Trump, Noem killing decorum in Custer County?

Just before Christmas in 2013 Brady Folkens of Brookings died in state custody after a botched diagnosis by an unqualified medical attendant at the former State Treatment and Rehabilitation (STAR) Academy in a South Dakota county named for a war criminal. 

After a public whimper petered out the death camp was shuttered and the sprawling property carved from the heart of Indian Country put up for auction. The stigmatized site was sold four times at sequentially reduced prices after the first buyer bounced a check to the state, the financing was unworkable or the scope of work proved too great. The State of South Dakota had been removing asbestos, lead paint and other hazardous materials even before Brady Folkens died but progress has been slow as the state's gutted environmental division is ill-equipped to advise developers.

In 2019 South Dakota’s NAZI District 30 legislators, Reps. Tim Goodwin, Julie Frye-Mueller and Sen. Lance Russell held court with administrators and board staff from three counties. Nearly everybody in the room said they felt helpless as they lose local control to Pierre.

In 2020 judges in the Seventh Judicial Circuit Court boycotted the Custer County Courthouse which they deemed "unsuitable and insufficient due to safety concerns." 

In 2021 at the courthouse in that South Dakota county named for a war criminal members of a religious splinter group bought the 140 acre compound built in 2005 by now-jailed polygamist Warren Jeffs for $750,000 despite its $9 million valuation. The cult was not delinquent on property taxes but the acreage was sold at a sheriff's auction to settle a $2.1 million judgment against the FLDS, the towns of Hildale, Utah and Arizona City, Colorado. Buyer, Patrick Pipkin is manager of Blue Mountain Ranch of Colorado — a summer camp for at risk adolescents, no less. 

A state park, a peak, a county and a town in the Black Hills are named after a murdererous war criminal. Veteran South Dakota reporters and columnists, Kevin Woster and Tom Lawrence agree that it's time to erase another killer's name from South Dakota maps.

And it's not just Wyoming where local governments are under threat of violence stoked by a felon, the South Dakota governor and a Wyoming US Representative so just forty miles east of Newcastle the South Dakota county named for a war criminal is coming unglued, too.

The ever-increasingly contentious political climate we see on the national level continues to trickle down into local politics, as more and more you can read stories about or see videos about people going to their local county, city or school board members and creating a scene while being downright nasty. 

From time to time you can see it even here in Custer County. Anybody who was at the Buffalo Gap Town Board meeting last week saw it first hand. The meeting vacillated from organized to chaotic, as tensions boiled over multiple times, leading to shouting matches between various members of the public and town board members, or between members of the audience. There were shouts of liar, insults and even people telling other people to go back to where they presumably came from before living in Buffalo Gap. 

At one point in the meeting in Buffalo Gap town attorney Lance Russell stood and implored those gathered that it was important to show decorum at the meeting, and we couldn’t agree more. That’s not how we run governments in this country (despite growing evidence to the contrary). 

And this isn’t just to pick on Buffalo Gap. Hermosa Town Boards have grown frequently contentious, the Custer County Commission occasionally has some steamed citizens that have to be calmed down, and there was a time nearly every Custer City Council meeting had people at each other’s throats. It’s one thing to be passionate, it’s another to be a disruptive jerk. [Decorum is important]

Learn more at South Dakota News Watch.