South Dakota’s body politic has endorsed Governor Larry Rhoden’s statewide property-tax/sales-tax swap with its silence. South Dakotans for Fair Taxes, a coalition of Dakota Rural Action, Bread for the World, and the state AFL-CIO, yesterday declared the failure their petition drive to refer 2026 Senate Bill 245 to a public vote:
Opponents of a new law that uses a higher state sales tax rate to fund property tax reductions for homeowners said Friday they did not collect enough petition signatures to put the measure on the Nov. 3 ballot.
South Dakotans for Fair Taxes needed 17,508 signatures from registered South Dakota voters to refer the law. A press release from the group announcing its failure to reach that threshold did not say how many signatures were gathered [Joshua Haiar, “Group Fails to Gather Enough Signatures to Put New South Dakota Tax Law on the Ballot,” South Dakota Searchlight, 2026.06.26].
Petitioners had 90 days to collect signatures to refer laws from this year’s Session, from the adjournment of the Legislature on March 30 to this coming Monday, June 29. South Dakotans for Fair Taxes didn’t launch its petition drive until a month into that circulation period.
Early April polling on another property-tax-relief measure, Governor Rhoden’s Senate Bill 96, suggested voters dislike SB 245’s use of next year’s sales tax hike to fund property tax cuts. But they apparently don’t dislike that plan enough to rally behind a petition drive to stop it.
The last successful referendum, the all-volunteer push to refer 2024 Senate Bill 201 two years ago, tapped widespread voter discontent that translated into the surprise unseating of several incumbent legislators. Legislators who backed SB 245 and SB 96 faced no similar wave of voter anger in this year’s primary. If voters were mad enough to refer SB 245, loudmouth jerk Toby Doeden could have ridden that issue to beat Larry Rhoden in the Republican gubernatorial runoff next month. But now Larry Rhoden, who attacked the referendum against his major Legislative achievement of this Session, can take the failure of the SB 245 petition drive as a sign that this year’s voters will stage no property-tax revolt to match the property-rights revolt of 2024. Toby Doeden can talk all he wants about property taxes being too high, and Governor Rhoden can confidently follow up by saying, “Yup, and I’ve actually done something about it” without worrying too much about voters saying, “But we hate what you did.”
With the referendum drive dead, SB 245 becomes law on Wednesday, July 1. We won’t really notice right away. On Wednesday, the state treasurer will transfer $55,896,576 from the general revenue replacement fund to SB 245’s homeowner property tax reduction fund. The Legislature set the maximum general education mill levy on owner-occupied houses at $0.669, down from $2.518 (see 2026 HB 1051), but that decrease is on taxes payable next year, so homeowners won’t see lower school property tax bills—and that first $55.9M tranche won’t flow to the school districts to make up the difference—until next year. The state sales tax won’t rise from 4.2% to 4.5% and six and two-thirds percent of sales tax revenues won’t flow into the homeowner property tax reduction fund until July 2027.
[Final paragraph on implementation of SB 245 corrected and updated with input from a close watcher of the Legislature—thank you!]
That petition drive by the “fair tax” fellows was declared moot, bogus and void some time back.
The bougee homeowners are getting proletariat renters and poor people to help them pay the taxes on their huts?
You German Americans have all the answers, huh? #laughing
You can’t start a referendum petition with a month burned already. It took the full three months to collect signatures to refer the Legislature’s approval of theLonetree Dump. That was an easy issue to explain.
From experience, I can assure that a successful campaign to get signatures for a referendum is hard work. It is a grind and required MANY to help and precise coordination.
I congratulate any who take on that charge.
It would be interesting to see who started the charge to get rid of property tax on the maga brain?
Mark, although not property specific, I would point to Grover Norquist as the loudest original drum-beater for the issue of lowering taxes as an absolute issue — consequences be damned. Ronald Reagan’s ear seems the most active in making that reality.
They were federal income tax focused; here in SD we had to adapt that throttling of taxation to property taxes.