Governor Rhoden may have gotten six county commissions to adopt his sales-tax-for-property-tax swap, but in two counties that have put the 2026 SB 96 optional tax to a public vote, public voters have lived up to spring polling and said cutting property tax for homeowners isn’t worth raising sales tax on everybody:
Brown County commissioners chose to put the tax on the ballot, while Codington County residents gathered petition signatures to force a vote. In Brown County, 56% of voters opposed the tax. In Codington County, 60% did, according to unofficial results from the Secretary of State’s Office.
Shelly Alvine, a Codington County resident, helped lead the petition drive and called the result a “nice outcome.”
Alvine said voters were “voting with their pocketbook” as inflation strains household budgets, and she called the rejection “decisive.” Renters, she added, wouldn’t have benefited from lower property taxes while paying higher sales taxes.
“If you could look a person in the eye and ask them for $50 to pay for your property tax, that’s what you’re asking them to do with this sales tax,” Alvine said.
Alvine said the results should give other counties reason to pause before pursuing their own sales taxes. Voters in Clay and Charles Mix counties will decide on theirs in special elections Nov. 17.
“I think that’s a good reason for the Legislature, before passing off their decisions on South Dakotans and the counties, to look for other ways to make property tax relief more equitable,” Alvine said [Makenzie Huber, “Voters in Two South Dakota Counties Reject Local Sales Taxes for Property Tax Reductions,” South Dakota Searchlight, 2026.11.04].
Two more counties have put the optional sales-tax-for-property-tax swap to a public vote. Clay and Charles Mix counties will vote next week on November 17 on accepting SB 96’s offer to raise sales tax in order to lower homeowner property tax. Yankton County was going to enact the SB 96 but last week apparently backed away.
Worth noting: at least two of those referrals, in Codington and Clay counties, have been driven in part by good Democrats (Alvine in Watertown, Caitlin Collier in Vermillion) who recognize (a) the power of petitions and (b) that sales taxes are regressive and that making renters and low-/middle-income folks pay for tax breaks on millionaire mansions isn’t really fair.