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SD public defense duties shift from counties to state; SCOTUS appears skeptical of restricting government communications with social media companies; Trump lawyers say he can't make bond; new scholarships aim to connect class of 2024 to high-demand jobs.

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The SCOTUS weighs government influence on social media, and who groups like the NRA can do business with. Biden signs an executive order to advance women's health research and the White House tells Israel it's responsible for the Gaza humanitarian crisis.

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Midwest regenerative farmers are rethinking chicken production, Medicare Advantage is squeezing the finances of rural hospitals and California's extreme swing from floods to drought has some thinking it's time to turn rural farm parcels into floodplains.

SD Game, Fish & Parks to Contact Meandered-Waters Landowners

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Friday, March 16, 2018   

PIERRE, S. D. – Implementation of the state's non-meandered waters bill will begin this spring, now that South Dakota lawmakers and the governor have approved legislation to remove a 2018 expiration date. The "Open-Water Compromise" had been the focus of two state Supreme Court decisions and occupied several legislative sessions.

Kevin Robling, special projects coordinator with the Game, Fish and Parks Department, was assigned to mediate the issue. He says it's all about compromise – between landowners where the waters are located, and people who want to use those sites for recreation.

"The work for Game, Fish and Parks really has just started, and is starting now with access agreements. How can we get more folks out there recreating? And that's going to be through the form of access agreements with landowners," he says.

The law opens non-meandered waters to public use, unless a landowner opts to close the property to public access, meaning it's open only by permission. Some private property owners have argued that the water on their property belongs to them, while recreationists contend the water is held in public trust by the state, and they have a right to access it.

The open waters issue didn't exist before the early 1990s, when Robling says heavy snow and an unusually wet spring flooded grazing and farmland in northeastern South Dakota.

"The vast majority of the non-meandered waters that do exist in the state that are being used or have been used in the past for recreational opportunities – i.e. fishing – for the most part are up in the northeast. Around Webster, Bristol, is where the majority of these water bodies currently exist," says Robling.

Robling says most property owners just want users to ask permission, and to be respectful of the land by removing trash and not driving on nearby fields.

He says there are 17 lake closures today. That means 4,500 acres of non-meandered water where fishing could be possible is closed off.

"These relationships are vitally important for Game, Fish and Parks. Eighty percent of South Dakota is privately owned, you know,” he says. “If you were to equate that to how much of the wildlife then resides on private land, you could say 80 percent of it, if was evenly distributed."

He notes that if summers are hotter than normal for the next 10 years, these waters may no longer exist.


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