They claimed verbiage in S.D. statute 45-1 (which states all water in principle is the people’s and is kept in trust), superseded property owners, South Dakota and U.S. Constitution explicit private property rights. Private property owners, tired of GF&P facilitated abuses of their Constitutional private property rights, sued for relief. On March 15, the S.D. Supreme Court ruled in the property owners favor and prohibited GF&P, or the public from entering or facilitating the use of the water or ice on the property owners’ property without their permission.

In an apparent attempt to influence the situation back to where the state was able to exploit property owners, Gov. Dennis Daugaard created a crisis by ordering numerous unrelated public waters closed to public access in addition to the handful of private properties ordered by the Court. The governor pushed the claim that the Legislature needed to have a special session to open the public areas the governor closed.

It was an effective ruse to facilitate efforts to replace portions of the overturned illegal policy. Legislation was pushed seeking statutory authority to restrict property owners rights on the waters on their property and returning certain public access to the waters, as well as more power for the GF&P. The legislation was touted as a “great compromise.”

I opposed the legislation and voted against it because it in fact compromises South Dakotans’ constitutionally protected private property rights. It passed with a two-thirds majority. It will be revisited again next session with impetus to further infringe on your property rights.

South Dakota Constitution Bill of Rights, Article VI; paragraph 1. “Inherent rights. All men are born equally free and independent; and have certain inherent rights, among those which are those of enjoying and defending life and liberty, of acquiring and protecting property and the pursuit of happiness. To secure these rights governments are instituted among men deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.”

Your state government is entrusted to “secure” your rights, not compromise them because the state government entities want to exploit your property to make money from the people who want access to it. South Dakota has hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars in numerous banks and financial institutions, which are kept in trust. If you walk into those institutions demanding access to your public’s money in trust? You will probably end up in jail as you have no Constitutional right to those monies even as is there no Constitutional right to access water legally accumulated on our fellow South Dakotans’ land.

Your legislators are supposed to be diligent protectors of your Constitutional rights, and act as checks and balances on the legislature, as well as the executive and judiciary branches, because government’s very nature is to acquire more power at your expense.

Unfortunately, all too often South Dakotans are seeing their legislators raising taxes, raising fees, compromising your rights for them to go along, to get along, to get a head. Private property rights are the very foundation of prosperity and freedom itself. My duty is to continue to exert my all in defending and preserving your rights, not compromising them. Because as John Adams warns us from the past … “a Constitution of Government once changed from Freedom, can never be restored. Liberty once lost is lost forever.”