CLASSES SET TO RESUME IN O’NEILL NEBRASKA AT ST. MARY’S CATHOLIC SCHOOL A WEEK AND A HALF FOLLOWING EXPLOSION THAT DAMAGED SCHOOL BUILDINGS

O’NEILL, NE – Classes at St. Mary’s Catholic School of O’Neill Nebraska are set to resume this week at remote locations after that natural gas explosion damaged the elementary and high school buildings last week.

To update, it was early morning on October 7th when a vehicle crash outside the St. Patrick’s Parish Center on the St. Mary’s School campus led to a natural gas explosion that destroyed the Parish Center and damaged several buildings in its vicinity, including the elementary and high school buildings.

In a Facebook post yesterday the school said staff could enter the buildings and retrieve items they needed to resume classes at remote locations. Last week, a structural engineer cleared the buildings and deemed them structurally sound, but repairs are needed before classes can be held at the two school buildings.

Classes have been on pause for the students in the district, but now St. Mary’s staff says classes will begin again this week in remote locations as repairs to the school buildings continue.

Grades 7 through 12 will begin on Wednesday, October 16 at 8 a.m. at the Northeast Community College campus in O’Neill.

The classrooms for grades K through 6 will be open on Wednesday, October 16 as well, for students and parents a chance to see their temporary classrooms if they wish, with classes officially beginning for grades 1-6 on Thursday at 8 a.m. Preschool, kindergarten and 1st graders will have classes at the former OHS Administration building with Grades 2-6 holding classes at Faith Community Church.

Preschool and Kindergarteners will begin class on Monday, Oct. 21st.

The district said with the unexpected disruption to classes and holding school in new locations, school counselors will be visiting each classroom to help students with the adjustment.

“While we wish we could be in our own familiar classrooms, we will be happy to get our students gathered together and back in school. We are so thankful for all of the people who have helped to make this transition as easy as possible for our teachers, and we appreciate the flexibility of our teachers, our staff, and our St. Mary’s families,” the district said in the Facebook post.

Authorities continue their investigation into the crash and explosion. Police say the vehicle’s driver was identified as a 58-year-old Guatemalan national. With the assistance of an interpreter, police say the man cooperated with the investigation before being transported to an Omaha hospital.

 

AMENDMENT H PRODUCES DISAGREEMENT OVER LANGUAGE BETWEEN OPPONENTS AND PROPONENTS

SIOUX FALLS, S.D. – We don’t talk a lot about Amendment H on the upcoming November ballot in South Dakota, but that does not mean it is without its own drama.  A top official for the South Dakota Democratic Party is challenging what the public has been told by leaders of a group trying to change the state’s method of choosing candidates in primary elections.

Democratic primary elections are open to independent and no-party-affiliation voters in South Dakota, and according to Dan Ahlers, the executive director of the South Dakota Democratic party that is contrary to statements in ads that suggest that the Democratic primaries are open only to voters registered as Democrats.

Ahlers disputes statements made by Joe Kirby and other leaders in the South Dakota Open Primaries movement that put Amendment H on the November 5 general-election ballot. The group wants the South Dakota Constitution changed, so that all candidates for an office would run in the June primary election, with the top two finishers advancing to the November general election, regardless of their party affiliations.

Both the South Dakota Republican Party and the South Dakota Democratic Party organizations have come out publicly against Amendment H. While the Democrats allows independent and NPA voters to participate in their primaries, Republicans allow only those South Dakota voters who have registered as Republicans.

The statement Ahlers and the Democratic party take offense to comes from Joe Kirby of Sioux Falls, along with De Knudson of Sioux Falls and Drey Samuelson, who was chief of staff to the late U.S. Sen. Tim Johnson.  Their statement appears in the brochure on the Secretary of State’s page regarding the Amendment, as well in advertising, that quote, “Currently, 150,000 independent or unaffiliated voters in South Dakota are excluded from taxpayer-funded primary elections.” End quote.

Ahlers points out that Independents and NPA are allowed to vote in the Democratic primary, so the statement is inaccurate.

Republicans currently hold all three of South Dakota’s seats in Congress, all statewide elected offices, and 94 of the Legislature’s 105 seats. That’s a big switch from 20 years ago, when Democrats held the three congressional seats and were more competitive for statewide and legislative races.

The trend has swung even more Republican in the past three primary elections.

Democrats had a presidential primary and one legislative primary in 2024; two legislative primaries in 2022; and a presidential primary and two legislative primaries in 2020. Republicans meanwhile had 44 legislative primaries in 2024; primaries for US Senate, US House and governor as well as 39 legislative primaries in 2022; and primaries for US Senate and US House as well as 27 legislative primaries in 2020.

 

SHERYL JOHNSON RUNNING FOR CONGRESS IN SOUTH DAKOTA USING THE LABEL “MOM FOR CONGRESS”

SOUTH DAKOTA (John Hult / South Dakota Searchlight) – Sheryl Johnson has never held political office. What she has done is raise her four daughters, manage retail operations and work in a public school.

That’s precisely why she thinks voters should check her name on the Nov. 5 ballot and send her to Washington.

She’s running as the Democratic nominee in a bid to unseat Republican Dusty Johnson for South Dakota’s lone seat in the U.S. House of Representatives.

The 61-year-old former Republican, who lives in Sioux Falls, has pinned her hopes for victory on her status as a mother with a range of real-world experiences. She says that makes her a better choice than an opponent whose career is defined mostly by political and government work.

Her campaign materials use the tagline “SD Mom for Congress.” It began as an offhand quip about her frustration with the U.S. House, its infighting and inability to find common ground.

“I said, ‘they’re behaving like a bunch of children. They just need a mom there,’” Johnson said. “And that’s kind of helped spur this idea of a South Dakota mom: The fact that there’s such division. It used to be that they could agree to disagree, make compromises and get along.”

That attitude, she said, resonates with the voters she’s met since signing on back in February to become the Democrats’ first U.S. House candidate since 2018. Dusty Johnson won his seat that year when he bested Democrat Tim Bjorkman, as well as an independent and Libertarian candidate. Johnson got 60% of the vote that year; Bjorkman got 36%.

In 2020 and 2022, Democrats failed to field a candidate, and Rep. Johnson coasted to wins over Libertarian opponents.

Dan Ahlers, director of the South Dakota Democratic Party, said Sheryl Johnson was near the top of the list when the party began to weigh its options for 2024. Her background, attitudes on problem solving and status as a political outsider were among the reasons why.

“The primary calculus for us was, ‘Who exhibits the qualities of a good public servant, who is someone who’s dedicated to serving others and listening to the concerns of the people around them?’” Ahlers said. “That’s what drew us to Sheryl.”

Rural upbringing, military family experiences shape beliefs

Johnson grew up on a farm in northwest Iowa. The area was and remains solidly Republican, and she grew up in a family that shared those beliefs.

But Johnson doesn’t see the values she learned growing up – values like hard work and responsibility – through a partisan lens. As a girl, she remembers her father telling her she couldn’t go swimming until she hopped in the tractor and mowed a field. That’s a boy’s job, she protested.

It’s a job that needs doing, her father replied, and she was as capable of doing it as anyone else. It was a lesson about hard work, she says now, and about how responsibilities come first. It also served as a confidence booster.

“As much as I was annoyed, it made me a little proud that he thought I was capable of doing that,” she said.

It took years for her to disconnect from the party of her youth. She and her husband Peter, a physician, were both Republicans when they met. He was in the U.S. Navy, and they both supported former president George H.W. Bush in the election preceding her husband’s deployment to Operation Desert Storm in 1991.

The couple and their youngest daughter arrived at Camp Lejeune, North Carolina just days before Iraqi President Saddam Hussein’s incursion against his neighboring country.

“We weren’t even done unpacking, and my husband came home and said, ‘Well, Saddam invaded Kuwait. We’re on standby. We’ve got to get ready to head to the Middle East,’” she said.

The year of his deployment taught her what it’s like to be a single parent and the impact that a declaration of war has on military families.

By then, Johnson said, she’d already begun to move away from the straight-ticket thinking in elections and toward “voting for the person.” It was the nation’s next major military conflict that pulled her out of the Republican camp for good.

“When George W. Bush got us back into Iraq and Afghanistan by lying about weapons of mass destruction, that was a huge turning point for me,” Johnson said of the 2001 and 2003 conflicts that followed the 9/11 attacks.

She grew steadily more opposed to Republican policies, she said, as she raised her kids and later managed the snack shop at Roosevelt High School in Sioux Falls.

The GOP’s opposition to same-sex marriage and reproductive rights were among her chief complaints.

“I felt like it stopped being about freedom and started being about control,” she said. “They wanted to tell people who they could love, who they could marry, when they have kids, how they have kids and what books kids read.”

Push from Democrat leaders prompts state House run

Her shift from political observer to candidate followed the election of Donald Trump in 2016. She went to a Democratic leadership training event with the intention of helping other Democrats run for office.

“By the end of the day, there were teachers and union people and farmers who were all stepping up to run,” Johnson said. “And I thought, ‘Well, you know, they’re regular people, just like me. Maybe I could run.’”

She’s since run three times for state House in District 11. She’s never won, but says she’s fared better than one might expect in a district where fewer than 30% of voters are registered Democrats. In her third race, in 2022, she challenged Republican Sen. Jim Stalzer and pulled in 44% of the vote.

“It’s because I worked really hard, and I think I was starting to have some name recognition,” Johnson said. “And when I talk to people, I really focus on independents and Republicans, because they’re the ones you have to convince.”

She talks to voters in that camp about her opposition to a controversial proposal for a carbon dioxide pipeline that would pass through South Dakota, which she opposes because she says it impedes on landowner rights.

She likes some Green New Deal ideas, but opposes top-down mandates that restrict local control. The Green New Deal is a broad outline for revamping U.S. policy to focus on climate change by transitioning to renewable energy sources.

“As we tackle the challenges of climate change, the voices and rights of South Dakotans must not be sacrificed in the process,” she said in a recent press release on the carbon pipeline issue. “I support innovative environmental policies, but I oppose the use of eminent domain to benefit private corporations under the cover of ‘progress.’”

She knows there are anti-abortion voters she’ll never win over. But even with those voters, she’ll sometimes share her personal story of how she needed a surgical abortion, known as a dilation and curettage, four months into a pregnancy in the late 1980s. The fetus was malformed and had no chance of survival, she was told, and continuing the pregnancy would put her at risk of serious infection or of sepsis, a potentially deadly condition.

“I was devastated,” Johnson said.

Or she’ll talk about her own daughter, now a physician, who Johnson said had a miscarriage that left her bleeding on the floor two weeks after the U.S. Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision, which overturned the right to an abortion in the U.S.

Johnson is concerned about state laws that put doctors in fear of caring for women who have miscarriages or D&C procedures, which is why she’d vote to legalize abortion at the federal level.

“There are states where they want to investigate it if women have miscarriages,” Johnson said. “I can tell you, as somebody that lost a baby, if I would have had to have somebody investigate me after that, that would have been horrible.”

No national party support

Johnson is touring South Dakota in hopes of connecting with as many voters as possible. So far, she said, no one has threatened to shoot her if she didn’t get off their property – something she said happened once while she was campaigning for state Legislature.

Tom Cool, who ran for Legislature alongside Johnson in District 11 in 2018 and later ran for secretary of state in 2022, has always been impressed with her work ethic and ability to connect with those kinds of voters.

So even though she told her husband after 2022 that she was done, Johnson was ready to listen when she got a recruitment call over the winter and sat down with party leadership to discuss the 2024 U.S. House race.

“She didn’t take a lot of convincing,” Cool said. “I think most candidates I’ve run into just need to have a little bit of a push.”

The national Democratic Party has offered little support for the race against Dusty Johnson in South Dakota. Sheryl Johnson says she’s almost lost track of the number of times someone has told her she can’t win.

She doesn’t care. Voters deserve a choice, she said, and a chance to vote for someone whose ambitions end with public service.

“My opponent, he’s a nice guy, but he’s running for governor,” she said, foreshadowing the 2026 race when Gov. Kristi Noem will be term-limited. “He needs money for his next election. So I’m not running to be a career politician. I don’t want to be there forever. I’ve got grandkids I want to enjoy someday. But if I could get in there, I’m not really beholden to anyone to toe the party line.”

Ahlers is glad his party has someone to run against Dusty Johnson for the first time in six years. He’s happier, though, that the party’s pick is someone who grew up on a farm, was a military wife, worked in the schools and raised children. Two of them are doctors, one owns an marketing firm and her youngest is a teacher in Sioux Falls.

“She has all these great stories and experiences, and that makes her a special kind of candidate,” Ahlers said.

 

DUSTY JOHNSON ANSWERS CRITICISMS POINTING AT HIS RECORD OF BOTH PUBLIC AND PRIVATE SECTOR WORK

SOUTH DAKOTA (John Hult / South Dakota Searchlight) – Republican U.S. Rep. Dusty Johnson and his political allies say the accusation that he’s a career politician is an empty one.

His Democratic opponent in the Nov. 5 election, Sheryl Johnson, bases the criticism on narratives that many South Dakotans have heard about the congressman.

His rise from a Republican upstart who hustled his way at age 28 to a seat on the Public Utilities Commission to becoming the state’s lone U.S. House representative has been thoroughly documented.

State- and national-level profiles of Johnson abound with familiar tropes: about his work ethic, his policy wonkery and the self-deprecating humor that had him comparing himself to teenage TV doctor Doogie Howser in the election night speech he delivered when he was first elected to Congress in 2018.

Johnson also frequently leans into a “workhorse, not a showhorse” narrative by chastising his fellow members of Congress for slinging mud instead of solutions.

When asked why he’s still interested in being part of an elected body he often describes as dysfunctional, the 48-year-old Johnson points to his membership in the pragmatist Main Street Caucus, or to articles with headlines like “Nerdy South Dakota Republican Is Quiet Power Behind the Speaker,” published last month by Bloomberg Government.

He posted a link to that story on his official congressional webpage.

“I helped to negotiate new work requirements for able-bodied folks in assistance programs, I helped to negotiate the biggest reforms to siting American energy projects in a generation,” Johnson told South Dakota Searchlight. “I mean, these are all things that actually got signed into law.”

Sheryl Johnson has criticized her opponent as someone who’s always eyeing his next job.

Rep. Johnson vacated his PUC seat in 2010 shortly after being elected to a second term, to work as chief of staff for then-incoming Republican Gov. Dennis Daugaard. Now, six years after winning his seat in the House, Johnson is widely thought to be considering a run for governor in 2026 when Gov. Kristi Noem is term-limited.

Sheryl Johnson said those are the moves of “a career politician,” and she chose her “SD Mom for Congress” slogan in large part to make the contrast clear.

Congressman: Private sector could have won over politics

Daugaard doesn’t agree with that characterization of his former chief of staff.

“The question is, ‘Can he relate to people who are not in politics?’ I think he can,” Daugaard said. “Just because someone’s been in politics for a number of years doesn’t mean they’re bad at it, or that it would be good to have someone who doesn’t know what they’re doing come in.”

Rep. Will Mortenson, the current state House majority leader, worked on Johnson’s first PUC campaign. He said charges of “career politician” stuck to Democratic former U.S. Sen. Tom Daschle in his losing race against Republican John Thune in 2004 because Daschle lost his connection with the state.

“Daschle moved to D.C.,” Mortenson said. “Everybody knows that Dusty is back every weekend, because they see him at county fairs.”

Daugaard and Mortenson also pointed to Johnson’s four years in the private sector at Vantage Point Solutions in Mitchell — the city where Johnson still lives with his family when he’s not in Washington — as proof that he’s about more than political ambition.

In political circles, his time at the company was seen as little more than private sector window dressing on an otherwise exclusively public sector career.

Johnson’s lifelong engagement with politics and policy plus the timing of his move to the private sector suggested that Vantage Point was strategic politically.

Current Gov. Kristi Noem held the state’s congressional seat in 2014. Daugaard ran for re-election that year; former Gov. Mike Rounds was running for U.S. Senate.

“The general path of someone who’d worked for PUC, then worked for Gov. Daugaard, that’s someone with political ambitions, Schaff said. “He was waiting for the timing to work out. He was ready to move up, but there weren’t really any openings. Almost everybody saw Dusty’s move to the private sector as biding his time.”

Vantage Point offered opportunity to bridge gap between policy, engineering

To hear the congressman tell it, his return to politics wasn’t certain. He made more money at Vantage Point than he can make in Congress, he said – he was a co-owner during his time there – plus the job allowed him to spend more time with his family.

“I’ve been in elected office 11 of my 48 years,” Johnson said. “I’ve been proud of the six years I had on the PUC and the five-years-plus I’ve had in Congress, but I’m every bit as proud of the very successful career I built in the private sector. That company’s got 450 employees right now. It is absolutely the national leader in rural broadband. And I helped get it to that point.”

Little has been written about Johnson’s work at Vantage Point, perhaps because of the complexity of the business.

Vantage Point actually employs around 500 people at this point, CEO Larry Thompson told South Dakota Searchlight, the lion’s share of whom work at its headquarters in Mitchell.

Even so, Thompson said, the company is little understood in its hometown.

“Everybody wants to work here because they always hear that we’ve got good pay and good benefits and things like that, but nobody knows what we do,” Thompson said. “It’s not like when you go down to the eye doctor or the chiropractor. You know exactly what they do based on what it says on the outside of the building.”

The engineering firm serves a range of urban and rural clients, but its primary customer base has historically been rural telecommunications cooperatives. A speciality is helping rural co-ops connect customers to or upgrade broadband networks.

“How critical that is was really made apparent during COVID, when all the kids were going home, and people weren’t showing up at work,” Thompson said. “Everybody realized how important broadband really was.”

Thompson said it was his interactions with Johnson the public utilities commissioner and his policy chops that made him a strong candidate to lead the company’s consulting division when the position opened up around 2014.

Rural broadband networks rely on federal funding, because there aren’t enough customers for them to make business sense. The federal government offers a host of programs and grants to bridge the gap and connect rural Americans.

But the programs and their compliance requirements are complicated. Johnson’s understanding of utility regulation, his ability to rapidly absorb policy minutiae and convey that information to co-op board members, Thompson said, made him an ideal candidate to lead the company’s consulting division.

“It’s a relatively small part of our business, but it’s an important part, in the sense that they’re the ones that figure out how to pay for and fund the networks,” Thompson said.

Thompson also praised Johnson’s energy and “marketing flair,” which wasn’t the company’s strong suit in the past.

“He did a lot of good for the group, probably more than we had initially envisioned when we hired him,” Thompson said.

Johnson said he appreciated being the guy who helped rural co-ops make “huge business decisions that were putting the finances of these rural providers on the line.”

“And I was really good at it,” Johnson said. “Revenues went up 35% after I’d been there just a couple of years.”

Back to politics

He also said he loved the work. Engineers, he said, deal in facts and evidence. There’s a certainty and finality to engineering decisions that he doesn’t see in his work in Congress.

“That can be the most frustrating thing about politics, how often people say things that they have no evidentiary support for,” Johnson said. “I just loved being able to talk real-person talk to the engineers, and engineering-talk to the real people.”

Eventually, however, Johnson returned to the political arena. In 2018, during his first campaign for Congress, he told South Dakota Public Broadcasting’s Lori Walsh that he “just kept feeling tugged on; that it was time for somebody to run into the fray and try to make a difference.”

Six years later, Johnson insists he’s done that, in spite of the “knuckleheads” he says take the work of legislating less seriously than they do their work on the next soundbyte. He also says he’s earned another term, in spite of his opponent’s contention that he’s only waiting for the right time to throw his hat in the race to become the state’s next governor.

“If I’m ‘the power behind the speaker’ while I have my eye off the ball,” Johnson said, referring to the Bloomberg Government article and his opponent’s allegation about his future ambitions, “it’d be interesting to see what I could get done while I’m focused.”

As far as a run for governor, Johnson said he’s focused on his current job, but that “if there are opportunities that pop up down the road, obviously I’d be interested in anything that would give me an opportunity to help South Dakota.”

Daugaard, his former boss, hopes Johnson takes that opportunity.

“I think he plans to run for governor, and I’m four-square behind him,” Daugaard said.

A look at Rep. Dusty Johnson’s record

U.S. Rep. Dusty Johnson generally votes in line with Republicans, but he has broken with some members of his party on occasion during his nearly six years in office.

Johnson voted to certify the results of the 2020 presidential election, against the wishes of some members and former President Donald Trump. He also voted to create an independent, bipartisan Jan. 6 commission to investigate the insurrection in the U.S. Capitol (although he later voted against creating the House select committee that ultimately did the investigation), and against ejecting Wyoming Republican Rep. Liz Cheney from House leadership.

In his second month in Congress in 2019, Johnson voted against declaring an emergency on the U.S. southern border, joining all House Democrats and 13 Republicans. President Trump moved to declare an emergency in order to fund the construction of a border wall after Congress declined to add $5.7 billion to a budget bill for the project. Johnson disagreed with an expansion of presidential authority.

“I spent eight years under President Obama fighting ever-expanding executive authority. I remain committed to that principle,” Johnson said in a statement at the time.

Johnson more frequently votes with his party on immigration issues, however. He’s also visited the southern border, penned columns about the “border crisis,” and told South Dakota Searchlight that border security should be the top issue for Congress in 2025.

“Shame on us if we can’t get a border bill passed,” he said.

His campaign says he’s cast more than 80 votes for border security. Johnson also told South Dakota Searchlight he agreed with most members of his party in opposing an immigration compromise bill this year that had been negotiated by a bipartisan group of senators, although the compromise never left the Senate. GOP leaders in that chamber said the bill was too weak on immigration after former President Trump came out in opposition to it.

The Johnson campaign also says he voted against “$13 trillion in unnecessary spending.” Johnson voted against President Biden’s Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act. Johnson’s 2024 Democratic opponent Sheryl Johnson criticized Rep. Johnson for appearing at an event celebrating the connection of the Lewis & Clark Regional Water System to the city of Madison earlier this year. The project received funding from the Biden infrastructure package.

Johnson said the infrastructure law contained “unsustainable spending,” and said he’s been part of “a huge bipartisan team (that) set aside politics to provide the bulk of the funding over decades” for the water project.

His campaign says that 19 of his bills have been signed into law or implemented administratively, and that his scores from the nonpartisan Center for Effective Lawmaking — which ranks him as the 14th most effective member of the House — show proof of his success in Washington, D.C.

Johnson told South Dakota Searchlight that co-sponsoring the Ocean Shipping Reform Implementation Act is among his biggest achievements.

The bill, signed into law in June of 2022, granted additional regulatory power to the Federal Maritime Commission. Johnson said the bill was sparked by news that foreign shipping companies were leaving U.S. agricultural exports behind and heading back to Asia empty, “further exacerbating supply chain issues.” The law allows the commission to create and enforce rules to address such practices, among other provisions.