Gov. Daugaard might as well put on some dark glasses, pack up the SD recruiting kiosk at Mall of America, and slink back to South Dakota under cover of darkness…

Methinks Mr. Daugaard’s real intent is some tax free shopping for pricey suits he thinks befits the governor of barely a state, with the taxpayers picking up the tab for the trip. And a GOP governor from anywhere west of the Alleghenies has to have cowboy boots to go with that suit, and he’ll probably pick them up at Mall of America too. Meanwhile, on the South Dakota economic development front…

The finally opened and barely operating (after millions in public subsidies) Northern Beef Processors is laying off workers, claiming lack of “operating capital” to buy cattle. Having burned through 150 million in foreign investors and South Dakota taxpayers cash, Northern Beef may be about to join South Dakotas two previous failures in taxpayer and foreign investor backed CAFO, the failed Veiblen megadairies. The beef and dairy markets are shrinking, there’s excess capacity everwhere, and what does the SD GOP run government do?  Recruit even more! 

Not having learned a bit from those failures, SD Governor Daugaard was just off to California recruiting more dairy farmers. Now he’s off to Minnesota to recruit workers for the SD GOP’s pet enterprises that are laying off workers on their way to bankruptcy. At least the foreign investors got citizenship out of the deal!

South Dakota under the GOP… The Badlands for business and workers!

Had a couple years of great crops up here on the Buffalo Ridge on the northern plains- plentiful precipitation, even a little too plentiful, more on that later. Early springs and late falls with hot summers to make the corn skyrocket. ‘Twas a couple years of silobusters that came out of the field dry, high test weight too. But last spring the drought moved north, with the spigot being turned off from July through December. We made it through on some residual soil moisture, and for the lucky farmers that had a crop to harvest, the higher prices made up for the smaller yields. On my own little homestead and my neighbors gardens, we low tech “irrigated” from the nearest lake and managed a respectable vegetable crop, and my little vineyard overflowed with juicy grapes.

So I come back from a few weeks in the Everglades in February, expecting another global warming early spring riding my motorcycles… Not! We’ve seen a steady bombardment of snowstorms and even a couple NOAA certified blizzards, even snowed again today! The good news is that the drought is over… The bad news is that today’s updated flood forecast for the Red River of the North at Fargo is for a crest of 38 to 40 feet, just shy of the all time record. Even 38 feet will put this years flood in the highest five crests ever, with three of those five occurring in the last five years- The 2009 crest set the record at 40.84 feet, followed by a 2011 crest of 38.81 feet. With over a century of records and what looks to be 60 percent of the highest crests occurring in the last five years, we got some weird weather goin’ on here!

And the cost of all this global weirding? Ever been in Fargo for a flood? I have. Figure on a hundred dump trucks with police escorts hauling dirt to build the dikes, plus a couple dozen loaders, ‘dozers, and ‘hoes working day and night at a cost of upwards of  $10,000 an HOUR. Easy to see why the near annual flood fight in the Red River valley alone runs well into the millions. The (maybe) fix: A billion dollar bypass channel around Fargo that should be able to handle a hundred year flood. But given that we’re seeing hundred year floods about every other year, an elementary application of Stats 101 suggests that a real hundred year flood would see downtown Fargo become an island between the river and a new back channel down the I-29 trench.

This year’s and 2011′s floods sandwich a drought that saw our rural water systems in southwest Minnesota and the Buffalo Ridge stressed to the point that new industries requesting water had to be turned down. The (maybe ) fix for that is the unfinished Lewis and Clark water system, a better part of a billion dollar bunch of pipelines and pumps to bring water from the aquifers along the Missouri as far as south central Minnesota. Good luck getting that funded with the GOP halting all “pork” except their own.

So yes, we can maybe mitigate global warming for a few billion dollars just for the Buffalo Ridge and a bit beyond. But this ain’t global warming, it’s global weirding, with a return of the dust bowl, the flood that swallowed Fargo, and the Hurricane that dumped the built environment from Miami to Naples back into the Everglades in the offing…

Maybe it’d be a little cheaper to cut back on our greenhouse gas emissions?

Lets start with the raw numbers- Minnesota income tax rates range from 5.35 to 7.85% depending on income and ability to exploit various and sundry exemptions, credits, etc.. Not very progressive, and perhaps explains why there are probably more low income than wealthy tax refugees from Minnesota in Florida… When you’re living on $20k a year, spending 6 months and a day in Florida can save you around $600 a year. Iowa, despite all the propaganda we’ve heard from the Minnesota GOP, has a higher top rate of 8.98% but a more progressive bottom bracket rate of .36%, which may partly explain why one sees less Iowans in Florida trailer parks. North Dakota ranges somewhere between, with income tax rates varying from 1.51 to 3.99%, but given that they’ve been gifted with one of the world’s biggest oil deposits, they probably don’t even belong in this comparison. South Dakota is the outlier, trying to scrimp by with zero income tax… More on that later.

So what do we get for our state tax dollar? Well, our small towns on the Buffalo Ridge are a good measure. My home town of less than a hundred souls maintains paved streets, a water system, a park, and a bunch of other stuff towns do, and about half of that is paid for by local government aid from the state. Twenty miles west in South Dakota, the streets are dirt and get a 4 by 4 if you want ‘em plowed, and if you want water drill a well or pay a five figure fee to hook up to rural water. And don’t even think of parks…

So clearly South Dakota is cuttin’ corners to get away without an income tax, and starvin’ small towns is just the start. Screwin’ over government workers contributes too, with SDSU in Brookings continually advertising skilled maintenance jobs with little success because they only pay around $12 an hour. And while shortin’ the staff on pay, the Dakotas have never been too proud to accept billions in federal welfare… Over the better part of a century the Dakotas have benefited from a  plethora of pork barrel projects. The WPA was just the warmup, followed by the Missouri River dams and hydro projects, the Interstate System, the world’s 3rd largest armada of ICBMs, multiple military bases, four laning highways to towns of less than 10,000, and now billion dollar flood control projects. The highway projects are illustrative- by objective standards I-29 would have ended at Sioux Falls and in fact wasn’t on the original Interstate System planning maps back in the 1930s. But thanks to lobbying by the Dakota’s long serving (read “high seniority”) congresscritters, I-29 was penciled in. In it’s wake came a bunch of other 80% fed funded highway projects, like the 4 laning of US2, US12, US81, US83, US85, etc.. By objective standards like minimum 10,000 vehicle a day traffic counts most of those projects would never have been funded, while practically every major highway other than the Interstates running out of “the cities” in Minnesota would have received that same 80% federal funding!

The conclusion? You get what you pay for, unless your state is highly proficient at hoggin’ the federal feed trough! 

Now you’d think the first tap off the transmission lines from these wind turbines would be right into the nearby farms, homes, and towns. But next town over to me is the local wind farm maintenance base of Florida Power & Light, and up the ridge a bit in Canby Duke Power from almost as far away as Florida just bought another wind farm operation. A mere couple hundred miles away, Xcel Energy has it’s own fleet of wind turbines. 

Now mega energy companies that trade in power by the megawatt seem to think only in regional if not national grids, and thus it’s no surprise that they want to distribute power in hub and spoke grids hundreds of miles across. Reminds me of when I worked at Yellow Freight and saw one pallet of freight from Sioux City to Sioux Falls take a thousand mile tour through KC and the Twin Cities because Yellow insisted on routing everything through hubs instead of adding a spoke to take that pallet the hundred miles from Sioux City to Sioux Falls. Thus the power from the wind turbines almost in our back yards is “shipped” many miles away, then maybe mixed with power from dirty coal and scary nuclear plants hundreds of miles away and then “shipped” back to us. Doesn’t help either that the wind turbine permitting laws favor big companies rather than local community investors.

Makes “micro grids” and community ownership of power production and distribution sound tempting…

Now we know you city cousins don’t do it on purpose and don’t mean to hurt us, but some of the stuff you do makes us wonder if we’re on the same side. I know, things like municipal and co-op power companies and why tiny towns persist is a mystery to you, but before you legislate us out of existance, could you listen to us a bit?

For a start, here in Minnesota we have a program called LGA, and that stands for Local Government Aid, with the state sharing some of it’s largesse with less fortunate towns that don’t have a lot of tax base, have a lot of older infrastructure that’s expensive to maintain, etc. The republicans have been shortin’ us on LGA, but now that the democrats are back in control of the legislature LGA funding is going back up to what it should be, and the formula’s gettin’ revised.

That’s where we got a problem, the proposed formula figurin’ that a town of less than 100 like mine can get by on a budget of around $400 per person. But a town of over 100 is some how expected to need more like $600 a year to keep the lights on, fresh water flowin’, the streets passable, and the city park neat. OK, we can take a hint- maybe that $200 a tiny town head penalty is to motivate us to disorganize our tiny town? If that’s the intent, it’s not workin’… We’ve now about a hundred towns of a hundred souls or less here in Minnesota, up about twenty since the 2000 census. And no, the co-op doesn’t charge us a third less for fuel for our city’s tractor because we’ve less than a hundred of us here. And our tiny towns provide a lot of services that we can’t afford to provide without LGA help- Like the playground in our park that kids from the townships for miles around play in, because we’ve the only playground for over 5 miles in any direction.

Second, and I’ll cut the laundry list there, could you remember us when you mandate wind and solar power percentages. Our (we own ‘em) little municipal and rural co-op power services out here were making and distributing renewable power long before it became popular- for example, a lot of our power comes from East River Co-Op and has been 30% renewable from hydro for decades. We’ve got wind power aplenty out here too, and it’s a lot cheaper than solar, so please don’t force us to buy solar when we can get more bang for the buck with wind. And please remember that some of our municipal and co-op power services are tied into long term contracts to buy dirty power from coal- we don’t like it either, but we’re stuck with it. forcing us to buy solar generated power can thus make us pay twice for electricity, and worse yet a big solar producer that uses public subsidies to plop down in our town will bankrupt us if we’re forced to buy power for them at artificially mandated high rates. The big boys like Xcel Energy can spread those costs over multiple states and millions of users, our small town municipal power services and county sized co-ops can’t. And the big boys in the power biz would just love to see our little municipal and co-op power services forced to sell out for peanuts.

We’ll get to why we need safe roads and rural transit just as much as you need new billion dollars light rail lines in another discussion…

But Noooo… The NoDak GOP legislators just outlawed abortion in their scattered state and sent a message to women engineers, nurses, doctors, teachers, truckers, and roustabouts: You’re not welcome. Williston and Stanley and dozens of other oil boomtowns are trying to turn the boom into lasting development, encouraging workers answering the call of the boom to move out of the mancamps, settle down in a home, and become lifelong residents. Warren Buffet calls that “family formation”, and it’s what drives real long term economic growth. Said “family formation” in most cases requires women, and in some cases requires gay folks too. 

You don’t build families, towns, and sustainable economies by denying women health care and sending a message that your state is anti-woman, anti-gay, and anti-just about everything except big oil companies and bigots… 

We’re in the easter recess, essentially half time in the legislative process, and a good time to see if any of this “overreach” by the legislators of our partisan parties has occurred. A bunch of “wish list” bills were dumped in the hopper by DFLers, mandating things like quotas of expensive solar energy that actually had me a bit concerned. Last couple weeks the deadlines for bills to make it through committees passed, and those bills seem to be dead for the session. The major target of the GOP legislators’ ire, the marriage equality amendment, made it past the committee deadlines but appears to be on the back burner… And the GOP have only themselves to blame for that issue resurfacing, being that when they were in command they dredged it up, forgot about most everything else, and threw it before the voters who shot their anti-marriage amendment down. And despite being in the minority, the GOP legislators have done their best to clog the hopper with a bunch of “cut ‘n’ paste” bills from the rabidly conservative Koch brothers ALEC. In the exception that proves the rule, I did find one GOP bill that actually answered a real need in non partisan fashion, and the DFL leadership rewarded it by passing it out of committee.  

Meanwhile, unlike the GOPers who march in lockstep, the DFLers are in the best tradition of the party debating amongst themselves- on the eve of easter recess the DFL governor dropped a new budget proposal with cuts in human services funding that isn’t receiving the warmest reception from a lot of DFLers. So on the Minnesota side of the Buffalo Ridge,  if there has been any overeach it’s been to pick up a heavy serving plate on the other end of the table to bring it closer and fill the plate of a child or elder with less strength and reach.

Overreach in Iowa’s been sorta difficult, being as the voters couldn’t decide who to let run the state and gave the presidency to Barack, evenly split their congressional seats, gave the governorship to the GOP, and gave each party a statehouse. The Dakotas are another matter, but first a plug for a couple blogs from the west end of the Buffalo Ridge that cover politics and a lot more much better than the often comatose local media- http://www.madvilletimes.com in SD and http://www.northdecoder.com in ND. Reading these two most excellent blogs we find that the GOP super majorities in the Dakota’s legislatures have been working hard to give their states to big business as quickly as they can pump the oil out of the ground and fill armored cars with tax dollars to “reward” businesses that were gonna come to their states anyway to take advantage of all the federally funded infrastructure there like I-29 and cheap hydropower. In the breaks between passing ALEC’s whole kit and kaboodle of big business giveaways, the Dakota’s GOP legislators have been competing to see who can pass the most regressive social legislation. It’s gotten to the point that a comedy hoax story that the NoDak GOPers were going to outlaw thongs got taken seriously. South Dakota’s GOPers matched that by being the one and only legislature in the country to take the NRA’s armed “School Sentinels” plan seriously and pass enabling legislation. Now the Dakotas already seem to be a sex offender sanctuary, and any school district in the state can now give any sex offender that doesn’t pop up on a sketchy records search carte blanche to walk about the schools, armed to the teeth. Heck, they can even buy ‘em the gun and pay ‘em if they want to!

So when it comes to the “legislative overreach” the Minnesota DFLers are like the small college team that cheerfully loses almost every game. The GOP legislatures of the Dakotas are clearly in a whole ‘nother league… Overreach? Heck, they’re workin’ overtime with the biggest backhoe made with the “extendahoe” option and an 80 feet extension of oil pipe welded onto that! 

Like her parents on the Buffalo Ridge, Karen’s a family farmer as well, founding an apple farm that became the Women’s Environmental Institute. She’s also served as a nurse before becoming a legislator, and in the little time her legislative duties don’t take she works as an educator. Again, she carries on the traditional values of the Buffalo Ridge, with farmers, nurses, and teachers being highly valued professions here for over a century. Another of our historic Buffalo Ridge values is commitment to family, and Karen has fufilled that requirement with extra credit with her four decade long committed relationship with partner family farmer and teacher Jacqueline Zeta. 

So why is a favorite daughter of the Buffalo Ridge living in the big city?

The ugly constitutional amendment that would have banned the recognition of Karen and Jacqueline’s relation by marriage was wisely shot down statewide, garnering but 47% of the vote. But in Rock County where Karen was raised it won 73% of the vote. Is it any wonder that gays are fleeing Rock County? Is it any wonder that despite becoming a virtual suburb of booming Sioux Falls, Rock County’s population isn’t growing?

Thank you Rock County for giving us Karen Clark… And if you don’t want to loose your gay kids and their numerous allies to the big city, get with the program and support marriage equality! 

Before the Minnesota house today is House File 5, a bill to set up a Minnesota Health insurance Marketplace. Basically it’s a federal compliance bill, required when the feds change their law and the states have to change theirs to avoid conflict with the new federal law. Such federal compliance bills used to be routine, uncontroversial, and passed quickly and unanimously.

But like the old guy on the Harley he can barely hold up, revving the engine to make sure we can all hear it thanks to it’s barely muffled exhaust, the republican representatives are loudly exhausting their bile just to remind everyone that they’re still around… I hear tell they’ll be offering a mere couple hundred amendments to the aforementioned federal compliance bill today and tonight. and after all the loud histrionics and theatrics from the republicans, they’ll all vote against the bill and it’ll pass anyway.

As a party, the republicans are tied to pretty much the same failed marketing strategy as Harley. Harley’s stock in trade is some tired old motorcycles badly in need of a 21st century redesign. Thus no surprise that Harleys are slow, unreliable, overheat, and none too durable. Case in point- while watching the republican’s noisy theatrics on Pioneer Public TV, I’m doing an overdue valve clearance check on a 2007 BMW F800S with 52,000 miles on the odometer. At that mileage a Harley is overdue for at least a valve job if not a full-on engine rebuild, but the BMW’s modern overhead cam engine’s valves are still within new specs and needed no adjustment. Heck, startin’ to wonder why I bother to check ‘em! I did replace the spark plugs, old ones were still within specs but I had the new ones handy so may as well put ‘em to work.  No wonder Harley is losing sales and laying off workers, while BMW and the other purveyors of 21st century motorcycles are recovering quite nicely from the depression.

The paranoia is similar too… While I fuel up on E30 at the blender pump, the Harley riders have ridden out of their way to find a station with ethanol free gas and paid a half buck a gallon extra for that 100% dead dinosaur swill. In similar display of paranoia, Representative Swedinski (R-Crazytown) introduced an amendment that would prohibit the Insurance Exchange from releasing information they’re not even collecting on gun ownership. Works just as well as the overpriced dead dinosaur swill, which still pings in the Harley’s ancient engine while the BMW with it’s 12 to 1 compression smoothly delivers 60 MPG on the cheaper 89 octane regular.

Harley and the republicans share a similar dying demographic too, with the average age of a Harley rider rising around 10 months every year. That means that neither Harley nor the republicans will joins the dinosaurs in extinction immediately, though their numbers will decrease and decibel level will probably increase. Probably was similar with the T-Rex, who the scientists who have researched their “straight pipe” vocal tracks assure us could be heard for miles. No doubt the dinosaurs protested loudly as climate change did them in, and barring some sudden evolution in Harley’s motorcycles or the republican’s platform, they have a similar date with extinction.

My sympathies to all the democratic legislators, staffers, and press who have to endure the republican’s political death throes, fortunately legislative TV coverage will end at 6 p.m. and save me from their noisy nonsense for the night.