Gov. Larry Rhoden hosted a Tri-State Governors’ Conference between South Dakota, Iowa and Nebraska.
While the three states are different in many ways, some of the issues the tri-state area faces are closely aligned. From cybersecurity to growing pushes to revisit nuclear power to agriculture, all three have some issues in common.
Gov. Larry Rhoden said there’s also an underlying theme with infrastructure and protecting it.
“That’s one step, like I had mentioned, I established the GRIT – which is the Governor’s Resilient Infrastructure Task Force – because I think in this day and age, we see attacks on our states every single day by the 100s of thousands of cyberattacks and different pressures to our infrastructure," Rhoden said. "We are being proactive and taking an all of the above look through that task force of what we can do to bolster our protections.”
He said that includes protecting and guarding the safety of citizens now and in the future.
“They’re not going to get fixed immediately. But we need to," Rhoden said. "You know, the best time to start was last year, but we’re going to start now taking bigger steps, more deliberate steps to at least know where we’re vulnerable and what we can do to bolster our strength.”
A lot of those infrastructure gaps are going to come through dollars, and dollars are something some say won’t be easy to come by in the future for states like South Dakota. That’s because federal funding cuts mean states have to come up with more financial support on their own.
South Dakota has seen its largest funding source, the state sales tax, decline in recent years.
Rhoden pointed to past financial decisions regarding one-time federal funds during the COVID-19 pandemic, saying South Dakota is poised for future infrastructure success.
“So, we’ve made a lot of investments," Rhoden said. "We’ll play our cards as their dealt to us at the federal level, but we’ll continue to look for ways to strengthen our infrastructure.”
He pointed to setting aside money for the prison project, rural broadband internet and water projects as specific examples.
