This interview originally aired on "In the Moment" on SDPB Radio.
Advocates have conflicting ideas about how legalized marijuana could be regulated in South Dakota. We discuss the dueling proposals on marijuana and other ballot questions.
Plus, is school lunch debt a moral failing? Or should a community feed children at school so they can learn? Our Dakota Political Junkie discusses possible solutions to the school lunch debt conundrum.
Jonathan Ellis is a co-founder of the independent newspaper The Dakota Scout.
_________________________________________________
The following transcript was auto-generated.
Lori Walsh:
Jonathan Ellis, co-founder of the independent newspaper the Dakota Scout is with us in SDPB's Kirby Family Studio today for our Dakota Political Junkies conversation where we dive into what's new in state politics.
Hey, welcome.
Jonathan Ellis:
Hey. Thank you.
Lori Walsh:
How have you been?
Jonathan Ellis:
I was in the weeds this week.
Lori Walsh:
Were you? Yeah. You were editing a story moments before the microphones turned on.
Jonathan Ellis:
Yeah. Maybe we'll even talk about that.
Lori Walsh:
It's never a dull moment at the Dakota Scout.
Jonathan Ellis:
No, no. I mean, this is press day for us, so it's always kind of getting everything out to the printer. All right, yep.
Lori Walsh:
So, let's start with one of the things that you've covered for a long time, long before you started the Dakota Scout. You were doing some really great reporting on marijuana in South Dakota. The conversation among voters, among lawmakers, and now explain this to me because I can drive up and down some Minnesota Avenue and then somewhere south of town, there are storefronts that say, this is a medical marijuana place.
Jonathan Ellis:
Correct. Yep.
Lori Walsh:
If I walked in them, how is that rolling out right now?
Jonathan Ellis:
If you have your card, yes. Right, you need to have a card.
Lori Walsh:
It says, medical cards. So, can you go in there and ask for a medical card?
Jonathan Ellis:
No. You can go through your regular physicians, although not necessarily a lot of them are doing that, but they have these clinics and there are some detractors on those that they think it's a pop-up clinic.
Lori Walsh:
One of them does look a little shady. I'm not going to lie. It's not the shiniest facility.
Jonathan Ellis:
Well, I will say though, I am not going to name any names here, but a person I know who got a card a year ago had to renew it at the same type of place, and they said, no, we're not going to renew it.
Lori Walsh:
Really?
Jonathan Ellis:
So yeah, so that's very recent. I don't know if they're kind of clamping down a little bit on that, but yeah, you get your card and I mean if you wanted to go, it started obviously with Flandreau, and you could get a trial card through them and access there. I think they are, several months, well, even more than that, ahead of the state in terms of getting its medical marijuana program off the ground. Recall that this is all a result of a 2020 ballot initiative that voters passed regarding medical marijuana. In that same year, there was also the behemoth medical marijuana, hemp and recreational marijuana that also passed that eventually the Supreme Court struck down.
Lori Walsh:
That's where we are now. Not a stretch to say that voters are curious about this idea. They have passed things previously.
Jonathan Ellis:
Correct.
Lori Walsh:
And now there'll be new ballot measures that deal with recreational marijuana. What are you seeing about what that could even look like? Because lawmakers don't seem to have any appetite.
Jonathan Ellis:
No.
Lori Walsh:
Last time you were here, we talked about abortion and just the idea that lawmakers will most likely try to talk about it at this session before voters put something on the ballot that enshrines reproductive rights for women. That is a prediction. We don't know if that's true, but it seems pretty smart.
Jonathan Ellis:
It's trending in that direction when you look at statewide elections.
Lori Walsh:
Yeah, we don't see that with marijuana in the state. We don't see a ton of appetite from lawmakers, or are you seeing that they're like, "We're going to go ahead and pass a law in 2024."
Jonathan Ellis:
There are some.
Lori Walsh:
There are a few.
Jonathan Ellis:
There are a few, for sure. But, they're a minority within the Republican-controlled legislature. But yeah, there are some who think, look, we should do this. And so, let's get to the ballot measures. So you have two dueling ballot measures on, potentially, if they make the ballot, recreational cannabis. Again, these are different because one of them, South Dakotas for Better Marijuana Laws is a pretty-stripped down version of legalization, and it would basically ask the legislature to establish a regulatory framework if voters were to pass it.
It's a, I guess you'd say, laissez-faire approach to it. Now you have another proposal from Emmett Reistroffer who has been a big advocate in this area across the nation for many years. He thinks that the regulatory structure should be sold if voters pass this. Recreational marijuana should only be sold through existing medical marijuana places because there's already a licensing structure for those facilities. Now he has, I mean, he's an owner, or he is a chief operating officer of Genesis Farms, which has several licenses for medical marijuana. So, obviously, it would benefit them immensely to have an approach where only that subset of the industry was allowed to participate in the recreation part of it.
Lori Walsh:
Right. So I mean, make no mistake, there's a lot of money to be made in this industry, potentially.
Jonathan Ellis:
I mean, I don't have numbers. I mean, I'm from Colorado originally, and so it was interesting to see how it rolled out there. The schools were swimming in money in Colorado from just the amount of money that went to their capital funds and buying and building new buildings and things like that. So, it's worked in some states for sure, in terms of funding education, but legalization, and I've always been kind of on the libertarian side of that myself. There are costs and benefits with every regulatory structure, whether it's completely having it illegal or completely having it open. So, I mean, you got to take good with bad.
Lori Walsh:
Yeah. The governor is definitely not pro-legalization of recreational marijuana. She's been pretty outspoken about that in the past.
Jonathan Ellis:
She was the one who ended up challenging the measure that got struck down.
Lori Walsh:
Alright. So, we'll follow that in the future. But you also mentioned schools, so let's talk about one of the stories that you're working on now. C.J. Keene for SDPB did a story on this recently and that is the school lunch debt conundrum.
Jonathan Ellis:
Yeah, yeah.
Lori Walsh:
Lay the tracks for it because this is a pandemic story.
Jonathan Ellis:
South Dakota Public Broadcasting. You've definitely done a good job of covering this issue as well. I mean, it came to light again now because of the policy that Sioux Falls is implementing. Now, some donors have wiped away a couple hundred thousand dollars in student debt in the meal program that was scheduled by the end of the year, at this pace, to be $400,000. That's a pretty significant debt. And what they're proposing, or what they're going to do now, is if you have any debt, you can't get a breakfast. If you have $20 or more in debt, you would only be able to get a snack and milk. And if you have $75 in debt, you don't get a meal.
Lori Walsh:
You get a cold meal, right? You get the cheese sandwich.
Jonathan Ellis:
My understanding is that that's the $20, the $75 is nothing. Now, I could stand to be corrected there, but that was my reading of that. So, that's an interesting story. The question that we had at the Dakota Scout is, is this a statewide issue?
Lori Walsh:
I'm going to read the quote from C.J.'s story, because I have it up here, and this is Gay Anderson. If there is more than negative $20 in their account, we would be giving them a smart snack, but we would have to charge them a dollar for that. Once they hit the negative $75, our policy states that we are not to be feeding them, and that's not something that anybody wants to be doing.
I think that speaks to you being correct there. No cheese sandwich.
Jonathan Ellis:
Journalists like to be correct. Good.
Lori Walsh:
I have experience in the lunchroom and, that is, that's the old way of doing it because you didn't get the hot lunch, but they would give you a cheese sandwich, which we called the Cheese Sandwich of Shame because then everybody would know. And that's what's at stake here. It's kids not learning. Kids being hungry. Kids being embarrassed. Equity. Teachers spending all their money to feed their kids with goldfish crackers and granola bars tucked in their drawers. And this idea that having school lunch debt is a moral failing.
Jonathan Ellis:
And that's unfortunate. I mean, look, we live in a society where there are people who have means and people who don't, and a lot of the kids that are in this situation would qualify for federal programs that exist for free and reduced lunches. There's a lot of that we will do away just to get those kids in those programs that, again, currently exist. I think we have to look at other ways, too, of how kids can participate, whether it depends on their age and things like that. But I mean, can they do some volunteer work? I mean, I think we've got to look at this other ways, too.
Lori Walsh:
You going to cut the school grass to get your lunch? Are you going to do dishes?
Jonathan Ellis:
Maybe. I mean, hey—
Lori Walsh:
Send them in the back to do dishes. Like go on. Come on.
Jonathan Ellis:
One of my first jobs in high school was a dishwasher. It was a good skill.
Lori Walsh:
Yeah, we're talking about kindergartners.
Jonathan Ellis:
No, and that's true. I mean, it's age appropriate things, but I think we've got to look at this in a creative way.
So, this is all stemming from COVID relief funding. There were two years where the federal government paid for everybody's student lunch, regardless of income. That ended, so there are nine states that have gone ahead and implemented it, at least temporarily, where they've kicked in the money to do this.
Lori Walsh:
Because one of the things we learned is there was nationwide, more than 80 million more meals were served when it was free. So there are a lot of kids going hungry. They're not incurring the debt, they're hiding, or they're sitting silently. They're not getting fed and inflation is tough. After the pandemic, a lot of people didn't know they had to reapply. They were getting a free lunch, but then there was a barrier to filling out the paperwork. They didn't understand it. It was complicated. Or their income became too high, but yet their real income didn't because of the inflation on the food, because it needed to be adjusted for inflation.
Jonathan Ellis:
Because it hasn't been adjusted for the inflation.
Lori Walsh:
So all of a sudden they're out of the program. There are a lot of factors here.
Jonathan Ellis:
Right.
Lori Walsh:
Are you seeing a push in South Dakota for universal free lunches?
Jonathan Ellis:
Oh, sure. Representative Kadyn Wittman had a bill. I mean, it got shot down 14 to 1 in committee. The issue is though, you've got a price tag on that. That's about a $40 million a year, to start. $40 million a year in revenue. The interesting thing about that is where do you find that revenue? But then some of the same people who are pushing that also want to eliminate the sales tax on groceries. So, there you're at $105 million or so there. Suddenly, if you did both of those things, you're getting close to $150 million of revenue. Where does that come from? What's that look like?
Lori Walsh:
Do you see a real conversation happening about this in Pierre this year?
Jonathan Ellis:
I do.
Lori Walsh:
You think so?
Jonathan Ellis:
Yeah. There's a group of lawmakers, a bipartisan group, that is going to try to address this. It may be to the point where there may be some, it's not going to be all a $40 million program, maybe something else. But I think that there'll be conversations. Now, again, whether or not that moves the football down the field, I don't know, but there certainly will be conversations about it.
Lori Walsh:
Yeah. One of the challenges is, don't you think, this idea of, we talk a lot about money on this show. Federal money, state money, it can be hard to access it. We just talked about free counseling for kids 4 to 17, and the walk-in clinics didn't draw a ton of people, and it's free for the next three years. Therapy for your kid if they had any kind of trauma, divorce, the death of a family member, a car accident, a dog bite, the pandemic, stress or whatever. It's hard to get the word out about these things and to provide the access point. So, a lot of people who are incurring debt, there's a federal program already in place for them.
Jonathan Ellis:
There is.
Lori Walsh:
They have not figured out how to cross that bridge.
Jonathan Ellis:
And we'll have a story. I mean, you mentioned that there are some language barriers. That's probably a fairly significant issue in Sioux Falls and some of the other areas. But for example, we interviewed the superintendent and there's the whole pride issue too. I mean, people who don't want to be on a government program.
Lori Walsh:
Right. Welcome to South Dakota. All right. You can read more at dakotascout.com.
Jonathan Ellis:
Thedakotascout.com.
Lori Walsh:
Thedakotascout.com. Jonathan Ellis, thanks so much. We appreciate your time.
Jonathan Ellis:
Thanks for having me.
