A great evening at Mount Rushmore

Greetings. What a historic week! Happy 250th birthday America! I had the pleasure of attending the 250th celebration at Mount Rushmore on the evening of July 3. The reason we had it on the third and not the fourth was because that’s the only day President Trump would attend. He had the actual 250th celebration at our nation’s capitol on the actual Independence Day, July 4.

On the campaign trail while promoting District 30, our legislative district, I give a kind of tongue-in-cheek speech. It goes something like this: We the residents of District 30 deserve more from the state of South Dakota. We should be treated like Alaskan residents, who receive a state government check each year, a kick-back from all their mineral resources. We in District 30 don’t get that because our legislature in recent years has shown a complete disdain for any kind of mining pipeline, including GEVO, an ethanol jet fuel ethanol plant. It would be great that our state receive a revenue stream other than our tax dollars.

However, we District 30 residents, who live in Fall River County, Custer County and rural parts of Pennington County, pay/collect way more than our share back to the state in sales tax dollars than we ever receive in benefits. In fact, if you look at a South Dakota tourism brochure, just about everything the state is promoting is located in District 30, including the two “biggies” of Mount Rushmore and the Crazy Horse Memorial.

I still can’t believe Rapid City renamed the civic center and the hospital The Monument. The only monuments most of us know are these two gigantic ones—Crazy Horse and Mount Rushmore.

Yeah, the city also agreed to doing away with the chamber of commerce and changed that to Elevate. So, hospital equals Monument, civic center equals Monument and chamber of commerce Elevate. To add insult to injury, Elevate Rapid City uses the Mount Rushmore logo. This is definitely misleading in that Mount Rushmore is about 25 miles from the Civic Center near the Town of Keystone. Keystone should have the rights to call Mount Rushmore theirs, not Rapid City. To top it off, the brain child of all this foolishness, the CEO of Elevate’s misleading change, has left town and moved to Texas.

Well, back to July 3 and President Trump attending, for the second time, our fireworks celebration. It was the most amazing event I have ever attended. 

After the rain stopped, the skies cleared, the wind stopped, making it weather-wise a perfect evening. What a proud moment for our great country and state!