Week 6 of the legislative session is in the books, and I wanted to wait until we took another vote on HB 1182 before writing my summary. After more than two hours last week of strong debate before a packed gallery, we repeated another hour of debate today before the bill was finally passed with exactly 47 votes. The proponents lost one yes vote but picked up two no votes garnishing the exact amount needed to pass. I was very relieved that we were able to gain the votes needed to send 1182 to the Senate.
This previous weekend we also had the legislative cracker barrel in Madison. I want to thank everyone who attended and also thank them for their professional questions and character. There are many contentious issues here in Pierre this year and we don’t always agree on them all. But it is important to still treat each other the way we would like to be treated and I was very happy with how the cracker barrel was attended.
I want to take this moment to answer a few questions that arose from the discussion. One of the questions was why don’t we use video lottery to fund education. The answer to that is that we do theoretically. One hundred percent of video lottery dollars are deposited into the general fund. Education is also paid out of the general fund, roughly 46 cents for every dollar. So the revenue gained from video lottery is already being allocated to fund general fund programs including education. Video lottery has also seen many ups and downs over the past five to 10 years. To depend solely on such an unstable revenue would not be effective for education.
It was also asked if our current budget would allow the dollars to fund the proposed teacher salary increase. The answer from the Appropriations committee has been a solid no. The last three years the federal government has been consistently cutting back 10 to 15 million dollars, and every department that has come in front of the Appropriations committee has had a reduction of federal funds.
I think it’s wonderful we are separating ourselves from our federal dependency, but this means we need to be smarter with our dollars. If we were to go through and cut the departments and reign back in the money we have this year, how long could it be sustained? We will continue to have the same issues with the Department of Corrections and their pay, the same problems with Community Support Providers, and the same problems with multiple other departments. We need new revenue and HB 1182 is the answer.
I want to thank everyone for their concerned emails, texts, phone calls and social media messages. Your voices are heard and I try my best to reply back to all who take the time out of their day to contact me. It is an honor to serve District 8 and I would encourage everyone to stop out to the capitol for a day this session. Please contact me with any questions or concerns at Rep.Wollmann@state.sd.us or on social media. Thank you!

I was pleased to have Jordanne Howe, the State FFA president from SDSU, shadow me and learn more about the legislature and how it works.
On Thursday, we heard two separate bills in House Health and Human Services. The first one was on midwifery, which established a statute in our code to allow Certified Professional Midwives to deliver very low risk babies at home.  It passed out of committee pretty easily, and will be on the floor next week.
The other bill dealing with dyslexia, was heard a second time as there were so many proponents for it, it had to be split into two days. After a lot of deliberation, that passed out of committee. Many parents that have dyslexic children, have found out the schools may test for it but are not required to. This bill would require that schools test for it. Many of you have contacted me on that issue. I will keep you posted on the progress of the bill.
Later that afternoon, we took up the House Bill 1182.  That had been deferred by the 5-17 rule again on Tuesday. That action can only be used twice on the same bill, so it was calendared for Thursday. As I had discussed previously, there were several amendments. The first one which we considered, made the collection of the half cent sales tax be compliant with the Streamline Sales Tax Initiative. There were at least 10 amendments that were drawn up, but the main two we took up on Thursday, dealt with reallocating money to the four South Dakota technical schools from the $40 million in extra money collected in the potential  half cent sales tax increase.
The second amendment was a lengthy process to find a way to make sure the majority of the increased revenue from this sales tax collection would go directly to teacher salaries. I decided after much careful thought, it didn’t seem right that we collect an additional half cent sales tax for teacher pay and then redistribute 40 percent of it to other groups that had not been identified in the Blue Ribbon report as having requested any assistance, nor was it a goal of the Blue Ribbon panel.
I was one of the 23 No votes, as I believed we should look within our means to find efficiencies in the budget before we passed this $107 million dollar tax increase, which would have been the largest ever in the history of our State, and 40 percent of the collected tax wasn’t even going to K-12 teachers.
Many of you have contacted me thinking I voted against teacher pay, but I voted against the method of how we would increase teacher pay. I am committed to finding the source to fund the much needed increase. This will be a long process and please understand this is not a simple up or down vote.
Once we make this decision, we will move on and try and address all the other issues that we have before us. I appreciate your respectful  feedback.  It has been a difficult 10 days for me. You can contact me at rep.heinemann@state.sd.us