Letter to the Editor - Kull: This is why I voted the way I did

After reading the letter to the editor from Manuel Luschas and his taking issue with my actions opposing his and Representative John Sjaarda’s HB 1198, I feel obliged to respond. 

For those that may not have been following this bill, HB 1198 was a bill that would have required any ‘high energy use facility’ with a demand of 20 megawatts or more, being built in one municipality, but located within one mile of the boundary of another municipality, the owners of the proposed facility would have to apply for a conditional use permit with that second municipality and obtain the approval of that second municipality in order to proceed with the project. 

When presented to the House Commerce and Energy committee, the prime sponsor, Rep. Sjaarda, started by stating that this was a ‘unique bill, that it was not an anti-data center bill, it’s a local control bill’. Then the testimony that followed made it clear to all that this was indeed an anti-data center bill. Which is fine if that’s your goal, but please call a duck a duck and not something that it’s not.

My main problem with the bill was that, without consulting with any authorities from the City of Brandon government, this bill was set to force upon the City of Brandon government some sort of authority to seemingly override the decisions of the Sioux Falls City Council on the zoning and use of property within their jurisdictional boundaries. I have serious doubts that such authority would even have passed constitutional muster.

The facts are that this authority was NOT something that the City of Brandon sought or wanted any part of in the first place. A further fact is that neither Mr. Luschas or Representative Sjaarda consulted with anyone from the City of Brandon about the bill. Had they, I believe there is a good chance such a bill would never have been introduced in the first place.

Had this passed, the costs of the legal gymnastics that would have been required to modify our own ordinances to accommodate such a statute would have been in the thousands. Then, assume it was in place and this conditional use permit was denied. The ensuing lawsuit from the project company or the City of Sioux Falls or both would have put a further and much greater legal litigation bill at the feet of the taxpayers of our city and in the end, I believe we would lose and face payment for damages. Taking all that into consideration, HB 1198 had to die.

Next, the question of why I felt I was the one that should stand up against this bill that was introduced by my fellow district mate. That was a simple choice for me. This would have had a direct impact on the City of Brandon, a place where I live and where I still serve on the city council. As such, I felt an obligation to put forth the effort to do what I could to make sure it did not advance any further in the legislative process. Would it have died regardless of whether I spoke against it or not? Probably, but my certainty of that outcome was nowhere near 100 percent. In the end, it went down on a vote of 21 Yea, 41 Nay. Even two of the nine representatives that voted for a ‘Do Pass’ out of committee, voted against it on the floor.

As I said in the floor speech, this was a bad bill from start to finish and we are all better that this one joined so many others on the ash heap of the 101st Session of the South Dakota Legislature.

The last paragraph of Mr. Manuel Luschas’ article seems to imply that I don’t take my job of listening to and representing my constituents seriously and that I must be there to do the bidding of big corporate interests. I would suggest he listen again to my floor speech. If he listens close enough, he will hear me argue against a bill that would have put the City of Brandon in an untenable position. That is me representing my constituents. As for doing the bidding for the corporation involved, I’ll leave you with the second to last paragraph of the speech I made on the floor against HB 1198.

“I have to be honest. Part of me wishes that this issue never came up; that I had never heard of Gemini or hyper-scale data centers. Part of me wishes we all still lived in an analog world, that phones still hung on the wall or sat on a desk and had cords. That our TV sets picked up three channels and didn’t have commercials about those things that are dysfunctional. But that’s not the world of today.”

If that’s doing the bidding of big corporate interests, I’m happily failing.

Rep. David Kull

Brandon