Lawmakers Weigh Options on Legislating in Pandemic Joe Sneve - Sioux Falls Argus Leader
A team of South Dakota officials are looking at options for keeping the 2021 Legislative Session on track while also balancing safety concerns during the ongoing coronavirus pandemic. State lawmakers make up a fraction of the hundreds who come through the doors at the capitol building each day during the annual legislative session. Lawmakers met using the hybrid of in-person and remote interactions during a special session earlier this week, but it’s unclear if those remote options will work during the full session. “To keep all those working and operating in a functioning way through the pandemic is going to take a lot of mental horsepower for staff and legislative leadership,” said Reed Holwegner, director of the South Dakota Legislative Research Council, which provides administrative support for the Legislature. A subcommittee of the Legislature’s Executive Board in August began working to find options to keep the state’s legislative body functioning during the upcoming session. They expect to have a final decision by year’s end. The subcommittee is looking at three methods of conducting business when session begins January 12: • Require legislators to be in Pierre to conduct business face-to-face; • have the entire Legislature use internet and telephone technology to attend committee meetings and proceedings on the chamber floors; • or a hybrid that allows some lawmakers to stay home and others to be in Pierre. So far, when legislators have had to convene during the pandemic, remote attendance has been an option for legislators. On Veto Day in late March, just weeks into the pandemic, nearly all legislators attended using remote technology, casting votes through their computers. And though more legislators were physically present for Monday’s special session to consider $13 billion in COVID-19 spending, dozens again participated from locations outside of the capitol building. House Speaker Steven Haugaard, R-Sioux Falls, said if there’s no vaccine yet available by the time final decisions need to be made, he anticipates his fellow members of the executive board will create an attendance policy that legislators be present at the Capitol but able to attend meetings remotely while sitting in breakout and committee rooms throughout the building. “We’re taking those measures to be safe. It might be that we’ll build in an option for remote attendance. But we could probably do that on site,” he said. Right now, though, that’s not really an option. The capitol building has undergone many renovations and upgrade projects since being built in 1910, but not all rooms where legislators meet are accessible with technology to allow remote voting. That’s why Holwegner and his team at the LRC are in the midst of an estimated $350,000 project to bring the necessary wiring and connectivity to nearly all of them and improve the voting systems used in the chambers of the Senate and House. Those dollars are expected to be reimbursed with federal CARES Act funds. But requiring all legislators to converge on the capitol building during session - regardless of where they’re at while attending meetings - might not be the safest way to go, said Sen. Minority Leader Troy Reinert, D-Mission. “We’re still in the middle of a pandemic, and we’ve already buried one of the legislators that we served (Continued on page 25)
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