Week three of the South Dakota Legislature is in the books. This was the first week where there was a significant amount of activity as committee agendas started to fill up and floor calendars started to get longer.

The deadline to file bills passed this week and when the final tally was done, there were 274 House bills and 195 Senate bills introduced for a total of 469 pieces of legislation. This is about equal to what we have seen, in terms of bills, for the past several years. Over the past several years, we have seen a reduction in the number of bills introduced. Some of that is due to tight budgets on the state level (ie. less money tends to equal status quo). Some of it is due to term limits—as you have more legislators who are new to the process, they tend to introduce fewer bills.

Most of the activity in the 2012 session for communications providers will center around SB 174. This bill will bring about some substantive changes to the 911 surcharge and the 911 system as a whole.

Forget the dry South Dakota history book your teacher made you use in fourth grade. SDN Communications^®is delivering a book bursting with color, interesting facts, and games about South Dakota. Immaculate Conception Elementary School in Watertown is a proud recipient of these books.

This week’s session was condensed to two days in order to allow legislators the opportunity to attend the Capitol memorial service on Tuesday and the funeral in Sioux Falls for former Governor Bill Janklow on Wednesday.

The legislative leadership decided to simply cancel these two days and work from a 33 day legislative calendar. That caused a flurry of activity this week as legislators and lobbyists worked to find sponsors and co-sponsors for bills in order to get them introduced before the filing deadline.

The South Dakota Legislature actually has two bill filing deadlines. The first deadline is for legislators who want to file an unlimited number of bills. That deadline is Monday (actually, it is Friday, January 20, as the bills need to be back to the legislative staff office in order to allow staff time to finalize the bills before they are formally introduced).

A recent study by Boyd Cos, a data security consulting company, showed that cities like Sioux Falls and Omaha are prime locations for future high-security data centers. The lower costs of operation, available and qualified workers, fiber-optic capacity, insulation from natural disasters and other factors puts Sioux Falls as the number 1 candidate for new data centers.

The first week of any legislative session tends to move at a snail’s pace. This generally has to do with various legislative rules and procedures as bills must be officially introduced to the legislature. Then, the presiding officer in each body (the Speaker in the House and the President Pro Tempore in the Senate) assigns the bills to the various committees. Then each committee must post their agendas 48 hours in advance of their next committee hearing. So even under the best of circumstances, the first day a bill can be heard is on the third or fourth legislative day—in this case either Thursday or Friday of the first week. And since some committees may few, if any bills, they may ask various agencies or lobbying groups to make presentations on various subjects (ie. Department of Revenue may brief the Taxation committee; the South Dakota Municipal League may brief the Local Government committee, etc.).

The death of former Gov. Janklow has brought changes to the legislative calendar. The Legislature will cancel their scheduled sessions on Tuesday and Wednesday of next week. Janklow’s body will lie in state in the Capitol Rotunda on Tuesday morning, followed by a prayer service at 12:30 that day. His funeral will take place in Sioux Falls on Wednesday morning.

SDN is proud to have several employees active in the Air or Army National Guard, and those employees are clearly proud of their employer as well.

The Employer Support of Guard and Reserve (ESGR) group has honored three SDN supervisors for the support and flexibility they offer Guard members.

• Cassie Baldwin, Network Surveillance Center Contact Center Manager
• Rodney Grissom Network Operations Director
• Travis Dangel, Engineering Circuit Design & B/OSS Solutions Manager