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Between the effects of record-breaking rainfall, claiming high levels of prevent plant and continued uncertainty over commodity prices, many of South Dakota’s farmers have become even more stressed than usual over the past year.
However, experts who participated in the South Dakota Farm and Ranch Stress Summit in Oacoma this week said producers’ willingness to talk openly about mental health and stressors is on the upswing, as well.
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LAKE ANDES — More than two weeks after heavy rainfall left much of southeastern South Dakota flooded, people in and around Lake Andes are still trying to determine how to handle the water remaining in their area and the problems that water has caused.
Among those affected are members of the Yankton Sioux Tribe, many of whom reside in tribal housing just south of the Lake Andes city limits. Those houses, Tribal Secretary Glenford “Sam” Sully told The Daily Republic on Thursday, have been exposed to water since March, and three-quarters will likely have to be replaced. Sully said there’s a sense of despair among tribal members.
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First responders rescued 10 people in four water-related events between Thursday night and Friday morning within Mitchell and farther south.
Those rescued in the approximately 15-hour period included four who drove around barricades, three who were stranded in high water and three who became trapped when their homes became surrounded by water.
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Nearly 25 years ago, Joaquin Ramos entered the South Dakota State Penitentiary to begin a life sentence for first-degree manslaughter, angry about the circumstances that led him there.
On Aug. 22, he sat down with The Daily Republic during regular evening visiting hours in the penitentiary’s visitation room. Over the course of about an hour and a half, as other inmates chatted and played cards with family members, he spoke about his time in prison and said if he hadn’t been put behind bars, he would likely have remained the angry person he was when he committed his crime.
Criminals’ stories do not end when they’re put behind bars.
But with the little access South Dakota prisons currently offer to media, the parts of their stories we’re able to tell are often forced to end when someone is put under Department of Corrections supervision. While the DOC clearly has a responsibility to keep its facilities secure and keep close track of who is coming and going, it’s still a public agency, and it shouldn’t be able to be as stringent as it is with media access.
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A Mitchell man was sentenced Tuesday to 15 days in jail for fourth-degree rape, making him the ninth person in the past 14 months to be sentenced for an offense involving the same victim.
Trevor Clark, 26, was granted a suspended imposition of sentence and ordered to serve 15 days in jail.
While The Daily Republic found nine criminal cases linked to the same boy through a search of Davison County court documents, Judge Chris Giles has indicated at multiple hearings that upwards of 20 people were investigated in connection with the now-17-year-old victim, identified in documents only as C.L.W.
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The U.S. District Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia ruled Friday that the Federal Communications Commission cannot make smaller 5G towers exempt from a review process on tribal land.
The decision remands the issue back to the FCC, as the court ruled that Rule 1779, which went into effect in July 2018, violated tribal rights under the National Historic Preservation Act to determine whether proposed structures such as cell towers and antennae will have an impact on historically or culturally significant land.
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In the wettest year on record in the state’s history, an unprecedented number of South Dakota’s farmers have had to rely on prevented planting payments from their crop insurance.
Heather Fillaus, an insurance officer for Farm Credit Services of America, said that between 95 and 98 percent of customers at the insurer’s Mitchell office have claimed prevent plant on at least some of their acreage, although the amount of acreage varies widely from one operation to another. In past years, Fillaus said, it’s been common to see that number under 50 percent.
“We haven’t had a year like 2019 ever before,” Fillaus told The Daily Republic on Thursday. “You talk to some of these 80-year-old farmers, and they say that they’ve never seen a year like this before. … This year, we had guys that farm a vast amount of acres that didn’t get anything planted or that maybe only got a few acres planted, which is very, very outside the norm for around here.”
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Julie Yager’s 92-year-old father died in February, but her struggle with the nursing home he had lived in didn’t end until months later.
Yager, who was not legally responsible for her father, Peter Oberosler, at the time of his death, began receiving bills for his stay at the Good Samaritan Society in Corsica.
“I thought I had made myself pretty straight, that I wasn’t financially responsible for the debt and that my dad didn’t have the money, and they didn’t deserve it,” Yager said, referencing a call she made about a bill she was sent in February. “So I thought that would be the end of it, but I continued to get billings.”
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After a year and a half of contesting the way she was fired, a former Davison County veterans service officer now plans to take her case to the South Dakota Supreme Court.
On Tuesday, Judge Patrick Smith issued a memorandum decision ruling that the South Dakota Department of Labor and Regulation correctly granted summary judgment to the county commission in November 2018 and that the commission’s decision to terminate Jessica Davidson in November 2017 stands.
Davidson’s attorney, R. Shawn Tornow, told The Daily Republic on Thursday that Davidson had a number of concerns with the decision.
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