SECRETARY OF STATE REMINDS VOTERS TO CHECK THEIR POLLING LOCATION
PIERRE, S.D. – Secretary of State Monae Johnson is encouraging voters to check their polling location before they head out to vote during the Tuesday, November 5th General Election. The Secretary of State’s website provides guidance on finding your polling location, tracking your absentee ballot application, and viewing your sample ballot at the Voter Information Portal.
Secretary Johnson reminds voters they must provide a photo identification (ID) card when voting, which may be any of the following:
A South Dakota driver’s license or nondriver ID card;
A U.S. government photo ID (e.g., passport);
A U.S. Armed Forces ID;
A current student photo ID from a South Dakota high school or college; or
A Tribal ID.
If a voter does not have a photo ID, they may be given the option to sign a personal identification affidavit under the penalty of perjury and vote a regular ballot.
In Nebraska voters can visit this page to check their registration and make sure they find their proper polling place and in Iowa just visit the Secretary of State’s webpage and follow the links to get that same information.
AVERA LAUNCHES $50 MILLION FUND-RAISING CAMPAIGN TO SUPPORT WOMEN’S AND CHILDREN’S SERVICES
SIOUX FALLS, S.D. – Avera recently announced a $50 million fundraising campaign, Tomorrow’s Promise, the largest philanthropic campaign in the region to support comprehensive women’s and children’s services.
The announcement was made at an Oct. 28 groundbreaking ceremony for a six-story tower addition to Avera McKennan Hospital & University Health Center to expand women’s and children’s care space and create a new welcoming entrance to the hospital. Together with a new medical office building at the Avera on Louise Health Campus, this represents the largest building project in Avera history at a cost of $245 million and 350,000 square feet of new patient care space.
“Tomorrow’s Promise: The Campaign for Women and Children will support the new tower addition, and also Avera services that branch out and touch lives in other ways, including expansion of patient and family lodging, and patient and family support,” said Dzenan Berberovic, Chief Philanthropy Officer for Avera Health.
“Avera has been investing in women’s and children’s care for decades, with a wide range of services and specialties. Today, we’re bringing them together like never before,” said Ronald Place, MD, Regional President and CEO of Avera McKennan. “The new tower building addition will provide a state-of-the-art home for the excellent care we are already providing through an expert team.”
Floor by floor, this tower will contain:
Gathering and education space
Labor, delivery and antepartum
Post-partum care
Pediatric hospital care and pediatric intensive care
Neonatal intensive care
The modern facility will be designed specifically for women and children, with cheery, calming spaces curated for patient comfort and equipped with the latest care technology.
“We are extremely grateful for those who have already committed to generous gifts, and those yet to join us for the Tomorrow’s Promise campaign,” said Jim Dover, FACHE, President and CEO of Avera Health. “People who think beyond themselves are those who create a better tomorrow.”
The building project is not only a home for expanded and enhanced women’s and children’s services; it addresses numerous needs, including more medical/surgical care space. Avera McKennan is a hometown hospital for Sioux Falls residents, as well as a specialty and tertiary referral center for a 72,000-square-mile geographical footprint.
Tomorrow’s Promise campaign chairs are James Gaspar, Jennifer Kirby, Randy Knecht and Molly Uhing, MD.
“Women’s and children’s care is important to me, because I realize that it’s often the beginning of a lifetime of care at Avera,” said Dr. Uhing, an OB/GYN specialist at Avera. “We want their experience to be amazing and unforgettable. As a doctor, I’m excited about space that will accommodate the latest technology, as well as changing needs and desires of our patients.”
Tomorrow’s Promise is led by the Avera Foundation, which for the sixth consecutive year has been recognized by the Association of Healthcare Philanthropy (AHP) with the High Performer distinction for 2024. AHP recognizes high performance based on organizations that fall within the top 75th percentile in net returns from fundraising efforts, minus expenses, for fiscal year 2023 data in overall revenue and overall productivity categories.
“We are gratefully inspired by those who have joined us for the Tomorrow’s Promise campaign, investing in a healthy tomorrow for future generations,” Berberovic said. “This is a once in a generation opportunity to have a lasting, positive impact on the lives of women and children.”
PAID SICK LEAVE ON THE NEBRASKA BALLOT: WHAT DOES THAT ENTAIL?
LINCOLN, NE – There is no federal law in the U.S. requiring businesses to allow paid sick leave to be earned and used by employees. Right now, just under 20 states have passed such a law.
In Nebraska, versions of that law have failed in the legislature multiple times. Now supporters are taking a different approach: a ballot initiative.
Initiative 436 was certified for the November ballot with just under 100,000 signatures. If passed next week, it would require all Nebraska businesses to allow employees to accrue and use paid sick leave.
Businesses with 20 or fewer employees would be required to offer five days, or 40 hours, to be earned. Those with more than 20 workers would have to allow seven days, or 56 hours.
Each hour would only be earned by employees for every 30 that they worked.
People and groups supporting the initiative, such as the Paid Sick Leave for Nebraskans campaign, said it’s a common-sense issue that is far past due for Nebraska.
“The common misconception is that there is already a policy in place for Nebraska workers, and that’s not true,” said Jodi Lepaopao, Campaign Manager, Paid Sick Leave. “In 2020, over a third of the state’s full-time employees didn’t have paid sick leave access. And that was during a pandemic.”
Lepaopao is a former restaurant manager, and has seen the effects that having no sick leave law can have.
“I would have employees come in white as a ghost, barely could walk,” she said. “And then just to have them tell me, I can’t afford to go home and rest.”
Those opposed, like the Nebraska Grocers Industry Association, said it’s a big business regulation and unfair to force upon the smaller stores throughout rural Nebraska, and an extra mandated cost could leave them unable to compete, and eventually unable to operate.
“They manage staff, they manage their businesses and they manage their home lives,” said Ansley Fellers, Nebraska Grocery Industry Association. “So dealing with government mandates on top is very difficult. There are smaller stores and they can’t spread that paying like a larger national company can. Losing food access means that we are adding food deserts.”
REGISTRATION OPEN FOR 100TH SOUTH DAKOTA LEGISLATIVE SESSION CELEBRATION
PIERRE, S.D. – Online registration is now open for current and former legislators, Legislative Research Council staff, interns, and pages wanting to attend the special events on April 12, 2025, commemorating the 100th session of the South Dakota Legislature. Interested people should register before March 1, 2025, through the South Dakota Historical Society Foundation at https://www.sdhsf.org/donate/100th-legislative-session-reception-reunion.html.
The day’s events, to be held at the State Capitol and the Ramkota Hotel and Convention Center in Pierre, will include a program from 2:00 p.m. to 3:00 p.m. at the Capitol Rotunda. Prior to the program, from 11:00 a.m. to 2:00 p.m., the legislative photographer will be on hand for group photos of former legislators and other attendees.
Beginning at 4:00 p.m., a reception will be held at the Ramkota Hotel and Convention Center, with a dance starting at 6:00 p.m. featuring the 147th Army Band of the South Dakota National Guard. Drinks and hors d’oeuvres will be served.
Representative Tony Venhuizen (R-Sioux Falls), Chair of the One Hundredth Session Planning Committee, encourages those affiliated with the South Dakota Legislature during its history to attend.
“I hope all former legislators and others who have been involved will plan to attend this historic reunion,” said Venhuizen. “It will be a great opportunity to celebrate our citizen legislature and its rich history, and to see old friends.”
Tickets for the reception and dance are $20 each. Registrants will be required to designate their affiliation with the legislature (as a current or former legislator, legislative staff, intern, page, or other affiliation) when they purchase tickets.
Other members of the One Hundredth Session Planning Committee include Senator David Wheeler (Vice Chair) (R-Huron); Representatives Erin Healy (D-Sioux Falls) and Stephanie Sauder (R-Bryant); Senators Jean Hunhoff (R-Yankton) and Steve Kolbeck (R-Brandon); former state lawmakers Bernie Hunhoff and Matt Michels; and State Historian Dr. Ben Jones.
34 YEARS AFTER THE PROJECT STARTED SIBLEY IOWA IS NOW DRINKING WATER FROM THE LEWIS & CLARK SYSTEM
SIBLEY, IA – In wind-swept cornfields just outside of this northwest Iowa city of fewer than 3,000 residents, a collection of leaders from every level of government lined up on Monday to celebrate something every human being on the planet should have — clean drinking water.
This group included a member of President Joe Biden‘s White House staff, the oldest and longest-tenured U.S. senator, and stand-ins for Iowa’s other U.S. senator and the region’s U.S. House representative.
They were there to join dozens of local leaders from three states to cut the ribbon and recognize Sibley’s meter building for the Lewis & Clark Regional Water system.
The ceremony came nearly two weeks after Sibley became the 20th and final community to be connected to the pipeline, which spans 5,000 square miles and serves about 350,000 people in those three states (South Dakota, Minnesota, Iowa).
“Super exciting day,” said Troy Larson, the executive director of Lewis & Clark.
“It‘s monumental because it is 34 years in the making — so long for this community to wait to finally have water they long sought and deserved, and we’re happy to provide it.”
The struggle to attain safe, clean drinking water has trudged a lot longer than 34 years for folks like Larry Pedley, who at age 77 has lived in Sibley his whole life.
“The water was horrible,” Pedley said. “It was disgusting. Nobody was drinking it.”
The former owner of the city’s downtown movie theater said the water was “95 percent hard.” If you wanted to drink pure water, or have it to make your coffee or tea, you had to use out-of-town wells. There was no bottled water available for people back then.
“It was good for flushing toilets, that’s about it.“
Larson recalls Sibley residents telling him that when bicyclists participating in RAGBRI — Register‘s Annual Great Bicycle Ride Across Iowa — would stop through the town, they were told not to drink the water or “otherwise they’re going to be in a cornfield a few miles down the road.”
Imagine that. Bikers looking for rest and hydration along their 424-mile journey were told the water in Sibley would do them more harm than good.
“It‘s embarrassing, for one thing, to bring somebody in here and the first thing you do (is say) ’don‘t drink our water because you could get sick if you’re not used to it,” Pedley said.
Pedley has been on the Sibley city council since 1985. One of his top priorities was finding alternate sources of water. The city capped its wells. Pedley went with a group to Phoenix to look at reverse osmosis. Sibley eventually joined Osceola County Rural Water System, stationed nearly 20 miles away in May City. It wasn’t enough.
In January 1990, the Lewis and Clark project was incorporated. Pedley made the made the motion at a city council meeting to join the project, and Sibley was on board by October 1990.
For over three decades, Pedley, with his low-key, matter-of-fact personality, joined other Sibley leaders to work with Lewis and Clark executives, as well as state and federal lawmakers, to make the pipeline dream come true.
“When I started this, I never talked to politicians or senators or legislators, but Lewis & Clark put me in position where I had to,” Pedley said.
“I was very surprised at how cooperative and generous they were in working with us on Lewis & Clark.“
On Oct. 17, 2024, Sibley started receiving 650,000 gallons per day of reliable and high quality drinking water from Lewis & Clark. That amount will ramp up to over 1 million gallons per day once the Lewis & Clark “base system” is expanded from over 44,000,000 gallons a day to 60,000,000 by 2030.
So, how did it take the Lewis & Clark project 34 years to reach this, its pipeline’s final destination?
Lots and lots of money, which meant lots and lots of political squabbling and bureaucratic red tape.
“It was 750 million dollars involved — the federal government, three states and 20 cities’ rural water systems all working together,” said Larson, who has led the project for 21 years.
Eighty percent of the base system comes from federal funding, while 10 percent comes from state funding and 10 percent from local funding, with water rates covering 100 percent of the operations and management.
“So, you can imagine the monumental challenges. This is a project that has never been done before in our nation. So, like our namesake — explorers — we were vanguards. We were trailblazers blazing a new path.”
Lewis & Clark was first conceived in 1988 with a simple idea: Take water from a plentiful source — the Missouri River — and transport it to places where clean water was scarce.
Its pipeline ranges from its water treatment plant in Vermillion, the nearest L&C community to the Missouri, to its northernmost point in Madison. Its westernmost point is Parker (SD), while Sheldon (IA), Sibley (IA), and Worthington (MN) mark its furthest-east locations.
The project was incorporated in 1990 and authorized by Congress in 2000. The two U.S. senators from South Dakota at the time — Tim Johnson and Tom Daschle, both Democrats — played a large role in the initial approval of the funding in the Senate.
“It was a herculean effort and then it fell on the shoulders of then-congressman John Thune to get it through the House,” Larson said South Dakota’s lone representative at the time, a Republican.
Johnson served on the Senate’s energy and water appropriations subcommittee to get the funding rolling, and continued to make the completion of Lewis & Clark a driving force of his time in Washington, D.C., until his final term ended in 2015.
“What he saw was economic development and quality of life are synonymous with water development,” Larson said. “You can’t have quality of life and economic development without water and it’s just a building block and he saw that. He realized that.”
Sen. Charles Grassley (R-Iowa), who grew up on a farm in Beaver County (230 miles east and south from Sibley) and voted in favor of the L&C authorization in 2000, recalled President George W. Bush in 2003 pushing for the funding, but “faceless bureaucrats in the Office of Management and Budget brought it to a halt.”
But construction of the project started in earnest in 2004, and the system began delivering water its first members from the water treatment plant in Vermillion in 2012. The third and final phase of the plant is scheduled to be operational in 2027.
Prior to 2021, about 75 percent of the funding needed to complete the pipeline had been raised.
About two months after President Joe Biden began his administration in January, he introduced the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, which the Senate passed in a 69-30 vote in August, followed by the House’s approval (228-206) on Nov. 5. Biden signed the bill into law ten days later.
The legislation, also known as the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, has funded a combined $152.5 million to the Lewis & Clark water system in the last three years.
“That was a godsend in being able to accelerate 10 years of construction in a very short period,” Larson said of the Biden legislation.
What does that mean? That kind of money, $152.5 million over three years, is a historically abnormal amount of federal funding for a project like Lewis & Clark. The money from the BIL has been distributed by the Bureau of Reclamation, represented in Sibley on Monday by deputy commissioner Roque Sanchez.
“Normally, on the reclamation project, Congress appropriates some money to us, and maybe we can give out $10 million at a time, each year, to sort of keep the work going,” Sanchez said.
“But, with the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, Congress gave the Bureau of Reclamation $8.3 billion to invest in water infrastructure for five years, and that allowed us to invest over $150 million in this project.
“Basically, that cut 10 years off of this project. We would be here in 2034 without the investment of the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, potentially. So, basically, what this allowed us to do is take a good project, good people, and invest more money into it to speed things up.”
Biden‘s legislation paid for 100 percent of the Sibley Meter Building and the Sibley service line that marks the finish line of pipeline, which is likely a reason why a sign reading “Project Funded by President Joe Biden‘s Bipartisan Infrastructure Law” loomed prominently next to the meter building at the event.
But Larson made it a point in both his Dakota News Now interview and his speech at the ceremony to honor the funding efforts that came federal, local, and state politicians before the BIL.
“There was a lot of heavy lifting that our tri-state delegation did through the years to get us the other 75 percent of our project,” Larson said.
“So, really, this is one of those projects that brings everybody together across state lines, across party lines in terms of Republicans, Democrats, Iowans, Minnesotans all coming together for a common good. We’re very excited, not only to celebrate water flowing to the city, but for that cooperation, because everyone sees the bad that happens in D.C., but this is an example of the good.”
It was not lost on Larson that Monday’s celebration of the final step of a 34-year, three-state, 20-city, bipartisan effort comes eight days before the Nov. 5 presidential election, following a campaign marked by an undeniable, if not historical, political divisiveness.
“Our elected officials make many votes and pursue many different pieces of legislation,” Larson said. “This is an example of a tangible result that they can point to and say, ‘Hey, I supported this, and here‘s how it’s really impacted the citizens of my state, my region.”
Sen. Joni Ernst (R-Iowa) — who voted against the Bipartisan Infrastructure Bill — sent a staff member to represent her for the Sibley event. So did Randy Feenstra, the U.S. House member representing Sibley’s district, who also voted “no” on the BIL.
But Grassley — one of 18 Senate Republicans to vote in favor of the legislation — showed up.
The 91-year-old, who has served in Congress for nearly 50 years and represented Iowa in the Senate for nearly 44 years, spoke about his support of Lewis & Clark dating back to authorization in 2000, when he crossed the aisle to stand with fellow senators Johnson and Daschle.
“I’m glad to be with you at the finish as well as the start,” Grassley said at the podium to a crowd made mostly of local civic leaders in both Sibley and some of the 19 other cities in the L&C system.
“I‘ve enjoyed witnessing your accomplishments and helping on the federal level. Way back in the 1990’s, people at the grass roots here in this area on a tri-state basis thought of this mission, dedicated to bringing safe drinking water to hundreds of thousands of people.”
Pedley was one of the original driving forces, a lifelong local politician who stayed in his hometown and fought for a basic human need that will be a newfound source of civic pride.
No longer will he nor any Sibley resident have to tell visitors to not drink the water. In fact, as Larson noted Monday and Johnson touted for years, clean drinking water from Lewis & Clark could also be a source of economic development.
Perhaps more businesses will want to operate in Sibley, and more people will want to live there, now that they can drink clean water out of their faucets.
Monday‘s ceremony started with the ribbon cutting for the Sibley Meter Building. It ended with the unveiling of a plaque on the cement structure that dedicated the building to Pedley.
“My name may be on the building, but it represents Sibley and all the good people who worked on this project to make it happen,” Pedley said. “So, thanks to all of you for this honor.”
