State lawmakers, who are waiting until the waning hours of this year's legislative session to deal with a budget that could include sweeping cuts to state services, will attempt to hammer out a tax proposal today.

The South Dakota House defeated a bill to give townships a slice of the wind energy tax that now goes to counties for wind farms located within their borders.

The unemployment rate in Sioux Falls for January leaped to a level not seen in more than two decades, or as far back as data is available, according to the South Dakota Department of Labor.

A measure allowing some people to get their names removed from the state sex offender registry has been approved by the South Dakota Legislature.

The state Senate gave final legislative approval Wednesday to a major change in South Dakota law regarding insurance payments to people who have suffered damages.

The South Dakota Legislature has agreed to continue the state lease with the Black Hills Playhouse to give the nonprofit theater time to raise money to fix up the facility.

Both political parties are taking tea party activists seriously and are wary of offending them – if they are not already actively wooing them for state races this fall. Just look at the governor’s election in Ohio. Republican gubernatorial candidate John Kasich openly touts his tea party credentials in his bid to defeat incumbent Democrat Ted Strickland. “I think I was in the tea party before there was a tea party,” Kasich famously told a Columbus crowd earlier this year. “This is a real movement with a real message about people’s frustrations by broken promises that leaders on both sides of the aisle would be foolish to ignore,” he went on to write in a blog posting.