Category: columns-business

Posted on by — Leave a comment

Requiem for a Gorilla

By Cory Allen Heidelberger

Back in the spring of 2007, Union County was abuzz with talk of the “Gorilla Project.” The mystery project got its name because rumors said it would be huge. For months, nobody spilled the beans, from local land agents working on acquiring 5,000 acres for the project, to Governor M. Michael Rounds, who was working behind the scenes to entice whoever the big developer was to Union County.

In June that year, Dallas-based oil company Hyperion announced that the Gorilla was to be a new tar-sands oil refinery. Boosters said it would bring thousands of jobs and big property tax revenues to Union County while promoting American energy independence. Opponents said it would overburden local roads and public services, wreck some of the best farmland in South Dakota with air and water pollution, and delay America’s kicking of its unhealthy fossil fuel habit.

Now, after five years of public controversy, the Gorilla is dead. As first reported by Julie Ann Miller in the Akron (IA) Hometowner, Hyperion started letting its land options in Union County expire at the end of August. Now it has let expire options on all 5,000 of the acres it was eyeing for its refinery.

Don’t be surprised: since 2007, there’s been strong doubt that Hyperion could build a refinery in Elk Point. Hyperion has never built anything this big. It has no infrastructure in place to get Canadian tar sands oil to Union County. The recession stunted oil demand and investor risk-taking. The profitable market for such refined product is overseas, in China, India, and other rising economies, far from Elk Point. One needs no tree-hugging hippie glasses to see that the Hyperion refinery lacked a compelling business case.

Even if the refinery were viable, it would have turned Elk Point into our own mini-Williston. Like the straining oil-boom towns on North Dakota’s Bakken formation, Elk Point would have become a town transformed and dominated by a single industry. Union County would have banked on processing finite, toxic materials from far away into fuels to be used farther away. And when the economy shifts away from fossil fuels (watch for that within our lifetimes), an oil refinery-based Elk Point would become our own mini-Detroit.

Farming is a gamble, too, but Union County’s rich soil won’t run out the way tar sands oil will. Union County’s farmers can produce wealth from their own resources and sell that wealth for healthy use in their own community.

Union County and South Dakota need economic development. But we don’t need gorillas that tear up our best resources and make us more dependent on unsustainable outside economic forces. The death of Hyperion’s gorilla bodes well for all South Dakotans who value clean air, clean water, and economic self-reliance.

Cory Allen Heidelberger writes the Madville Times political blog. He grew up on the shores of Lake Herman. He studied math and history at SDSU and information systems at DSU, and is currently teaching French at Spearfish High School. A longtime country dweller, Cory is enjoying “urban” living with his family in Spearfish.



Posted on by — Leave a comment

Dairy Queen in the Body Politic

By Cory Allen Heidelberger

Today (Thursday, July 26) is Dairy Queen’s Miracle Treat Day. This nationwide event raises money for Children’s Miracle Network, which helps local families cover costs when they have to take their kids to the hospital for serious injuries and illnesses. You buy a Blizzard, and the money goes to CMN. Pretty cool.

The Madison Dairy Queen has led the nation in Miracle Treat Day fundraising every year since 2006. Madison DQ owner DeLon Mork has found the right combination of promotion, hustle, and heart to distinguish his store as a Blizzard powerhouse.

The focus of Miracle Treat Day is helping kids and families in need, not scoring political points. Yet this convergence of business and public service carries some useful political lessons. Let me pull out my left-right poli-goggles and see what Miracle Treat Day at the Madison Dairy Queen says about how we interact in the body politic:

1. Leaning Right: Corporations. I occasionally grumble that big chain-store corporations harm small communities, killing local businesses and reducing opportunities for independent entrepreneurship. Dairy Queen is a big corporation, but its franchise model seems to leave plenty of room for local entrepreneurship. Mork has corporate rules to follow, but he’s been free to develop his own marketing for Miracle Treat Day. DQ bosses have come to Madison to learn from Mork’s success. Mork’s achievements, not just on Miracle Treat Day but in year-round business, have built him a platform from which to act as a community leader. Contra Romney, corporations are not people… but they do help people do some good things.

2. Leaning Left: Cooperation. Miracle Treat Day exists because Dairy Queen and the rest of us recognize that unexpected medical costs are more than pretty much any family can bear on their own. Rugged individualism doesn’t pay most medical bills; cooperative effort does.

3. Leaning Left: Communitarianism. Madison rightly pats Mork on the back for his efforts. Mork consistently responds to such praise by pointing to all the other people who make the Dairy Queen’s success possible. He lauds his staff, who hustle all day to feed a line of people that circles the store and spills back out the door. He thanks a community that turns out in droves to support the cause. Mork might paraphrase President Obama and say of Miracle Treat Day, “I didn’t build that; the community did.” Like Mork, the entire town takes greatest pride in the things we do together. We tout that togetherness, downplaying our selfish interests and emphasizing the good that comes from community effort.

But as anyone in Madison will tell you on Miracle Treat Day, the big debate is not between Left and Right. It’s between Oreo and Choco Cherry Love. Grab a friend from the opposite party, and share a warm fuzzy Blizzard!

Cory Allen Heidelberger writes the Madville Times political blog. He grew up on the shores of Lake Herman. He studied math and history at SDSU and information systems at DSU, and is currently teaching French at Spearfish High School.



Posted on by — Leave a comment

Thrift Store Debate Defies Political Labels

By Cory Allen Heidelberger

Since I got back to Madison for the summer, I’ve been blog-embroiled in my hometown’s latest controversy: a proposal by a handful of local boosters to build a million-dollar, 18,000-square foot community thrift store.

There are lots of facets to this story, but one that hasn’t come up is political ideology. I know the thrift store steering committee includes at least one Republican and one Democrat. One shop owner who strongly opposes the thrift store put my blog URL on a bright yellow poster in her Main Street window. I have yet to ask her whom she’s voting for in November or whether she considers herself a political Lefty like me. Another business owner opposing the project has frequently declared himself a firm believer in free enterprise, but his econo-fundamentalism didn’t stop him from giving me two hours of his time to talk about his concerns about the thrift store.

Trying to view this local issue through ideological lenses gets confusing. The thrift store proposal arises from leftish concerns that government funding for local poverty assistance programs may dry up. The thrift store organizers say they would donate the store’s profits to help the poor. Asking for taxpayer dollars ($150K from Madison, $150K from Lake County) to subsidize the store seems like it could only come from us lefties. However, privatizing assistance to the poor–moving authority over tax dollars from public agencies to a private non-profit–sets off alarm bells similar to those that ring in my head when I hear conservatives talk about replacing public schools with private options.

The thrift store proposal could win conservative points by emphasizing the free market as a tool for generating assistance for the poor. Yet as an economic development tool (and the organizers make that an auxiliary selling point), the thrift store plan seems to reject a free market solution: it knocks down two functional commercial buildings and a third vacant building on which no daring entrepreneur wants to roll her capitalist dice.

The usefulness of political labels breaks down somewhere between Washington, D.C., and Madison, S.D. I can point to Lake County neighbors who argue bitterly with my defenses of Barack Obama the usurping socialist (no, he’s not!) but who agree with me completely on the boondogglery of the community thrift store. I also know one good Dem whose socialist impulses lead him to support this project.

That’s one reason I like local politics: we have to drop the ideological labels and prefab talking points and get down to the practical questions of how to spend our tax dollars.

Cory Allen Heidelberger writes the Madville Times political blog. He grew up on the shores of Lake Herman. He studied math and history at SDSU and information systems at DSU, and is currently teaching French at Spearfish High School.

Posted on by — Leave a comment

The Real Cost of Renewable Energy

By Ken Blanchard

I took a few minutes last week to determine what wind and solar energy actually cost. Proceeding on the assumption that the real cost of a turtle is how much cash ends up in the hands of the turtle seller, per shell, I wondered how much consumers pay for a given unit of energy and how much other money producers get for various forms of energy generation.

The average price of residential electricity in the U.S. is about 12 cents per kilowatt hour but varies widely by state, according to the Energy Information Administration. In South Dakota it is nine cents. In Alaska it is almost twice that and in Hawaii, three times that. Doing a quick conversion, Americans pay on average about $120 per megawatt hour for electricity.

That is not quite the price of electricity, for energy producers also receive state and federal subsidies. Add the subsidy to the retail price and you get a reasonable estimate of the real cost. The Institute for Energy Research calculated the cost of federal subsidies from the EIA’s production reports. I cannot find anywhere that the EIA actually tells us what we need to know here: subsidies per unit of energy produced.

The IER finds that in 2007 natural gas and petroleum liquids received about $0.25 in Federal subsidies for every megawatt hour produced. Coal gets $0.44; hydroelectric, $0.67; and nuclear power gets $1.69. About 87% of our electricity is produced from those sources. Given that, the subsidies add up to considerable amounts of money. The total increase is still only a small fraction of the cost of the energy.

In 2007, subsidies for wind and solar power per megawatt hour were $23 and $24 respectively. That obviously dwarfs the subsidies for conventional sources and it means that electricity from these sources costs considerably more. A megawatt hour from coal would cost $120.44. A megawatt hour of wind or solar generated electricity costs $144.

That was back in 2007. As a result of the stimulus bill, subsidies to all sources of energy increased, but the subsidies for renewables ballooned. Here are the numbers for 2010:

For solar power, they were $775.64 per megawatt hour, for wind $56.29, for nuclear $3.14, for hydroelectric power $0.82, for coal $0.64 and for natural gas and petroleum liquids $0.64.

That means that wind energy is now costing over $170 per unit. Solar power is off the charts at almost $900. I admit some astonishment that the solar industry in the U.S. is not booming rather than wobbling. At that level of reimbursement, you’d think they’d be giving away whole house solar instillations for joining Netflix.

Proponents of renewable energy will argue that there are large costs involved in fossil fuel production and consumption (environmental degradation, health, etc.). That may be true, but it gets the cart before the horse. One turtle may be cooler than another and one form of energy generation may be more desirable than another. That doesn’t change how much the turtle or the megawatt hour costs.

It misses something else, equally important. Subsidies shift wealth from one place to another. Wealth shifted to renewables is wealth generated by non-renewables. As long as the subsidies last, they don’t reduce the secondary costs of traditional energy.

What they do accomplish, with mathematical certainty, is to make energy more expensive in the short run. This is not ruinous only because the renewables produce less that 3% of our electricity. Of course, it may be that the subsidies will eventually kick in and wind and solar power will dramatically increase production while prices fall precipitously. Is there any sign that that is happening? How efficient would these machines have to become (10 times as efficient?) and how much turf would we have to cover with pinwheels and panels before these sources constituted 20% of electricity generation?

Wind power and solar power are pretty ideas. They have been the sources of the future for as long as the monorail has been the transportation of the future. Maybe one day they will really pan out. Right now, these industries are neither producing jobs nor economic growth. They are absorbing both.

Dr. Ken Blanchard is a professor of Political Science at Northern State University and writes for the Aberdeen American News and the blog South Dakota Politics.

Posted on by — Leave a comment

Drilling for the Truth

By Ken Blanchard

It would appear that the President of the United States is appallingly ignorant about energy and really, really bad at math. Here is a juicy quote from Mr. Obama’s recent campaign speech at the Copper Mountain Solar Project in Boulder City, Nevada. From the official White House transcript:

We have subsidized oil companies for a century. We want to encourage production of oil and gas, and make sure that wherever we’ve got American resources, we are tapping into them. But they don’t need an additional incentive when gas is $3.75 a gallon, when oil is $1.20 a barrel, $1.25 a barrel. They don’t need additional incentives. They are doing fine.

Did you get that? The President of the United States thinks that a barrel of oil costs a dollar and twenty five cents. He is only off by about $105.

It is possible that the President really said or meant to say that a barrel of oil costs $125. It seems likely, however, that the official transcript is what Obama was reading when he took the stand. So far, no one at the White House has bothered to correct it. If his figures had been accurate, nothing useful could be inferred from them.

For a better case in point, see this passage in the President’s speech:

An energy strategy that focuses only on drilling and not on an energy strategy that will free ourselves from our dependence on foreign oil, that’s a losing strategy. That’s not a strategy I’m going to pursue. America uses 20 percent of the world’s oil, and we’ve got 2 percent of the world’s oil reserves. Think about — I wasn’t a math major, but I just want — (laughter) — if you’re using 20, you’ve only got 2, that means you got to bring in the rest from someplace else. Why wouldn’t we want to start finding alternatives that make us less reliant, less dependent on what’s going on in the Middle East? (Applause.)

Here the logic is unmistakable. The President is arguing that we must be importing 90% of our oil from other nations. Leave alone for a moment the fact that the argument is utterly stupid. Does he really not know what the genuine figure is? Either he is ignorant about a matter of national importance, or he is lying. Here is the real figure from a recent blockbuster piece by Clifford Kraus and Eric Lipton in the New York Times:

In 2011, the country imported just 45 percent of the liquid fuels it used, down from a record high of 60 percent in 2005.

No, the President is no math major. But consider Mr. Obama’s substantive argument: that we need to invest in alternative energy in order to free ourselves from reliance on foreign oil. In fact, we seem to be well on our way to energy independence. Contrary to the President’s argument, the supply is coming from, well, wells.

Not only has the United States reduced oil imports from members of the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries by more than 20 percent in the last three years, it has become a net exporter of refined petroleum products like gasoline for the first time since the Truman presidency. The natural gas industry, which less than a decade ago feared running out of domestic gas, is suddenly dealing with a glut so vast that import facilities are applying for licenses to export gas to Europe and Asia.

National oil production, which declined steadily to 4.95 million barrels a day in 2008 from 9.6 million in 1970, has risen over the last four years to nearly 5.7 million barrels a day. The Energy Department projects that daily output could reach nearly seven million barrels by 2020. Some experts think it could eventually hit 10 million barrels — which would put the United States in the same league as Saudi Arabia.

In fact, a policy that focuses solely on drilling (if you mean by that, as the President seems to mean, fossil fuel extraction) is in fact“an energy strategy that will free ourselves [is freeing us] from our dependence on foreign oil.” By contrast, the President’s alternative energy strategy is contributing nothing toward that end. It is unlikely to do so in the foreseeable future and cannot possibly do so in the near term.

President Obama suddenly wants to take credit for a boom in oil production. As the NYTs piece makes clear,”this turnabout is a story of industry-friendly policies started by President Bush and largely continued by President Obama,” policies that Obama opposed as a candidate and that are contrary to the policies he favored when first elected. That’s the buried lead in the NYT piece: Dumb Cowboy from Texas Secures U.S. Energy Independence.

You can decide for yourself which set of policies he should have pursued. What is certain is that he is feeding adoring audiences with a diet of falsehoods leavened with stupid arguments. It is scarcely impossible that the President is as ignorant about energy policy as he seems above. I will be more charitable. He just doesn’t give a rat’s ass about the truth of anything that he is saying.


Dr. Ken Blanchard is a professor of Political Science at Northern State University and writes for the Aberdeen American News and the blog South Dakota Politics.

Posted on by — Leave a comment

Wearing o’ the Green Shoes

By Rebecca Johnson

I’m German, Norwegian and Dutch, but everybody’s Irish on St. Patrick’s Day. And I can’t wait to celebrate at the St. Patty’s Day Mile in Sioux Falls. I’m actually running the 5 mile race. There’s a 5k too, or if you’re really tough you do the”Irishman” and run all three courses. It’s sort of like the Ironman, but shorter, drier and with funny costumes.

Race director is Steve Kurtenbach, owner of Allsportcentral, a leading business for road race and triathlon promotion. I’ve seen Kurtenbach at a lot of the races I’ve run, but I didn’t realize that the St. Patty’s Day Mile launched his successful company.

Kurtenbach owned Bay Technology Group in 2000.”We were looking for ways to show you could do entire businesses on the web and there weren’t a lot of examples,” says Kurtenbach. Bay Technology decided to promote the Phillips Avenue Mile before Sioux Falls’ St. Patrick’s Day Parade (the name was changed to the St. Patty’s Day Mile the following year.) Internet businesses were fairly new at that time and the intent was to show clients they were safe. The event was paper-free, offering registration, payment transactions and results entirely online.

“Once we started doing that and putting on the race we decided this is actually a pretty fun thing to do,” says Kurtenbach. Allsportcentral’s official launch was in July of 2000 with the”No Rest till Jazzfest” race. Kurtenbach closed Bay Technologies eight years ago to focus on Allsportcentral due to what I like to call the”fun factor.” The company now has clients worldwide and race organizers have the opportunity to hire Allsportcentral for onsite services like race timing and photography.”The majority of the events we travel to are in the five state area and a lot in the Caribbean,” he says.

But Kurtenbach will be close to home for Saturday’s race. Allsportcentral’s new offices are located at the 8th and Railroad Center in downtown Sioux Falls and all of Saturday’s races end nearby at 5th and Phillips Avenue. The post-race party is just across the street from the company’s new digs held at Monks House of Ale Repute.

You might make some money at the party if you are speedy. Anyone who breaks a course record or Irishman record is awarded at least $100. The mile’s course record is 4 minutes and 34 seconds. This year if a man finishes the mile in under four minutes, they’ll receive $100 for breaking the course record and an additional $500 for running the mile under four minutes. Women get the same opportunity for running it under 4 minutes and 30 seconds.

Overall race, age division, and costume contest winners are sure to by delighted by their leprechaun shoe trophies. Kurtenbach says they are made by a leprechaun cobbler that Allsportcentral pays with a pot of gold. Keep this on the down low, but Kurtenbach really makes the trophies with one of his good friends. They order the green shoes from suppliers and mount them on homemade bases. A participant who won two trophies was actually seen wearing them later on in the evening. The costume contest winners are chosen by loudest applause.”We’ve had people dressed up like life-sized Guinness bottles and hundreds of people dressed up like leprechauns,” says Kurtenbach. One year a guy dressed up as a green running shoe. I hope he comes back. I would like to see that.

And lest you think this event is just about silly debauchery, I should tell you that it also raises money for charity. Teams can fundraise in advance, and the team with the most participants gets $200 to donate to a charity of their choice. The charity is then added as one of the official event charities. Last year’s was Helping Hands for Haiti. Funds raised also go to the SDSU Nursing Student Association, and Augustana Athletic Training Students Association.

Posted on by — Leave a comment

Land of Infinitely Interesting Eateries

By Katie Hunhoff

Our magazine’s writers literally savored the opportunity to explore the far reaches of South Dakota earlier this year for a big feature on the state’s ethnic restaurants. We visited dozens of interesting restaurants, and along the way we discovered that entrepreneurism is prospering in our towns and cities

Every restaurant had a story, but Maria Pontiero told us one of the best. She runs Nucci’s Italian Bistro in Sioux Falls, but the story of the bistro began long ago in Italy when a young man named Gaetano Pontiero moved to the United States after WWII.

The Pontieros had been farmers in Italy, and Gaetano dreamed of continuing that tradition in his new country. When he learned of land for sale in South Dakota, he moved to Kimball. He and his brother ran a restaurant there for 20 years and Gaetano saved his money until he could buy a farm. Then he traveled to Italy to find a bride. He courted a pretty girl named Rita and six months later he brought her to his new Kimball farm.

They had a daughter, Maria, who grew up amid cattle, sheep, goats and rabbits. Rita loved to cook, so she worked at several restaurants around Kimball when she was not busy on the farm. When Gaetano finally retired, the family moved to Sioux Falls to fulfill Rita’s dream of having her own Italian restaurant. They put together a cozy little place in a strip mall at 57th & Western on the south side of town, and today Maria helps her mom serve sandwiches, lasagna, pasta and other specialties to happy customers. They call it Nucci’s, a term of endearment in Rita’s native Calabria.

Everywhere we went, we found equally interesting restaurateurs. At Gregory, Joe Nguyen and his family run The Homesteader. With a name like that, you expect to find good steaks and you will. But The Homesteader chefs also serve kung pao chicken and other Asian treats. The walls show off the work of Burke taxidermist Pete Liewer.

In Brookings we met the Theodosopoulus family, owners of a three-generation Greek eatery called George’s Pizza. The founders, Spiro and Yoita, still show up every morning to make their special sauces and doughs.

Robert Wong, one of the world’s great nature photographers, exhibits his pictures in a Chinese restaurant he runs with his wife, Ying, on Mount Rushmore Drive in Rapid City.

Retired soccer star Sidney Zanin runs Guadalajara in Pierre, along with his wife Elizabeth. German immigrant Waldraut “Wally” Matush started serving wiener schnitzel, bratwurst and filet mignon at Hill City’s Alpine Inn in 1974. Today her daughter Monika manages the restaurant.

Hungry yet? Walleye and steak will always be our staples but when it comes to eating, South Dakota has truly become the Land of Infinite Variety.

Editor’s note: South Dakota’s ethnic eateries were featured in the Jan/Feb 2012 issue of South Dakota Magazine. To order a copy or to subscribe, call us at 800-456-5117.

Posted on by — Leave a comment

Give “Tanks” to Your Community Do-Gooder

By Heidi Marsh

It seems to be the season for giving. Girl Scouts are trudging through snow packed sidewalks to sell cookies, school clubs are peddling magazine subscriptions and city halls are hosting dances for volunteer firefighters, new senior centers and some just to pay the heating bill.

In my small town, I’m seeing even more. Neighbors racing to scoop each other’s driveways. Dads spending entire weekends coaching youth basketball tournaments. The list goes on and on.

Cenex stations across the Midwest are recognizing those volunteers through their Tanks of Thanks program. Nominate your community do-gooder at TanksofThanks.com and they’ll be placed in a drawing for a $50 gas card. A dozen gift cards are given out each month.

In addition to the monthly drawing, each Cenex dealer or retailer can also give away gift cards to individuals they see doing good in their local communities. By the end of 2012, it is anticipated that Tanks of Thanks will have recognized more than 2,500 people in small and rural communities across the country.

That’s a lot of free trips to the gas pump.

Posted on by — Leave a comment

Technology: Friend or Foe to Rural South Dakota?

By Bernie Hunhoff

The 35 familes of St. Agnes Catholic Church of Sigel are wondering if this is their last Christmas as a parish community in Yankton County. And down the road a bit, the same families’ post offices in Utica and Lesterville are also on the chopping block. Both towns lost the last of their schools in the 1990s, and they’re probably just hoping that they don’t lose the last beer & burger joint.

Is it any wonder that Susy and Johnny have left for jobs in Sioux Falls and Omaha?

We constantly hear that technology is going to be a friend to rural America, allowing us to run a business no matter how far we live from the consumers of the world. But the hype isn’t matching reality. Not in rural areas. Not even in urban areas, if you believe Peter Thiel. And you should.

Thiel is the visonary founder of PayPal. He’s made billions on dot.coms, and put some of the early money into Facebook. But he told the New Yorker last week that he’s disappointed in the technology revolution because it hasn’t created the jobs or the quality of life advances that he’d hoped.

If the urbane Peter Thiel is disappointed, imagine how the familes of the Sigel community might be feeling this Christmas. Since 1886, they’ve done everything that Rome could have asked. They built a church, watched it blow away in a cyclone in 1907, and then built another. They’ve cared for a growing cemetery, educated their children to the glories of the Church, rasied money for the overseas poor, helped one another in hard times and celebrated together in the good times.

But because cars can easily transport them on good, asphalt roads to the next parish 15 miles away — and because more young men would rather work on Wall Street than attend the seminary, and because young women aren’t yet allowed in seminaries, and a dozen other becauses out of their control — they are unsure whether they’ll have a functioning parish in 2012.

The nearby post offices are also ripe with becauses. Technology made letters obsolete. Businesses gravitated to bigger cities because they couldn’t get broadband in the small towns. Immense equipment and high-tech seeds and pesticides made it possible for one man and his remote-control tractor to tend an entire township, so there are fewer mailboxes per mile. The postmasters in Utica and Lesterville could surely see that little brown trucks and cell phones were running circles around them, but no leadership came from above on how to compete.

So technology — thus far — has not been a great friend to all small towns.

We may see an alternative example, however, as the 2012 South Dakota legislative session unfolds. A big divide has occurred in the state for several years over whether many of the state’s 34 emergency call centers should be consolidated to just a few. Thanks again to technology — especially GPS — a state our size could probably be served by one 911 center and it could probably be located in India or Ireland. We no longer need a local operator to tell the deputy or the fire chief to head down Walshtown Road and turn left where the big cottonwood tree stood before it was struck by lightning 10 years ago.

Urban legislators and top law enforcement officials wanted to put major restrictions on the smallest 911 centers, including a requirement that every center be staffed 24/7 by two operators. Of course, that would be hunky-dory in an ideal world. But it hardly makes sense in small, rural counties where the dispatcher probably gets only a call a day and tends to a dozen other responsibilities while awaiting that call.

When emergency response leaders realized that the legislature was loathe to close rural centers, other ideas began to surface. Maybe, someone suggested, we could use technology to link the small centers together so the calls might roll from one town to another if the local dispatcher is already on a call, or running errands while on a lunch break. That seems to be the compromise that is part of a reform package heading to the legislature in January.

Technology is neither friend nor foe. It’s what we make of it. Could USPS become a player in the broadband revolution that’s badly needed in rural America? Could the Pope beam a Sunday Mass to every Catholic parish on Earth?

South Dakota won’t be the place we love today if it becomes a state of three or four cities, separated by economic hinterlands of unemployed, unchurched and unhappy people. Granted, that’s an extreme scenario. The good news is that we have more solutions and choices available than ever before in history, thanks to technology and the internet. But we need to make it work for rural South Dakota.

Masses at St. Agnes Catholic Church of Sigel north of Yankton were recently suspended, but parishioners will now be able to celebrate masses over the holidays before awaiting word on the future availability of priests. (Photo: Katie Hunhoff)
Posted on by — Leave a comment

Yoga’s Hot in South Dakota

By Rebecca Johnson

South Dakota may not be the yoga mecca of the U.S., but there are classes galore at fitness centers and studios throughout the state. Yankton alone has at least seven yoga teachers, and two of them work right here at South Dakota Magazine. I personally teach a basic, flowing style of yoga — linking poses with the breath then ending class with a guided relaxation. And it’s not just an exercise class — yoga is a 4,000-year-old tradition originating in India that helps to strengthen the body, improve flexibility, and calm the mind. An added benefit for us in the Western world is that it helps to manage stress.

One thing South Dakota has lacked is a hot yoga studio. Hot yoga classes typically take place in a room heated to 105 degrees Fahrenheit with 30% humidity. I tried a workshop once at the Dharma Room in Sioux Falls. I expected it to be a vigorous, powerful class, but was surprised by the slowness and gentleness of the practice. The class consisted of 26 poses and two breathing exercises. The heat allowed me to feel more flexible in poses that normally would have been out of my reach. But, since it was a one-time workshop, I hadn’t been able to have a go at it again.

Now I am in luck. Two hot yoga studios have popped up in South Dakota in the last few months and both have events this weekend. Deena Rushton opened Yogaversity in November. It’s located in the new Old Market Galleria in downtown Brookings. The studio is hosting their first workshop tomorrow from 3 p.m. to 6 p.m. and the cost is only $20.

Also new to South Dakota is Santosha Hot Yoga at 5003 S. Bur Oak Place in Sioux Falls. Their grand opening is tomorrow with the first class starting at 10:00 am. According to instructor Jennifer Long’s blog, Saturday’s class has a waiting list, but you may still be able to get in on Sunday’s class at 4:30 p.m. I recommend calling 275-YOGA to sign up. All December classes are only $5.

Yoga in a 105 degree setting is not for you? Then try a different type of class in your community. It’s a fantastic way to improve your overall health and you will be glad that you did.