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Failure of task force bill complicates South Dakota’s prison construction impasse • South Dakota Searchlight [1]
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Date: 2025-02-25
South Dakota lawmakers have reached an impasse on prison construction talks: They have a stalled $825 million plan, and no path to a new plan for replacing the aging penitentiary or addressing prison population growth.
The latest twist happened Tuesday at the Capitol in Pierre when the state Senate voted 20-15 against the formation of a task force to study new options.
Sen. Kevin Jensen, R-Canton, summarized the situation as he tried unsuccessfully to save his task force proposal.
“What next? We have no other alternative,” Jensen said. “We have no place to go.”
Tuesday’s Senate vote followed earlier drama in the House of Representatives.
Legislation to approve the final $182 million needed for the $825 million prison construction proposal failed to get a House vote Friday when it became clear it lacked the two-thirds support needed for a spending bill. The House also rejected a substitute effort Friday, and again on Monday, to keep talks alive by continuing to set aside money without approving a specific construction plan.
Meanwhile, there’s more than $600 million lingering in a prison construction account, the result of money lawmakers set aside during past legislative sessions and interest earned on that money.
There’s also a lingering $62 million of spending authority that lawmakers approved during previous legislative sessions to prepare a site for construction. That site is 15 miles south of Sioux Falls in rural Lincoln County, where the state Department of Corrections hopes to build a 1,500-bed men’s prison that would largely replace the antiquated Sioux Falls penitentiary, parts of which date to 1881. Jensen’s bill to freeze that money failed Monday in a committee, and his procedural attempt to force it onto the Senate calendar failed Tuesday.
The proposed prison site has been controversial and opposed by neighbors since it was announced in 2023. The plan has also been controversial for its cost and size. A new crop of lawmakers elected last year has tilted the scales against the plan in the Legislature.
Majority Leader Jim Mehlhaff, R-Pierre, lamented that reality during his remarks on the task force bill. He said some legislators are trying to “grip the process in analysis paralysis.”
“What we have here is this current Legislature trying to unwind the work of the previous Legislature and do things over again,” Mehlhaff said. “And the danger in that is that the other Legislature had already authorized and appropriated very significant funds to move forward on a certain plan.”
Legislators expressed various other reasons for opposing the formation of a task force.
Sen. Tamara Grove, R-Lower Brule, worried the task force wouldn’t consider sentencing reform, which she said is a root cause of the growing prison population. Sen. David Wheeler, R-Huron, said the task force idea lacked buy-in from the Department of Corrections and was therefore doomed to produce a failed plan.
Legislators now have about two weeks left in their annual lawmaking session to figure something out. The stalemate not only affects prison planning, but could also affect the formulation of next year’s budget, since it leaves so much money hanging in the balance.
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