“This isn’t politics as usual; this isn’t the status quo,” insists Kristi Noem as she announces she is keeping eight current agency heads and promoting from within for another four. The keepers:
- Transportation: Darin Bergquist
- Tourism: Jim Hagen
- Game Fish & Parks: Kelly Hepler
- Labor & Regulation: Marcia Hultman
- Health: Kim Malsam-Rysdon
- Environment & Natural Resources: Steve Pirner
- Administration: Scott Bollinger
- Human Resources: Laurie Gill
The internal movers:
- Public Safety: Craig Price (up from Highway Patrol Superintendent)
- Revenue: Jim Terwilliger (over from state economist & deputy secretary of Finance and Management)
- Information & Technology: Pat Snow (interim, up from chief tech officer and telecom director)
- Corrections: Laurie Feller (interim, up from deputy secretary)
Noem is seeking applicants for the seven cabinet posts she is targeting to blaze some kind of new trail toward “a brighter, stronger future“:
- Education (Don Kirkegaard bailed in May)
- Agriculture (Mike Jaspers bailed in May, too)
- Economic Development (Scott Stern announced right before the election that he’s headed back to the family oil business)
- Social Services
- Human Services
- Veterans Affairs
- Tribal Relations
Just about two out of three Cabinet positions sticking with the same old same old—that sure sounds like the status quo. But I guess we can’t count on Kristi Noem to use words with meaning any more than we can count on her patron Donald Trump.
Kristi Noem invites your trailblazing applications via the state transition website.
I don’t know how much it will cost for non-family members to buy themselves positions in the few cabinet positions Noem is targeting, but tickets for the Capitol and Inaugural Balls on January 5 go on sale Monday for $25.
Pirner? He should be shown the door. But it’s not a surprise she’s not making many changes.
The keyword for working with Kristi is: “You gotta be nimble”. She seemed to like that word toward the end of her campaign.
Pirner… DENR… no change… another hint to Democrats that we should make real environmental protection an issue in 2020?
South Dakota… small state… nimble… Noem used that notion throughout her campaign… but how often does South Dakota really behave nimbly? We were pretty nimble with EB-5. We were pretty nimble about tossing GEAR UP out to a rural education co-op to manage millions in federal dollars.
In what other situations has South Dakota really acted “nimbly”? How often do we as a small state engage in some remarkable and necessary reform faster than larger states?
Say, how much turnover happened in the Cabinet when Daugaard succeeded Rounds?
The bureaucrats whose arses have grown roots in government chairs in Pierre will continue to be rooted to their chairs. That’s why SD is stuck in long-term malaise. There are never any new ideas in state government because the state is run by a permanent class of complacent Pierre functionaries. Running state government has even become hereditary. Just look at Pam Roberts and her dotard son Hunter. Many of these people have never been forced to demonstrate their skills in the private sector. Rounds was a visionless caretaker governor who spent his entire life in Pierre and populated government with his relatives. Daugaard is perhaps more earnest than his predecessor but equally visionless and demonstrably rigid in his ideology. Does Noem have vision? She can’t even see a need to uproot the fat and happy permanent Pierre bureaucracy – even after Hughes County voted for Billy Sutton.
I want to highlight this word:
Malaise: a general feeling of discomfort, illness, or uneasiness whose exact cause is difficult to identify.
That describes SD perfectly. SD is being left behind by all of the states around it, and nobody in state government has even identified a problem let alone given any thought to a solution. South Dakota is a backwater that hasn’t figured out how to grow or diversify its economy or attract people or businesses from elsewhere. SD’s main export is its best and brightest of all ages.
Tariffs are making us pay more for what little we get Mr. Rorschach. This is a poor state with a poor economy and now we are forced to pay more for less with the trump tariffs. China and everyone else who we have put a tariff on just raises the price of the goods so we pay more for less. It’s a tax on us consumers, a hidden tax that is right out in the open. We know we are paying more for less, but we still keep paying it because we are too damn dumb to know we are getting screwed with the lights on.
Answer me this, why is gas .25 to .30 more a gallon in Rapid City than in just about every place east of here? Crooked South Dakota politics allow crooks and liars to fleece the public. The pipeline from the refinery in New Castle, Wyoming goes to a tank farm in Rapid City and yet the price is gouged. A man in Sioux Falls and I were talking about this and he says maybe it is because the gas in Sioux Falls is day old, like a bakery. Funny, but another tax without representation by the elite. Count on seeing more of a fleecing when NOem takes the reign of a failed state.
Steve Pirner is as nimble as an ox – except when called upon to use his authority to do the bidding of business interests.
Yep ! South Dakota … Mississippi with snow.
Pirner and Tolefsrud got on the phone to USEPA and tried to sabotage our efforts to bring NPDES permitting to the Gilt Edge mine, and other heap leach mines across the nation. We (Technical Information Project and Atlantic States Legal Foundation) had given notice that we intended to sue EPA to get these mines under water quality laws that might, just might have prevented some of the water quality problems that resulted from unregulated management of water at heap leach mines. I had gone into DENR offices to look at the detailed drawings of the mining plans and made sure the legal theories matched the reality at the mines. And to have state bureaucrats try to stab citizens in the back to favor a Canadian-Australian-owned mine was quite an experience in just how corrupt these people were.
“Malaise.” Perfect Rors.
Donald Pay thank you for your efforts to protect our water and air. And also protect our sovereignty as human beings, and as a state and tribal governments, against the craziness that exists as foreign owned natural resource exploiters whom know how to dangle a few coins of silver in Pierre and dc (under the veil of ‘jobs’) to poison us.
Water is life.
I believe one of the greatest and under publicized issues in South dakota and the adjoining areas of the black hills is the serious damage and pollution done by the mining industry. And the future looks pretty tough.
My experience with DENR was there are some great scientists working there, very hobbled. . Some struggle to be effective and find ways to reduce the damage big industry and politicans are doing to us without losing their jobs. While the political appointees and elected officals rubber stamp our environmental exploitation and degradation.
Same old same old in Pierre, if not worse.
Thank you Donald Pay.
Mr. Pirner is a salty old fellow who knows how to keep the federal government at bay, and who has real scientists working for him using data and things. His whole department is all #4Science and many are probably just bitter about being driven from the state in anger after not being promoted to a cabinet job.
Spike,
Thank you, too. It takes a lot of folks to make change. I was honored to be a part of it, and I still do try to do whatever I can. But I’m more honored when any person steps up and steps into the arena. One thing I learned over the years is that nothing is ever won. It’s going to be a continual struggle. We always need people to do what they can.
And I agree with you that there are some fantastic folks working at DENR. I always respected their expertise, but, like you say, they are hobbled.
Grudz,
Any Governor that would think about appointing me to a Cabinet post is a Governor I would not want to work for.
Spike and Donald Pay, OT and FWIW- https://www.rawstory.com/2018/12/us-conduct-additional-keystone-xl-pipeline-review/
Hopefully this one will be a bit more objective than the last.