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South Dakota Gov Honors Term-Limited Lawmakers
01/19/2000
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Following is the full text of Gov. William Janklow's State of the State address:
Governor William J. Janklow's
State-of-the-State Address Transcript
State Capitol, House Chamber 1:15 PM, January 11, 2000
Thank you very, very much. Madam Lieutenant Governor Hillard, Mr. Chief Justice Miller, and members of the Supreme Court, you Ladies and Gentlemen who are Constitutional officers, and you Ladies and Gentlemen of the South Dakota Legislature, thank you for that greeting that you've just given to the other constitutional officers and me.
As I start today, I really can't help but reflect on the fact of what the obvious is. That is that you and I and all of us are embarking on a new century. This is a state that's a little over 110 years old in terms of its formality, but it's a state that's had an incredibly rich and diverse history. It's a state that's, frankly, had more challenges than most states in the Union. It's out in the center of America. It was one of the last states in the lower 48 to be developed and to come into the Union. And for a whole host of reasons, a lot of things that have happened elsewhere in America never really came to South Dakota. But as we embark on the new century, you and I and each and every one of us have an incredibly unique opportunity to truly, truly do the things that a hundred years from now will cause folks of any and all political parties to look back and reflect on what we all did together that made a difference in theirs and their predecessors' lives.
Today, I come to speak to you about the state of what I see as the affairs of the State of South Dakota. As I do that, I'd like to run through just a quick analysis or snapshot of various areas that are of incredible importance to all of us.
Let's talk about the kids in this state for a few minutes. We in South Dakota, all of us as elected officials, talk about what we believe with respect to young people, how we want to deal with young people, and what our responsibilities are. But the fact of the matter is, to each and every one of us, that we really need to stand back and reflect on where we are succeeding and where we are failing. Fortunately for us in South Dakota, in the vast majority of instances when children are born, they're born into a robust, healthy, dynamic family. They're born to people who want them. They're born into circumstanceswhether they be born into wealth or no wealththey're born into circumstances where they receive the nurturing and the care and the understanding and the growth and the types of things that any human being needs when it's in a defenseless state as it starts to learn.
Each and every one of us, if we're born normal, is born with 100 billion brain cells. What we do with them really depends on the kind of assistance we have in the beginning in developing them. We're born with them, but they're like a magnificent computer. They can't do anything by themselves initially, other than breathe and eat and just a few functions. What we propose to do over the course of this fiscal yearwe're not even waiting until next fiscal yearis, with every child born in South Dakota, we're going to give them a welcome kit into the family of this state. We're going to give them a little book, the Good Night Moon Book, we're going to give an Ages and Stages Guidethat's just a couple sheets of paper that say what the age-appropriate things are for children at various stages of their early development. We're going to give them a Mozart CD, a Food for Thought videowhich is the video that we showed to you Ladies and Gentlemen of the Legislature a year ago who cared to watch itto show how incredibly important it is that children are read to, how incredibly important it is in terms of how their minds develop, even in the first couple months, when they're subjected to reading and that quality time that adults take with children. We're going to give them all a local library membership card, a little book on parenting tips to the parents, and a resources guide that says where you can go if you're interested to get books and music and videos and things of that nature. We're establishing a toll-free number that will start in mid-day and go until mid-evening that's available for anybody in this state to callwhether they be a babysitter, a parent, a teacher, a grandparent, whatever it isto ask questions about a child at any given moment when they may need to feel that they have something that needs to be answered.
We're moving forward understanding that 62 percent of all the children in this state that are born now are subjected to a hearing test before they leave the hospital. I've written to the medical providers and the hospitals over the course of the last week. I've asked them if there's a way that they can figure out how they can subject the remaining 38 percent of all the children born in South Dakota to hearing exams before they go home without us having to try and address it in a regulatory or a legislative way. I really believe that once we ask them, they'll figure out how to come together to do this so that all children who are born in South Dakota will have a hearing exam before they go home.
It's our objective to make sure that every child born in this state has significant screening with respect to their hearing and their vision and their developmental aspects before the age of three. This will give all of us as a society the opportunity to address unique needs the children may have before they get to school-age years and before it becomes a far greater burden in terms of the ability of the child to learn and the expense or the involvement that society has to take. Children that are born with handicaps are far more adaptable when they're young than when they get older. It's no different than all of us. It's far easier for us to learn when we're young than it is when we get older.
We're starting a comprehensive parenting program, which we've talked to you Ladies and Gentlemen of the Legislature about before. Over the course of the last couple of years, you have passed legislation that makes it mandatory that anybody convicted of domestic violence must be subjected as part of their sentence to a course with respect to parenting. Ladies and Gentlemen, that's beginning to make a difference in terms of the attitudes of people out within our society. It's beginning to make a difference in terms of the violence that we see subjected by individuals towards each other. In addition to that, all of the individuals that are in our correctional facilities must go through a parenting course.
Now, we're moving on to the next step, moving to interactive video through what we have available in the schoolswhich I'll be talking about in a few minutesbut in addition to that, through utilizing the publicly-owned mediapublic television, public radioin assisting in utilizing those facilities to bring about parenting training for individuals throughout the state.
We've got a Web page that should be up and running in just a couple of weeksI've actually just this morning looked at a test of it up on an Internet sitewhere we will try and put together on that site all the information that we gather of an interactive nature, where people can spin into other Web sites on the Internet to find out information with respect to early childhood and children and the development of children, nutrition of children, health care of children, educational aspects of children. All of the various types of things that society has been able to gather as information that's available on the information networks, we're going to make available through that Web page that anybody can tap into free, at no cost, anytime, twenty-four hours a day.
As you all know, we worked together passing laws and funding programs to deal with immunizations in South Dakota, several years ago. I can happily report to you today that we've gone from an average of 64 percent success in what we call age-appropriate immunizations, the first two years, we've gone to 74, almost 75 percent over the course of the last three and one-half years. Our goal is 100 percent. But, we put the infrastructure in place that will now allow us to move forward very, very quickly in making up the gap with respect to the remainders.
Wellmark, the former Blue Cross/Blue Shield, has made a substantial donation to the state that, in partnership with the funding that's available from the state, is going to make sure that all the children in South Dakota get their vaccinations for chicken pox, and we're going to collapse it from both directions. They're going to provide funding to do it from the age of five backwards as we do the age-appropriate from zero forwards. So, in just a couple of years, we should be able to collapse the unimmunized, and we will be able to say that every child in this state is protected from the ravages of chicken poxnot just because of what it means to the children. It actually can save the lives of children, but it keeps them from having disabilities throughout life. The economic costs in our society to parents that have to miss work and parents that have to stay home and all of those types of things are immense. They're an immense drag on the economy in a state that can ill afford it, and we'll be able to deal with it as we move forward on this whole immunization program.
We're going to have a home visitation program that we start in Minnehaha County and Pennington County, working in conjunction with local agencies within those communities. Our goal is, over the course of the next year, to visit 400 children where it's deemed appropriate by the authorities, by the hospital officials, by medical personnel, by school personnel, state Social Services and Human Services, and Labor and Education Department officials. Where it's deemed appropriate, we will offer the resources of the state and the local communities to go in to assist young children400 of themin Pennington and Minnehaha Counties, where we'll do our pilot program to see how those programs carry forward.
Over the course of the last year, we've been able to move forward. We've talked a lot about education, and I realize that educational funding is an important dynamic, but in addition to that, there are a lot of other aspects of how well we are doing with the resources that we have. This state, fortunately, and I say fortunately, has always been able to buy a phenomenal amount of quality education for what we've been able to afford to pay. As you all recall, we've really worked hard on standards over the course of the last several years. As you'll remember from speeches that I've given, our goal of this administrationand, frankly, all of you Ladies and Gentlemen of the Legislature who have supported us on thisis to have standards that are uniform throughout the state. They're universal in terms of their application; they're universal in terms of their content. And they would be clear. They would be measurable. They would be very specific. They'd be very demanding. And they would be comprehensive.
As you recall, several years ago, I put a couple of examples up of gibberish, which were the old standards. I can happily report to you today that the Fordham Foundation, which is one of the major organizations in the country that analyzes school issues and school standards and those types of things, has reported over the course of the last two weeks that South Dakota has gone from forty-third in the nation to the number eight place in the nation in just two years with respect to the standards that we've implemented. As a matter of fact, the grade that we received for mathematicsthey grade us just like a studentis an A. We have as high a rating for our mathematics standards as anybody in the nation. And, the point that I'm making with this is that we can be proud of what it is that we're putting in place that are the goals by which all of us have the responsibility for seeing to it that our children are educated.
Education involves things in addition, in addition, to just setting standards, and we all know that. We've always known that in South Dakota. I deliberately have engaged upon the approach of engaging in a dialog orif you want to call it thata monologue on this whole education question with respect to where we stand. It is too important not to. I honestly believe it is far more important than any political risks that are involved. These children out there that I'm talking about belong to Democrat parents. They belong to Republican parents. They belong to Independent parents. They belong to parents that aren't involved in any political parties or aspect. And yours and my responsibility is an absolute duty to make sure that we put in place the structure that enables them to have a world-class educational opportunity. There is nothing less, nothing less that we're entitled to do for the kids of this state, and testing is part of that.
Testing is clearly part of it. There isn't a one of us as a parent, and none of us I guarantee you ever had parents that would have sent their children to a school that said the greatest attribute of our school is that we don't test the children. We live in a society that believes in testing. Now, we have to make sure the tests are fair. We have to make sure that the tests cover the materials that are studied, and that's why we have standards. We have to make sure that the tests are appropriate. But once we've done those things, we have to test to know where we stand within our own class, where we stand vis--vis other classes within our school system, and where we stand vis--vis the neighboring schools and the rest of the schools in South Dakota and America and the world. It's the only way that we know. We have to measure how well we're doing.
We have to be very, very concerned that we deal with this question of the future certification of teachers. It is too important to deal with willy-nilly. We face the prospect that a large number of our classroom teachers and educators will be retiring over the course of the next half-decade to a decadea huge turnover. And, honestly, public employee retirement programs are feeding into that, because people are reaching the appropriate age measurements of time and service, which give them the ability to leave and go out into another profession. And, in tight labor markets like we have now in America and South Dakota, it's easy to leave an occupation and go to another one and get your retirement and move on and up elsewhere with another opportunity. You and I have a unique responsibility to make sure that the certification we do of teachers or that we allow of teachers is appropriate for our children. We have to be very, very concerned about teacher education. We have to make sure that our five public universities out of the six that have colleges of education are, and stay, on the leading edge of how you train classroom instructors. In the K-8 mold, as well as the high school mold, we have to make sure across the whole K-12 spectrum that we have world-class educator education.
I'm going to be assembling a task force. I probably won't get it done until spring. I'm asking classroom teachers, I'm asking school administrators, I'll be asking citizens of all political persuasions from all over South Dakota, representing large as well as small, and East River as well as West River, and minority school districts as well as majority school districts, and the whole spectrum of citizens, a group of them, to come together to take a look, in a comprehensive citizen way, at the aspect of, Where are we as we embark on the new century? And, How do we want to get into the future? It's not always an issue that you and I can deal with in a legislative sense. It's not always an issue that I can deal with, or any governor can deal with, in a regulatory or an administrative sense. Sometimes, we honestly need to stand back and get the input from the broad base of our citizenry as to where we are, where we want to go, and then you and I have the responsibility to help chart the road map on how we can get there.
We're going to be asking some former Teachers of the Yeara phenomenal group of people in this state, a phenomenal group of peoplewe're going to be asking some former Teachers of the Year to come into the employment of the government for one year, one school academic year. We desperately need them. I've talked to some of these people, and we desperately need them to go out and visit with other classroom educators. We desperately need them to go to our universities to talk to our colleges of education. And, very honestly, we desperately need them to go out to the length and breadth of South Dakota in its hinterland, talking to editorial boards and the media, and talking to Rotaries and Kiwanises and Lions and BPWs and AAUPs and all kinds of organizations. We need them to explain to the people of South Dakota what they are, what they're like, and what their mission is, because if we do that, if we're able to do that successfully, it'll make an incredible change as we build toward the future.
You know, as I've thought back getting ready for this speech, I've really wished that there was a way that all of you in South Dakota could have the opportunities that any governor has. Whether it's Bill Janklow or Walt Miller or George Mickelson or Dick Kneip or Ralph Herseth, it doesn't make any difference. Whoever's fortunate enough to be governor gets to go places and attend things and meet people and be in discussions that, unfortunately, everybody doesn't get to be involved in. And, I'm always left in the circumstance of deciding, How do I come home and tell everybody in South Dakota what I just had the chance to witness? How can I share with people and not leave a lot out, what I just got to listen to or see, on what's really going on out there in this world of oursall-too-often hostile to our interests? How do we do it? When you think back about it, as far back as you want to go, when man and woman first were on the planet up until about 100 years ago, it was the Agricultural Age. People were occupied with just figuring out, How do I get enough to eat today? How do I get enough to eat tomorrow? How do I get enough to store it so we can get through the winter or the monsoons or the droughts or whatever visits us? How do we do it? The world was preoccupied with just feeding itself. Beginning about 100 years ago, the Industrial Age started to spring forth, and I suppose you could say it came when someone invented a fulcrum or figured out what a fulcrum was or a wheel. But as it's progressed in the last 100 years, it's been phenomenal. In the lifetimes of you and me, look at the mechanization that's taken place. It's hard to believe that the PC computer, the Personal Computer, the PC was only invented 20 years ago. That's all.
Twenty-five years ago, one transistor cost six dollars to manufacture. Today, you can make 16 million transistors for six dollars. You can make 16 Megs at a manufacturing price of six dollars. Twenty-five years ago, it cost six dollars to make one transistor. Just think of what an impact that has had on our lives.
We all just came through a huge Y2K scare because of the Computer Age and the transistors, and thank God it was a party that nobody had to go to. Everyone was prepared after having spent lots of money and lots of time.
But, the Industrial Age meant phenomenal things, especially for America, especially for America. The immense, dynamic growth that this country had, part of it was because it was a nation of immigrantsand, but for the Native Americans, we're all the sons and daughters of immigrants, every one of us. We are all of the lineage, except for the Native Americans, we are all of the lineage of boat people.
Some came to this country because they were running from religious persecution and tyranny. Some came because they were running from oppression with respect to their race or their color or their religion or their origin. Some came because of economic deprivation. But they all came to America and got off at Ellis Island, and they stood there with a little carpet bag or a little sack and that's all they had in the world. Those were the risk-takers. Those were the people that understood risk. Those were the people that never looked behind them and always looked fore them. The only things they brought with them were their religions and their culture and everything else they left behind. And this state was one of the last states in the Union to be settled by the immigrants. As a matter of fact, here, at the Missouri River, it was the stopping line for the immigrations from Europe. West of here was the Great Sioux Indian Reservation, as we all know, that covered many states and the whole State of South Dakota west of the river. That's why we, even in South Dakota today, have all these little ethnic communities, the huge Germanic influence of the James River Valley, the Czechoslovakian influencewe weren't original, in some of our names, like Scotland, South Dakota, or New Holland, South Dakotathe Scandinavian influence on the eastern belt, but all of it made up what we call South Dakota.
This Industrial Age was an incredibly important Age, because it's where the real wealth was created by lots of people other than the landed folks. It's where you didn't have to own land and you could generate wealth. But, the new world that we live in, at the speed of electricity and the speed of light, 186,000 miles a second into the future, is the Information Age. And we in South Dakota run the risk for the opportunity, and, you Ladies and Gentlemen and Bill Janklow, will be the ones that will make the choice. There is no next year. There is no five years out for this. It's now or never for the people of South Dakota. We will seize the moment or we will let it pass by, but there is no catch up. There is no way we could ever, ever catch up if we let it pass us.
We have put ourselves, all of us working together, have put ourselves into the position of being able to capitalize on the Information Age unlike any other society on this planet, if we're willing to do it. And, when I say that, I don't mean in any way to minimize the impact or the influence that agriculture has on South Dakota. It is truly the capital and the economic backbone of this state, but from that comes the other opportunities that we will have to generate wealth for all of those people that will not be affiliated with agriculture in the future in the economic sense.
I did not put it in my budget, but I'm asking the Legislature to set up and to fund a new Office of Agricultural Policy and Advocacy that we're setting up in the Agriculture Department. By Constitution, I have the power to do that, but, obviously, we need the funding, and I won't do it without the approval of the Legislature.
We find ourselves dealing with issues that are being thrown upon us externally, external influences that we're being subjected to and we're unprepared to deal with them. We don't even understand the facts. We in South Dakota listen to politicians who pop off thinking they know the facts or somebody in the media who thinks they know it, or somebody else. The truth of the matter is, we can't agree on what the facts are. I've always believed, always, that if we can agree on what the facts are, then the debate gets to be on how we deal with them. If you can't agree there's a problem, if you and I can't agree we've got a problem, we can't fix it. But, if we agree we've got a problem, then it's not hard for us to figure out how to compete with ideas to bring about a resolution to the problem.
An example of this is the wetlands issues as they affect South Dakota. These are immense issues and they're important issues. They involve questions of serious public policy and clean water, but they also involve the ability of agriculture to sustain itself through large areas in this state, and we need to understand the underlying facts. What is a wetland? How are they defined? Are there different ways to classify them? And are our people being treated the same by federal officials as, for example, those in Minnesota and elsewhere? If they are not, how do we deal with it? But, we can't deal with it until we understand the facts.
The same thing is true with respect to the Black Hills and forestry. I'm constantly getting resolutions from local governments that we forward on to Washington. Nobody listens to these resolutionsyou all know thatany more than you listen to resolutions that are sent to you. People like passing them because they feel good, but they don't do anything. They're not laws. They're not policies.
But the important thing is, we've got a beetle problem out there destroying huge acres in the Black Hills. It holds the potential to destroy the vast majority of them, and yet, we're being subjected to a policy that people are still debating.
The same thing is true with respect to the Endangered Species Act. At the present time, we, in South Dakota, have a real reason to be concerned about federal Fish and Wildlife officials and how they will deal with the Topeka Shiner Minnow, how they will deal with the Black Hills Black-Tailed Prairie Dog, and how they're dealing with the Black-Footed Ferret. In addition to that, the plovers and the terns, the Least Terns and the plovers that migrate on the Missouri River and nest on the sandbars are having a direct impact on how the river gets raised and lowered. We need to understand, What are the underlying laws? What are the underlying policies? How do we want to deal with this? Because, in the final analysis, this is where we live. It's where Washington regulates, but it's where you and I live. We have a vested interest, more than anybody, in clean water. We have a vested interest, more than anybody, in the aesthetics of the environment that we live in and live in compatibly with nature.
Railroad policy will also be in this office with respect to understanding it. International tradesomething that is of immense interest. I live in a state where everybody badmouths NAFTA and GATT, but they're the law. What's really amazing is how many people don't like NAFTA, but they all want a four-lane highway from Canada down through their part of the state for the NAFTA highway to go to a place in Canada where nobody livesjust another way to get a highway.
The international trade questions are immense, and we shouldn't have to be left to whoever's governor, whether it's Bill Janklow or somebody else, having to put an embargo on trucks from another nation to determine what the policy of this nation may be. Why do we have to file lawsuits like R-Calf? Ours is the only state, with bipartisan support, it's the only state that contributed to the R-Calf litigation. But, why should we have to sue our government to get them to represent and fight for us on these issues? Ours is the only state that came in with financial support for the sheep-growers with respect to what was happening to them from outside influences.
We need to look at the serious question of landowner rights. We throw that rhetoric around, but it's important that we understand, When I own a piece of property, what rights do I really have with that? What rights does society have to regulate it, and how can we, in a civilized way, deal with those kinds of aspects setting our policies in South Dakota?
How do we deal with the questions of depredation? We hear about it and people come to these halls angry about depredation and what wildlife is doing to their particular economic and agricultural operation. How do we, as a society, understand these issues and how do we deal with them? All of those will be in this Office of Agricultural Policy and Advocacy in the Agriculture Department.
As I indicated in the Budget Message, we need to have a Centennial spruce-up in South Dakota. If you drive from Sioux Falls to the Flandreau exitmy own beloved Moody Countyas you drive north, you can pass more than 20 abandoned buildings just along the Interstate alone. You can do virtually any highway in South Dakota that you want to travel, and we see the same thing.
After the tornado in Spencer, that lovely little community, we hauled away three semi-loads of spare tires as we cleaned up the community.
Not long ago, as I indicated in the Budget Message, in Moody County, we tried a pilot project there of cleaning up the tires where civet cats and coons and skunks and rodents and rats live. And just with a little bit of publicitynot a lot18,000 tires were turned in to be hauled away.
We're going to do that throughout the State of South Dakota. We've hired a couple of individualswe're going to hire a couple more for West River. We've hired a couple for East River. We've hired one to help us work the reservations, and we're going to have a yearlong clean up in South Dakota.
It's really going to be a spruce-up. We're going to haul the tires away. We're going to get these batteries, these old batteries that have sulfuric acid and lead, hauled away. We're going to get the pesticides to the extent the people want them removed, old pesticides and herbicides, hauled away. Household hazardous materialswe're going to get them all hauled away. We're going to assist people in bulldozing down their buildings and burying them, or, maybe in a lot of instances, with landowner permission, we'll probably burn them with the local fire department using them for training and then bury the refuse of what's left.
We have almostI thought it was 1,000. This morning, the report told me we have 1,900, or virtually 2,000 abandoned underground gas station tanks in South Dakota. And, these are places where gas stations used to be that are now gone. And, we, all of us that are older, remember what it was like. And then we watched them abandoned. Then, over the years, they slowly fell in, and then the surface was hauled away, but the tanks remained.
In an experimental program, over the course of the last year, we picked 10 sites at random from Wood, I believe it was, to Timber Lake, and we pulled 10 of those tanks out of the ground. Six of them were full of water or nothing; four of them had the old sludge in them and were contaminating the soils around them. We cleaned up those four. The average cost was $30,000. It was a little over $6,000 to do the other tanks, because it takes specially trained people.
What we did was try to figure out, in real time, what it's going to cost us to address this problem. Well, the time has come now to just move forward and let's get them all dug up; let's get them cleaned up. It's in all of our selfish interests. We don't need any petroleum distillates going to any of our children or grandchildren. We don't need to leave it there for the generations of the future. Let's get those tanks out of the ground over the course of the next couple of years and get them cleaned up. We're going to be proposing legislation to allow us to use the Petroleum Release Fundhave it amended in such a way that we can utilize that fundto move forward.
As we clean up the state, we can't do this with just the government, and we all know that. What we need is South Dakota doing what South Dakota does best. In eve
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 | Stateline.org has put together a list of state public policy resources organized by issue. Here, you will find useful links to essential information from government, academia, and think tanks. If you have a link to add, please email us.
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