ratings, most are pa-dinkally places like San Marino, Liechtenstein, Aruba, and the Northern Mariana Islands. Our Norsky forebears also outnews us (19.3 dailies per million), but South Dakota beats Sweden (11.0), Denmark (7.2), and the United States as a whole (6.0 dailies per million, or one paper per 167,000 people).
Think of South Dakota as a single community that just happens to be spread out across 77,000 square miles: we have 11 daily newspapers serving a population about the same size as Indianapolis or San Francisco. Yahoo's directory pops up fifteen papers for San Francisco. Mondo Times lists four Indianapolis papers.
But does quantity mean quality? That depends on how you define quality in newspapers. If we're talking reach and impact, only two of those 130 publications, the Rapid City Journal and that Sioux Falls paper approach statewide status (though I get the feeling from the Web that the Mitchell Daily Republic is trying). Most of the rest do what they do reasonably well, covering their local events, but rarely reaching beyond their county borders.
If we're talking breadth of viewpoints, well, we're eating mostly white bread. Most of the newspapers Jon Hunter counts are of the same genre: community booster rags with lots of pics from the kids' basketball games and the local Tour of Gardens, spiced with the occasional contrarian letter to the editor. (Monday's Madison Daily Leader letters: advice from the Car Care Council in Maryland on keeping our cars ready for winter, and tips from a local nursing home manager on good Christmas gifts for old folks.) Most South Dakota newspapers operate in tiny media monopolies with no alternative voices on paper to challenge them. The closest thing to a regular alternative press may be the college weeklies (and note: after 108 years in print, DSU's student newspaper, The Trojan Times, is going all digital).
Compare that to San Francisco, where the mainstream San Francisco Chronicle dominates, but where dozens of alternative newspapers coexist and serve the same community with different ethnic and political viewpoints.
And as we love to point out, of those 11 South Dakota dailies, only the Madison Daily Leader is independently and locally owned. Local control matters, especially when it comes to news. When the money decisions are made elsewhere, you end up with the biggest papers in the state not maintaining bureaus in Pierre to cover state government.
Having lots of newspapers is great. South Dakota's newspapers tell stories that no one else is going to cover. But the lack of local ownership, diversity of voices, and breadth of coverage leave room for improvement. Keep printing, Jon!
Last week I noted the difference in fiscal politics between Minnesota and South Dakota. That essay arose from a conversation with my neighbor and outgoing state legislator Gerry Lange. In the following guest column, he exapnds the view to include North Dakota:
Recent headlines here in Madison and in Minnesota highlight our two states’ sharply contrasting value systems. Here in South Dakota, our leaders are telling us we’ll have to cut ecucation funding to balance the budget! There in Minnesota, the finally-elected new governor, a multi-millionaire heir of the Dayton fortune, is acting like a statesman with “noblesse oblige!”Read more >>
Rather than slashing education and vital services, he’s calling on his own class of affluent “winners” to come up with more income tax to patch their budget holes. How could sister states be so different? Could be a matter of their preferring a number one quality of life where it’s worth the trade-offs: more taxes for better wages, better infrastructure, and no taxes on food, clothing, auctions, and building contracts.
National government publications are rich with “best practices” from other states. As legislators, we brought home numerous “success stories” from meetings all over the country. One of the best that could save us millions is as close as North Dakota! They’ve been doing “electronic monitoring” and intensive probation for quite a few years. Results? 1000 fewer in prison than here, and a ten percent recividism compared with some fifty percent in most states.
Most of our leaders in Pierre know this, so it’s puzzling as to why we don’t adopt this successful approach. Do South Dakotans really believe that converting colleges to prisons has been a better strategy? Do tax-fearing voters really prefer to balance the budget on the backs of our kids?
—Gerald Lange, December 2010
