Ho Ho Ho! Madville Times Moves to New Domain!

Merry Christmas! Enjoy your hot chocolate, pick up all the wrapping paper and boxes... then come see the new Madville Times!

• New domain: MadvilleTimes.com
• New RSS feed: http://madvilletimes.com/feed/rss/

I am moving all Madville Times blogging activity to the new site effective immediately. So change your bookmarks and feeds, and keep coming for good conversation. Happy new blog... and happy new year!

Madison Central Charges Admission to Vote?

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.

If election law allows early voting, election law should hold early voting places to the same standards to protect voter rights as regular election day voting. Individuals should not have to purchase tickets to access a polling place. The polling place should be conspicuously announced by a sign at the entrance of the building.

By the way, as we consider spending millions of dollars to build a 2500-seat gym, my correspondent reports there were plenty of open seats in the current 1200-seat gym.

Put Down the Smart Phone and Drive... the Helicopter!

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!]

Governors-Elect Consider Cutting Drug Programs -- Why Not Legalize Pot

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.

Web Spinning, Media in the Tank for MHS New Gym

Some statistics of interest, Web and otherwise:

• 245: hits received by the Madison Central New Gym/Renovation Project website since launched earlier this month. Superintendent Vince Schaefer crows about this popularity on the front page of last night's Madison Daily Leader.
• not mentioned: number of those hits coming from the Madville Times.
• 700: hits received by the Madville Times yesterday.
  
• 163: votes submitted to the Madville Times online poll on the school bond issue in one week.
  
• 109: views of MHS Tour Intro, the most popular of the 18 videos I shot and posted of the MHS facility tour last month.
• 60: views of MHS Locker Room Toilet, the second-most popular video of the MHS series.
• 17%: amount of $16.98-million bond issue projected for new gym.
• 75%: possible understatement of actual new gym cost.
  
• 0: individual components of plan that cost more than the new gym.
  
• 9: paragraphs you have to read through before encountering Chuck Clement's first use of the word gymnasium in last night's front-page 12-paragraph article on the project.
• 16: paragraphs you had to read through to find new gym in Clement's October 8 19-paragraph article on the project.
• 2: times Clement said "screw you" to me last March in response to my criticism of his journalism.
  

Ohio Loses Two Seats: Kucinich Unbound?

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].

On the bright side, I'm pleased that the Republicans might consider Kucinich a sufficiently big thorn in their side to draw him off the Congressional map. But I'll bet some elephant in the map room is thinking, "Hey! If we redistrict Dennis out of a job, maybe he'll change his mind and run in the 2012 primary against Obama!"

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Bonus Ohio love: Bob Schwartz has been enjoying a solstice resurgence, cranking out lots of good blog posts on new START (passed!), ethanol, Thune hypocrisy, and other matters over the past week. Keep those keys clicking Bob!

Legislature Posts First Proposed Bills of 2011

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:

1. On or in connection with any advertising or promotion for any product, business, organization, service, or article whether offered for sale for profit or offered without charge;
2. In a political campaign to assist or defeat any candidate for elective office; or
3. In a manner which may operate or be construed as an endorsement of any business, organization, product, service, or article.

In other words, if this passes, Senator Russell Olson (R-8/Madison) will have to get the Bulldog Media folks to whip up a new header for his website:

Small but deadly: Senate Bill 3 would ban use of the state seal in political campaign literature.

Senate Bill 3 would empower the Secretary of State to come up with rules to "assure tasteful and high-quality reproduction of the seal." I welcome readers to compose their own punchlines.

The Interim Bureau of Administration Agency Review Committee put this bill together. They even had the foresight to pre-empt complaints of censorship. Says Section 7:

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.

Hey, Ehrisman! You're still good to go! But now let's see if there's floor debate on whether blogs meet the Legislature's definition of "news media."

There's much more fun to come from our hearty 105 in Pierre. Stay tuned!

MHS Publishes Early Voting Schedule: No Tickets Required

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

Dang—I already missed a couple!

A couple things occurred to me last night about the school district's early-voting scheme. First, the school can't conduct early voting at a basketball game... or at least not on the other side of the ticket table. Suppose concerned citizens want to observe the voting, as they are entitled by state law to do. Suppose they're on a tight budget and can't afford a ticket to the basketball game. If school business manager and election officer Cindy Callies sets up a voting table on paid side of the ticket booth, she creates a barrier to poll watchers, not to mention potential voters.

There can be no price of admission to access any polling place. That's why, in the above schedule, the polling during high school games is listed at the cafeteria or the auditorium. But there still had better not be any electioneering near that voting table!

Note also that it's a bit tough to make to observe the polls when the school district doesn't include a closing time for its early polls. Keeping democracy honest is hard work, but on January 20th, for instance, it would be nice to know if voting will run for just an hour or if I should pack a snadwich and expect to be there for four hours.

Absent from the school's new gym/renovation information site is a list of workplaces that have requested early voting sessions. If any such sessions are scheduled, we should expect similar public notification.

Note, business owners, that if you invite Mrs. Callies to hold early voting at your business, you'll need to open your doors to any person who wants to come in and watch or even vote. That's our right. You can't call Mrs. Callies and say, "I have five employees who want to vote; please bring five ballots down." If folks on the street hear that you're conducting an early vote at your office, and they want to drop in and vote at that time as well, you have to let them in, and Mrs. Callies has to bring enough ballots for such a contingency.

The school district has already lost one supporter with its gaming of the vote. I hope the school will compensate for its questionable vote-stacking by keeping the process as transparent as possible.

Poll: MHS New Gym/Renovation Bond Issue Well Short of 60%

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%)

Total Votes: 163

That's pretty tight, but given that it takes 60% to pass the bond issue, these numbers suggest the school district has some convincing to do.

Now of course, the margin of error for Madville Times polls is bigger than any gym MHS will ever have, so keep your grains of salt handy. For instance, back in September, my poll on the county commission race got the winners right, Pedersen and Wollmann, though in different order. On the other hand, my poll was way off on the local sheriff's race: the tie between Lurz and Wyatt wasn't too far off, but my vote totally underrepresented Sheriff Hartman's support.

But consider: I was off on the sheriff's race because I suspect my readership underrepresents the older crotchety crowd that likes the status quo. If my school bond poll underrepresents that crowd, then the bond issue is in real trouble.

Basin Electric Suspends NextGen Coal Plant; DoE Cancels EIS

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].

Basin Electric's webpage for the project is gone; you can still read up on NextGen's specs on the WAPA's site and in the South Dakota PUC docket. That's 700 more megawatts of coal-fired power the industry has decided we just don't need. That's also $2.5 billion in construction dollars, 1700 temporary construction jobs and 150 permanent jobs that won't be coming to Walworth County.

Not getting nixed: Basin Electric's Prairie Winds SD1 wind farm, scheduled to start pumping out 150 megawatts of clean wind power in 2011. Estimated cost: $350 million.

Again, check that math: $350 million gets 150 MW in wind power. That's $2.3 million per megawatt. NextGen would have cost $2.5 billion to get 700 MW in coal power. That's $3.6 million per megawatt. As I've said before, it's not envirowhackos driving the industry away from coal power. It's good old economics.

Update 10:31 CST: Plains Justice is also pleased.

Hunter: South Dakotans up to Eyeballs in Newspapers

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!

Lange: SD Can Learn from Minn. Statesmanship, ND Criminal Justice

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!”

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