Editorials

Opinion pieces on issues facing Brookings, written by AI and disclosed as such on every piece below.

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Tuesday

Editorial

The Case for Doing the Same Thing Every Month

Look closely at Brookings' community calendar this fall and a pattern emerges that most people will read past without noticing: several of the town's most reliable offerings are, on paper, boring. The South Dakota Art Museum is holding a “Community Art Day” for what appears to be the third time this season, twice built around collaged paper portraits. McCrory Gardens opens free on the fourth Wednesday of every month, May through October, without variation. The Brookings Professional Network holds a “casual meetup” nearly every month, sometimes with the location still unannounced. None of this sounds like news. That is exactly the point, and it is why Brookings should resist the temptation to treat repetition as a failure of imagination. The instinct in a lot of small-city civic life is to chase the special event. A visiting scholar. A gallery reception with three named artists. A one-time lecture on Black Midwestern history that draws a crowd, generates conversation, and then is gone. These events matter and Brookings is right to keep hosting them. But they are not what builds a town's actual texture of participation. That work is done by the events nobody has to think twice about attending, because they already know when it happens and roughly what it will be. Consider the Community Art Day series at the art museum. Running it once might read as a nice one-off for families. Running it three times with a similar format, same “no experience needed” pitch, same free materials, same parking instructions, is a different kind of commitment. It tells a parent who missed September that October is coming. It tells a hesitant adult who has never set foot in the museum that the bar for entry stays low every time, not just on a single publicized night. Novelty draws people who are already looking for something to do. Repetition draws people who are not. The same logic holds for McCrory Gardens Community Days. Fixing the schedule to the fourth Wednesday of every month from May through October is a small administrative choice with a large practical effect: it removes the need to check. Nobody has to hunt down a special announcement to know that free admission is available in July, then again in August. That predictability is what allows a garden visit to become a habit rather than an event, and habits are what create the kind of visitor who eventually brings a neighbor, or a visiting relative, or shows up on a Wednesday for no particular reason at all. BPN's monthly meetups make the case in reverse, by showing what happens when the format is right but the specifics lag. A “casual gathering for professionals to connect” is a fine idea precisely because it repeats, but a meetup with the location still listed as “TBA” close to the date undercuts the very reliability that makes recurring events valuable in the first place. The lesson is not that BPN should abandon the monthly format. It is that recurring events only deliver their real benefit, the lowered threshold for a first-time or hesitant attendee, when the mechanics are as dependable as the concept. A commitment to “every month” is only half a commitment if the where and when keep sliding until the last minute. There is an obvious objection here: doesn't this argument just excuse institutions for lacking creativity? Shouldn't the art museum come up with something new instead of running the same portraiture project three times? The honest answer is that novelty and repetition are doing different jobs, and a town this size doesn't have the bandwidth to do both well everywhere at once. The Flyover reception, with its named artists and a single evening's worth of conversation, is built to be memorable. Community Art Day is built to be attendable. Confusing the two, or worse, judging the second by the standards of the first, is how small cities end up with a calendar full of impressive one-time events and no actual increase in the number of people who feel like the museum, the gardens, or the professional network belong to them. Brookings doesn't need more signature events this year. It has a lecture series, an exhibition reception, and a leadership sit-down already doing that work well. What it needs is confidence in the unglamorous stuff: the fourth Wednesday, the repeated art project, the meetup that happens whether or not anyone is watching. That is not a lack of ambition. It is the actual mechanism by which a visitor becomes a regular, and a regular becomes, eventually, someone who thinks of this as their town.

September 1

Editorial

Brookings: The Number That Matters More Than $3.2 Million

When the SDSU Alumni & Foundation launches its tenth annual One Day for STATE campaign this week, the number that will dominate headlines is the dollar figure. Last year's drive pulled in $3.2 million in twenty-four hours. That is an impressive sum, and organizers will be watching closely to see whether this year's total climbs higher. But the number that actually deserves attention is smaller and, in the long run, more revealing: 5,000 donors. That is the campaign's stated goal for participation this year, and it is the right thing to be chasing. Here is why the distinction matters. A campaign built around a dollar target can hit its number with a handful of large gifts. A campaign built around a donor count cannot. Reaching 5,000 donors in twenty-four hours requires breadth, not just depth. It means the ask has to work for the alum who can give five dollars as much as it works for the one who can give five thousand. It means the campaign's success depends on how many people feel some stake in SDSU, not on how wealthy a small handful of them happen to be. That distinction should matter to Brookings well beyond the university's finance office. A community's health is not measured by the size of its largest gifts. It is measured by how many people show up, chip in, and feel some ownership of what happens next. A $3.2 million total tells you what SDSU can extract from its most generous supporters. A 5,000-donor count tells you how wide and how deep the sense of belonging actually runs. The second number is the one that predicts whether an institution will still have a community behind it in twenty years, not just a balance sheet. The pairing of One Day for STATE with the free Yellow & Blue Block Party on Alumni Green makes the point almost by accident. The giving campaign asks people to put something in. The block party, with its food trucks, free ice cream, and Pride of the Dakotas performance, asks nothing of anyone and simply invites them to show up. Running them side by side, on the same evening, treats participation and generosity as the same civic instinct wearing two different outfits. That is a smarter design than it might look at first glance. It signals that showing up counts as much as writing a check, and that the campaign wants the second kind of participant as much as the first. It would be easy to dismiss this as a difference without a distinction, since more donors likely still means more money in the end. But the emphasis shapes behavior, and behavior shapes culture. A campaign that markets itself around a dollar goal trains its community to think of generosity as something calibrated to personal wealth, best left to those who have plenty to spare. A campaign that markets itself around a donor count trains its community to think of generosity as something available to everyone, regardless of what they can afford. Brookings, a town built on a land-grant university whose entire premise was that education should not depend on family wealth, should recognize which of those instincts fits its own history better. There is a lesson here for how the rest of Brookings organizes its own fundraising and civic appeals, from the Humane Society's golf scramble to the monthly Drive to Donate at the local oil change shop. The instinct to publicize how many people participated, not merely how much was raised, deserves to spread. A raffle winner's name means less to a town's sense of itself than a tally of how many neighbors bothered to enter. If One Day for STATE hits 5,000 donors this year, that number, more than the dollar total beside it, will be the one worth printing in bold.

August 25

Editorial

Brookings Solved the Teenager Problem. Almost Nobody Noticed.

Look at a typical week of public programming in Brookings this summer and a pattern emerges that nobody planned as a statement but that amounts to one anyway. The farmers market brings out families with strollers and a free yoga class for parents. Downtown at Sundown fills Main Avenue with live music, food trucks, and activities aimed squarely at younger kids. Trivia Night at Wooden Legs is for the 21-and-up crowd. Good Roots' pizza nights are a blanket-and-lawn-chair affair for adults and families with dogs. Almost every recurring public event in this town sorts itself, without much discussion, into “for young children” or “for adults.” There is one glaring exception, and it is the Brookings Public Library, which has quietly built an entire parallel calendar for the age group every other institution in town treats as an afterthought: teenagers. This summer alone the library is running two separate Teen Book Club tracks, a Teen Graphic Novel Club, a cooking session called Teens in the Kitchen, and a recurring Teen Workshop Wednesday series that has already covered crafts and will run again in July and August. That is not a token gesture. That is a sustained, multi-month infrastructure built for a demographic that most towns, including this one, otherwise leave to fend for itself. It is worth saying plainly why this matters and why it deserves more credit than it gets. Middle and high schoolers occupy an awkward civic no-man's-land. They have aged out of the stroller-and-splash-pad programming that dominates family events, but they are years away from being welcome at a 21-and-up trivia night or comfortable spending a Sunday evening drinking lemonade on a farm with their parents. Downtown at Sundown's “free kids activities” are, by every description available, pitched at a much younger crowd. Summer, for a fourteen-year-old in Brookings, is otherwise a stretch of months with remarkably few places to simply show up and belong to something. The library noticed this gap and built around it deliberately, not as an accident of scheduling. Two book clubs running in parallel each month, rather than one, exists specifically so a teen's schedule conflicts don't lock them out. A graphic novel club discussing a title like Blue Flag treats teen readers as readers with real taste, not as an audience to be managed with easier books. Teens in the Kitchen and the beaded-decoration workshop give young people something to make with their hands and something to show for an afternoon, which is precisely the kind of small, concrete accomplishment that this age group is otherwise starved for outside of school assignments. Here is the argument worth making out loud: this is not filler programming, and it should not be treated as a nice-to-have line item the next time library funding comes up for discussion. It is the most serious piece of youth policy this town is currently running, more consequential to the actual daily experience of Brookings teenagers than any ribbon-cutting or growth alliance initiative aimed at downtown's economic vitality. A fourteen-year-old with a standing Tuesday afternoon book club and a place to make something with their hands is a fourteen-year-old with a reason to be downtown, engaged, and known by name to the adults who run these programs. That is not a small thing in a county also worrying, elsewhere on its meeting agendas, about zoning and growth on its edges. The center holds better when the people growing up in it have somewhere to stand. The other organizers of Brookings' summer calendar, the Regional Growth Alliance chief among them, should take note. Downtown at Sundown draws bigger crowds and better headlines than a Tuesday afternoon graphic novel discussion ever will. But if the Alliance wants proof that dedicated teen programming works, and is worth building into its own events rather than leaving to the library alone, the evidence is sitting on the library's own calendar, running quietly, month after month, while everyone else's attention is on the music and the food trucks.

August 11

Editorial

Brookings: A Summer Calendar Worth Protecting

Look at what a single week in Brookings offers for free or next to nothing: live music downtown every Thursday, a farmers market with yoga on Saturday mornings, trivia nights at two different breweries, wood-fired pizza on a working farm, and once a month, the gates of McCrory Gardens swing open at no charge at all. Add a swim night for dogs and a weekend of kart racing where kids under 12 get in free, and you have something that looks less like a loose assortment of summer activities and more like a functioning civic ecosystem. That ecosystem deserves to be treated as infrastructure, not as a happy accident that renews itself every year without anyone's help. It is tempting to see this calendar as simply what small towns do in summer. But look closer at who is actually running it. Downtown at Sundown depends on the Brookings Regional Growth Alliance. The Chamber trains tourism ambassadors and runs kids' camps out of a single building on 4th Street. Trivia nights rely on individual breweries donating staff time and prize money for an evening that brings in no cover charge. The farmers market runs on volunteer producers and a free yoga instructor. None of this is guaranteed. All of it rests on a small number of organizations and even smaller number of committed people choosing, year after year, to absorb the cost and effort of keeping a public commons open. That fragility matters because what this calendar actually produces is not entertainment in the narrow sense. It is the kind of low-stakes, recurring contact between neighbors that sociologists call social infrastructure: the trivia team that becomes a friend group, the family that runs into the same vendors every Saturday until they're on a first-name basis, the retired couple who show up to Downtown at Sundown every single Thursday because it has become their summer. Brookings, as a college town, has an unusually high turnover of residents. Students arrive and leave in four-year cycles. New hires cycle through the university and the hospital. A town like this needs more, not less, of the connective tissue that a free weekly gathering provides, because it has fewer decades-long relationships to fall back on. This is where the town's civic leadership should stop treating these events as charming extras and start treating them as something to fund and formalize. When a program depends entirely on one nonprofit's staff capacity or one brewery's willingness to keep hosting trivia at a loss, it takes only a bad budget year, a staffing change, or a change of ownership to end it quietly, with no announcement and no public debate. Compare that to how the city treats a pool or a park: nobody expects Hillcrest Aquatic Center to survive on volunteer goodwill alone, because everyone understands a pool is infrastructure. The Thursday concert series and the monthly free garden days serve the same civic function and should be funded with the same seriousness, through multi-year commitments from the city and county rather than year-to-year hope that the Growth Alliance's budget holds. None of this requires turning free events into ticketed ones or handing them over to a bigger institutional bureaucracy. It requires the opposite: a deliberate decision by the city council and the county to put line items behind the organizations already doing this work, so that a McCrory Gardens community day or a Thursday night on Main Avenue isn't quietly dependent on whether one grant renews. The alternative is a town that discovers, five or ten years from now, that its “beloved summer tradition” simply stopped happening, and nobody quite remembers who was supposed to keep it going. Brookings has built, mostly by accident and mostly through volunteer effort, something that many towns twice its size have lost entirely: a summer where you can leave your house on any given evening and find your neighbors, for free. The task now is to stop treating that as luck and start treating it as policy.

July 28

Editorial

Brookings: When Every Notice Looks the Same, None of Them Do

Brookings has a transparency problem, but not the kind anyone wants to hear about. The city isn't hiding anything. If anything, it's disclosing too much, too often, in language so repetitive that it risks teaching residents to stop reading the very notices meant to keep them informed. Look at the summer calendar. A quorum notice for the 4-H Achievement Day BBQ on August 6. Another for the New Resident BBQ on September 15. Three separate notices for Downtown at Sundown, on July 30, August 6, and August 13. A fourth for Meet State at SDSU on August 21. Each one says essentially the same thing: several council members might show up, a quorum might technically form, but no city business will be discussed or acted upon. This is boilerplate required by state open-meetings law, and the city is right to file it. But six near-identical notices in six weeks, all announcing that nothing will happen, train residents to read “quorum notice” as a synonym for “ignore this.” That's a problem, because not every notice this summer says nothing will happen. On July 30, the same night as a Downtown at Sundown quorum notice, the actual City Council met and took up real business: a public hearing on leasing city property to RTI, LLC, a second reading on a budget amendment, and a hearing to annex two outlots into city limits. These are the kinds of decisions that shape how land gets used and who profits from it. They deserve scrutiny. But they were surrounded, that same week, by a cloud of routine notices about barbecues and street festivals, all using the same civic language, the same format, the same “no business will be conducted” reassurance. A resident skimming the public notices could be forgiven for lumping them all together and moving on. This is not an argument against the law. Open-meetings statutes exist because quorums have a way of becoming informal decision-making sessions if nobody's watching, and South Dakota is right to require disclosure whenever enough council members might be in the same place at the same time. The problem isn't the law. It's that the city is applying the letter of the requirement without much thought to how the requirement is communicated, and the result is a kind of notice fatigue that works against the law's purpose. Some will say this is a minor gripe, that residents who care about local governance will read the agendas regardless of how many BBQ notices clutter the calendar. Maybe. But most people don't parse city communications for a living. They skim headlines, and if six headlines in a row say “nothing to see here,” the seventh gets the same treatment by default, even if it's the one about an actual land deal. There's a simple fix, and it doesn't require changing any law. The city could distinguish, in format and framing, between notices tied to substantive meetings and notices tied to purely social gatherings. A single seasonal notice, filed once, could cover all the summer's Downtown at Sundown dates and community BBQs where council presence is expected but no action is planned. That would satisfy the legal requirement without repeating the same non-event announcement five or six times across a summer. It would also free up attention, both the city's and the public's, for the notices that actually matter: hearings on annexation, leases, rezoning, budget amendments. Transparency isn't just about filing the right paperwork. It's about making sure people can tell the difference between a barbecue and a decision. Right now, Brookings is technically compliant and functionally noisy, and noise is its own kind of obscurity. If the city wants residents to keep paying attention when it counts, it needs to stop asking them to pay the same attention to everything.

July 21

Editorial

Brookings: The Quiet Virtue of a Boring Notice

Every Thursday this summer, the city of Brookings has issued the same small notice, week after week, ahead of Downtown at Sundown: at least four City Council members might show up. No official business. No votes. Just a heads-up that if you're out on Main Avenue between 5:30 and 9, you might spot a majority of your elected representatives enjoying a bratwurst alongside everyone else. Five weeks running now, the notice has landed with the same dutiful, unremarkable wording. It would be easy to read this as bureaucratic overkill, a legal department covering its bases for an event that is, by any reasonable measure, just a street party. That reading is wrong. This weekly quorum notice is exactly the kind of quiet, unglamorous transparency that keeps small-town government honest, and Brookings residents should recognize it as a model rather than roll their eyes at it. Here is the logic behind the notice. South Dakota's open meetings law, like similar statutes across the country, exists because a quorum of elected officials gathered in one place creates the possibility, however incidental, of informal deliberation happening outside public view. It doesn't matter that the setting is a summer festival instead of a council chamber. If four or more members of a five-or-seven-person body are standing together listening to music or eating a taco, in principle a conversation could drift toward policy, and the public would have no record of it. The law doesn't assume bad faith. It assumes that informal proximity is exactly the condition under which real business quietly gets done, and that citizens deserve a heads-up when that condition might arise. The easy objection is obvious: nobody actually believes four council members are going to hash out the next budget resolution between bites of a funnel cake. Isn't this just legal theater, a box checked for the sake of checking it? That skepticism misses what the notice is actually protecting against. The danger was never a single dramatic backroom deal at a street fair. It's the slow normalization of officials treating public proximity as private space, one casual gathering at a time, until nobody thinks to ask whether decisions are being shaped somewhere other than the council table. The notice is not evidence that Brookings has a problem. It's evidence that the city is keeping a habit alive precisely so the problem never gets a chance to start. There's also something worth admiring in the sheer repetitiveness of it. Five weeks of nearly identical language, publishing the same disclaimer for the same low-stakes event, is not exciting news. It won't drive traffic or spark debate. But that's the point. Good governance is rarely dramatic. It looks like routine, procedural steps taken so consistently that they become invisible, until the day someone actually needs them. A city that bothers to file this notice even when the stakes are this low is a city that will almost certainly file it when the stakes are higher, when a quorum happens to gather somewhere less charming than Main Avenue on a Thursday evening. Compare this to the alternative, which residents of larger cities know all too well: officials who mingle informally, make decisions in hallways or fundraisers or golf outings, and leave constituents piecing together after the fact what was actually discussed. Brookings is not immune to that risk simply because it's small. Small towns can be more vulnerable to it, in fact, because everyone already knows everyone, and the line between “neighbors talking” and “officials deliberating” blurs easily when the neighbors happen to hold public office. The quorum notice draws that line deliberately, every single week, whether or not anyone reads it. So when the next notice arrives before Downtown at Sundown, don't file it under civic trivia. File it under the kind of unglamorous discipline that keeps local government accountable in a town too small and too familiar for accountability to be automatic. The council isn't hiding anything by showing up to enjoy the evening. They're doing something better: telling you exactly where they'll be, and why it matters that you know.