John Hult, South Dakota Searchlight
When the South Dakota Department of Corrections announced the site where it hoped to build a 1,500-bed men’s prison in 2023, it told the public it was the only usable site available.
The state had sent a request for information months earlier, hoping someone would offer up land for the project. No one who was willing to sell had exactly what the state was after, Corrections Secretary Kellie Wasko said.
This week, department spokesman Michael Winder again wrote that “no formal submissions” met the criteria for the prison.
“The state continued to do outreach, get referrals, and conduct research” after the request was placed, Winder wrote, but “in the fall of 2023, the other sites the state was pursuing declined to sell.”
So the department transferred $8 million to the state Office of School and Public Lands, laying claim to 320 acres of farmland a few miles south of Harrisburg that had been leased to farmers for years. The lease proceeds were used to fund the state’s K-12 schools, and the $8 million went into the trust fund into which those lease payments had flowed.
The locations of potential men’s prison sites submitted to Project Prison Reset.
The site was a “gift from God,” Republican Gov. Larry Rhoden would later say. But its selection sparked fierce opposition, political activism and a lawsuit from neighbors. It also contributed to the Rhoden administration’s failure to push the $825 million project across the finish line during the 2025 legislative session.
In March, the state sent out another request for information, this time as part of an effort to “reset” discussions on a correctional facility to replace the state penitentiary.
In less than a month, more than a dozen options emerged.
One of them, the former Citibank campus in northern Sioux Falls, was apparently available as an option back in 2023.
Citibank had built a new headquarters on the south end of Sioux Falls in 2019. A representative for the company selling the land said they didn’t submit it as a possible prison site in 2023, but said the state didn’t reach out during the “outreach” phase of its site search.
“I don’t know what happened the first time around,” said Troy Fawcett of NAI Sioux Falls Commercial Real Estate.
New process wider in scope
Rhoden’s office wouldn’t comment on whether the former Citibank campus just north of the state penitentiary was under consideration in 2023, but spokeswoman Josie Harms did note its size in a statement to South Dakota Searchlight.
In the first request for information, the state sought at least 100-200 acres of land or more for a 1,500 bed facility, based on a consultant’s report.
“The Project Prison Reset task force isn’t looking back — we’re moving forward,” Harms wrote to Searchlight. “With that said, the Citibank building is only 70 acres.”
Ryan Brunner, a policy adviser for Rhoden, presented the new options to members of Project Prison Reset during the group’s second meeting on Tuesday in Springfield. He told Searchlight after the meeting that several options may not have been for sale in 2023, and that the market in Sioux Falls has changed.
“We’ll have to do some analysis on these sites to see if they’re a fit or not,” Brunner said.
The parameters for a potential site are less restrictive this time around.
The governor’s work group is exploring all options, including smaller facilities, multiple facilities and locations outside the Sioux Falls area. There’s a preference for sites within 20 miles of Sioux Falls in the newer request for information, but that’s not a requirement.
That easing of requirements made it possible for the state to field offers from Big Stone City, Aberdeen, Huron and Mitchell. Big Stone has an empty cheese plant on more than 100 acres. Huron has 100 acres in an industrial park. Mitchell has more than that, on land south of town near its landfill. Aberdeen has two options on two ends of the Hub City.
The newer parameters also put the Citibank site, with its 70 acres, in the running. That offer is the spendiest option by asking price, at $33.8 million, and the one with the smallest footprint.
It does offer some enticements the others do not, though.
It has buildings that could be refurbished, rather than built from the ground up. It’s connected to water and sewer, and is less than a mile from the current penitentiary campus. The minimum and maximum security units on the current penitentiary grounds will remain, regardless of the future of the 1881 main penitentiary.
More options offer more wiggle room
Sen. Chris Karr, R-Sioux Falls, told South Dakota Searchlight that the work group’s Springfield trip, with its tour of the medium-security Mike Durfee State Prison and rundowns of the multiple vocational programs offered there to more than 1,000 inmates, was illuminating. It solidified his skepticism on the need for 100 acres or more.
The Mike Dufee campus, formerly a university, is smaller than 70 acres. The penitentiary in Sioux Falls is overcrowded by medium security inmates, Karr noted, not maximum security ones. The 1,500-bed proposal and its 100-plus acres were designed around maximum security housing units.
“I’m not convinced we need 100 acres,” Karr said. “I don’t think anybody is at this point.”
Karr’s not fully sold on any of the new proposals – there isn’t space at any of them for the ideal security perimeter, for example – but said the idea that Citibank is “almost turn-key” is appealing.
Karr said the state should have worked harder to find sites back in 2023, instead of requesting information and waiting for offers. The work of site selection may have been more fruitful if it had included the kind of public forums now taking place with Project Prison Reset, he said.
“This is getting vetted and discussed the way it should have been the first time around,” he said.
Other options include multiple undeveloped properties with 100 acres or more in the Sioux Falls area, most presented for sale on a per-acre basis.
There’s land at the intersection of interstates 29 and 90, a plot near Amazon’s Sioux Falls distribution center, and another near the Department of Correction’s West Farm site, home to a facility for juveniles in state custody.
The Sioux Falls Development Foundation has offered land near Worthing as another Lincoln County option, and the city of Canton pointed to tracts of land west of town.
Lt. Gov. Tony Venhuizen leads the Project Prison Reset work group. During the initial site discussions in 2023, he was still a Republican state representative for District 13 in Sioux Falls.
He’s pleased to have so many offers, noting that the publicity surrounding the work group may have drawn more attention.
Even so, he said, “we need to be realistic” about how the potential sales might go over with neighbors. The site obtained in 2023, he said, is still an option.
“I don’t find it particularly surprising that we have owners of land in some of these communities who are willing to offer it,” Venhuizen said.