Rapid City mayor: Legislative issues should be local

• Sam Kooiker

Sam Kooiker

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RAPID CITY (AP) — The mayor of South Dakota’s second-largest city says many of the issues on tap for the 2013 legislative session would be better off handled at home, but his hands are tied by state policies that govern the city’s legal authority.

Rapid City Mayor Sam Kooiker said the city of 68,000 people gets bogged down by waiting for lawmakers to approve requests, which this year will include rewriting maintenance service contracts, collecting money for ambulance services, and managing funds for a future drainage utility.

“Think of how much more efficient we could be if we could make decisions like this at the local level,” Kooiker said. “We’d still be accountable to the voters and we wouldn’t have to go to Pierre and bombard them with requests every legislative session.”

The Rapid City Journal reported 10 South Dakota cities have adopted home rule charters that give them more local control. Those communities, including the state’s largest city, Sioux Falls, have the authority to do whatever state law does not specifically forbid.

Rapid City is not a home rule city, which can be created only by a special local election. Yvonne Taylor, executive director of the South Dakota Municipal League, says it’s difficult to get residents interested in those issues.

Most of the South Dakota cities that adopted a home rule charter did so in the late 1990s and early 2000s, Taylor said. Sioux Falls adopted home rule in 1995.

“A city the size of Sioux Falls, the regular state laws just weren’t working for them. They had outgrown state law,” she said.

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