FLORENCE, S.D. – A significant operation led by the Codington County Sheriff’s Office resulted in the discovery and safe disposal of numerous homemade explosive devices and a potential explosive manufacturing operation. The operation, which began with the execution of a search warrant for illegal firearms at a residence on Flyer St in Florence, SD, also led to the discovery of several illegal firearms and drugs.
The operation commenced on May 2, 2024, at approximately 8:15 am. During the execution of the search warrant, deputies discovered suspicious devices, prompting them to contact the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF), the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), and the Division of Criminal Investigation (DCI). As a safety precaution, a handful of houses were temporarily evacuated.
By 6:39 pm, the ATF and FBI had properly disposed of the many homemade explosive devices and explosive manufacturing materials located at the scene. Deputies completed the search warrant, having located several illegal firearms and drugs.
Christopher Gamble (39) and Katelyn Gamble (28), both residents of 321 Flyer Dr. Florence, SD, were arrested in connection with the search warrant. Both are currently held at the Codington County Detention Center and awaiting a bond. Further arrests may follow as the investigation continues.
Christopher Gamble faces multiple charges, including probation violation, possession of a firearm by a former violent offender, possession of a firearm prior to a felony drug conviction, four counts of child abuse and neglect, maintaining a place where drugs are sold, kept, or used, possession of explosives, and possession of a controlled drug or substance and marijuana.
Katelyn Gamble has been charged with four counts of child abuse and neglect, maintaining a place where drugs are sold, kept, or used, possession of explosives, possession of a controlled drug or substance and marijuana, and violation of a protection order.
The operation involved Child Protection Services, the ATF, the FBI, the DCI, Watertown and Florence Fire Departments, and Codington County Emergency Management.
Sheriff Howell praised the cooperation between the agencies, stating, “Being able to get these illegal explosive devices, firearms, and drugs off the street wouldn’t have happened without the assistance and great cooperation we have with the assisting agencies and community.”
PIERRE, S.D. – South Dakota Attorney General Marty Jackley announces that a South Dakota Division of Criminal Investigation (DCI) review indicates that Sioux Falls Police Officers were justified in shooting a man who was armed with two knives during an incident April 4, 2024 in Sioux Falls.
“This suspect had the means and opportunity to cause bodily injury to those law enforcement officers present, and he posed a safety risk to those who were nearby,” said Attorney General Jackley. “The officers used non-lethal force first to try to gain compliance with the suspect before using lethal force.”
The incident began when Minnehaha County Sheriff Deputies received a mental health detention warrant for Daniel K. McKillip, 42. The deputies attempted to serve the warrant to McKillip at his residence located at the Cayman Court Assisted Living Facility, 4101 W. Cayman St in Sioux Falls. The deputies approached McKillip and explained they were there to place him on a mental hold. McKillip refused to comply and eventually produced two knives.
Negotiations for McKillip to comply with the order to drop the knives continued for about 28 minutes, but he refused to comply. A Sioux Falls Police Officer fired a less lethal round at McKillip. When McKillip began to stand up with the knives in his hand, two Sioux Falls Police Officers fired three lethal rounds at McKillip. Additional less lethal rounds also were fired by Sioux Falls Police Officers.
McKillip was taken to a Sioux Falls hospital for treatment of his injuries. After McKillip was discharged from the hospital, he was placed on a mental health detention warrant.
Test results on the two officers were negative for drugs, alcohol, and inhalants. McKillip does have a history of prior mental health holds.
DCI processed the crime scene, collected and analyzed evidence, reviewed forensic examinations, interviewed the officers and suspect, gathered witness statements, and viewed all available video.
The Attorney General and the Division of Criminal Investigation would like to thank the South Dakota Forensic Laboratory, the South Dakota Highway Patrol, the Minnehaha County Sheriff’s Office, and the Minnehaha County State’s Attorney’s Office for their assistance. The Sioux Falls Police Department cooperated with the investigation.
RAPID CITY, S.D. (Bart Pfankuch, SD News Watch) – After two years with the lowest possible health and safety rating from the federal government, Monument Health’s score will rise from a 1-star to a 3-star rating when the new results are released publicly in July, the Rapid City hospital said Wednesday.
“These achievements demonstrate the effectiveness of our ongoing quality initiatives, and we will continue to strive for excellence in all aspects of patient care,” Jill Tice, Monument Health vice president of quality, safety and risk management, said in a news release.
The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services ratings range from the lowest, a 1-star overall rating, to the highest, a 5-star rating, based on dozens of criteria in five major medical safety and quality categories.
Monument also said its hospital in Spearfish will receive a 5-star rating. Its Rapid City hospital will also see an increase from a “C” grade to a “B” grade when updated ratings are released this summer by the Leapfrog Group, a national nonprofit hospital evaluation firm, it said. Leapfrog rates hospitals on a scale of A-F, with “A” the highest and “F” the lowest qualify ratings.
South Dakota News Watch recently reported that Monument Health’s Rapid City hospital received the lowest federal quality rating possible over the past two years, according to CMS, which evaluates hospital safety and quality of patient care.
No other hospital in South Dakota or within a 200-mile radius of Rapid City had a 1-star rating in 2023, the latest year the ratings were released, and only about 8% of U.S. hospitals reviewed by CMS received a 1-star rating last year.
Among the 14 South Dakota hospitals in the state that received a CMS quality and safety rating in 2023, no hospital had a 2-star rating, two had a 3-star rating, four had a 4-star rating and seven had a 5-star rating, according to the CMS Care Compare website.
Improvement programs appear to pay off
Monument said the CMS ratings are based on data that is often a year or even several years old, and that the poor CMS ratings in 2022 and 2023 did not fully reflect the outcomes of a broad, ongoing effort to improve patient care and quality.
In 2019, Monument implemented daily staff huddles to highlight challenges and successes, and a 5-tier improvement program that seeks to document and address any issues or problems in a systemic and immediate way.
“Monument Health reinforced our commitment to high-quality, safe patient care in 2019,” Tice said in the release. “While the CMS star rating is still based on information dating back to 2019, it shows progress on our quality journey and using the same measurement with today’s data would result in higher ratings.”
While updated CMS ratings are not yet available for other state hospitals, a spokeswoman from the Leapfrog wrote to News Watch in April noting that no hospital in either South Dakota or North Dakota will receive an “A” grade in the 2024 ratings that will be released soon.
Past ratings reveal quality concerns
According to the latest public CMS review of Monument, updated in October 2023, the hospital was at or above national averages in several key areas, including in mortality rates for patients with strokes, heart attacks and chronic pulmonary disease.
The hospital also scored well in regard to patients not requiring readmission for any reason after discharge, a low rate of “central-line” catheter infections and it had a low rate of complications following surgeries. Costs for many procedures were also in line with national averages.
However, Monument was below state and national averages for percentage of patients receiving appropriate care for severe sepsis, in regard to length of time of visits to the emergency room, in the rate of surgical site infections after colon surgeries and in percentage of patients that received advanced breast screening after an initial mammogram.
Leapfrog, in its last publicly available rating, noted that Monument performed above average in quality of nursing care, safe medication administration, and organization leadership and staff cooperation to prevent errors.
But Leapfrog scored Monument below national averages in several areas, including in sepsis infections after surgery, accidental cuts and tears, dangerous blood clots, surgical wounds splitting open, site infections after colon surgery, patient falls and injuries and “deaths from serious treatable complications.”
Monument: Infection rates have fallen
In the news release, Monument said the hospital has seen safety improvements in at least three areas:
A 37% drop in colorectal surgical site infections in 2022, with a 74% drop in the same infections from 2022 to 2023.
A 92% reduction in central-line catheter bloodstream infections in 2022-2023, and two years without that type of infection reported.
A 75% decline in hospital-onset Methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) infections over the past nine months.”While these scores provide valuable insight, Monument Health acknowledges that they are just part of the story. There will continue to be a delay in reporting from CMS and Leapfrog,” Jay White, Monument executive medical director of quality and safety, said in the news release. “Over time, these scores will accurately reflect the dedicated and quality care Monument Health physicians and caregivers provide today, and every day.”
Monument added that the health group will soon launch a public quality dashboard to inform the public about future quality improvement initiatives and results in real time.
ENGLEWOOF, CO (John Hult, South Dakota Searchlight) – The company that aims to place a massive jet fuel plant in Lake Preston told investors Thursday that updated guidance from the federal government on biofuel carbon credits could be a boon to its prospects of success.
Englewood, Colorado-based Gevo wants to build a plant to turn ethanol into sustainable aviation fuel in South Dakota, with a project cost of $1 billion or more. President Joe Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act included billions of dollars to encourage the production of such fuel, which currently represents a miniscule slice of the overall aviation fuel market.
Gov. Kristi Noem, whose son-in-law is a registered lobbyist for Gevo, has called the company’s Net Zero-1 plant “the largest economic development project in South Dakota history.”
Critics in South Dakota have questioned if Net Zero-1 will ever come to fruition, citing Gevo’s sub-$1 stock price and its reliance on federal subsidies.
During Thursday’s fourth-quarter earnings call, CEO Patrick Gruber and other company executives talked up multiple pathways to profitability, some of which are untethered to its Lake Preston aspirations.
Gevo currently operates a renewable natural gas plant in northwest Iowa, for example. It also has software called Verity to track the carbon footprint of farm fields, which Gruber says will be valuable to any industry that values carbon reductions.
The company ended the first quarter with cash, cash equivalents and restricted cash of $340.6 million. Updated guidance on how the federal government will calculate the carbon scores of biofuel feedstocks, which offers points for low-carbon corn or soybeans, are a positive development, Gruber said.
“We’ve got money. I don’t like our stock price at all, but by God we’re making progress,” Gruber said.
Moving parts, uncertainties
Several dominoes must fall in Gevo’s direction for the NZ-1 plant – its largest project – to become a permanent fixture in rural Kingsbury County.
The project’s economics are linked to Gevo’s ability to offset high production costs with carbon credits from the federal government. The Biden bill’s incentives for sustainable aviation fuel are part of a series of policies that hope to reduce the release of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, as the gas contributes to climate change.
Gevo is in the process of securing a $950 million federal loan guarantee from the U.S. Department of Energy to stake its claim in a lower-carbon future. To secure the loan, Gevo needs to prove that NZ-1’s fuel will hit the carbon reduction mark – specifically, by producing biofuels that reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 50% compared to traditional fuel.
To do that, Gruber and other company representatives have repeatedly said Net Zero-1 can’t pencil out to profit in South Dakota without access to a carbon capture pipeline from Summit Carbon Solutions. Linking to the pipeline would reduce the Gevo fuel’s carbon score, thereby boosting its market value.
That $8 billion pipeline remains unbuilt and mired in controversy. Like Gevo, it would take advantage of federal tax credits, in its case cashing in by capturing carbon dioxide gas from 57 Midwestern ethanol plants and pumping it to a sequestration site in North Dakota.
The Summit project has sparked blowback and lawsuits from landowners – one of which landed in front of the South Dakota Supreme Court and awaits a ruling – and a host of legislative proposals. A “landowner bill of rights” passed in the waning hours of the 2024 legislative session was sold as a compromise between the company and its detractors, but some Summit opponents nonetheless hope to challenge it by way of a ballot initiative this fall.
On Thursday, Gevo Chief Operating Officer Chris Ryan reiterated the importance of the carbon pipeline. Hooking into the pipeline would help Gevo reduce its carbon intensity score and, by extension, the market value of its products to airlines that aim to reduce their own carbon footprints.
“We want to see the CO2 pipeline in South Dakota move forward, to keep Lake Preston as our most attractive site for producing sustainable aviation fuel,” Ryan said. “But we’ve developed a slate of potential sites that we’ve prequalified for future Net Zero projects.”
Eric Frey, Gevo’s vice president of finance, declined to disclose those locations in an email after the earnings call.
Lake Preston is attractive for reasons beyond a pipeline, though. Ryan mentioned its proximity to rail transport, and its relative proximity to airports in Chicago and Minneapolis.
“Both of those airports are in states with a sustainable aviation fuel tax credit of $1.50 a gallon,” Ryan said.
Many Lake Preston-area farmers already use “climate smart” agriculture practices like no-till planting or the use of certain kinds of fertilizer, he said.
The company had initially planned to spend up to $175 million on the fuel plant project this year. On the earnings call, Ryan said that figure has dropped to between $90 million and $125 million, largely as a result of holding off on certain construction costs until the federal loan guarantee is secured.
CEO: Carbon model bodes well
Summit’s future is uncertain, but another piece of Gevo’s economic puzzle is closer to solid, Gruber said Thursday.
The CEO heralded a final decision from the U.S. Treasury Department on a carbon score calculation model from Argonne National Laboratories called Greenhouse Gases, Regulated Emissions, and Energy Use in Technologies (GREET).
The Biden infrastructure package directed the Department of Energy to use a different model for calculating the emission reductions of sustainable aviation fuel at first. Agriculture groups in the U.S., however, pilloried that initial model as Eurocentric and unable to account for climate-friendly farming practices in the U.S.
The Energy Department announced its intention to use GREET last fall in response, but the agency also ruled that the model needed an update for use as a standard for sustainable aviation fuel. It offers credits for “bundling” ag practices like no-till and cover cropping.
That updated model earned its final approval Monday for use in what are called 40B tax credits, which expire in 2024. The following year, the credits will transition to what the infrastructure law called 45Z credits.
The acceptance of the GREET model for the first round of aviation fuel credits bodes well for its prospects next year, Gruber told investors Thursday.
“It recognizes the many carbon reductions we’ve been talking about,” Gruber said. “It’s moving properly towards the recognition of climate-smart ag.”
Some farm groups have expressed concerns about the updated GREET model, with the president of the American Soybean Association arguing that cover cropping isn’t realistic in all parts of the country.
Gruber gave a nod to concerns about “bundling” practices on the earnings call, but still called the updated guidance a step in the right direction. Gevo’s hope is to see the model be updated again to recognize what he called “field-level” carbon tracking – through the company’s Verity platform – that would negate the need for bundling by measuring carbon emissions directly for each climate smart practice employed on the farm.
Paul Bloom, Gevo’s chief carbon officer, told investors that Verity, through which some farmers in Lake Preston are already collecting payments, will help farmers prove the low-carbon worth of their crops.
“We want farmers to be rewarded for reducing their carbon footprint and helping foster rural economic development with agriculture done right,” Bloom said.
