This interview originally aired on In the Moment on SDPB Radio.
Americans for Prosperity, a political advocacy group, took three South Dakota legislators on a trip to the southern border. There's a lot we don't know about that trip.
That's because lobbyists in South Dakota are only required to disclose their name and employer. Nothing else.
Seth Tupper discusses his investigation into the state's lax lobbyist disclosure requirements. He joins In the Moment to talk about the impacts of South Dakota's limited transparency in this industry.
Plus, he unpacks his recent reporting on Gov. Noem, from her use of an emergency fund to her investment in an ethanol plant.
Tupper is editor-in-chief of the South Dakota Searchlight.
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Lori Walsh:
Well, when you strip down lobbying to its very basics, it's all about trying to influence a politician's belief and therefore their vote. And that practice has a huge impact on what gets into the law books.
But as Seth Tupper reported in South Dakota Searchlight, there is incredibly little transparency in the industry, at least in South Dakota. A lot of times we don't really know what the state's lobbyists do or what they spend on what they're doing.
Seth is editor-in-chief of the South Dakota Searchlight, and he is with me from SDPB's Black Hills Surgical Hospital studio in Rapid City to break it down.
Seth, welcome back. Thanks for being here.
Seth Tupper:
You're welcome. Thanks for having me.
Lori Walsh:
Dan Ahlers was just talking about things that were a voter approved and altered by the state legislature in the future, and lobbying is one of these issues where voters have expressed frustration before with what we don't know about lobbying.
You did the research on this. Tell me a little bit about that first, and then we'll talk about how it's playing out in the state right now.
Seth Tupper:
Yeah. So my interest in this was triggered in 2015. The Center for Public Integrity, which is a nationwide nonprofit, was hiring people in every state to be a state researcher on what they called the state integrity investigation. And they had done this, I think, at least once before. I think it was 2012.
And our mutual friend, the late great Denise Ross had done the research then, and it was a really big time commitment and it was a great freelance gig, but she just didn't have the time or desire to do it again. So she asked me if I was interested, I said I was and undertook the work.
And basically the Center for Public Integrity compiled a list of if we had the ideal set of laws in every state to prevent corruption, what would those laws and policies and practices be? And they made a recipe or a very big laundry list of those types of laws.
And then they hired somebody in every state to research. Does your state have these laws and these policies and these practices, or to what extent do they have them? So basically as a researcher, they gave me that list and said, "Go about researching this." And I had to read all kinds of state laws and state policies and interview people and talk to people and come up with answers.
Yes, we have this law, or we have it partially, or, yes, we have it, but it's not enforced. And then I had to turn my research over for independent review, and everybody in all 50 states did the same thing. And eventually they came out with this big report on all 50 states and how they ranked regarding their laws to prevent corruption.
And we ranked an F, and one of our worst categories was lobbying disclosure.
Lori Walsh:
Yeah. What an education though. Now I feel I can ask you anything about this, and this comes up again because three state lawmakers go to the US southern border. Who are they funded by? Now they tell us about the trip. They're very public about what they learned, but we really don't know how much it costs. So tell me why you circled back to writing the column in the Searchlight that you just did and the inspiration for it really?
Seth Tupper:
Well, it has always been on my mind since 2015. And just to back up a little bit, the reason why is prior to that, I had never really seen the lobbying spending disclosure reports that are filed in South Dakota.
At that time, they weren't even on the internet. So I had to request them back in 2015 from the Secretary of State's office. And when I got them, I started looking at these forms and almost all of them just had the lobbyist's name and who they worked for. And then there's like 15 lines to report their expenditures and it says, "attach additional sheets." And nobody ever reported any expenditures.
Just form after form, after form, after form, dozens and hundreds of forms that are just blank except for a person's name and their employer. So of course, I thought, "What in the world is going on here?"
Well, found in the research that we have, we have so many exemptions in our lobbying disclosure laws that basically everything a lobbyist does is exempted from disclosure as an expense. We don't require them to disclose how much they're paid by their employer. We don't require them to disclose which bills they lobbied on, et cetera, et cetera. So I've always known that since the 2015 state integrity investigation.
So recently when it was three lawmakers, Casey Crabtree, a senator from Madison; and Will Mortenson from Pierre; and Tony Venhuizen from Sioux Falls, the letter to our representatives are all Republicans. They were very public. And there were some stories written in other media about the fact that they went on this trip to the border with Mexico in Texas to get a tour and see what was going on down there.
And Americans for Prosperity took them on that tour. And Americans for Prosperity is a giant national political nonprofit that basically spends millions to influence politics and policy and laws. And there an offshoot of Americans for Prosperity called the Americans for Prosperity Foundation, it turns out funded this trip.
And it just struck me how odd I knew immediately that because of the exemptions in our lobbying disclosure, none of this would have to be formally disclosed as far as who paid for it, how much was spent, et cetera.
And I compared that in my commentary on our website to the fact that if I don't make political donations since I'm a journalist, but if I was just a non-journalist, I decided I wanted to give Casey Crabtree $150 for his campaign. He'd have to disclose that, my name, my address and the exact amount I gave on his campaign finance forums.
But if I represent a major national nonprofit with like $100 million in revenue a year like Americans for Prosperity, and I want to pay for a trip to take three lawmakers to the Texas border and pay for their flights, their lodging, their food, their ground transportation, I don't have to disclose any of that.
It's just a really odd situation. I don't think many people would say that's how it was probably intended or how they would want it to work.
Lori Walsh:
Can the lawmakers disclose on their own? We flew coach, we stayed at somebody's house, or we stayed at this hotel. I mean, because they did. I mean, I read Will Mortenson's assessment of what he did. I thought a nuanced approach or what he learned there. You can argue whether or not they should be there or what they learned and what they're going to do next.
My question to you is, can the lawmakers say, "Here is a running list of everywhere we ate and it was steak on this night and it was fast food on the..."
I mean, maybe nobody would, but they could?
Seth Tupper:
Well, certainly they could, but then of course they'd have to deal with Americans for Prosperity. And this is a group that went to the US Supreme Court with a case to keep from being required to disclose their top donors when California tried to make them do that. So whether that would be something that would be kosher with Americans for Prosperity, I don't know.
But certainly, yeah, I mean, legislators could disclose a certain level of things.
And when you bring that up, one of the things that's really funny about our lobbying disclosure forms that I just recalled when I read the Old Center for Public Integrity stuff this morning was there's actually a portion on our lobbyist disclosure form that instructs the lobbyists in capital letters do not in caps include a lobbyist salary fee, registration fee, travel, lodging, or personal meal expenses. Those are exempted from disclosure. And there's a all caps bold warning not to disclose that just in case anybody would get the crazy idea that they should disclose more than they have to. That's actually on that form.
Lori Walsh:
When you did this research, most of the lobbyists are South Dakota teachers, Americans for Prosperity, big national organizations.
Who are lobbyists in Pierre?
Seth Tupper:
And the one good thing we do have is at least we require lobbyists to disclose their name and who they're working for, that's about all we get. They disclose that on the disclosure forms.
And when I last looked, there were both the employer and the lobbyist have to file forms, and it looked like there's about 700 and some odd forms that get filed.
So lobbyists for anything and everything you can imagine from, like you say, representing educators to lobbyists for the oil and gas industry, to lobbyists for the carbon pipelines that are proposed to be built in the state to lobbyists for the ethanol industry and farmers groups and whoever might be affected by any law that the legislature might pass.
Almost everybody has some lobbyists that they hire, an organized interest group that they hire.
Lori Walsh:
I want to pivot a little bit in the interest of time to another piece that you wrote about emergency and disaster money paying for border troop deployment.
Because here we are again talking about the US southern border and it's coming out of the emergency and disaster fund. You talked with Lee Schoenbeck and he said, "That's not following the law."
Help us understand what's happening here.
Seth Tupper:
Well, yeah. When we looked into this, the governor announced that she's going to send troops to the border again, which she's done previously. And the trigger for us was one of the last times this happened, she used a donation from some guy out of state who wanted to donate money to help send National Guard troops to the border to assist with securing the border.
This time, she never said anything about any donation. So we asked where the money would come from and yeah, she said it would come from this emergency and disaster fund.
And when we started looking into that, the purpose of that fund, as was stated, when $2.5 million was approved for that fund in the last session in every hearing in the legislature that it was talked about, it was mentioned that this is for tornadoes, natural disasters, hail, drought, whatever, helping South Dakotans recover from these types of disasters.
And nowhere did anybody say that it was intended to send National Guard troops out of state.
Lori Walsh:
All right. So if the president sends the National Guard somewhere, it's federal pay status. If the state sends them this last time it was a private donor which caused controversy, and now it's the federal... I'm sorry, not federal. It's the state emergency and disaster fund. No wonder I'm confused.
So this is the governor saying, "I'm going to send troops to Texas to help out another governor who was requesting my help. The state's going to pay for it."
Am I tracking or am I off base anywhere?
Seth Tupper:
Absolutely.
Lori Walsh:
And can they do anything about it? If legislators say, "Wait, she can't do that," is there a recourse?
Seth Tupper:
Well, I asked Lee Schoenbeck about that, and he was a little bit coy about it. But he just basically said that if this is the way she's going to spend money in a way that we didn't intend, then she might find that she'll have a harder time next year getting her budget requests filled.
Because there were some other examples of times when some legislators, including Lee Schoenbeck, didn't feel like money that they appropriated was being spent in exactly the way they intended. So what can they do? They do control the purse strings, and it doesn't appear that they'll do anything in the meantime.
But if they really want to next winter when the governor makes her budget requests, they have the power to honor those or change them or reject them or whatever they wish.
Lori Walsh:
Yeah. This is not a group of lawmakers who necessarily have the best relationship with this governor to begin with, and this is increasing it.
How do you think it will play out in session?
Seth Tupper:
Well, it's hard to say because people's memory is short, and who knows how many other controversies we're going to wade through between now and then.
But we saw last session that Gov. Noem had a hard time on several of her priorities. She didn't get her repeal of the state grocery sales tax passed and some other things that she proposed didn't get passed through. So certainly there does seem to be a building up of a little bit of animosity and maybe a difficult relationship, the layers of that just keep building.
So we'll have to wait and see if legislators really want to carry through, and we'll have to wait and see what exactly happens with this border deployment and what it costs. And that's all information we'll have to try to get later.
Lori Walsh:
All right. This is a softball question for you, but as I look at this piece, like you reviewed budget documents, public testimony, legislation, state laws, to how important was that level of research to your understanding as a journalist to the intent to what lawmakers said at the time was supposed to happen with this emergency and disaster fund?
Seth Tupper:
Well, it was vital. And to give SDPB a shameless plug, I was able to do that because all of the audio from when legislators appropriated two and a half million to this emergency and disaster fund, every time it was discussed in a committee hearing or on the Senate or house floor, the SDPB was there to capture the audio and archive it. That's what allowed me to go back and listen to all that.
I mean, immediately when we were told the money's coming from the Emergency and disaster fund, my question was, "Well, what's that for?" There's no better way to do that than to go back and listen to and luckily, it was a standalone appropriation bill.
So there was testimony on it repeatedly through the session, and I was able to listen to exactly what everybody had to say about it. And repeatedly it was, again, it's for tornadoes, it's for droughts, it's for major hailstorms, whatever, to help South Dakotans recover.
Lori Walsh:
One more in our remaining minute. This is reporting from Joshua Haiar and Seth Tupper on South Dakota Search Light. And this is about, again, Gov. Noem's investment in an ethanol plant that is part of this Summit Carbon Solutions been very controversial about land owner rights. Again, a lot of in-depth reporting.
Tell me a little bit about your findings and just how challenging was that to suss out?
Seth Tupper:
Well, this one we got lucky because we had a tip on this one, as we mentioned in this story.
But yeah, what's funny about that story is Gov. Noem has been disclosing, I can't remember, I think since maybe 2010 or thereabouts, that she is an investor in this particular ethanol plant in Granite Falls, Minnesota.
And those are disclosure forms that she filed when she was in Congress, where she gets her income from and their disclosure forms that she's been filing since she's been governor. And nobody had really checked to see if she was an investor in an ethanol plant. And we got a tip saying, "Hey, she is."
So yeah, we went and verified that and got all the financial disclosure forms that she filed when she was in Congress and since being governor. And those forms basically are intended to show people and voters where is this candidate or this office holder get their major sources of income so that we know what interest do they have and what conflicts might they have. Yeah.
It turns out that she's an investor in one of the ethanol plants that intends to partner with some carbon solutions on a carbon capture pipeline.
Lori Walsh:
All right. We're going to have to leave it there. I'll send people to southdakotasearchlight.com for the full stories.
Send your tips to Seth Tupper, editor-in-chief, or to in the moment team at [email protected].
Journalism is alive and well in the state of South Dakota. Thanks, Seth. Appreciate it.
Seth Tupper:
You're welcome.
