This interview originally aired on In the Moment on SDPB Radio.
Seth Tupper is the editor-in-chief of South Dakota Searchlight and our Dakota Political Junkie this week. He brings a few of the stories he's been following at his publication to our political discussion.
Learn more about Tupper's reporting.
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Lori Walsh:
You're listening to In The Moment on South Dakota Public Broadcasting. I'm Lori Walsh.
A watchdog group has rated the effectiveness of members of Congress and South Dakota's congressional delegation fared well in the rankings. Plus, could there be a water rush where Western states get in line in front of South Dakota for use of water from Missouri River reservoirs? Seth Tupper writes about those topics and more online for South Dakota Searchlight. He is their editor-in-chief and he is our Dakota Political Junkies analyst today. He's with us in SDPB's Black Hills Surgical Hospital Studio in our Rapid City offices for today's conversation. Seth, welcome back. Thanks for being here.
Seth Tupper:
You're welcome. Following Sylvia Poggioli is a tall order, but I'll do my best.
Lori Walsh:
I agree. It's just tough to follow that. But Sylvia Poggioli's not here in South Dakota looking at what's happening on the ground and looking ahead to what happens with our water either. So, let's talk about that first because I think this is a compelling commentary that you put on South Dakota Searchlight, which is somewhat hypothetical, but also some really reasonable conclusions and predictions here. Explain to people why you wanted to write about this.
Seth Tupper:
This goes way back for me and I had an experience when I was a reporter at the Daily Republic newspaper in Mitchell in the early 2000s that I'll never forget. I was covering a story with the B-Y Water District, which runs a water pipeline from the Missouri River. I don't remember the exact particulars. I think they were expanding it to more communities or something at the time. I remember I was interviewing one of the water district officials and I said, "Gosh, in South Dakota, everybody seemingly wants water from the Missouri River. Are we ever going to get to a point where we're pulling too much water out of the river?"
This water official paused a beat and said, "There's more water that evaporates off of those reservoirs every day than all of the water districts use, than they pull out of it combined." That really stuck with me as an indication. The point he was making was just that there were absolutely, just mind-bendingly, massive amounts of water stored in the mainstem reservoirs on the Missouri River is something that you really... It's tough to get your mind around. That always stuck with me. Fast-forward to my current job, last year, I was at an editor's summit for States Newsroom, which is the national non-profit umbrella organization that we're under as part of South Dakota Searchlight, and I was with a bunch of other editors at this editor summit.
We broke into topic groups to discuss ways we could collaborate on stories and things. I went to a breakout group on water and I was with editors from Colorado and Arizona and New Mexico, all these states that are really struggling to find water sources and are dealing with cutbacks in water, and was looking around at them. When it came to my turn to talk about water, I said, "Well, we have more water than we know what to do with in South Dakota in all these Missouri River reservoirs." They just seemed to have no concept that these reservoirs on the Missouri River even existed. It just wasn't even on their radar. That really got me thinking about, "Wow, it's only a matter of time before people in these states wake up to the fact that we have all this water in South Dakota and maybe want to come and get some of it."
So, I started doing research for this commentary that's on our website. I did note that this has been studied by some western states years ago. They decided that, "Well, this is too cost prohibitive." But as I talked to South Dakota water officials, they tell me that if you don't have water, things that looked cost prohibitive 10 years ago suddenly seemed to look a lot cheaper when you're literally running out of water. So, there are water officials in the state who are thinking about this, and I think it's something that we should all think about, which is water rights are first come, first serve, and we don't want some day to end up standing in line behind some other state for the water that flows through our own borders.
Lori Walsh:
To be clear, no one said there are plans for some pipeline that will head west. It's not on anyone's particular radar. But as you look at the process and the reality of the future in a warming planet and the problems we've seen with drought in California and those Western states, it is a plausible thing to start thinking about from a regulation standpoint.
Seth Tupper:
Absolutely, and we do have several proposals in South Dakota right now. There's a proposal to run a water pipeline to Western South Dakota, to the Black Hills area. There are a couple of pipeline proposals East River, especially up in the Aberdeen area where they really need more water. The idea among a lot of the water officials that I've talked to is, hey, not that we want to hoard all this water for ourselves, but just that if we have needs, we need to really figure those out now and we need to really look into the future and we need to secure rights to the water that we think we're going to need, so that when it comes time that we really do need it, we're not in line behind Colorado or Arizona or somebody who by that time may have come up with a proposal to get water from the Missouri River and may have used the clout that they have with a bigger congressional delegation than we have to secure funding for that and make it happen.
Lori Walsh:
Yeah. Well, we all know how long it took the city... Or it's taking, present tense, the city of Madison to get some of the water infrastructure that they need, that they've been working on for so long. So, how does the pandemic funding, some of the Cares Act, or some of the infrastructure act from the Biden administration... When there's money flowing around, people want to build stuff.
Seth Tupper:
Right. South Dakota actually took a bunch of that federal pandemic aid last year and earmarked hundreds of millions of dollars for water and waste water projects that are still working their way through bidding and the regulatory process and all that. This year, Helene Duhamel, legislator from out here, had took a proposal all the way to the legislature's final day to try to get more money for potential water pipeline projects. That actually died on the last day of session. The reason I wrote it is because I think it's just sometimes we get so caught up in the day-to-day things that are happening, we don't often think about these big picture issues like this. I just think it's something that people in the state should be thinking about, and there are some people thinking about it as I noted in that commentary.
Lori Walsh:
The proposed gold mine in the Black Hills will take a ton of water if that comes through. So, it is not the last time we'll be talking about water, where is it coming from, who's paying for it, and how does it affect the environment of the people who currently live there. We can talk about this all hour.
Seth Tupper:
Right.
Lori Walsh:
Water.
Seth Tupper:
Big issue, yeah. In South Dakota, as you said, we have a lot of experience with it, with the Lewis and Clark pipeline that has taken decades and is still being added onto with the Mni Wichoni pipeline that took decades to get that funding from Congress. By the time you need water, it's really too late. You should have been working on it 30 years ago if you're talking about a big pipeline type of project.
Lori Walsh:
You mentioned our congressional delegation, things that need to come from that federal level. Tell me a little bit about this watchdog group rating our congression... Well, rating all members of Congress for their effectiveness and what they found South Dakota's representatives and senators are doing well.
Seth Tupper:
I wasn't previously aware of it. Of course, when they gave representative Dusty Johnson a high ranking, he was of course very eager to get the word out about that. That was the first I had heard of it. But it's the Center for Effective Lawmaking. It's a joint project of the University of Virginia and Vanderbilt University, and it appears to be based on some pretty solid research. They take all these metrics into account. Basically, are lawmakers introducing meaningful, impactful legislation and are they getting it advanced through the legislative process? They ranked them overall on their overall effectiveness, but they also break it out by topics like agriculture and transportation and things like that.
This Center ranked our own Dusty Johnson 14th out of 222 House Republicans in overall effectiveness, ranked him top among House Republicans on agricultural issues. And then on the Senate side, Mike Rounds and John Thune were ranked ninth and 13th respectively out of 50 Senate Republicans. I mean, I think we should take some solace in that. You can agree and disagree with the particular things that our congressional delegation is introducing and advancing the positions they're taking, but I think what this shows is that according to this impartial observer, they're trying to do serious legislation and they're getting it advanced at least somewhat through the congressional machinery and they're trying to do serious work.
Lori Walsh:
If you're just tuning in, my guest right now is Seth Tupper, editor-in-chief for South Dakota Searchlight. Seth, we've talked a lot on this show about recapping the legislative session, but I'm curious from your perspective, because I don't think you and I have spoken about it, at least not recently, going forward, now that we've put a bow on the legislative session, what are some of the things that you predict we'll still be talking about that came out of this session? I'm guessing taxes is going to be top of that list. Where do you want to begin?
Seth Tupper:
Well, I'll throw a curveball then and say prisons.
Lori Walsh:
Sure.
Seth Tupper:
I think this was a session when a lot of things, directions we thought we were going seven or eight years ago turned into different directions clearly this session and prisons was one of those. During the Governor Daugaard administration, prior to Governor Noem, there was a big push to keep people out of prison, to not build new prisons. A lot of criminal justice reform and the rationale for that that we heard a lot of times was, "We don't want to have to spend hundreds of millions of dollars on new prisons." Well, guess what we're doing now? Hundreds of millions of dollars [inaudible 00:10:57] new prisons were awarded this session by legislators. And then, they also took some steps in truth and sentencing bill and some other bills that will really probably keep some people in prison for longer than they otherwise would've been. So, seems to be a real direction change there and I think that's something that obviously is going to be with us for a long time to come. Taxes, of course, I mean-
Lori Walsh:
I want to jump in here there-
Seth Tupper:
Go ahead.
Lori Walsh:
For just a second, because I think those things are... Two things can be true at the same time, right? I listened to Sheriff Mike Milstead of Minnehaha County here on this side of the state talking about how you remember there used to be this time when you would see crews from the jail. They'd be in stripes and they'd be out in the community picking up trash or some such things. Those programs don't exist anymore because those people with that level of the ability to release them into the community in a work detail, those people are in the community now in an ankle [inaudible 00:11:57] program, or they're in some kind of 24/7 monitoring or something different. The people who are in the jail, according to Sheriff Milstead during this briefing, they're the ones who really need to be there. So, veterans court, drug and alcohol court, all those things are happening at the same time that we're building these prisons for the future. It's really an interesting story to think about criminal justice going forward in this state.
Seth Tupper:
Well, for sure. I think my takeaway from this session is despite the best intentions of some lawmakers and a previous governor, it's something that we don't have our arms fully around. Despite a very concerted effort to not need to build new prisons, they've now come to the determination that we do need to do that. You build facilities that large, that labor-intensive, that comes with a lot of costs and that leads into the next big thing this session, which was cutting tax revenues.
Lori Walsh:
We're not going to get to taxes today because I'm going to let listeners know you can go find Seth's work at southdakotasearchlight.com. More on taxes in the future if you just can't get enough of that conversation. Seth, thanks so much.
Seth Tupper:
Hey, thanks for having me.
