The final week of the 2016 legislative session came to an end at 11:30 a.m. on Friday, March 11. This is a historically early conclusion to the legislative session as a result of the new appropriations schedule that saw the budget completed at 4 p.m. on Thursday afternoon.
This year’s legislative session ended with many things I am happy about and some work left undone.
As you know, the teachers of our state will be receiving greater compensation for the very important work they do in educating our next generation of workers and business owners. While, over all, the results of the increased sales tax program will be positive, many of our smaller schools will be challenged with the 12 to 1 teacher-student ratio. For many schools this ratio will mean they will have teachers for whom they won’t receive increased state aid and will have to make up the difference in salaries from capital outlay. In contrast, the large schools such as Sioux Falls will receive funding for 70 more teachers than they have on staff today. This is one example of issues that will need to be addressed in future legislative sessions.
Many bills that I viewed as being socially regressive and prejudicial were either vetoed or defeated, but will be returning in different forms in future legislatures.
We took away a voice for the people by removing a step from the county zoning process, but provided prenatal care for low-income non-citizens to ensure that these babies will be born healthy.
We did not expand Medicaid, which was a disappointment. However, the federal government has agreed to changes in reimbursement for tribal members who receive medical treatment outside of IHS hospitals. I am hopeful that we will have a special session later this summer to expand Medicaid, which will provide health insurance to over 50,000 fellow South Dakotans. These individuals have medical insecurity because they receive their medical treatment in the emergency room, when earlier intervention could have prevented serious medical issues and saved thousands of dollars.
All in all, the 2016 session was a success, but as always there is still work to do. We need to address how we are going to increase support to community providers like our nursing homes and developmentally disabled service providers stressed with high staff turnover because of low salaries for very challenging work.
Additionally, we will need to continue to ensure that our adult and juvenile criminal reform is working, and that counties and communities that have an increased responsibility to provide treatment and support to individuals who have committed nonviolent crimes are adequately compensated.
It has been my great honor and pleasure to be the voice for the citizens of District 8 these past two years as your Senator. I have filed my papers to run for re-election and look forward to visiting with many of you in the next few months about issues important to District 8.

Wintertime is for early nights at home, reading, eating dark chocolate and drinking wine, so I have some book reviews to catch up on. I’ll try to keep them short and to the point since there are a few.

Betrayal: The Crisis in the Catholic Church
By The Boston Globe Investigative Staff
This one grabbed my attention I think simply because it was written by newspaper reporters and it’s on a subject I admittedly didn’t know a ton about. I’m not Catholic and I either didn’t pay enough attention when it was all blowing up, or I’d forgotten most of the details. In my defense, I was sorta busy in 2002, getting married and graduating college… either way, the book peaked my interest.
To be honest, I don’t even remember if I finished this book. This is one of those books that really grabs you the first few chapters and by the time you’re two-thirds in, you’re stuck plodding along, wishing it would just wrap itself up already ‘cuz you don’t want to be a quitter! That said, I still learned a lot and I don’t feel like I wasted my money.
All I have to say is the things The Boston Globe uncovered are abhorrent. To think the Catholic Church knew and covered up these abuses, spent parishioners’ money to pay off victims, and then proceeded to enable abusive priests to continue to work in the church and have contact with children, is hard to wrap your head around.
Anyway, this was another eye-opener, despite that it only took me about two-thirds of the book for them to open.

Lights Out: A Cyberattack, A Nation Unprepared, Surviving the Aftermath
By Ted Koppel
This one was definitely an eye opener, and what it opens your eyes to, is the fact that we are probably screwed.
The moral of the story is our enemies can, and probably at some point will, cut off our power. I’m not talking a nine-day blackout ice storm of 2005 style. What Koppel claims is that an attack on our power grid is not a matter of if, but when. The NSA happens to agree. FEMA has no plan. In fact, nobody does. Apparently, we are totally sitting ducks for a cyber attack and there’s not much being done about it.
What is the answer, though? More security and more regulation, which inherently come with losses of freedoms? Koppel makes a good argument, but for now the point is moot. Nothing is in the works.
My husband and I went shopping for generators after I read this book.

In the Heart of the Sea
By Nathaniel Philbrick
This was also a movie. It didn’t do well, but I’m still hoping to see it soon. I wonder if it really wasn’t very good, or if it suffered from bad advertising.
Billing your movie “the story that inspired ‘Moby Dick’” in my humble opinion was probably not smart. The American movie-going public, in general, are not literary kings. Nobody’s going to get excited to see the movie about the book they were forced to read in school and probably didn’t actually finish.
I, however, am kind of a nerd. I thought this book was really good (I’ll admit, I’ve never read “Moby Dick”). “Heart of the Sea” is, unbelievably, the true story of the Essex, a whaling ship from Nantucket that really was attacked and sunk by a sperm whale 3,000 miles off the coast of South America.
This is another all-true survival story, and it’s a crazy one. I’ll never cease to be amazed at the capacity of the human body to undergo hell.
The book takes you from Nantucket, to the coast of Africa, to the horn of South America, to the Galopagos Islands, to French Polynesia and back again. It made me want to cheer for the whale, yet commiserate with the crew.
Maybe I’ll read “Moby Dick” yet…

Openness in government:  “Democracies die behind closed doors. The First Amendment, through a free press, protects the people’s right to know that their government acts fairly, lawfully, and accurately.” – Judge Damon Keith, U.S. Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals.
Is government too open, or not open enough?
It depends on where you are standing.
If you are a journalist, you often bump up against closed doors that guard conversations and actions by public officials, both elected and appointed. These public servants may be at high levels of state or federal government, or on the town council.
If you are one of those public officials, you may feel that the media is pushy, arrogant and sometimes inaccurate in its efforts to get the story.
This being Sunshine Week,  a national observance to emphasize the importance of  openness in government, it’s a good time to reflect on whether government has become “transparent” enough to keep citizens informed. Goodness knows, examples abound in South Dakota to illustrate the need for open government. Start with the EB-5 program, which allowed foreigners to buy green cards for themselves and a route to permanent U.S. citizenship. When former state Economic Development Secretary Richard Benda, who was heavily involved in the program, died as a result of a shotgun blast, it blew the lid off the program and raised more questions than the sinking of the Titanic.
And then there was, and is, the Mid-Central Education Cooperative scandal and the horrifying deaths and destruction it left in its wake.
There are other examples that show why openness is essential to expose conflicts of interest and other wrongdoing. Government accountability often needs the penetrating light of the press to keep its house in order.
Closer to home, when I reported last summer on the 25-year-old arson case of the Taft Hotel in Chamberlain, my efforts to see the investigation files were rebuffed by law enforcement. A reader asked me why I didn’t use the Freedom of Information Act to access some answers. I had to tell him that FOI requests pertain to the federal government only. It is easier to obtain information from the federal government, in some cases, than agencies controlled by South Dakota statute.
As a footnote, the South Dakota Newspaper Association made some inquiries early in the current legislative session to see if there was a possibility of modifying the pertinent statutes on that quarter-century arson case. The answer: No.
The fight for open government is an ongoing one.