South Dakota lawmakers killed a bill that revises certain requirements for reporting motor vehicle accidents.
Current state law says that accidents causing $1,000 or more to one person’s property or $2,000 per accident need to be reported to police. House Bill 1074 doubles those amounts. Representative Dan Kaiser is a prime sponsor of the bill. He says it provides integrity in data collection.
“The amounts that are currently in law, the last time they changed was 15 years ago,” Kaiser says. “The time they changed before that was 14 years ago. So the amounts that are current have a different physical amount of damage to a vehicle 15 years ago than they do today. So when we’re compiling accident data, right now it looks like our accident trend is going up. But it might not actually be because we have not adjusted for inflation and the costs that go along with fixing damages to our vehicles.”
Kaiser says the bill also protects South Dakotans from having to request an accident report for smaller incidences.
But opponents, like Representative Don Haggar, say police reports are important.
“Raising this limit eliminates the presence of that police report, which is the objective record of that accident which helps determine who was at fault,” Haggar says. “And I can also tell you from an insurance background, that’s very important.”
With a vote of 25 to 42, House Bill 1074 failed to make it past the House of Representatives.