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SB 39: Squeeze Local Government Budgets to Save Novstrup $12 Per Air Hockey Table in Registration Fees

Al Novstrup clap clap
Cheering for more tax breaks?

As I noticed last month, the Legislature is cooking up another corporate tax break for Al Novstrup, now in the form of Senate Bill 39, a repeal of registration requirements for certain amusement devices.

Currently, SDCL 10-58-3 imposes a $12 registration fee for each mechanical or electronic amusement machine that arcade owners and other Main Street carnies make available to the public. That fee takes the place of municipal sales or use tax on the sale or use of such amusement machines.

Senate Bill 39 eliminates the registration requirement and fee. SB 39 then prohibits local governments from stepping in with their own registration fees or applying their own municipal sales and use tax to those machines’ sale or operation.

Thus, businesses like Senator Al Novstrup’s (R-3/Aberdeen) new coronavirus concentration station Allevity, with its skee-ball, air hockey, and video games, get a tax break. Where they currently bear some of their fair share of community taxes by paying $12 a year per fun machine instead of having to include those machine receipts in their tedious monthly tax remittance calculations, Senate Bill 39 says they should pay local tax on those machines at all. Where the state currently returns those registration fees to Aberdeen and the other towns where Al has his family fun centers, Senate Bill 39 takes that revenue away from those communities.

I’m sure the last thing community-minded Senator Novstrup wants to do is take vital revenues away from local communities at a time of budget challenges. I’m sure that when SB 39 comes to the Senate Taxation Committee, on which Senator Novstrup heavily sits, he’ll say, thanks, but no thanks, and protect his strapped local governments from this loss of tax revenue.

8 Comments

  1. Donald Pay

    What a self-dealing rat this Novstrup is. I’m sorry, between Novstrup and Mr. Dale, I loose control of my bowels, so here goes. I can’t stand pieces of dung like him. Somebody should turn that mfer upside down, stick that ridiculous mop of hair of his in the nearest john and give him a 30-minute swirly.

  2. Loren

    Thank goodness he doesn’t do triage in the ER. He’d put the kid with a sliver ahead of the arterial bleeder. I’m glad there isn’t anything else more important like the potty issues or bedroom issues, GOP favorites.

  3. Al’s new beer-and-axes palace must really be hurting for business if he can’t afford to pay a measly $12 a year for the pleasure of not paying monthly sales tax on those games.

  4. scott

    I’ve heard his imitation Dave & Busters in Sioux Falls isn’t as big deal with the locals has he thought it would be.

  5. No! Mr. Novstrup has one of those places you can drink beers and throw axes at the wall!? That is an outstanding business move. I have heard they really rake in the big bucks.

    Mr. Novstrup is indeed a heavy hitter in the legislatures, and I bet he can toss a splitting maul over his shoulder, blind-folded and opposite-handed, and split a match.

  6. Porter Lansing

    Same old grudzie.
    Glad the “Rona didn’t darken your basement room.
    Keep the faith.
    The Bishop’s watching.

  7. grudznick

    Mr. Lansing, grudznick has sure missed you. I bet even Mr. Novstrup has missed you, but he doesn’t call you or I any longer, since that last dinner party went to hell so we may never know. Unless you want me to ask him for you when I visit the legislatures.

  8. Mark Anderson

    Gruds, I much prefer the bars with dirt floors, playing pool there is so much finer. Your stance is so much more secure even if they throw sawdust on it, like the bar in that town named after that hippie hair general.

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