House Journal 01/24/1997 2:00 PM

Thank you very much. Thank you. Lieutenant Governor Hillard, Mr. Speaker, ladies and gentlemen of the Legislature, and Constitutional Officers. The Supreme Court is not here today. The Chief Justice contacted me. The Supreme Court had hearings scheduled for today because we were supposed to have this occasion yesterday, and they were really unable to attend. Frankly, they were willing to rearrange their schedule, and I told them that certainly wasn't necessary.

As I came in today I saw Representative Koetzle in that Chicago Bear necktie. I couldn't help reflecting for a moment about an occasion that happened not long ago in the court system where there was this young bear that was in court, because they were trying to find a safe home for him. The judge said, I'm going to place you with Mama Bear. Baby Bear said, I don't want to go with Mama Bear. She beats me all the time. He said, Well then I'm going to put you with Papa Bear. He said, I don't want to live with Papa Bear. He beats me all the time. He said, Well, if you can't live with Mama Bear and Papa Bear, who you going to live with? He said, The Chicago Bears. They don't beat anybody.

You know, I've had a map prepared that so many of you've seen. Actually, we've added a couple more reds to it, a couple more counties in the red. Every one of you knows what the State of South Dakota is under, which is an immense set of blizzards culminating in the big blizzard of a week ago that we're dealing with. As I speak to you now, it's snowing very

heavily in some parts of eastern South Dakota. According to the National Weather Bureau, we could have winds, in the central and eastern part of the state, 25 to 40 miles-an-hour sustained winds beginning late afternoon into tomorrow.

There aren't any of us that can determine what God's really going to bring for us, because we don't know. But, we'll deal with whatever it is when it comes, and we'll deal with it exactly like the people of this state did over the course of the last week. At the present time, we have 619 pieces of equipment, at this moment, operating in the state: 475 from the Department of Transportation and 102 from the South Dakota National Guard. We've contracted for 22 pieces of large D8 and D9 Caterpillars and 7-yard front-end loaders. The State of Nebraska has given us 14 of their brand new blowers that are operating throughout the state. The State of Iowa only has 11 blowers in their whole state and even though it's snowing in the State of Iowa now, 6 of their 11 blowers are operating in our state.

In addition to the state highway system_and what you see there in green is not the entire state highway system, it's the backbone system that is the number one priority for clearing roads when we have a blizzard_and from that we go to the state's additional numbered highways, and then from that we deal with what we can. Our township system, this morning, had 5,600 miles of blocked township roads. Our county system had 2,855 miles of blocked roads. So, between the counties and the townships, as of this morning, we still had 8,500 miles of blocked roads in the state. Now, we can't possibly clear all those roads, and people know that. But a backbone system, within the counties, and a backbone system within township areas, are incredibly important to the people who live there. So what we've done is turn to the state equipment and our loaned equipment and our contracted equipment and the National Guard equipment, and we've now started working on_once our system was cleared off so it was passable_we've turned to helping clean out some of these small communities. We've turned to helping on the county roads and the township roads. Frankly, that isn't authorized under the law, but we're doing it under emergency powers and we realize there isn't anyone in South Dakota that would object to those kinds of circumstances.

Over the course of this blizzard that we've been dealing with_let me give you just a couple of sets of numbers. Last winter, through January 10, from the beginning of the fiscal year, July 1 through January 10 of last year_we'd spent $2,500,000 sanding and plowing the roads in South Dakota. This fiscal year through January 10, we've spent $6,034,000. The record winter for South Dakota in expenditures was the winter of '93-'94 where we spent $7,400,000 for the entire fiscal year. We all realize that we still have a substantial portion of January left and all of February left and all of March left as we face the winter ahead of us. So, I don't think there's any question_unless something incredibly unusual happens_that we're going to break the record by a substantial margin, in terms of the cost and the expenditures that it's going to take us to deal with the road situation in the state. We have a lot of places where people travel in South Dakota. We have 7,800 miles of state highway, 36,000 miles of county highway and 34,000 miles of township roads_5,200 miles of other roads_which are basically municipal roads. When they're all totaled up we have a grand total of 83,000 miles that automobiles can travel on in some organized way within the state.

Over the last 10 days we've all heard the incredible stories, or some of them, that have taken place. The rescue of Mrs. Nelson really reached national and international proportions. It captured the imagination of the media. It captured the imagination of people outside of South

Dakota. The reason that it probably did was she had the ability to communicate from where she was at, and that made the tale much more gripping. But while that drama was unfolding and while that incredible sheriff and the ambulance unit and the county snowplow operators and those volunteers on snowmobiles spent those 12-13 hours out there in -70 to -80 degree below zero wind chill factor_while they were doing that, there were a whole bunch of other stories unfolding in South Dakota. Frankly, the vast majority of them weren't operations where the government, at any level, made the big difference. Whether it was the volunteer snowmobilers from the Fire and Rescue Department down there in that little community of Davis that went out and found Colonel Rayburn, or whether it was Mr. Kennedy and his son, while we were trying to get our state equipment between Sioux Falls and Montrose to find that Mr. Crawford, it was the Kennedys that, on their own, banded together and went out and started a search that was ultimately successful. Elderly people that were shut-ins that need medicine, folks that needed dialysis, individuals that ran out of fuel, some individuals that ran out of perishable foods that had to have certain kinds of foods, diabetics that needed certain kinds of nutrition and medicine, across the length and breadth of this State, human beings took care of human beings.
You can talk all you want, and people will always talk about someone or some community's finest hour. South Dakota never_we may have had them as good_but we've never had better times in terms of how our people took care of each other during that blizzard. There were no Republicans out there. There were no Democrats out there. There were no Independents. There were no Indians or non-Indians. There was no East River and no West River, and there was no urban and there was no rural. It was just a whole community of people banding together to see what they could do for each other and doing for each other what was really necessary. That's the real story of the blizzard and that is people caring for people as a community. It was absolutely awesome what took place. Over the course of the next several days, the weather notwithstanding, we will continue to clear out the backbone roads. I have given orders to the state Highway Department that once the state highways were cleaned, that we turn to assisting in selected areas in counties and selected areas in townships. At the same time, we're to turn to selected areas and assist people getting access to their own property.

Up within that area, the red, there are 7,200 livestock producers. There are 1,400,000 head of cattle. There are 400,000 sheep. That's 1,800,000 head of livestock. There isn't any way that we can care for all of those people and all of those needs. But, what we are doing is turning to, with all the resources and all the equipment we have_and, frankly, the other story of this whole problem is this incredible work that the people that we all, at one time or another, make fun of. Those are the employees that were working in state government for the Department of Transportation and those other agencies. Those are the men and the women in the South Dakota National Guard. One hundred percent of the people on active duty working are volunteers. They weren't just volunteers in the Guard, they volunteered for this mission. We did not have to forcibly activate anybody into the Guard system. They all came up as volunteers, the thousands of county and township and municipal employees, all of them helping each other. One of the first communications we got after the blizzard was from the small community of Lake Norden. They said they'd gotten their community cleaned out with the limited equipment that they had, what were some other communities that they could go help? Nobody talked about who's going to send the bill to whom. Nobody talked about how much it would cost. Everybody talked about, how can we help? At the absolute height of the blizzard, we had 700 people without electricity from Sioux Valley Electric over in the eastern part of the state at several different outages. At 11 o'clock at night I called the highway employees, the Highway

Department over in the community of Madison. I asked them if they would be willing to go out to try to get to a line that, if they fixed it, would only help 20 families out of the hundreds that were out. I asked the National Guard if they'd send one of their Caterpillars. Forty-five minutes later the National Guard dozer, the D7 dozer, and the state Highway Department people were escorting the Sioux Valley Electric people out to that outage over south of Junius in order to help just a small group of 20 people try and get their electricity for tomorrow, or the next day. That's the story of the blizzard. That's the kind of optimism_and that kind of attitude, frankly, my friends, is the attitude that you and I now have to be a legacy for. It's our responsibility to do the people's work with as much diligence and with as much effort and with as much tenacity as we saw exhibited by the people that all of us represent.

Every single time they tried a new system to rescue Mrs. Nelson it failed. Every time. From blowing sirens to honking horns to flashing lights to using radio telemetry trying to focus that way, to using specialized antennas. If they'd have gone home after any one of those failures, everybody would've called them heroes for trying. They wouldn't quit. When it was finally determined that she may have to stay out there again another night, when they told her she'd have to stay and as she started to break up and get emotionally involved in her situation once again, the Sheriff said, "Don't worry, we're going to be out here all the time with you; you will not be alone out here in this blizzard." Well, it's yours and my responsibility, my friends, and we all know it, to make sure that nobody's left alone in South Dakota. Those are the things that government has a responsibility to do.

You know over the course of the last two years, there have been some revolutionary changes. I realize they don't command a lot of hype, some of them, and I realize that other people may not look at it that way; but let me just take you through a short list, if I can for a few moments, of some of the things that have been accomplished by the Legislative and the Executive Branch over the last two years. Let's just think, as we go through this list. What if it works? What's the impact going to be to South Dakota, not tomorrow, but a decade from now?

We rewrote the state aid formula. For the first time in the history of this state, every child in South Dakota_whether they live in the wealthiest school district or the poorest school district, no matter what side of the tracks or community they come from in this state_every child in South Dakota has the same amount of wealth behind them in their school district. The only exception was we carved out an exception for the smallest school districts, to give them a little additional money_for some all the way up to 20 percent more money, based on the smaller the size, the greater amount of money_because of the lack of economy of scale.

We rewrote the special education formula. Again, for the first time in the history of this state, whether a child has developmental disabilities or some other kind of disability, it doesn't make any difference whether they're in the Bison school system or the Sioux Falls school system. There is the same amount of resource behind every child in a school system that has a need for special education. And, the determination of what requires or qualifies someone for special education has become uniform for the first time in South Dakota.

Substantial changes have been made in the structure of state government. The reductions in the number of the employees in the Executive Branch over the last two years are the largest reductions in the United States in any state since the Great Depression. Over a thousand

Executive Branch positions have been eliminated. A tremendous number of them have been eliminated by attrition. Some of them have been accomplished by layoffs and terminations, and although every place I go people tell me, “Cut the government. Cut the government. Too many government employees. Cut the government,” the reality is, as some of you have heard me say over-and-over at times, I'm not cutting the sons and daughters of Florida, Arizona and Alaska. These are the neighbors and the relatives and the loved ones and the sons and daughters of South Dakota. But we've had to make a value judgment, which we made. Is government's function to be an employer or a provider of service? If it's to be an employer, then we should hire everybody that says they want to work for the government, tax ourselves to death, and pay them. If it's to be a provider of service, then we have a responsibility to structure it in such a way that we get the maximum amount of delivery of the services that government provides at the most reasonable, proper cost. And, that's what we've endeavored to do over the last two years and, with the Legislature's help, we've been able to accomplish phenomenal goals.

We brought property tax relief to people. Did we bring the full 30 percent? No, we weren't able to. We didn't have the money. For those people that say all we did was just shift taxes from one to another and there was no relief involved, we raised $14.7 million in Video Lottery, $6.6 million in additional taxes on tobacco, $11.6 million in all the rest of the package that involved broadening and elimination of exemptions that some people had; that totals $36.9 million. The remaining $53 million additional dollars came from nongrowth in the government, cutting back in the number of people that work in the government, and running the government programs more effectively and not appropriating it elsewhere. Fifty-three million dollars of that total tax relief that's been granted and the checks that will go out this year to the counties comes from nonadditional taxes, nonbroadening or nonremoving exemptions that some people had.
In the area of criminal justice, tremendous things were accomplished. First of all, every prisoner is now treated exactly the same. There is no such thing as good time any more. We used to tell people, if you just behave yourself in prison_we forgot that the reason they were in prison is they couldn't behave themselves_but we used to tell them, if you behave yourself in prison, you automatically get cuts in your sentences. We no longer do that. Now when a judge says, you're sentenced to hard time_which under our law everybody, if they go to the pen must be sentenced to hard time_they have to work and they have to earn certain things in order to get prerogatives. Now it's all built into a mathematical structure that's uniform and equal for every inmate. As I reported to you when we did the budget address a couple months ago, the inmates in the past year, have worked, through the first of December, 406,000 hours outside the walls of the penitentiary. They worked on 90 different projects. It cost us about $300,000 to $400,000 to supervise those 90 different projects. The inmates did $2,600,000 worth of work if you assume their labor is worth $6.50 an hour. Approximately $1 million worth of tuck pointing was done on the state capitol grounds with the work that these inmates did.

In terms of how we deal with the juveniles, again, what you accomplished and we accomplished together, was revolutionary. As of July 1 of this past year, as we started this fiscal year, we had 126 juveniles that had been sentenced by the courts of South Dakota to an out-of-home placement that were waiting at home or someplace else to be placed. The waiting list was 126 juveniles long. Today it's zero. We have no backlog in the out-of-home placements that have been ordered by the circuit courts of South Dakota. On July 1, we had 171 beds that were available to place juveniles in out-of-home placement within the structure of state

government. Today, we have 325 beds that are up and running. Come July 1 next, when the juvenile prison is done in Plankinton, that will add 40 more juvenile prison beds. We will have 365 total beds where we can place juveniles that have been ordered out of the home.

The change is in terms of now we have a one-stop place, the Department of Corrections, when a juvenile is placed out-of-home, instead of 35 different judges_and I don't say anything critical about them, I'm just saying we had 35 different modalities and ways that they were doing it; we now have one. Every juvenile that comes into the system is given an individual assessment. They're given an individual analysis. Then a determination is made: Do they go to the old Youth Forestry-type of operation? Do they go to the boot camp? Do they go to Plankinton? It's treated in a uniform way.

What we're doing in terms of after care is phenomenal. There is going to be nobody better in America than the way we're doing it, because we all know that it isn't too difficult sometimes to straighten out some of these young people. But, just as fast as you can straighten them out, they can turn back in the other direction when they go back to their old environment. A lot of these come from terribly dysfunctional families, and we've got to be honest enough to step up to the plate and say that. Some people know how to make children but they can't raise them. They have tremendous violence in their home. They have drug and alcohol abuse problems within their home. They have all kinds of problems, whether it deals with lack of education of their parents or lack of an ability to get along, or a whole host of things that cause problems in how these children grow up. Within the programs of our after care that we're going to have with the juveniles, we're going to address these situations while we're addressing the juvenile that is within our custody.

What you did with respect to deinstitutionalizing the patients at Custer not only took, frankly, guts and courage, but it was the right thing to do. I can report to you that the people who used to live in Custer, the developmentally disabled that used to live in Custer, have had less hospitalizations since they moved to the community centers than they did in a comparable period of time within Custer. I can also tell you the number of visits by relatives has grown substantially from what it was when they lived at Custer. One of the statistics when I first started to deal with this that always bothered me was that of the 72 patients at Custer when we started the presentation to the Legislature, one-half of them had never had a human being come to visit in the previous twelve months. And, of the remaining half, one-half of them only had one visitor, one time, in the previous twelve months. No human being, no human being on the planet Earth should ever be that alone, should ever be that neglected. I don't mean in terms of their physical environment, because they were well cared for there. I mean in terms of the companionship and the relationship that we all need with people.

In terms of tourism, we had a tough year last year. Some people say it's the lack of funding for advertising and, very honestly, it's much more substantive than that. There's a whole changing environment taking place out there on what people want to see, and where they want to go, and how they want to do it, and what they can afford to do. So, one of the things that we've done is embark on a program to enhance the entire State of South Dakota. The reason that I took ISTEA money and allocated it to the rebuilding of Fort Sisseton is because, notwithstanding that great weekend that the local people have put together on the Fort Sisseton Days, it's a place and it's a unique creation of history that can be exploited, if I can use that

word, and used for tourism enhancement in northeast South Dakota almost on a year-round basis.

The Adams Preserve, where the Adams family has given us an incredible resource to the state_down in southeast South Dakota, down by Nebraska and Iowa, way down in Union County_and its development as an outdoor preserve taking it all back to its historical nature is going to be a tremendous asset.

The funding of the Mickelson Trail and finishing it. As a matter of fact, a friend of mine, Steve Zellmer, said to me one day_I shouldn't say this about him_but, he said to me, “You know that Trail's never going to get done, Janklow,” and I said, “Why?” He said, “Because once they name it after a governor, no other governor will ever want to put money into it.” The next day we funded the entire completion of the Mickelson Trail to make sure that it got done for the utilization of not just the tourists, but all the people of South Dakota. And, if you look at the kinds of things where we're putting our emphasis, it's things that are for the enjoyment of the citizens of our state as well as the guests who come to visit us.

I can report to you today that the housing program, these 760 square foot houses, the small houses that are being built by the inmates, we have sold 54 of them. Thirty-six of them have been delivered. One has become the Senior Citizens Center in the community of Mellette. Twenty-two of them are being built at the present time. These are houses that will be built at Springfield and are being built there, but are delivered anyplace in the State of South Dakota for around $20,000. We don't charge less because shipping costs us less near Springfield. We blend the costs; so whether you live in Bison or Newell or Edgemont, the cost is the same for someone who lives within the community of Springfield. This is a program that doesn't apply in the 14 largest communities in South Dakota. We have a tremendous need for adequate housing for our elderly. We have a lot of people, some of them husbands and wives, but a lot of them either a woman or a man with their spouse now gone, that live in a three- or four- bedroom house in a community that was appropriate at the time they had their family. Now their family's gone and they're alone. It's more house than they need, it's more house than some of them can afford, but they have no place else to go. They don't want to be, and shouldn't be, in a nursing home. They don't want to be, and shouldn't be, in assisted living. They're independent and can care for themselves. If we can find a home that suits them better, which these houses do, it frees up a house in a little community for another young couple that is starting their upward mobility in life with their family and can't afford to buy something new. And, I'm glad to report that the South Dakota Home Builders have given total support to this program and don't look at it as some kind of competitive beast from the government that's going to do them any ill.

I'm pleased to report that, in the technical schools, they're cooperating better and moving forward faster than at any time in the state's history in the terms of their operation. I realize I took some flack for the changes that I made. Frankly, that's the easiest flack I've ever taken, because, as I told a group of those students one day, “I'm going to fight for your right to make better money and have better skills than you want me to, and I'm willing to stick to that fight notwithstanding the criticism.” It makes no sense, and it's almost morally wrong, to let a student go out and borrow money or have their families or loved ones give them money or work with their own labor to earn the money to go to a school that when they graduate they don't

make enough money to put a roof over their head, food on the table, and provide for the necessity of their lives and their upward mobility.

We have 58 courses now being offered throughout our vocational schools. The vocational schools, as a consortium, have gotten together and decided to drop nine different areas of instruction, all of them because of low demand or low wages that would be paid for the graduates. Have we got a total answer for this? No, we don't. Are we finally moving in the right direction to give people the marketable skills for the better jobs that they'll need in order to survive economically in the future? The answer is yes.

I can report to you in the wiring of the schools program that Colman-Egan is wired and done. Lemmon has recently been completed. Hill City has been completed. Wessington Springs has been completed. As I speak today, they're wiring in Britton. As a matter of fact, that's the only good thing out of the whole blizzard. Because nobody went to school, we could work full time on wiring the school at Britton. The next schools on the list are Douglas, Volga and McCook. The interesting thing about McCook is our first all-woman brigade of wirers from the Women's Prison will be wiring the McCook School.

Ray Christensen, the individual from the Sioux Falls school system whom they've lent to us as a consultant to head up and manage this project, is the best person in America for this job. He's an absolute Godsend to South Dakota in terms of what he's doing to get this moving forward. Our goal is to get approximately 50 schools wired this year. At the same time, we recognize some schools are wiring themselves and other schools, if we can give them some resources, will also heave to and start wiring themselves. So, between us all, we're going to continue this project until we get it done. The interesting thing about it, when it's done, it will not be Balkanized. There will be one set of standards and uniformity throughout the state so that everybody is in a situation of meeting whatever standards it is that we come forward with.
In terms of moving forward on immunization, we now have 31 clinics in 10 cities that are hooked up to the system and ongoing in terms of the incredible amount of record keeping that's necessary to keep track of the right time for giving all these various shots and the various boosters and those types of things.

Frankly, at this point in time, I've ordered the Boot Camp not to allow any new visitors. So many people were coming down there for visits to view the Boot Camp that it was, honestly, disruptive to the program that they had for the young men and for the program that's going forward with the young girls from the old Lamont Center that are now at the Youth Forestry Camp. So, I've asked them not to allow any outsiders to come in and view it until they can really get these programs up and running, one. And two, it's incredibly important that we all remember these are young people; they're not really animals in the zoo on display that we all go view all the time. So, we have to be very sensitive in how we do that. But, come this spring, for those that are interested, we will arrange a tour when the weather's good so people can go out and see this program up and running and see what phenomenal accomplishments this team, which is the best in America, are doing with these young people.

We're going to name this Boot Camp after Patrick Henry Brady. Patrick Brady comes from Philip, South Dakota. He was in the United States Army in the 44th Medical Brigade in Vietnam where he was a helicopter pilot. As his Citation read_and I will only touch parts of

it_he distinguished himself as a UH-1H helicopter pilot in Vietnam by doing action above and beyond the call of duty. He was first called out one morning to help rescue some wounded soldiers who were within enemy-held territory. They were badly wounded and they wouldn't survive until they could be rescued on the ground. He descended through heavy fog and smoke and, hovering over the valley and tilting his helicopter sideways, he was able to blow some of the smoke and fog away to the point where he could set down on the ground. His helicopter was shot up, but he was able to evacuate the two badly wounded soldiers. Shortly thereafter, he was called to another area where American casualties lay 150 feet from the entrenched enemy positions. Two previous helicopters had been shot out of the sky trying to effectuate a rescue, but he volunteered to go give it a third try. After three unsuccessful attempts, he was able to make and land his helicopter and make four separate flights into that zone where he rescued all the wounded. On his third mission of the day, he was asked to go help rescue some Americans that were injured and trapped in a mine field. He took a replacement aircraft, because his first two had been destroyed on his earlier missions. He took a third aircraft and went out to the mine field. On three separate occasions, he landed his helicopter in the mine field to rescue seriously injured American soldiers. His helicopter detonated one of the mines. Two of his crew members were badly damaged and injured, and he still completed the mission. Throughout the day, utilizing three different helicopters, he piloted helicopters that evacuated 51 seriously wounded soldiers from the battlefield. For that activity he was granted, by the President and the Congress of the United States, the Congressional Medal of Honor.

I asked Major General Brady if he could be here today, and he wasn't able to be here. I've asked his permission to name the Boot Camp after him, and he's given his consent. I think it's incredibly important that every boy that ever leaves that Boot Camp understands we're putting them in a position where they can make choices in life, because that's what life really is for human beings; it's opportunities to make free choices. At every fork in the road that they come to, they can make two choices. They can go the way that General Brady went, or they can go another way. But, we've equipped them to make the choice to go the right way all the time if they so decide to do it.

As we stand here or sit here today and talk about South Dakota, we obviously have more work to do. We always have more work to do. We always have more things to do, and we always have better things to do. I can report to you that we'll be submitting legislation to the Legislature to deal with the question of the funding of finding physicians for our rural communities. Over the past decade, we've spent millions of dollars in programs to try and attract physicians to our rural communities. Of the 181 family practice physicians that have come through the program that we have helped fund substantially, of 181 physicians, 101 of them don't even live in the State of South Dakota today. Only 81 even stayed in the state. Of the 81 that stayed in the state, only 18 of them are practicing in some county other than Pennington County, Minnehaha County or Lincoln County. In other words, Rapid City, Canton or Sioux Falls has every graduate that stayed in South Dakota from the family practice residency except for 18. So, out of 181 that went through the program, only 18 ended up outside one of those three counties or in the state. It's intolerable.

We'll be submitting legislation to the Legislature that's based on a citizen task force that was made up of members of the South Dakota Medical Association and citizens throughout the state to address this. The solutions that they've come up with, the proposed solutions, are good solutions.

We're going to ask the Legislature to pass legislation that provides that students know in advance that any high school athlete that receives a drug conviction will be barred from high school athletics during the term of the remainder of their high school career. And, any person, after high school, that gets a conviction for drugs will be ineligible for any financial assistance or scholarship, be it athletic or academic, from the State of South Dakota or any of its political subdivisions.

Over the course of the last year, the South Dakota Supreme Court made a decision that, where you have a child or children that have been so abused and so neglected that you have to terminate their parental rights, and if and when you can find an opportunity to find these children a new home and get them adopted, the South Dakota Supreme Court basically ruled that, because there's no prohibition to it in the law, they would treat it as a conditional adoption; and the courts can allow visitation from the natural parents throughout the course of the juvenile status of these children. That's intolerable, ladies and gentlemen. We're going to ask to have that corrected by statute.

We're going to ask the Legislature to pass legislation that provides that where frivolous lawsuits are filed, that you have an automatic right to file a counterclaim. Instead of just a Rule 11 where a judge may determine that it's frivolous and may impose sanctions, an individual who is sued on a frivolous claim can counterclaim based on the frivolity of it and have a jury determine whether or not it's frivolous and award damages because of it.

We had a recent situation where a young child, a young boy who was developmentally disabled, committed a rape, a sexual offense against a very young girl, a very young girl. The decision was made to place that child back home a few doors from where the young girl was. We're going to be proposing legislation to the Legislature that provides that that kind of circumstance can't happen again.

Unfortunately, in this great South Dakota that we have, and with all this wondrous outdoors that we continue to develop and, frankly, that our people have the right to enjoy, we've got slob sportsmen that come here at times. A few of them are our own people, and the others come from elsewhere. When the limit says three walleyes, it doesn't bother them to take 100 or 200. When we say three pheasants, it doesn't bother them to shoot 40. If we say two ducks, it doesn't bother them to take 20. They're slob hunters. They're slob fishermen. They have no place in our environment. And, we can't increase the civil penalties because of a United States Supreme Court decision. So, I'm asking that the Legislature pass a law that says that anytime anybody has more than twice the legal limit in their possession, they'll be given an additional criminal penalty that cannot be suspended or reduced and cannot be plea bargained away of $500 per item. Now it sounds onerous, but there's nothing more onerous than a slob hunter or a slob fisherman that steals from the other people, in terms of resources that we spend millions of dollars a year on as a government and our citizens spend untold millions more in protecting and trying to foster the growth and development of this type of enjoyment.

There's a lawsuit currently going on that the Attorney General has publicly spoken out about that involves a statute that, frankly, a lot of us didn't even know existed, that makes it illegal for someone to talk about a strike until the matter is resolved. Frankly, that case can't be won. Until the matter is resolved, someone will be allowed to continue to earn attorney's fees, and I don't say that critically, that's the way the civil rights laws are written. So, I'm

asking that the Legislature very, very quickly pass legislation over the next couple of days to repeal that statute so we put an end to the necessity for the litigation. People in South Dakota have a right to say whatever they want, whether I agree with them or you agree with them or anybody else agrees with them. We all have that fundamental right to freedom of speech. We can take actions that will get us in trouble, that will put us in jail or cost us money or get us sued, but our mouth should never be in a position that does that unless, as Justice Black said one time, someone decides to yell fire in a crowded theater.

Last year I asked the Legislature to deal with legislation that's not a big deal, unless it's one of your loved ones, doing something to let us stop the speeding through the construction zones on our highways. At any one point in time in the summer we have a hundred different sites in South Dakota on our two-lane and four-lane roads where construction workers are out there working. They're around heavy equipment that makes a lot of noise. They can't hear the traffic coming by and, as time goes on, you sense less and less the environment around you and the danger. It's inexcusable that we let anybody speed through a construction zone. Frankly, I don't want to take the position, as governor, where we create highway stop signs and bring people to full stops at three different places through these construction zones. But absent some other remedy from the Legislature, I have no other choice, because, as I speak today, we have two South Dakotans who aren't with us any longer because someone drove into them down on the interstate last summer and killed them while they were working on the interstate.

Over the course of the next several weeks, we're going to have a wild debate over hogs. Some politicians seek political advantage from this and so be it. They're entitled to. But, let me tell you all, my friends, this is an agriculture state. You can't pass rules for hogs that don't apply to cattle. So, when you sit down and you craft together anything that you choose to do, you'd better be very careful to understand that you're affecting the entire spectrum of agriculture. Frankly, if you're asking me my personal opinion, and nobody does, farmers should have the right to conduct their farming operation the way they feel like conducting it. Whether I feed my cattle or somebody else's cattle is my business and the person I'm doing business with. The government has no business sticking its nose into those types of situations. We preach freedom. We preach free enterprise. We preach entrepreneurship, and we spend our time trying to tell people all the time what's good for them with the laws that we pass. Let's let our people make their own decisions, and let's you and I deal with what we should deal with, and that is how do we make sure that we put reasonable safeguards in place to protect our environment, to protect the health and safety of our citizens. That is our responsibility. It's not our responsibility to tell any farmer of any persuasion how they ought to make their living. That's their own decision.

When it comes to education, for too long, too many people talk about what they're against. Anytime you get into a discussion of education, you always find out everything people don't like. So it's not always what we're for, it's what we're against. The fact of the matter is, it's what we're for that's going to make the difference in the long run, not what we're against. Although they convened an educational summit years ago, President Bush did_and Bill Clinton when he was President of the National Governor's Association during that period of time_they came up with this Nation at Risk document, and they set all these standards and all these goals and these lofty things that were going to be done by the year 2000. None of them will be done. Rhetoric. When you look at the international comparisons_and recently I saw some people saying that well, when you look at our math and science courses for example, in

the international comparison for eighth graders with 41 different countries, we're doing okay. There are nine countries ahead of us. Singapore, Japan, Korea, Austria are examples of countries that are ahead of us. Before we get too many bragging rights, let's name a few that are behind us_Cypress, Iran, Kuwait, South Africa. It doesn't speak well for the future of America.

Last year, if you'll recall_and the Regents don't have the report done yet this year_I believe the number was either 400 or 600 graduates of South Dakota high schools that had gone to one of our six public universities as freshmen, were told that, in order to continue in the school, they had to take remedial courses at their cost in English or math in order to stay there; because, even though they had a high school diploma from a South Dakota school, they were incapable of doing collegiate-level math or English in a South Dakota university. It's inexcusable. There's no reason in the world that should happen. If we give someone a high school diploma, it ought to be our word that they've met all the criteria and they've met all the qualifications to get through with that high school diploma. If any high school in South Dakota has its own standards that are so low that a student with their diploma can't get into one of our six universities, a community better get very worried about what's happening to their young people.

We always spend our time arguing how many days a year kids ought to go to school. We're looking at it wrong. There shouldn't be any magical number of days. For all the difference it makes, get rid of the number of days that students have to go to school. You know what's really important? What do they learn in school? That's what's important. It's not 175 magical days and you count a day until noon as a snow day and you have to make it up, that's all gibberish. Community people shouldn't be forced to make those kinds of decisions. What we ought to establish as a people is a set of standards that it takes to get from the first grade to the second grade, and the second grade to the third grade, and the third grade to the fourth grade, through high school. I don't care if somebody can learn that in two months or if it takes eleven months. Whatever it takes in a community to get your students to that level, that's how many days those students ought to go to school. That's how many days the teachers ought to teach, and that's how many days the school ought to be open. It shouldn't be any magical number of days. You know, we've really got two groups in this whole education area, and they're not antagonists to each other, or they shouldn't be. We have the producers and we have the consumers. The producers are the teachers, teachers' unions. The producers are the Superintendents Association and the Administrators Association. The producers are the principals and their associations. They're the PTA's and they're the school boards, they're the producers. The consumers are the kids going to school. It's the kids' parents. It's the taxpayers, and it's the employers that hire these graduates. So, we have producers, and we have consumers within the educational process. Too often, very honestly, we spend our time arguing amongst and between and about the producers, and we lose focus. We lose real focus of our responsibility to really look at the consumers. No business has ever been able to survive by just looking at itself. It survives by the service or the quality of the product that it sells its consumers, its customers. There are a few basic things that I think we all agree on, and any step we take should never be inconsistent with any of these things. If we disagree on them, then we ought to fight that battle out in these halls and over at the Senate and make a policy decision for South Dakota. If we agree on them, then every action we take ought to be consistent with them.

One, we all believe in public education. We believe in a public system of schools funded by the taxpayers with equal access to all. They're paid for by the public, they're open to the public, and they're accountable to the public. We believe in basic skills and fundamental knowledge for every child, whether it's in a course in English or math or science or something else. And we believe it ought to be taught in the English language. We believe that the core of these things ought to be set by the state. They ought to be augmented and enhanced by local communities_different strokes for different folks. Let people decide for themselves within their communities their own destiny.

And, when I say augmented in the community, it's by the community, it's by the school, and it's by the classroom teachers. Everyone nowadays is talking about re-doing standards. When you read the various state's, including even ours, they're pretty vague. They're pretty nebulous. They don't really get to the point of things. We talk nowadays about learning to appreciate geography. We don't need to appreciate geography. We need to understand the geography of the planet that we live on. We don't need to act like a historian. We need to understand history and the lessons that it teaches us and what it tells us about our culture and ourselves and the mistakes that other people made that we don't want to repeat. We don't need to learn to think like a scientist. We need to understand basic science. As I heard somebody say one day, whatever we do, it ought to pass the hair dresser shop, the beauty shop or the barber test. Can you present it before five people sitting in a beauty shop or a barber shop and not be laughed out of the room. If you can, then it meets the criteria within a community.

We believe in solid testing. We can argue all we want about these tests and how we'll teach the tests and we'll do this and we'll do that, but the fact of the matter is, there's no person in South Dakota that wants to go before any doctor to be healed that hasn't passed the Medical Boards. Nobody wants to go before a lawyer that hasn't passed the Bar Exam. Nobody wants to have a teacher in a classroom that doesn't meet the teachers' qualifications, and that means they've been tested throughout their academic career. We, as a people, believe in testing. We want testing. Whether it be multiple choice, whether it be fill in the blank, whether it be essay or some ambitious profile assessment, because they all can work. We want testing that compares us to others within our own sphere. I know that the parents, the consumers, in Mobridge want to know how they do vis-à-vis Aberdeen or Letcher or Rapid City. I know the students in Pine Ridge and their families want to know how they do vis-à-vis Pierre. Consumers are entitled to know these things and they're entitled to know them in a language that they understand. We don't need to deal with all this percentile stuff. Just tell them, Half the students in the state are better than your son or daughter in this subject. Your son or daughter is better than three out of four. We can put it in simple language so they all understand. We demand real consequences in education. Students, teachers, principals, school board members and even governors. We demand consequences for the success and the failure of a system based on a comparative analysis that's fair. And, if testing and other things show that we're not up to snuff, there ought to be consequences for the school and the school officials that teach there. If they show that they're above snuff, if I can put it that way, then also there ought to be merits and rewards and the recognition that comes with excellence. It shouldn't just be a one-way street.

We demand orderly and safe classrooms. It's not a game to send the drug dogs into the schools in South Dakota. It should be abhorrent to every citizen of this state, anyplace, that there's ever even a necessity for that. Whether or not some parents and some people in a

community think its cute, or if they're cavalier about it, or because they did it in the '60s and the '70s, it's a stage they're going through, there are going to be no drugs in the school systems in South Dakota, period. We, as consumers, all of us as consumers, have a right to demand that. We have a right to demand that unruly students do not dominate the classroom environment to the detriment of the other students in the classroom. Whatever laws or regulations it takes to remove the unruly student from the environment of the other students, we should do it.

The students have a right to be in schools, and teachers have a right to teach in schools that are absolutely free of intimidation of any sort of anybody within a school system. We believe in and we need fine teachers. We believe in them and we need them. They should be well-paid consistent with the resources that we have available; that's part of it. We should expect them to teach to world-class standards and we should recognize it when they do. It's a good, honorable profession, and none of us should ever forget the average student during their school years spends almost as many waking hours with their classroom teachers as they do their parents. We send them off for the full day, five days a week to be with their classroom teachers. And the civilians ought to be in charge of our school system, not the Federal Department of Education, not the State Department of Education, not any Bill Janklow or any bureaucracy or technocracy. The civilians in the communities ought to be in charge of the school systems.

As hard as they would try, the medical community cannot reform the delivery of medical services. As hard as they would try, my brothers and sisters in the legal community cannot reform and do what's necessary to straighten out problems within the tort law. It's the people that aren't in those professions that are consumers and understand also what's going on that have a tremendous voice to play in bringing solutions to these problems.

We should only use proven, instructional techniques. They don't do it anymore, but Mary Dean and I had one of our children that went through the modern math with the base of 10 and the base of 7 when they went to school. We want to jump on every fad that comes down the pathways of life nowadays. There's a tendency to want to do it. God hasn't changed the human being's mind for a long time in how it works and how it learns. And yes, there are new methodologies that you can use. Yes, there are new approaches and new techniques, but all they do is enhance the same basic way of learning that God gave every human being to varying degrees. We should use proven instructional methods. And if they don't work, let's discard them as quickly as possible and get on with what works. We can talk all we want about reinventing and reregulating and devolving and all of these kinds of grandiose terms, but the bottom line is, we need to get off the backs of the educational system if they can meet the criteria, the nine criteria that I just talked about, on which I'm sure all of us agree.

Let me share with you, if I can for a couple of minutes, a proposal that's going forward that does not take any legislative action. What you see up there on the map is the Standing Rock Tribe, the Cheyenne River Sioux Tribe, Lower Brule, Crow Creek and Yankton. I recognize as I put this map up, that there's been no clear, final delineation of whether or not there is or isn't a Yankton reservation. It's been in the Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals. Very recently they decided not to rehear the case which continues the tribe's classification as that area in orange being a reservation. The Attorney General is filing a Petition for Certiorari before the Supreme Court, and they haven't even done that because the decision just came down in the last several days. But, assume that's what the structure looks like.

Last year, a year and a half ago, there was a proposal by a Senator from North Dakota to return the take-lands to the tribes adjacent to those reservations in North Dakota and the Standing Rock Reservation only in South Dakota. What you see there in the brownish colors are what I'll call the take-lands. On the Oahe Reservoir, the highest the reservoir can get is 1621 feet above sea level. Once you get above 1621 feet above sea level, it will go over the emergency spillway on the dam_which by the way, in the flooding last spring came within 18 inches of going over the emergency spillway. At that time we would have had a free-flowing Missouri River from South Dakota to St. Louis, because it would have gone over every one of the remaining dams down below us in South Dakota_but, what you see there in the blue is the shore line, and I'll say that represents 1621 feet, and what you see represented in the dark orange represents what the federal government owns adjacent to the shore. I felt that it would have been really just a mess to deal with that only with the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe, and that it should be something that's uniform throughout the state, and that there would be a tremendous policy for what we could do with respect to the Indian Tribes adjacent to the river and the State of South Dakota adjacent to the river.

I got a letter from Senator Daschle, where he, frankly, expressed the same views. So he and I started visiting about it. We sat down and came up with a basic format. We sat down and invited all those tribes that are represented along the river to be a party to it, and I think, with one exception, they've all signed on to it.

What this proposal will do_and frankly, it takes an act of Congress, there's nothing we can do in the state to effectuate it. The jurisdiction over the wildlife management and hunting and fishing will be resolved. We will no longer ever have to go to court in this whole multitude of litigation we're always in over what I'll call the control of the river, the tributaries to the river, and the resources, the land along the river. It will provide funding for wildlife habitat mitigation, something that was supposed to have been done from and after the Flood Control Act of 1944 that the Corps of Engineers has never done. It will also provide for management of the Corps of Engineers' Recreation Facilities along the river. That's what the proposal basically does.

In more detail, what the proposal does with respect to the state, the state would get the right under federal law, we would be given all regulatory authority over all persons who utilize the Missouri River. In addition to that, the state would be given regulatory authority for hunting, for fishing and recreational use of all_if you'll remember that one map with the water and then it had the takelines_of all the takelines that are located outside the boundaries of one of those reservations.

What's in it for the tribes? The tribes would get regulatory authority over all persons who utilize the take area that's turned over to the tribes adjacent to the water within the boundaries of a reservation. Tribal members would have the right, without cost, to free access to the shoreline waters and the reservoirs to hunt, fish, and participate in recreation. The one caveat is they would have to be in compliance with the laws of the State of South Dakota that apply uniformly to all other citizens. What it boils down to is, they wouldn't need to buy fishing licenses or hunting licenses, but in terms of bag limits and things of that nature, it would be uniform for everybody.

What also would it mean? At the present time, the Corps of Engineers has 61 areas, from boat ramps to what I'll call more developed marinas, up and down the river within South Dakota. Under the proposal, they will have none. The State of South Dakota currently has 22. If the law passes, we would have 64. The tribes currently have none. They would get the 19 that lie within their borders adjacent to their reservations. There are currently 83 in existence. There would be 83 when it's over. You can see from this that the one that would be out of the picture is the Corps of Engineers. In addition to that, a trust fund account would be established within the Treasury Department of the United States to provide enough funding in perpetuity to give us three-fourths of the money the Corps currently spends up and down the river to take care of hunting, fishing, recreation and mitigation. Why three-fourths? Because we feel that with three-fourths the money, we can do a better job than they're doing, cheaper. So we're willing to accept three-fourths of what they're spending and assume all the responsibility and get the Corps of Engineers out of the picture, and, for the first time since 1944, we would have total peace within South Dakota. Everybody would understand the rules of what happens when you're adjacent to the reservoir on the reservation. What happens when you're adjacent to the reservoir off the reservation, and what happens on the waters of the Missouri River when you're utilizing that for any recreational purpose.

Welfare reform. You have a big job ahead of you, ladies and gentlemen. We all do. Some of us have been complaining as long as we can remember about the welfare system. We have a welfare system in place, frankly, if you go back to the old days, and some of you remember it when we were young. We didn't have a state welfare program. We had county poor relief. If some family was in need or an individual was in stress, you went to the County Auditor. She applied to the commissioners or he applied to the commissioners, and they gave you a grocery order, or they gave you a clothing order, or they gave you a fuel order. You didn't get cash, but you got fulfilled, or they paid your rent or they did things for the necessities of life. Over time, a program started to develop with the advent of federal funds. Pretty soon it became a full- blown entitlement program. One size shoe fits all. Everybody in America had to follow the same standards, and all of a sudden the way they handled welfare in Harlem, we had to handle it in Eureka. The way they handled it on Pine Ridge, we had to handle it the same way in Brookings. The way they handled it in Sioux Falls had to be like it was in south central Los Angeles. One size shoe doesn't fit all in America. Our culture is incredibly unique in this melting pot that we have. The net result was everybody came to the point that they didn't like it. Some people didn't like it because they felt the only answer was keep opening the Treasury and shoving more money at people. Some people didn't like it because they felt it destroyed the incentive that human beings had to develop themselves and find useful occupations for themselves. And we all debated that. Well, the debate's over, because Congress has passed a law and decoupled the whole thing. Today, there's not a right to welfare in America, unless it arises under state laws. There is no federal right to welfare in America. The entitlement program is gone.

What you ladies and gentlemen will be dealing with is a current structure. We have 5,746 cases; a case means a family unit. That may be a single parent with one child, or it may be a single-parent or two-parent family with fifteen children. Each one of those units is called a case. Pennington County has 14 percent of all our cases. Minnehaha County has 10 percent of all our cases. All the other counties, except the reservation counties, have 23 percent of our cases, and 53 percent of those 5,700 cases lie on one of the nine Indian Reservations within the State of South Dakota.

In terms of the trend of our caseload, you always hear these reports of what all the other states are doing_Wisconsin, New York, Michigan. We just don't take the time to toot our own horn, because no state in the Union has had greater success over the last decade_about a decade and a half_than South Dakota. As a matter of fact, everybody in America is talking about workfare. We started that program back in the early '80s when I was in office before. They hadn't invented the word workfare so we didn't use that word. We called it CWEP, the Community Work Experience Program. We went to the Legislature, and we got their permission, and then we went to Washington and we got a waiver_because one size shoe has to fit all in America, so they had to give us a waiver to be different_where we provided that one of our goals was to get people working, and we would move them into the labor force. And if they didn't go to work, we would put them in community service work to make sure they worked that way, but that there was dignity and development of human beings to work. These are really the successor programs to that. In the nonreservation communities, there's been a dramatic reduction since 1992. You can see in the reservation communities, which is the blue line, it peaked about fiscal year 1994, and that has also started down. So, notwithstanding the fact of the disparity of the statistics in the state, you can see that across the length and breadth of South Dakota to varying degrees, we are headed in the right direction that we have to go in terms of moving people off of welfare and into something that provides more dignity for them.

The key tenets of our reform program, as you'll see in a few minutes, involve work, involve supporting children you bring into the world, involve caring for those children while their parents have to be at work. There's dignity in work. There's no job that any human being can hold that's a lousy job, unless they don't like it. In terms of status of jobs, they all have equal dignity.

We have children in South Dakota_and you know too often we spend our time debating about the parents, and we forget what the whole objective of these programs is. You can't reach some of the parents, frankly. Some of them we're never going to change; and you can dump all the money you could ever invent in this government into them, and we're still going to have a lousy result with them. The real objective of these programs is, how do we make sure these kids_we all talk about being for kids, here's our chance to prove it. Here's our chance to put our money where our mouth is. Here's our chance to not just talk the talk, but walk the walk. We are going to focus our programs on how these children can grow up understanding there's dignity in work; how these children can grow up in households where they don't have violence all the time; how these children can grow up in households where there are problems with respect to alcohol or drug abuse and things of that nature, and we also have children, and we have large numbers of them, that come from families that aren't dysfunctional. They just need a hand-up and not a hand-out. We're going to fashion and develop our programs to move people forward, so they have the opportunity to develop themselves to their fullest potential. It starts with a job.

We have a large number of people that work in the day time and go to school at night in South Dakota. We have a large number of people who work and save money so they can go to school. Under this new law, the Feds have given us the dollar amounts. We know from now until the year 2002 to the penny how much money we're going to get from the Feds in the block grant. We can look it up on the chart and see until the year 2002. In the old days for every dollar we spent, they just sent us two more. That's the entitlement program. If we raised our

spending a million, we'd bring two more million dollars into the state and have three million in spending. That's all over. What's incredible is, if our statistics turn up and our poverty people go up, or our people on welfare go up, we still don't get any more money from the federal government. If our population of folks, the total amount of them, go up 20 percent next year or the year after, we don't get 20 percent more. We must live within the money that we have in the block grant or spend a 100 percent of the difference from the general fund. There's no more federal money.

We have to meet stringent support requirements. Fortunately, South Dakota's moved in the right direction of that. On the left in red, you see in millions of dollars what we've been able to facilitate collecting for support of children over the last several years. What you see on the right hand chart are the number of people in the thousands that we've had contact with in getting them on some kind of payment schedule. And you can see that those are tremendously good statistics; they're moving in the right direction. As I said when I gave my budget address, I'm not a person that quotes Jesse Jackson too often, but I heard him say to a group of young kids one day, in a school lecture, “You know, it doesn't take a man or a woman to make a baby. It takes a man and a woman to raise a baby.” That makes a ton of sense. People that decide they want to be the mother or the father of children are going to support those children. It's their responsibility. And only if they, not won't, but can't, is it then yours and my responsibility to step in and help support those children on behalf of them. We're going to be proposing legislation to the Legislature that provides where someone is not making their payments that they have to make to help support their children, be it a mother or a father, that we can then put them to work for community service work while the taxpayers are picking up the tab for them. So that everybody, absent some unique disability, that fathers or mothers a child will be part of the support circle for that child.

We're going to have a work component, and we're going to have a support component. Additionally, we're going to have a day care component. I realize there are some people that feel that the government has no place in day care. I fully understand that. There's no question about that. But when it comes to child care, we have to recognize if we're going to tell people you have to go to work, then if they can't find a safe, healthy environment, nurturing environment for their children, we have to be of some assistance. Frankly, folks, we're going to attack this_you've seen some on the news_across the whole broad front in South Dakota. In some places_and we're working with the Sioux Falls school system and that may be the first, although recently I've also received correspondence from the Watertown school system_one of the things we may be able to do is utilize some buildings that, for example, Sioux Falls might not need as their demographics are changing within the community. Rather than just sell a building, let us use it. If our program fails and doesn't work, if it's a screwy idea, they'll get the building back, and then they can sell it or do what they want with it. But give us an opportunity to use it.

In every school system in this state, where there's a necessity in the community, it would be a no-brainer to make the school available from the time school is out in the afternoon until 5:30-6:00 o'clock at night for parents that are working to then get their children. This should not be an expense of the school system. It should not cost them any additional funds. But, the taxpayers locally are paying for these buildings, and if they could be put to use for a few extra hours, where kids that are in school_now this doesn't help those that are two and three years old_but where you have children that are in school and parents who are working in the labor

force, if accommodations could be made to have a latchkey program right in the school, what a tremendous savings and what an opportunity for the kids to sit right there and do their homework for the next day or play in the playground or whatever it takes. But, they're safe and they're being nurtured at the same time.

For some people we're going to have to teach them how to be parents. The government can't teach people how to be parents, and we all have to understand that. We will be calling on the religious community across the whole broad spectrum of religions. I don't care what religion any human being professes to be. There's no religion that doesn't believe in the sanctity of a family. There's no religion that doesn't believe in the nurturing and the growth of children. And there's no religion that doesn't believe that one of their responsibilities is to reach out in the mission sense to other people in need and bring them within the fold and provide them assistance, whether or not it's within the sectarian sense. We clearly have_between our religious community, our profits, our non-profits, and the governments, the spectrum and the good people of South Dakota_we have more resources per capita than any other state to address this problem to really focus on the unique needs that these people are going to have. It's going to make a tremendous difference as we move forward. It's going to make a tremendous difference when we find work, when we make sure that kids have child care, and we make sure that people support their children.

The federal government feels so strongly about it, this is one of the strings. They have some strings, but not a lot of them. By the end of fiscal year 1997, we must have 25 percent of all the people in this state that are on welfare in the labor force. And that means that if they're not working at a job, then in some form of community service that we assign or work out with them to the tune of 20 hours a week, and if we don't, we will lose 5 percent of our block grant for the following year. As you can see until the year 2002, that goes up every single year 25, 30, 35, 40, 45, until the year 2002, you've got to have 50 percent. This is for all families; that's single-parent families, primarily.

The second column are those where there are two-parent families. By the end of this fiscal year, 75 percent of all the people getting welfare assistance from us must be in what's defined as the labor force and that's any one of 12 different kinds of ways to work. And they must be doing it at least 35 hours a week. By the year 2000, actually by the year 1999, it's got to be 90 percent. Under the new law, legal and illegal, and for our purposes, legal aliens are no longer eligible for public welfare. If we want to provide welfare to aliens, we must provide it out of our general fund. We can use no federal funds unless we provide and get a waiver. In addition to that, if you're on food stamps and you're able bodied, between the ages of 18 and 55, under federal law, you're only eligible for three months of food stamps and then you've got to go to work. If they don't have a job or you can't find a job, you have to do community service work or you can't get your food stamps. People now have a lifetime maximum of five years, 60 months on welfare. After five years, they don't care what the circumstances are, you can no longer be drawing public assistance; that's a tremendous change that's taking place. But, more than anything, my friends, it's one of the biggest opportunities South Dakota will ever have. For years we've chafed at the bit of the federal government telling us what to do. We now have a golden opportunity to take our own destiny in our own hands. After this Legislative Session goes home, if I can report back to you next year “X” number of hundreds or thousands of people got off the poverty rolls and got a job, had their family life tremendously straightened out, parents were supporting children in an ever increasing rate, and children were protected and

cared for while their parents were working, I'd be glad and so would you if that was all my state-of-the-state was. We'd have accomplished a tremendous amount.

We have another major policy initiative that we're going to be dealing with in South Dakota, we're going to be dealing with the Legislature on; the whole area of communications. It's something that's been totally alien to most of us. There are very few of you that understand this. And nobody understands it less than Bill Janklow. It's been a tremendous learning curve for me. Those of you who are electrical engineers and some of the others, you understand this. We all have opinions on it, but like my mother has said to me so often and she's right, “Son, you're not always right, but you've never been in doubt.”

    Let's talk about communities of interest for a second, and I'm not talking about real people at home. We have a community of interest in education in every community in South Dakota. It doesn't make any difference where it is. We have a community of interest every place we provide education: K-12, post-secondary academic, post-secondary vocational, private schools, tribal schools, public schools, all of them. We have a community of interest in medical care. It's a community of interest. It isn't good enough to just talk about Telemedicine; it's will we ever have it? And, as you'll see in a few moments, unless it's reliable, unless it's secure, unless it's dependable, we're never going to have it. We'll have it as an adjunct, but not as an in-place- of, because nobody wants to have anybody hooked up to a heart machine while I'm sitting in Flandreau and I'm hooked up to a Cardiac Care Unit someplace, and then have the phone lines go down. It can't have that kind of dependability and develop the resource.

    We have places where we have to develop business, and one of the best couple examples, three I can give you. In the community of Winner, they peaked out at over 300 employees last summer in the HFS Company that does the reservation systems for the Ramada Inns, the Days Inns, the Howard Johnsons of America. When the phone lines went down because somebody cut the cable at Salem, they missed 30,000 telephone calls before the lines got back up. Nobody bringing economic development to any community wants to put their resources or their business where that can happen. Frankly, forget the out-of-staters and economic development, we can't have that happen to us who live here all the time, either. We must deal with that on a priority basis. We've got the government. We've got government all over South Dakota, and the government in an ever-increasing way is putting to use technology and the bits and the bytes and the zeros and the ones and the things to transmit data, to transmit information, to use audio, to use video, to transmit data, as are all the other communities of interest. What we're talking about is the real development of South Dakota for a few minutes in a major, major policy way.

This is what South Dakota looks like. Many of you have seen me use this chart before. This is what South Dakota looks like with the buried fiber-optic cable. Now whether it was because of genius, tenacity, caring, or luck, we have more miles of fiber-optic cable in the ground than any state in the Union. There are some states that have bigger bundles, but nobody has more miles of wire than we do. As you can see, a lot of them are roads that start no place and end no place. They happen to have twisted-pair copper wires hooked to them from there. And this map isn't even quite accurate, because over the course of the last year since this map was first made for my benefit, we've added through the independent companies and the private companies and US West, the public tel-cos, the co-ops and the municipals, they've added more fiber-optics, not a great deal, but they've added more.

    As you look at that map, you can't realize what a horrendous problem we really have. Notwithstanding the protestations of the people in the business, we have 60 different telephone companies in South Dakota. These aren't the long distance companies. They're called LECs, the Local Exchange Carriers. We have 60 of them in South Dakota. That includes US West, the co-ops, the independents, the municipals, and even a Minnesota telephone company that operates for 10 customers someplace in the eastern part of the state. That map, if you put in all the phone companies, would look like the former Yugoslavia, and we all know what happened to them. We can't afford to let that happen to us. What we've really got we can draw an analogy to. It's like toll roads. If everyone of the highways in the state, the municipal one, the county another, the township another, and the state another, if everybody built their own roads and charged a toll, it'd be the darndest mess you've ever seen to get from here to there, wherever there is. It would be unacceptable to everybody. Even though it moves electronically, that's sort of the direction, it's not totally the way, but that's sort of the direction that we have. We need to do something. For the first time in our history, and I emphasize this, for the first time in our history, we have the chance to put the best telecommunication in the world in place over the next couple of years. We have a chance to be a world class leader, not because it's important what we do for other people to see, because of what it'll do for us in terms of our schools, our businesses, our governments, our people. That's what's important.

    The technology I'm going to talk about over the next few minutes is here. Everybody says they're going to bring it to us, but it's here. Not in this state, it isn't here. But, it's all available. What are our capability requirements going to be?

    We need to have a system that is ubiquitous. We need to have a system that is feature-rich, and I mean every place in South Dakota, not just Sioux Falls and Rapid City.

    We need to have standards and they have to be secure and they have to be private and they have to be survivable. They have to be robust. They have to be addressable. They have to be switched. They have to be symmetric and affordable and available. Let me go through those again for just a minute.

Ubiquitous means it's universally accessible. If it's one place it can be everywhere. If any one person can have it, everybody can have it if they want it.

Feature-rich means this is just the mere transport. The network has to provide a wealth of features and functionality. For example, it includes everything that you can imagine that's on the board today from data transmission, to voice transmission, to audio transmission, and all the various combinations. That's what's important.

It has to be robust. Robust means it has to be able to sustain the rigors of growth and extensive use by the public. In other words, robust means it can handle success. It can grow with its success without having to make incredibly expensive substantial improvements.

It has to be secure. The best way to look at that is the hardware stuff has to be vandal- proof so people can't get at it and bring it down, so people can't destroy it in some way, so it's hardened so to speak.

It has to be private. When I say private, just analogize that to you write a letter to a loved one, you lick the envelope and seal it, and you expect it to stay that way until your loved one that opens it breaks the seal or opens the envelope. Nobody else can get into it. That's what private means in telecommunications.

It has to be survivable. That's real simple, it means will it pass the back hoe test. When you cut it with a back hoe in Salem will it shut you down in Winner? And if the answer's yes, it's not survivable.

It has to be addressable. Addressable means the ability to connect and communicate with a specific person easily and securely on a dial-up basis.

It has to be switched; that's unlike cable broadcast. When the cable company broadcasts to yours and everybody's house, it's one way-it just broadcasts. Anybody that's got a receiver can pick it up and listen to it. The Internet is routed. You put all the addresses on there and they get routed. Switched means that it's got circuit packet channel-type switching. In other words it means that it's all seamless as it moves through the electronic boxes at the speed of light.

It has to be symmetric and not asymmetric. Symmetric meaning it runs both ways the same. Right now there's a way that you can use the Internet where you can use your home modem whether you're at 9.6 or 13.4 or 33.4 kilobytes to get out and you can put a dish outside your house so it goes down to the computer you're talking to at a maximum of 33.4, but it comes back to you on a DSS Satellite at a tremendous speed, at a broadband speed; that's not symmetric, it's one way. They've just gone to 56 kilobyte modems. Sportster's got a new one out, US Robotics does; so does Motorola. It says you can now go 56K, but the fact of the matter is, it's 56K one way. When you talk to me on the phone or I talk to you, it's going at the same speed in both directions. And all this horrendous stuff that's going to move forward, all this opportunity and technology is moving forward. We have to make sure it is symmetrical, it moves both ways the same. It has to be very cost-effective. That's incredibly important.

So South Dakota's performance requirements are every place in this state, when you go home, we should have a policy in place that we have open access in South Dakota; that we have interconnection in South Dakota. And I'm not proposing that we interfere in anybody's turf at all. This is not a regulatory matter. This is a public policy matter of the highest sort that deals with the well-being of our citizens in everything from schooling to economics to medicine to the daily lives of our citizens that use what they call POTS, which is the Plain Old Telephone Service, and the developmental opportunity that it brings every community in this state. With a system like I'm suggesting, you can run credit cards as easy out of Newell, South Dakota, as you can downtown Sioux Falls. You can run a back office for an insurance company as easy out of Akaska as you can Yankton. And do any of us feel that our citizens don't have that right? So when it's done, we require a system that's fully switched, addressable_and I'll get to addressable in just a second_feature-rich, survivable, narrow band, wide band and broadband_which I'll get to in a few seconds_networks that handle voice, data, video and multi-media communications needs for our citizens.

Let's go back to addressable, because it highlights the whole thing. Anybody know what that address is? On the Internet? That's the Webster School System. If you want to get a hold

of the Webster School System, that's what you've got to type and hit every letter accurately. The dots, the back slashes, the works. That's what the current address is.

Now I'm going to give you another address. [Sounds like the Band-Aid coming off my arm when I was a kid.] You know what that address is? That's the address you use if you want to find the blizzard conditions in South Dakota today. You have to type that address in. Would any of us suggest that's addressable by the standards I'm talking about? Now if you don't want to do the one in red, there's another way that you can address and get the information. You can dial that phone number. That's what we understand to be addressable. That's the difference, and the system that we're going to have in place after you folks go home will give us the ability to have things that are addressable the way normal human beings can understand them, not because we're going to force the words, but because we're going to put the policy system in place through all the telephone providers in South Dakota to set us up with that kind of structure. Tremendous opportunities for us.

What is band width? We always hear about it; just in terms of reference only. The little purple dot over there on the left is what you call your little analog plain old telephone, what all the people in the industry call POTS, Plain Old Telephone Service. Narrow band goes and the plain telephone today, with existing technology, in the symmetrical sense, can go up to 33.4 kilobytes with your modem. If you remember they had 2400 baud modems, then 3000, then 9600, then 14,400, now they're up to 33,400, but an interesting statistic is 60 percent of the phone companies in America, even of the phone lines in America, even if you got a 33,400 kilobyte modem, can only take 14,400 and handle it. That's this handshake scratchy noise you hear between your modem and somebody else's when it's all coming together. They handshake and say what the speeds each of them can effectually function on over these phone lines. But think of your telephone service as the pipe coming to your house the size of that purple. Narrow band, which includes ISDN, the Integrated Services Digital Network, can go from 64 kilobytes to 144. Under today's technology the maximum is 144 kilobytes. That's 64,000 to 144,000, remembering the little purple one maxs out at about 33,000. And under the existing copper technology today, you can max out at about 144,000 kilobytes, that's thousands of bytes going down the line per second.

Wide-band technology, which is really a transitionary technology, we're going to phase through it. All the world will phase through it. But we're going to phase through it faster than everybody else, because we're going to get our policy adopted and we're going to move forward. That's got the capability today of doing 144,000 bytes to 45 million bytes per second; notice I said 144,000 to 45 million.

And broad-band technology, which is the big pipe, and I'm only showing you one part of it just pretend that that circle continues right on around. That broad-band technology has the capability today of going 50 million bytes per second, theoretically to infinity. As a matter of fact, they've got it operational at one million billion bytes per second. Compare one million billion bytes per second with that little old telephone operating at 33.4 and not just for having big pipes, what can we put them to use to is the key?

The next chart that I have shows our narrow- band network. This is not the exact road plan, but this is an example of what we've got to have in place before the year is out as our goal. What it shows, and you can't see it very well unfortunately, you can see a bunch of green lines;

they're very dim. Those green lines are where we have existing fiber in place. Where you see the bigger circles with the purple lines coming out from them, those are switches. There's nothing magical_that's exactly where a switch has got to be located. This is representative of the kind of thing that we're talking about. Where you see the little purple triangles, those are little host switches in communities. Now, what all this means is you can break a line someplace and it just goes in the other direction. No longer will they ever be able to break a cable in Salem and shut Winner off_or, for that matter, the same day, Pierre to Vermillion or Sioux Falls, because that happened also the same day with the same break. It will just instantly go in the other direction because it'll have all the features that I was talking about from ubiquitous to standard to feature-rich to survivable to private, etc. All those performance parameters and capabilities we have to meet. It also means that if your switch goes out, for example in the community of White River, if somebody breaks a line between White River and I'll say Winner in Tripp County, under this representative map, White River phones will all continue to still function. They won't be able to get to Winner and the outside world, but they'll be able to continue to function for any purposes of local calling, which includes medical and emergency and the local people, other than the fact that they can't get out the community with their phones, can talk to anybody within the community.

Remember, this is narrow band. Narrow band will only come from the copper wires. But, for the vast majority of the uses that we will need over at least the next decade, copper wires can do about 80 percent of it because of the enhancements that are being made. This is a tremendous opportunity. As a matter of fact, in copper wires today on narrow band, they have the ability to expand that ten-fold up to one hundred fifty-fold. That seems like a lot, but it's nothing in the world of computers. The key thing is, this is a survivable system and it's seamless. The public will never know whose system they're going through; the phones will just work.

Let's talk about wide band and broad band for a minute. What you see is we'd have two gateways in South Dakota and they're the logical ones, Sioux Falls and Rapid City, those are the big purple. Those are the routes to the whole world; and they'd be giant pipes that we can get out of. Now you can see in the green better, and there are a few areas that are in brown. Those few areas in brown are where we don't have fiber-optic cable today. And so once we get those connected with fiber_and frankly I don't care whose phone company does it. I don't care if it's the independents, the co-ops, the municipals, US West or somebody else. Once we get those things built, our systems can't go down. It will become a distant memory for us, that someone can cut a cable, or electricity, do something, and all of a sudden all of the phones quit working. We'll have a tremendous system in South Dakota because everything will be ringed and working off of those center sites. Where you see the green circles, and I put four of them, those are data centers, and they don't have to be where they're at; that's where they're at today. There's one in Aberdeen, one in Sioux Falls, one in Pierre, and one in Rapid City. There are other data centers in Vermillion and Brookings, but I mean these are where the primary ones are. Data is where we're going to store information that the public has a right to get to and the public will utilize; and it all has to come very quickly. But, it gives us our access to the world and it also gives us the ability to survive.

The three networks, the blue one is what we call the narrow band, the two-tone one is wide band, and broad band is the orange one. Narrow band is all copper. You can put it over fiber, but it's all copper; it uses copper parameters. Wide band is really a transitionary thing. Part of

it lies in the copper world, part of it lies in the fiber world. But it's how you get from here to there. But look at the differences in the capabilities. One hundred forty-four kilobytes, that's 144,000 zeros and ones per second. Wide band can do about two million, broad band, a minimum of 50 million kilobytes. Think of all this as the water pipe that comes into your house, for all of you it's 1, 1½, or 2 inches, it gets out into some place in the system in your community, especially in the larger ones, where it's part of a bigger pipe. But the pipe coming out of the community water system where it purifies the water, is a giant pipe. The little one going into your house, that's narrow band. The medium-sized one is wide band, and the one coming out of the community water treatment facility, that's broad band. We're going to have that capability for everybody in the State of South Dakota. That's what it's all going to look like with our community of interest up there, and you can add a lot more.

    What I'm asking you to do, ladies and gentlemen, and we look forward to working with every telephone carrier. It's not right or proper for any of them for their own selfish interest. I don't care who they are, whether they're owned by a co-op or shareholder-owned like US West, or municipal, or privately held, it doesn't make any difference. Nobody has a right to stand in the way of a public policy that benefits everybody in the state. By the same token, there's rewards for everyone. Because in the final analysis, it shouldn't cost you any more money to get your work done, your business done, or get phone service in Lemmon than it does Sioux Falls. If we put this system in place we will have a system that meets the performance standards of open access, universal interconnection features and services, and meets the rural challenge.

    Remember what our rules are in South Dakota. Number one, we all make the trip through life together, or nobody makes the trip; that's always been our standard. Nobody gets left behind because of where they live or who they are.

You know Abraham Lincoln said one time, “Let's plan for the future because the people who stay in the present are always going to be in the past.” That's a great admonition. You know, there's an old Chinese adage that says, “May you live in interesting times.” These challenges_and they clearly aren't all the problems and all the issues of South Dakota, I know that_but there's only so much, frankly, that you can bite off and chew every year. If you look at that list of things that you all accomplished, you who were in this Legislature over the last couple years_and frankly, sometimes it was only one party that did it. Sometimes there was bi-partisan support, but it got done, that's the important thing. History isn't going to remember who did it; they're going to remember if it succeeded or failed. There's an old rule in politics that we all understand. Victory has a thousand fathers and defeat is an orphan.

Back when I was a kid I went to Chicago for an interview the day Gayle Sayers ran for six touchdowns against the San Francisco 49ers. I had a ticket to the game. The company that was interviewing me wanted to hire me and gave me a ticket to the game. But instead, I rode the train back to Sioux City so I could get back for Monday morning school at Vermillion. I listened to it on the radio, and the guy said something on the radio which prevented me from fibbing about it my whole life. He said there's only 47,000 people here today at this lousy day in Wrigley Field, but 20 years from now a quarter of a million Americans will swear they were at the game and watched this.

You know you hear people use these clichés all the time. Even when a clock's not running it's right twice a day. This acrimony that goes on, if we're going to fight between parties, and I can't mean this more; nobody likes to fight better than me. I love the debate. I love the tangling on the issues. I love the dialog. I thrive on it, as some of you do. But, it doesn't get the people's work done unless you're moving forward. Frankly, the public doesn't care who brought them property tax relief. They wanted property tax relief. The public doesn't care who straightened out the state aid formula. If they were getting the shaft from it, they wanted it straightened out. The public doesn't care about all these things at these dramatic moments where people take these great stands that will be forgotten in eight minutes after it's on the evening news. They don't mean anything. They literally don't mean anything.

I'll tell you what means something. Ten years from now when you look back on your tenure, and I look back on mine, did you make a difference? Is South Dakota truly in an important way better than it was when you found it? Because, if you're not a contributor, you're a destroyer.

Let's all be contributors. Let's be builders. Let's start the debate. Let's start the dialog. Let's start the challenges. Let's fight the good fights, and when you all go home a few days from now, let's be able to look everybody in the eye and tell them that the things that we put in place, the problems that we solved, the things that we funded, and the policies that we created will be the things that make South Dakota a better place next year than it was today.

Football's a game of inches; so is life. Government's a game of feet and yards; sometimes we can't wait. But, you and I have a responsibility to move forward. I may not always do it constructively, but I'm willing to do more than my part. I know every one of you is willing to do your part. None of you ran for the Legislature telling your home constituents, "You know I'm going to get out there and I'm just going to be a stumbling block, I'm going to be a whiner, I'm going to be a griper, I'm going to be a complainer, and I'm just going to try and stop everything from happening." You all made commitments to the public. It's my job to fulfill mine. It's your job to fulfill yours. I look forward to working with you as we go forward for all of us to fulfill our commitments to the people of this state.

Thank you very much.

Rep. Pederson (Gordon) moved that the House do now adjourn, which motion prevailed, and at 1:39 p.m. the House adjourned.

KAREN GERDES, Chief Clerk