Your rights · District 32
No Flock cameras.
No data centers on your bill.
Two things government should not touch: where you drive, and how high your power bill goes. On day one, I'll file a bill to ban Flock cameras in South Dakota. And I will defend the law that makes data centers pay their own power costs, not you.
There is a Flock camera in Summerset pointed at the road by Stagebarn Middle School. It photographs every license plate that drives past, writes down the time, and files it in a database that can be searched. No warrant. No South Dakota law that says what happens to it.
The company promises the data stays local and clean. In Dayton, Ohio, the same promise was made, and the records got handed around for immigration purposes thousands of times anyway. The promise is not the protection.
I am not going to write a better promise. I am going to file a bill to take the cameras down.
Where you drive
Ban Flock cameras. Not regulate them. Ban them.
The Fourth Amendment does not have a technology exception. That is the whole reason.
A Flock camera is an automated license plate reader on a pole. Put up enough of them and the system can rebuild where your car has been, day after day, for anyone who holds the keys. That is a record of where you work, where you worship, which doctor you see, and whose house you park at.
The Supreme Court has been drawing this line for years. When the government wanted to track a car with GPS, a search of a phone, or months of location records, the Court said the Constitution applies. The Court has not ruled on plate cameras yet. I am not willing to wait for it while the networks go up.
Rules on paper do not hold. Dayton had purpose limits, and its own police department found its Flock data had been shared for immigration purposes in several thousand instances, against its own promises. It suspended the program. San Francisco had purpose limits, and an audit found out-of-state and federal agencies had searched its network improperly roughly 300 times in about a year. The only reason anyone knew was the audit.
A warrant rule decides who gets to open the file. A ban means the file never gets built. South Dakota has no law on these cameras today. The first one it writes should be a ban.
How high your power bill goes
Data centers pay their own way. Not you.
South Dakota already got this one right. My job is to keep it that way.
Data centers draw electricity and water by the city's worth. When a utility builds new capacity to serve them, those costs can get spread across every family's monthly bill. That is not growth. That is a subsidy, paid by you, for a corporation's server farm.
In 2026 the Legislature passed SB 135, the Data Center Bill of Rights for Citizens, now Session Law Chapter 190. It covers data centers with 10 megawatts of peak demand or more and requires utilities to keep separate terms for them, so the data center reimburses the utility for the costs fairly attributable to serving it. In plain English: the data center pays for its own power, not you.
That law is already under pressure. SB 239 changed the reinvestment payment program in ways that benefit data centers. That is exactly the kind of special deal I will vote against. Bring the jobs, pay your own way, meet the standard, and you are welcome here. Run up the grid and send me the bill, and you are not.
- Defend SB 135, the Data Center Bill of Rights for Citizens, so the data center reimburses the utility for the cost of serving it.
- Oppose the carveouts, like the SB 239 changes to the reinvestment payment program, that chip away at it for the benefit of data centers.
- Welcome the projects that pay their own freight, use their own dedicated power, meter their water, and site responsibly.
- Never let your power bill become a subsidy fund for anyone's server farm.
Your car is yours. Your power bill is yours.
Principled. Committed. Fighting for you.
In South Dakota, the people keep an eye on the government, not the other way around. District 32 elects two House members. Make me one of your two. Vote early at the Pennington County Auditor's office, or on Tuesday, November 3, 2026.
Sources
- Carpenter v. United States, 585 U.S. 296 (2018), supremecourt.gov
- United States v. Jones, 565 U.S. 400 (2012)
- Riley v. California, 573 U.S. 373 (2014)
- Dayton suspends Flock program, Dayton Daily News, May 2, 2026
- SFPD Flock audit, CBS San Francisco, June 18, 2026
- SB 135 (2026), 2026 Session Law Chapter 190, and SB 239 (2026), sdlegislature.gov
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