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. 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. How that money gets to school districts to offset property taxes remains to be seen, and school districts will want to see that money before lowering their general education tax levies. 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.
That petition drive by the “fair tax” fellows was declared moot, bogus and void some time back.