Minnehaha County Commission · 2026
Twenty years running toward the emergency. Eight years doing the homework.
I spent two decades in the fire service and the last eight years on the Sioux Falls City Council. One job taught me how to keep my head when everything is going wrong. The other taught me how to read the whole budget before I vote on it. Minnehaha County needs both.
Eight years on the city council
City council work is not ribbon cuttings. It is eight budget cycles, a decade of zoning hearings, and a lot of Tuesday nights spent on questions most people are lucky enough never to think about. That is exactly the experience the county commission runs on.
Same taxpayers, one statement
Nobody gets a separate paycheck for city taxes and county taxes. The people I represent have been asking me about that one property tax statement for eight years.
I already know the county's files
Jail costs, dispatch agreements, public health and shared infrastructure came across the council table repeatedly. I will not need a year to learn the acronyms.
I can read a budget in the dark
Eight cycles is enough to recognize how an ongoing expense gets quietly funded with one-time revenue — and to catch it before the vote rather than after.
The boring part is the job
Highway equipment, drainage easements, zoning appeals, human services contracts. It is unglamorous, it is most of the work, and I have shown up for eight years of exactly that.
Twenty years in the fire service
Before the council, I spent twenty years as a firefighter. You do not do that job for two decades without learning how systems really work — where the mutual aid agreements hold, where the staffing math breaks down, and what happens to a family when the safety net has a hole in it.
On a scene you get incomplete information, a clock, and people counting on you to decide anyway. You learn to stay calm, work the plan, and own the call you made when it is reviewed afterward.
Rural fire districts, township roads, dispatch and ambulance coverage only work when the agreements between jurisdictions are written well and funded honestly. I have depended on those agreements personally.
An engine, a set of turnout gear, a training hour — every one of them is a number in a budget I now help write. Twenty years on the other side of that number is hard to fake.
Overdoses, mental health crises, house fires, the last bad night of a long illness. You see exactly where county human services, law enforcement and health care hand off to each other — and where they drop the ball.
In the fire service you do not get to argue about whose department it is while the building is burning. County government should work the same way.
What I will work on
Not slogans. Three areas where a commissioner's vote decides something concrete, and the specific work I intend to do in each one.
Fund the people who answer the call, and stop using the jail as the county's only open door.
Public safety is the county's core promise: the sheriff's patrol, 911 dispatch, the jail, and the emergency services that cover every township. I have stood on the response side of that promise for twenty years. I know what it costs to keep it, and I know that a crisis that ends in a jail cell instead of treatment costs the county twice.
Growth is coming. It should pay for the roads, drainage and services it needs.
Minnehaha County is growing, and that is good news if we plan for it. It is expensive news if we do not. Development should follow the infrastructure we have already built instead of leapfrogging onto farmland and handing the county a road, a drainage problem and a service area it never budgeted for.
Eight years of public votes, plain-language budgets, and returning the phone call.
Leadership at this level is not charisma. It is reading the packet, explaining the numbers in language a taxpayer recognizes, and being reachable when the decision is unpopular. That is how I have worked for eight years on the council, and it is how I would work on the commission.
About Curt
I have built my life in this community: twenty years in the fire service, a family raised here, and the last eight years representing my neighbors on the Sioux Falls City Council. Public service in Minnehaha County has never been an abstraction for me. It is the place my kids grew up and my grandkids are growing up now.
Most weekends you will find us together — at a ballgame, around a kitchen table, or up at the cabin where the whole crew still crowds onto one deck for a photo nobody can get everyone to look at the camera for.
That is the part people miss about local government. The decisions a county commission makes are not really about levies and plats. They are about whether the ambulance gets there, whether the road holds up, and whether the next generation can afford to stay in the county they grew up in.
I am asking for your vote because the work is not finished, and because I would rather spend my retirement in a commission chamber getting it right than complaining about it from the sidelines.
Donate
A county commission race does not run on television buys. It runs on yard signs, postage, gas, and the literature a volunteer hands you at your door. That is why a check from a neighbor goes further here than almost anywhere else on the ballot.
It is also the simplest accountability there is: when a campaign is funded by the people who live on these roads and pay this levy, those are the people it answers to.
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