John Hult/South Dakota Searchlight
SIOUX FALLS – The term of art is “insolated, but not isolated.”
That’s how Bob Mundt of the Sioux Falls Development Foundation describes his metro area’s position as it faces the unpredictable economic conditions driven by the tariffs imposed – and frequently un-imposed or adjusted from day to day – by President Donald Trump.
Trump has downplayed the impact of tariffs as speed bumps on the way to a stronger manufacturing sector. While rejecting claims that tariffs will hurt the economy as a whole during an interview with NBC’s “Meet the Press” over the weekend, he did nod to economist consensus by saying that some goods, which he said Americans could go without, could cost more as a result.
The Sioux Falls metro area, Mundt said, has weathered economic storms in the past thanks to South Dakota’s “conservative nature.” During a panel discussion at the Sioux Falls Rotary Club this week, Mundt said the market’s twists and turns have spurred trepidation, but not panic.
“We tend to react very well to challenges, whether that’s tariffs or pandemics or anything else like that,” Mundt told the Rotarians who’d gathered at the Military Heritage Alliance.
About a quarter of South Dakota’s residents live in the Sioux Falls metro area, located in the lower portion of the state’s southeast quadrant, which is one of the most rapidly growing areas in the U.S.
Tyler Tordsen, head of the Sioux Metro Growth Alliance, also sounded a hopeful note on the region’s economic fortunes. He pointed to cities like Brandon, just east of Sioux Falls, as proof that expansion has not ceased in light of the topsy turvy economic signals.
“There’s a lot of dirt that’s moving” in that city, Tordsen said before rattling off a handful of building projects.
“I am hearing hesitation, a little bit, but really nothing that’s stopping any projects from moving forward,” Tordsen said.
On the retail level, “new entrepreneurs” are still looking for opportunities to expand, Tordsen said. He also said that pre-Trump challenges like workforce development, exacerbated by a dearth of child care options and affordable housing, remain. The unemployment rate in the metro area is 1.8%.
The region’s history has shown that those challenges aren’t dealbreakers either, he said.
“I remember questions of ‘there will be 1,000 jobs at Amazon, how are they ever going to fill those?’ and they did,” Tordsen said, referencing a distribution center opened in 2022.
An Amazon spokesperson told South Dakota Searchlight that it took around seven months to hire a full staff at the center.
On workforce, Mundt pointed to former Gov. Kristi Noem’s $9 million Freedom Works Here campaign as a net positive for the area, “whether you loved it or hated it.” Mundt’s organization reached out to about 10,000 of the 11,641 people who filled out a form expressing interest in relocating to South Dakota for work.
Mundt said the foundation pointed potential workers to job openings, but didn’t track what happened afterward due to privacy concerns. He can’t say for certain how many people moved to Sioux Falls for work, but said spikes in attention can help address the area’s skilled labor needs.
“Right now, it’s becoming a situation where we need people with specific skill sets,” Mundt said.
Dawn Dovre of the South Dakota Department of Labor told South Dakota Searchlight that 4,047 of the people who’d filled out those forms were later connected with job advisers who “offered personalized support, helping with job opportunities, relocation resources, and housing information.”
The state doesn’t have a firm number of relocations, either. But listings on the SDWORKS jobs website have dropped from 25,000 at the start of the campaign to 18,000 today, Dovre said, “reflecting increased workforce engagement and strong results from the campaign’s reach.”
Jodi Schwan is the owner of the marketing firm Align Content Studios and operator of the website SiouxFalls.Business. She told the Rotary crowd the city needs to “tell its story” as a place that can serve as a home base for industries like financial technology, biotech and agribusiness.
“Low-value manufacturing is not coming back to this country, no matter what is said out there,” Schwan said. “High-value manufacturing is where the future is. We need to be a location of choice for that.”