Republican Governor Kristi Noem says there’s a downtrend in revenue coming to South Dakota.
She says the state’s economy is struggling because of low commodity prices and poor weather.
Governor Noem says her office has been watching a trend of decreasing sales tax collections for the last six months.
She says South Dakotan’s are tightening their belts.
Despite that, the state placed more than 19 million dollars into the budget reserves at the end of the 2019 fiscal year.
“That our economy is being impacted by the poor prices and the poor weather and that your state is taking action. As we’ve seen less acres get planted we’ve seen commodity prices rally, as well,” Noem says. “We’re not in any situation where we think this is an alarming situation. We could see the trend turn around here in 6 to 8 months as well, as certainly always hoping for better news in the future.”
Noem says most indicators show people aren’t spending money because AG is suffering.
Noem remains optimistic. She points to a new soybean processing facility in Aberdeen that opened on Wednesday.
“I was just up at AGP up in Aberdeen, it’s a new processing plant that we had the grand opening for yesterday and that’s great news for South Dakota that we have that kind of investment here in our state,” Noem says. “It’ll give us another market for our soybeans here, they’ll add value to it by processing it into meal and oil that we then will ship to Washington state, which will then be shipped to Vietnam, Thailand, some of the other Asia regions that we do have good trade working relationships with.”
Noem says that’s good news in the meantime.
But she says she continues to encourage the White House to get a good trade agreement with China. She says congress also needs to ratify the USMA trade agreement, the NAFTA replacement.