State senators and representatives meet in a conference committee with a full audience at the Capitol in Pierre on March 6, 2024, to discuss pipeline bills. (Makenzie Huber/South Dakota Searchlight)
I’ve never been very good at political predictions. I knew George Mickelson as a tall boy I played volleyball against in the adult league in Brookings. Even though he was a force at the net, I didn’t think that qualified him to be governor. John Thune was unknown to me when he first ran for Congress. He certainly didn’t stand a chance of winning a primary against Bill Jankow’s lieutenant governor. No one asked me to bet, but I would never have bet on Mike Rounds winning a three-way primary for governor.
While political races have proven impossible for me to predict, my crystal ball isn’t all that foggy when it comes to predicting what will happen during a legislative session. Even this far from the start of the 2025 session in January, I can say it will all be about courage.
For years, the Legislature has debated the need to address South Dakota’s property tax system. A summer legislative investigation just wrapped up its work trying to find ways to ensure tax bills are handled the same way across the state. Like former President Donald Trump, who admitted in a debate that he had “concepts for a plan” to improve health care, the summer survey offered “concepts” that could make assessments more uniform.
These concepts are rooted in more collaboration, more education, and absolutely nothing that citizens want to hear about when the topic is property taxes. According to a story from South Dakota Searchlight, property tax payments have increased by nearly 60% for residential properties, 47% for commercial properties and 28% for agricultural land over the past decade.
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Those property taxes are not only a burden on property owners, they are also a lifeline for local governments: 56% go to schools, 27% to counties, 13% to cities and the rest to various local tax authorities. Consequently, any changes to the system could wreak havoc on local government budgets.
Some legislative candidates are joining in on a pledge to cut property taxes. However, it takes more than one legislator with a plan. The problem is big enough and complex enough to require a study similar to Governor Dennis Daugaard’s Blue Ribbon Task Force, which studied teacher pay. That study resulted in a half-cent increase in state taxes in 2016, with some of the money spent on increasing teacher wages.
That brings us to the other issue that will take legislative courage: How can we increase teacher salaries? While the Blue Ribbon Panel’s proposed sales tax increase pulled South Dakota’s teacher pay out of the basement, legislative oversight has dropped the state to 49th nationally.
This month, a Searchlight story from South Dakota noted that not only did teacher salaries in the state rank near the lowest nationally, but teacher salaries in the state have increased by 7.6% over the past six years have fallen, adjusted for inflation. Lawmakers can’t continue to dodge the issue by falling back on the excuse that South Dakota has a low cost of living.
With many new lawmakers likely to head to Pierre after the election, the 2025 session may not be the best time to tackle big, complex issues. However, taxpayers are crying out for relief. Teachers need more pay.
The mechanisms used to solve these problems cannot be one-off. If Daugaard’s Blue Ribbon Task Force has taught us anything, it is that solutions must be nurtured. Lawmakers didn’t pay enough attention to teacher pay, and now the state is near the bottom again.
The best solutions for property tax relief and higher teacher pay will be solutions that monitor these markets so that the Legislature can make necessary adjustments over time. Such solutions require study, innovation and a lot of courage.
