By: John Hult
PIERRE, S.D. (South Dakota Searchlight) – South Dakota lawmakers will not convene to make the call on a new prison site on July 22, according to Gov. Larry Rhoden’s office.
Lt. Gov. Tony Venhuizen wrote a letter to Rhoden this week asking that the special session the governor had hoped to call on that date be pushed back. Lawmakers would be asked to back plans for a new prison at that session.
Venhuizen leads the Project Prison Reset group, called into being in February via a Rhoden executive order and charged with deciding if the state needs new prison facilities, how large and where those facilities should be.
Members voted during a Springfield meeting in late April to build a replacement for the South Dakota State Penitentiary, which is located in Sioux Falls.
Pierre played host to the group’s most recent meeting last week, where the group narrowed down locations to Mitchell or Worthing and existing prison campuses in Springfield and Sioux Falls, and voted to cap the cost of such a prison at $600 million. Elected officials in Mitchell including the mayor and sheriff have since come out against locating the prison near their community.
This week, Venhuizen wrote that the group had made “excellent progress,” but that the two weeks between the next Project Prison Reset meeting and the intended special session aren’t enough.
“Even if the task force is able to adopt a specific proposal on July 8, we do not feel that two weeks provides adequate time for a final proposal to be completed with adequate detail, and for state legislators to learn about that proposal prior to the special session,” Venhuizen wrote.
Rhoden, through spokeswoman Josie Harms, said the governor will “accept the task force’s request” and “consult with leadership on a rescheduled date.”
“I’m eager to see what the task force can accomplish in their next meeting,” Rhoden wrote.
The cost of the Rhoden administration’s preferred solution to correctional overcrowding – a 1,500-bed, $825 million facility south of Harrisburg in Lincoln County – was among the primary concerns for the lawmakers who rejected the idea in February.
A consultant hired on behalf of the task force to reevaluate the state’s needs concluded that the state needs more beds than that, 1,700, immediately, to ease current crowding.
A 1,700-bed prison wouldn’t solve the state’s problems long-term, however, according to the consultants. By the mid-2030s, the state would need yet another 1,500-bed prison.
The task force ultimately rejected those conclusions, betting that $600 million would be enough to bulk up the system and replace the oldest parts of the Sioux Falls penitentiary complex.
Lawmakers had put back more than $600 million for prison construction before the 2025 legislative session, and the fund had swelled larger than that with interest by winter.
Ongoing construction bills at the site of a new women’s prison in Rapid City – an $87 million project that earned legislative approval – have since come out of that fund, DOC spokesman Michael Winder told Searchlight on Thursday.
The state’s also paid some of the bills associated with site prep at the now-rejected Lincoln County site out of that fund. Lawmakers had approved the spending of up to $60 million in prison design and site prep for a men’s prison in 2024, and the state spent or obligated $52 million of that money for the Lincoln County plan before it came to a halt.
Subtracting the money spent since the last legislative session’s end and adding the $23 million earned in interest this year that will be deposited in August, Winder said, the fund’s available balance will sit at approximately $538 million by the end of summer.
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