SD Editorial Roundup

A roundup of recent editorials from South Dakota daily newspapers:

The Argus Leader

It's conventional wisdom that many people are for fiscal discipline — until it affects the projects in their state.

And when it comes to the Lewis & Clark Regional Water System, we can't pretend to be impartial. The project will deliver water not only to Sioux Falls but to a number of other cities in the area.

But the argument for continuing to pay for the project at a sustainable level is strong, both because the pipeline is essential and because it already has so much invested in it.

Frankly, the $2 million devoted to Lewis & Clark in President Obama's budget is disappointing — and our congressional delegation needs to work hard to ensure that number improves.

Fortunately, Sioux Falls won't suffer a whole lot if progress is delayed. Along with nine other cities, we'll start receiving water in 2012.

Towns such as Madison, though, would have to wait if the federal allotment isn't increased now, even though almost every city that signed up for Lewis & Clark water has paid for its portion of the pipeline's construction.

It seems as if every year, states go through this same dance to force the federal government to honor its commitment. But time is running out. If the pipeline isn't completed on schedule, some towns will have to scramble to bridge the gap when their water supply doesn't come online as planned.

The entire regional water system was built on the premise of a federal-local partnership. Local partners have kept up their end of the bargain.

Now it's up to South Dakota's delegation to apply pressure to increase that total from $2 million to the $27 million that pipeline officials estimate is really needed.

Rapid City Journal

Nobody likes to raise taxes, but we believe a proposal that would allow cities and towns to do exactly that through an optional one-cent sales tax deserves legislative approval.

The House Local Government committee will consider HB1198, a bill that would allow municipalities to impose an additional penny sales tax to finance special projects for short term use, but only with voter approval.

One of the best indicators that HB1198 is a good idea may be its long list of primary sponsors. That list includes lawmakers from municipalities large and small. Legislators from places like Hill City and Prairie City have joined forces with those from Rapid City and Sioux Falls to back the idea that an additional penny sales tax, imposed for limited times for a specific use, is the best type of taxation: local and limited in time and scope.

While we agree that the regressive nature of a sales tax falls more heavily on the poor, we do like that, at least, this tax burden would give voters of all income levels the right to approve or reject that burden directly at the polls. As long as the additional sales tax remains a "special" tax with a sunset provision, we think it's a logical short term solution to some city funding issues.

Rep. Mike Verchio, R-Hill City, believes the additional one-cent tax would be a boon to small communities like his. So do mayors of other area cities, which often are strapped for money to fund major capital projects or to make necessary infrastructure improvements. So does the South Dakota Municipal League, which supports passage of the bill.

In Rapid City, we've seen what can be accomplished with a targeted sales tax through the Vision 2012 funds. Numerous civic projects that improve the quality of life in Rapid City stand as testament to that tax. We think HB1198 would put the ability to create those important special projects in the hands of other local taxpayers statewide and we urge lawmakers to approve it.

Watertown Public Opinion

History suggests local school decisions are best left to local school boards.

Go back to when our area was settled. One of the first, if not the first, things settlers did was build a school - and then a church - often before they even had built their own homes and businesses. There was no state or federal government telling them what to do, either. The settlers simply knew they needed a place to educate their children and build their community around.

That's what's so interesting about the debate that raged on and on at the first of the legislative cracker-barrel sessions on Saturday at the Watertown library.

Watertown school district supporters are aghast that the Legislature is considering legislation — House Bill 1168 — that would not require students to stay in school until they are 18.

Supporters at Saturday's meeting, mainly Reps. Bob Faehn and Roger Solum, indicated outside of larger districts like Watertown, there is a real cry to eliminate that age requirement, especially in the rural and smaller districts.

Who's right?

We can't help but wonder if that's a decision, like nearly all when it comes to schools, that shouldn't be left to the local school boards to decide.

On this issue, if Watertown's school board believes it's the right thing to do to keep our young people in school until they are 18-year-olds, then they should require it and the laws of the land ought to support it. On the other hand, if school district XYZ in rural South Dakota thinks 16 is old enough, then so too should that be allowed.

Which district makes the right/better decision will only be known by the results produced by the affected students.

But we have to sit back and wonder why is this issue being debated at all (either pro or con) at the state level? Why couldn't it simply be a matter decided up by the local district, by the people who know what's best for the children of our communities?

The Daily Republic

Sexting is a serious topic that's gaining national attention. A member of the Dakota Wesleyan University faculty is doing his part to raise awareness even more.

Jesse Weins, a Dakota Wesleyan University assistant professor, says state laws are not keeping up with the realities of sexting, which is the act of sending sexually explicit texts, particularly photos or videos, via cell phones.

Whereas sexting takes place between people of all ages, evidence shows that teens are especially involved. According to a national survey by the National Campaign to Prevent Teen and Unplanned Pregnancy, approximately 20 percent of teens have participated in some form of sexting.

Where sexting gets especially tangled is in how it is prosecuted. When sexting involves photos of children — even teens — sexting can run akin to possessing or distributing child pornography. For instance, CBS News reported last month that three teen girls from Pennsylvania and three male classmates all faced child pornography charges after the girls allegedly sent nude or seminude photos of themselves to the three boys.

Weins, chairman of the Department of Criminal Justice at DWU, says state laws aren't keeping up with the realities of electronic messaging. He said teens run the risk of being victimized by poorly drawn statutes.

He and a colleague from Kansas are addressing this topic in a soon-to-be-published article in the Tennessee Law Review, a respected national law journal.

The two contend that kids aren't aware of the consequences of sexting and that they sometimes are prosecuted rigorously by overzealous prosecutors.

Weins proposes creating a base misdemeanor charge for sexting, but also leaving room for aggravating circumstances. The idea of the paper he and Todd Hiestand, assistant professor of criminal justice at MidAmerica Nazarene University, wrote is to give states a bit of guidance to follow when dealing with sexting.

It's a good idea.

Sexting certainly is a serious crime. But should a teen who makes a stupid choice — and sexting is a very stupid choice — be put in the same class as an adult convicted of a child pornography charge?

We don't think so.

Weins argues that a legal response is both necessary and appropriate for sexting, but that response should take the form of a lesser juvenile charge, rather than the use of traditional child pornography statutes.

We agree.

Aberdeen American News

Following his State of the Union address to Congress recently, President Barack Obama engaged in a televised question-and-answer session with House Republicans. It was instructive, even remarkable, for at least two reasons: the first was that no voices had to be raised to make a point; the second was that something good actually came from it.

We don't mean that a deal was forged on health care reform or an energy cap-and-trade policy, subjects that naturally came up, but about which a fundamental disagreement still persists. The upshot of the meeting wasn't that the philosophical divide was effectively bridged, only that it was rendered a little less impassable.

The two sides, in other words, discovered that it was possible to talk to each other calmly, rationally and civilly. The deep-seated areas of disagreement obviously remain, but the parties found that they didn't have to be quite so disagreeable in staking out their positions. The substance of the exchange didn't matter as much as that there was an exchange.

Neither the president nor his GOP interlocutors won or lost, and it is doubtful that any minds were changed as a result of the confab on Capitol Hill. But this public display of political comity certainly came as a welcome change from the trench warfare we have witnessed in the last few months leading up to the electoral shot heard 'round the nation a few weeks ago in Massachusetts.

In fact, Scott Brown's defeat of Democratic Machine candidate Martha Coakley in the Bay State seems to have been the tipping point in convincing the president that the best way to stave off a Republican rout in this year's midterm election is to be perceived as willing to meet the party out of power in the middle.

Cynics will call this a ploy to strike a bipartisan pose, but we prefer to think of it as reaching out. Obama said as much in a meeting with Senate Democrats, which was also televised, cautioning members of his own party not to be reluctant to extend a hand across the aisle. While there is no guarantee that asking Republicans for their vote will be viewed as anything other than an empty gesture, the president said, it can't hurt.

This is smart politics, in our opinion, but it's also what the public is looking for in the people it sends to Washington, D.C. Joining forces to get something done for the country may take a backseat to gaining partisan advantage in an election year, but that doesn't mean it isn't worth a try or the public doesn't care.

It is, and we do.

Yankton Daily Press & Dakotan

The latest example of the democratic inertia that has overtaken the U.S. Senate is provided courtesy of Richard Shelby, the Republican senator from Alabama. And it stands again as proof of how the legislative branch of our government has become hopelessly compromised.

Shelby announced last week that he was placing a "unilateral hold" on about 70 of President Obama's executive branch nominees over a dispute concerning two spending projects earmarked for Alabama.

The senator announced Monday that he was dropping most of his holds. Nevertheless, the prospect loomed that the business in the U.S. Senate may have come to a standstill is it coped with potentially 70 threats of what has become the new f-word: filibuster. And yes, 60 votes would have been needed for cloture, which would have brought an end to the effort.

At a time when the approval rating of Congress (which includes both parties) is plummeting, this isn't precisely the best medicine to ingest.

It was the latest in a line of instances in which one senator, or one small group of them, has been able to hold sway over an entire body. The health care reform debate has provided numerous examples, with Sen. Ben Nelson providing one of the most irritating: holding out on his support for the reform package until Nebraska was cut a deal on Medicaid reimbursement.

The institution of the Senate often seems to be floundering because of the ability of very few even one to logjam the process. As a result, Congress (at least the Senate side of it) often seems able to do nothing and respond to nothing. When people demand action on an issue, they need to wait for the Senate to overcome its own dysfunctional mechanisms.

The Senate hold that Shelby deployed is a little-used tactic, but it's not new. For instance, Sen. Harry Reid, the Democrat from Nevada, used a blanket hold in 2004 on all of President Bush's nominees, except for judicial and defense nominations. Reid did it as part of his longstanding opposition to turning the Yucca Mountains into a nuclear waste dump, reported the Las Vegas Review Journal in 2004. His hold was used to get a colleague sympathetic to his cause put on the Nuclear Regulatory Commission.

Shelby's effort was tied to another seemingly dirty Washington label that lawmakers alternately despise and embrace: pork barrel spending. Shelby placed the hold in order to ensure that his state gets funding for an FBI laboratory focused on improvised explosives and a plant to build an aerial refueling tanker. But according to the Los Angeles Times, the FBI doesn't believe it needs the lab, so the White House canceled the project; and Shelby wanted to ensure that the aeronautics plant was built in Alabama on a no-bid contract, thus preventing other companies from submitting bids and, potentially, moving the plant to other states. The earmarks amount to billions of dollars.

As one L.A. Times writer put it: "Outside the Senate, Shelby's conduct would be called extortion; inside the chamber, it's a parliamentary tactic.'"

It's also like dumping yet another bag of cement into our legislative process, grounding it to a halt.

Worse, it serves as yet another lesson to other senators that, in this bitterly partisan age, they can each flex their muscle to get what they want by employing such tactics. It stands as a recipe for more inertia to come, the consequences be damned.