WEEK NINE LEGISLATIVE REPORTS

With only Veto Day left, the 101st Legislature Session is in the books. When I look back to the seven sessions that I’ve served in I can’t help but realize a few things. First is, we should never increase the days of our session and secondly, of all the bills we hear there’s only 6 or 7 things that we get done that really matter to this state. When I see 500 to 600 bills every year, I can’t believe there are that many things wrong with our state and to be honest I don’t know where they get all these ideas. Ok, I’ll get off my soap box so we can visit about how the last week of session went. This is always the week where we hammer out a balanced budget by voting on the Supplemental and the General bill, also known as the G bill. I voted for both even though I didn’t like some of the appropriations that were in them but like we’ve talked about before, we do the best we can in 40 days and the fact is not everyone is going to like everything in the budget. Example is, I voted and fought against the 5 million for a new airplane, but when I voted for the Budget, I ended up voting for the new airplane. Also, we talked a lot about property tax relief for South Dakota residents and passed two bills, SB 96, which is the Governors bill to let counties put a half cent sales tax on, along with SB 245 which will use part of the sales tax to reduce the local effort for general education levies on owner occupied single-family dwellings. Now to be clear, neither of these bills increase the sales tax rate, but if the sunset comes off in 2027 and the rate goes from 4.2 to back to 4.5, then the .3 increase or around 110 million will go to property tax relief for owner occupied. SB 96 is also for owner occupied but also for all property tax and can be referred to a vote of the people in that county. Now since SB 245 won’t take place until July 1, 2027, we are going to buy down the first half of the year from one time money and return 55 million to the citizens, this is the part I liked about this deal. Year after year I watch as most of the one-time money ends up in the east or west side of the state and for once we’re getting some back. I believe this is just a start and would imagine this conversation will occupy future legislature sessions for years, we need to figure out some things with our schools like how we fund special education and overall spending. One of the greatest things about our state is the low taxes and I want to keep it that way and that will take more conversations and some hard decisions in the future. Once again, I want to thank Tristen Petrik for serving as my intern this session. He was awesome and made my job easier. It’s great when I get to work with our talented young people. I also want to thank all of you who support me, it is a true pleasure serving you and I hope you give me that chance again. Please attend one of the five candidate forums that are planned in April and May where you can visit with the candidate’s seeking office in District 21 and let me know if you’d like to post a yard sign for me. If I can be of assistance to you or you have a question feel free to contact me at 605-680-0304 or at Marty.overweg@sdlegislature.gov. I should also thank the newspapers of District 21 for posting these articles every week of session. They do this at their expense, and we all should be grateful for that service. I hope to run into you this campaign season and get a chance to visit on issues that you have concerns on. Thanks, Representative Marty Overweg.