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Legislators endorse adding tribes to list of infrastructure grant-eligible entities [1]

['John Hult', 'More From Author', '- January']

Date: 2024-01 

The House State Affairs Committee signed off Friday on a bill that would open up a pool of housing infrastructure funding to tribal entities.

Rep. Tyler Tordsen, R-Sioux Falls, described House Bill 1041 as a “small but important technical fix” to the $200 million housing infrastructure financing program created last year.

That program has already awarded nearly $100 million to projects across the state to support the construction of things like streets, streetlights and water and sewer infrastructure for housing projects.

The issue addressed by HB 1041 revolves around the ultimate ownership of that state-supported infrastructure. In order to be eligible for a grant or loan through the program, a developer must pass along ownership of that infrastructure to a “political subdivision of the state.” Tribal governments are sovereign entities, not political subdivisions.

In practice, that’s meant developers could get money to build a street that later becomes the property of a city or county, but that they would not be able to get financial support for a street that would ultimately become the property of a reservation.

The Oglala Lakota County School District was able to take advantage of the program to build teacher housing, but only because, as a public school system, the district is a political subdivision of the state and took ownership of the streets and water lines.

Tordsen’s bill would expand eligibility by adding “any federally recognized Indian tribe” to the list of eligible entities.

Tordsen, a member of the tribe known as the Sisseton-Wahpeton Oyate, said he’ll take “any chance I get to remind folks that tribal members are South Dakotans, too,” and that “certainly there’s some housing challenges in our rural communities and in tribal communities.”

“We think that this is super important,” Tordsen said.

The bill has an emergency clause, meaning it would take effect immediately if signed by Gov. Kristi Noem, instead of in July when most adopted legislation becomes law.

A lobbyist for three housing and economic development organizations testified in favor of HB 1041, and no one testified against it.

Rep. Roger Chase, R-Huron, echoed Tordsen, some of the lobbyists and a handful of other committee members when he called the exclusion of tribes an unfortunate oversight.

“There was never any intention to leave the Indian reservations out of the infrastructure funding,” Chase said.

The bill passed 12-1, with Rep. Jon Hansen, R-Dell Rapids, voting against it. Hansen voted against the infrastructure funding program bill in 2023.

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[1] Url: https://southdakotasearchlight.com/briefs/legislators-endorse-adding-tribes-to-list-of-infrastructure-grant-eligible-entities/

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