The Project Prison Reset group meets on April 3, 2025, at the Military Heritage Alliance in Sioux Falls. (John Hult/South Dakota Searchlight)
Land that Sioux Falls economic development boosters had once hoped to see anchored by a $500 million slaughterhouse is now on offer as a men’s prison site.
Also a prison site option, as of Tuesday: a hundred-plus acres of ranch land just east of Box Elder, the growing city near Ellsworth Air Force Base.
Letters offering up the Pennington County ranchland and the land near what would have been Wholestone Foods in Sioux Falls were posted on Tuesday on the Project Prison Reset task force’s website. Gov. Larry Rhoden formed the group in February to study options to address the state’s swelling correctional population after lawmakers said no to the 1,500-bed, $850 million prison the governor wanted to build in southern Lincoln County.
Prison group stuck between local opposition and limited space
The task force has since rejected that Lincoln County site as an option, in spite of the state having spent about $50 million on it so far, capped the price of a new prison at $600 million, and asked Rhoden to push back the date of the planned special session of the Legislature next month at which lawmakers would be asked to sign off on a final prison plan. Rhoden agreed to the delay.
Until Tuesday, the task force’s two remaining property options for a new prison that don’t involve land already owned by the Department of Corrections were outside of Worthing and Mitchell, respectively. Citizens and some community leaders in both cities have rallied against prison construction, however.
The task force winnowed down the options to Worthing, Mitchell and existing DOC properties in Sioux Falls and Springfield from a list of more than a dozen submissions, each sent in response to a request for information a few months ago.
The state wants at least 100 acres of land for a prison, ideally within 20 miles of its existing penitentiary workforce in Sioux Falls.
Unbuilt slaughterhouse, ranch added to options list
Tuesday’s two late-arriving options came from opposite ends of the state.
Sweetman Partners of Sioux Falls sent a letter to the task force on Tuesday to inform the group that if the state wants it, the company would be happy to negotiate a sale of 137 acres of its eastern Sioux Falls property off Interstate 229.
The land is just south of what would have been a 1,000-employee hog operation. Wholestone, part of the Iowa-based, producer-owned Pipestone Cooperative, had recently aimed to open what would have been one of the largest swine butchering operations in South Dakota in that industrial park, and the company still owns the land.
Locations of the potential prison locations that remain in play, plus the location of the original rural Lincoln County site that’s been ruled out.
Sioux Falls voted down an effort to ban new slaughterhouses in the city on the 2022 ballot, but the project nonetheless fizzled. By mid-2023, Wholestone had partnered with an Iowa company to meet its production needs.
Today, Sweetman Partners is in the process of selling off smaller hunks of the property just to the south of the Wholestone land. Sweetman’s managing partner said in his Tuesday letter to the Project Prison Reset task force that he’d be “willing to sell it all to the State of South Dakota.”
“If you are interested and would like to enter into negotiations, please let me know,” Thomas Sweetman wrote.
Sweetman told South Dakota Searchlight he got a call near the end of May from someone – he couldn’t recall who – asking him if he’d sell the land to the state for a prison. He said yes, and was told to write a letter to the lieutenant governor saying as much.
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Lt. Gov. Tony Venuhizen, who leads the prison task force, emailed a copy of the resulting Sweetman letter to his fellow task force members on Tuesday. He also forwarded along the pitch from the economic development coordinator for the city of Box Elder. Both letters were posted to the Project Prison Reset task force website.
The Box Elder letter touts just under 105 acres of land owned by Gikling Ranch LLC as a workable prison option. The city of Box Elder would service the site for water and utilities, the document says, and the state could take advantage of the area’s large and growing workforce.
Box Elder has grown rapidly in recent years to meet the Air Force’s anticipated needs as it expands the base to host B-21 bombers.
“The city offers a pro-growth climate, excellent access to training and education resources, and a collaborative approach to public-private partnerships,” the letter from Box Elder’s Sean Overeynder wrote.
Any sale of the land, he said, “is subject to appropriate due diligence and additional discussion with the City of Box Elder,” and final approval would need to come from the city council.
The next Project Prison Reset task force meeting is scheduled for July 8 in Sioux Falls.
