• With the 2014 Legislative Session officially over it is time to look forward.  We will start the campaign season very soon and I look forward to travelling throughout District 2 to discuss and defend my positions on the major issues as I ask you to vote for me for a second term as your SD State Senator from District 2.  It has been a great honor to represent you.  I thank you for the opportunity.   
• South Dakota is known as a low tax state and we brag about that a great deal.  We do keep our taxes low and we do a good job with the revenues that we receive but there is a cost to this.  Economic choices have consequences.  The fact that we are a low tax state means that we cannot provide the level of services that we need in a number of areas.  Probably one of the most important areas is in the field of education.  We do not fund our schools at the level that would insure that we can offer all the programs and services that our children need.  In fact we are funding schools at a level which is below

what we were providing five years ago.  That has resulted in many cuts to programs.  We have cut Career and Technical Education programs and now we are upset that we do not have enough young people skilled in these areas to take the jobs that are available.  We have cut counselors out of many of our schools and we wonder why we have students who have behavior problems and/or problems in planning their futures.  We have students that have talent in art and yet many schools have cut their art programs.  We know from our discussions last summer that our schools have utilized their capital outlay funds for general fund expenditures and have traded off building projects and needed maintenance.  We also know that we are losing our teachers to other fields of employment, to other states, or retirement.  We are reaching a crisis situation. 
• We have low taxes and as a result we have terrible issues with roads in our counties and townships.  We did try to address some of these things in the 2014 session but the threat of a veto by our Governor prevents our legislators from supporting an increase in funding measures that would address these issues despite the plea from our county and township officials.  We must address this in the next session and I am hoping that a summer study comes up with some viable solutions.  This is also a crisis situation in terms of safety and economic impact. 
• We brag about having the second lowest unemployment rate in nation but many of our jobs pay very low wages.  In fact, low wages are one of the things we use to draw businesses into SD.  We talk about being the best state in the union in terms of the business climate.  Again the low wages and low taxes are the drawing card.  Many of these low paying jobs provide no health insurance and the burden for the bills often fall on the county and hospitals and results in higher health care costs for everyone.  When we had the opportunity to expand Medicaid to provide some relief for our local governments and healthcare

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