South Dakota
Changed forest and market factors share blame for sawmill troubles, forest supervisor says • South Dakota Searchlight
Changed forest conditions and market forces likely contributed to layoffs at a Spearfish sawmill, according to the U.S. Forest Service’s top official in the Black Hills.
Last week, the owner of the sawmill blamed logging reductions in the Black Hills National Forest for the layoffs.
The forest’s supervisor is Shawn Cochran. He said this week that the Forest Service was saddened to hear about the laid-off employees, and the agency is concerned about the economic health of sawmills.
“The mills here in South Dakota and across the West are facing what appear to be some tough times,” Cochran said. “It’s not necessarily tied to just the timber supply chain, because we’re seeing the same things happen all throughout the West with mill closures.”
South Dakota Searchlight confirmed about 1,700 job losses at sawmills across the country since September, based on news reports about mill closures or layoffs in Florida, Montana, West Virginia, Oregon and Arkansas.
Companies cited outdated facilities, labor and housing shortages, rising costs, and plummeting lumber prices. One measure of those prices, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics’ producer price index for softwood lumber, has fallen by 56% since a peak in 2021. The “softwood” description includes the Black Hills’ predominant tree species, ponderosa pine.
Wyoming-based Neiman Enterprises announced 50 layoffs Thursday at Spearfish Forest Products, the company’s mill in South Dakota’s northern Black Hills.
Neiman said the layoffs were “the direct result of reductions to the Black Hills National Forest timber sale program.” The company made similar comments in 2021 when it closed its other South Dakota mill in Hill City.
A year prior to that closure, Forest Service researchers said severe wildfires and a pine beetle epidemic had drastically reduced the number of trees big enough for logging in the Black Hills. Those trees, called sawtimber, measure at least 9 inches in diameter at a point 4.5 feet above the ground. The forest had only half the sawtimber-size trees needed to sustain the level of timber sales allowed in the forest plan, the researchers said.
Some members of the timber industry disputed the research. Neiman’s Thursday news release included a statement from Ben Wudtke, executive director of a timber industry trade group called the Black Hills Forest Resource Association. Wudtke said “we have more timber now than in the ’70s and ’80s when the Black Hills National Forest was selling twice the amount of timber.”
The Forest Service initially declined to respond; then, on Monday, the Forest Service offered interviews with Cochran to several media outlets.
In his interview with Searchlight, Cochran defended the Forest Service research.
“The forest is very much in a changed condition,” he said.
There are many young trees in the forest, he added, which have sprouted in the wake of the pine beetle epidemic and severe wildfires. But those are not sawtimber size.
“More volume than ever?” he said, responding to a question about Wudtke’s statement. “I’d say, yes, we have a tremendous amount of volume that’s 9 inches and below. However, 9 and above, that has dramatically declined.”
Cochran said the Forest Service has spent $70 million during the last 10 years to help the Black Hills timber industry weather changing forest conditions. He did not provide a full breakdown of costs but said the amount includes stewardship sales. In those sales, the Forest Service covers some of the high costs that timber companies encounter in difficult logging areas, such as steep slopes.
There are more steep-slope areas to harvest, Cochran said, but logging those areas would come at great cost to the Forest Service, since companies need help to make steep-slope logging profitable. Cochran said the Forest Service’s cost to continue a full program of steep-slope logging on the forest could be up to $20 million.
“There is a need to do that, but there are also other needs on the forest,” Cochran said.
The Forest Service also spent $3 million on a pilot project to transport timber by train from other parts of the country to Neiman’s mill in Hulett, Wyoming.
“The last thing we want to do is see additional mill closures, and that’s why the Forest Service is investing heavily in the timber industry,” Cochran said.
Yet the changed conditions in the forest and the high costs of steep-slope logging remain “driving factors” for timber sales, Cochran added.
The Forest Service measures timber volume in a unit called “CCF,” with 1 CCF equaling 100 cubic feet. The agency plans to sell 63,000 CCF of timber in the Black Hills National Forest this fiscal year. That continues several years of reductions and is about a third of the allowable sale quantity of 181,000 CCF in the forest plan.
Sawmill layoffs and closures
Some recent sawmill layoffs and closures around the country:
- April 11, 2024: Neiman Enterprises says it will lay off 50 employees at Spearfish Forest Products.
- March 29, 2024: A company spokesperson confirms the closure of the West Fraser Sawmill in Perry, Florida, affecting 126 workers.
- March 20, 2024: Roseburg announces the closure of its particleboard plant in Missoula, Montana, and the layoffs of 150 employees.
- March 14, 2024: Pyramid Mountain Lumber in Seeley Lake, Montana, announces its plan to wind down operations and close, affecting 100 employees.
- Feb. 25, 2024: West Virginia state officials confirm that Allegheny Wood Products will shut down, eliminating jobs for 850 employees and contractors.
- Feb. 16, 2024: A Canadian company, Interfor, says it will shut down its Philomath, Oregon, sawmill, and cut 100 jobs.
- Feb. 9, 2024: Resboro Co. confirms the closure of a mill in Springfield, Oregon, and the layoffs of 25 workers.
- Jan. 10, 2024: Hampton Lumber says its sawmill in Banks, Oregon, will shut down indefinitely, leaving 58 employees without work.
- Jan. 9, 2024: West Fraser Timber Co. announces the closure of its sawmill in Maxville, Florida, affecting 80 employees, and also announces a plan to “indefinitely curtail” operations at its sawmill in Huttig, Arkansas, affecting 140 employees.
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South Dakota
After Standing Rock, could a canceled mine project offer a roadmap for opponents of a new oil pipeline in South Dakota?
Almost exactly a decade since the start of the Standing Rock protests against the Dakota Access pipeline gained national and international attention, new disputes are simmering over tribal rights in the Black Hills of South Dakota.
Earlier this month, an environmental organization and a Native American advocacy group sued the US Forest Service, claiming that an exploratory graphite drilling project on national forest land threatened a recognized ceremonial site on mountain meadows known as Pe’ Sla, or Reynolds Prairie.
But on Friday, Pete Lien and Sons, the company behind the project, abruptly withdrew, saying it would perform reclamation on the site and would not seek to file another plan. The decision came as a striking victory for Native American tribes and environmental groups that had opposed it – but other projects in the works may not meet the same conclusion.
The project, claimed nine groups within the Sioux Nation, including the Standing Rock Sioux, would “directly and significantly” affect the use of Pe’ Sla, which sits within Ȟe Sápa, the Lakota name for the sacred Black Hills of South Dakota, itself the locus of Lakota creation myths.
A second exploratory project by a Canadian company looking to mine uranium on state-owned land could affect Craven Canyon, an area that contains 7,000-year-old sites of importance to Indigenous tribes, historians and archaeologists.
Opposition to the twin projects – backed by Pete Lien, of Rapid City, and by Clean Nuclear Energy Corp – comes as a proposed Alberta-to-Wyoming pipeline for carrying Canadian crude oil to the US is close to securing commitments from oil companies after Donald Trump granted permitting through an executive order.
All the projects have at their heart issues of extraction, water safety and sacred sites, much as the Standing Rock dispute of 2016 that saw “water protesters” gather in a standoff with law enforcement over concerns regarding water safety and sacred sites.
That case began when the Standing Rock Sioux passed a resolution stating that “the Dakota Access Pipeline poses a serious risk to the very survival of our Tribe and … would destroy valuable cultural resources” and was a violation of the 1868 Fort Laramie Treaty guaranteeing the “undisturbed use and occupation” of reservation lands surrounding the pipeline.
In the aftermath, the environmental group Greenpeace was ordered to pay damages of $345m by a North Dakota judge to pipeline company Energy Transfer and subsidiary Dakota Access in connection with the protests, an order that is set to go to appeal. Greenpeace claims the legal action is designed to silence activists.
Most of the current disputes relate to energy, reflecting the Trump administration’s drive toward US energy independence and away from dependence on foreign sources, particularly China. Graphite, used in electric vehicle batteries, is almost exclusively imported. Roughly 95%–99% of uranium is purchased from foreign sources, including Russia and Kazakhstan.
The pipeline deal, meanwhile, is expected to help increase oil output from Canada, the world’s fourth-largest producer, to around 6.1m barrels a day, up from 5.5m now. Bridger, the company behind the Alberta-to-Wyoming pipeline, has said the project was being developed in response to identified market interest.
Wizipan “Little Elk” Garriott, a member of NDN Collective, an Indigenous rights group opposing the mining at Pe’ Sla, says the entire process of approval for the planned mine “happened in the dark”.
“There was no notice that they were proceeding provided to us, nor to the sovereign tribal nations,” he says, in violation of environmental and cultural impact study requirements and consultations with the tribes.
Lilias Jarding, director of the Black Hills Clean Water Alliance, one of the parties in the victorious Pe’ Sla action, says the decade since Standing Rock has seen a huge growth in projects attempting to mine tribal lands and areas of ceremonial significance.
Since the start of the second Trump administration, the push for both minerals extraction and energy has dramatically increased. “They’re being more aggressive,” Jarding says. In the case of Pe’ Sla, he adds, the company didn’t stop drilling when the lawsuits was filed: “They started drilling 24 hours a day.”
The alliance, along with tribes, claim the graphite project violated the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) and the National Historic Preservation Act (NHPA) and that the US Forest Service improperly used a process known as a “categorical exclusion” to bypass reviews.
Oglala Sioux president Frank Star Comes Out said in a statement that the Sioux tribes never ceded to the US the lands in the Black Hills, which, he said, “remain the spiritual center of the Great Sioux Nation and they are not for sale, lease or exploitation” and that the lawsuit is a “united tribal response to protect a sacred site from those who continue to desecrate our ancestral lands”.
Oglala activist Taylor Gunhammer said that drilling at Pe’ Sla was akin to “drilling under the Vatican or at a sacred site in Jerusalem”.
A representative of Clean Nuclear Energy Corp, Mike Blady, said the company was “aware of the cultural significance and are doing everything in our power to ensure that there is no collateral damage”.
Will this amount to a populist action similar to Standing Rock?
The Pe’ Sla dispute did not provoke the kind of Indigenous-led, grassroots resistance to fossil-fuel infrastructure projects that accompanied the Dakota Access pipeline, which in some ways became a template for contemporary protests, powered by social media, celebrities and politicians.
The tribes were not in favor of following in that direction, Jarding says: “It’s a deeply sacred spiritual and ceremonial site, and elders have made it clear that it’s not a good place for another Standing Rock with thousands of people. They say this is not the place.”
Under the Biden administration, the tribal groups felt they were entering into a period of co-management policy over federal lands that in many cases lie within treaty agreements. But under the Trump administration, that sense of co-operation has diminished.
“We’ve seen a ramp-up of opening up federal lands for mineral and gas exploration, but as a planet we need to be moving away from fossil fuels and toward policies that are sustainable into the future,” says NDN’s Garriott.
What was planned for Pe’ Sla now, or was happening at Standing Rock a decade ago, or has indeed happened over a long history of disputes between sovereign tribal groups and the US government, he says, is “protecting our land and protecting our water, not only for ourselves but for the planet. We’re not random protesters out there – we’re protecting our own land”.
The South Dakota Lottery offers multiple draw games for those aiming to win big.
Here’s a look at May 9, 2026, results for each game:
Winning Powerball numbers from May 9 drawing
15-41-46-47-56, Powerball: 22, Power Play: 2
Check Powerball payouts and previous drawings here.
Winning Lotto America numbers from May 9 drawing
08-12-13-27-42, Star Ball: 04, ASB: 04
Check Lotto America payouts and previous drawings here.
Winning Dakota Cash numbers from May 9 drawing
01-02-04-08-18
Check Dakota Cash payouts and previous drawings here.
Winning Millionaire for Life numbers from May 9 drawing
08-11-17-29-49, Bonus: 02
Check Millionaire for Life payouts and previous drawings here.
Feeling lucky? Explore the latest lottery news & results
Are you a winner? Here’s how to claim your prize
- Prizes of $100 or less: Can be claimed at any South Dakota Lottery retailer.
- Prizes of $101 or more: Must be claimed from the Lottery. By mail, send a claim form and a signed winning ticket to the Lottery at 711 E. Wells Avenue, Pierre, SD 57501.
- Any jackpot-winning ticket for Dakota Cash or Lotto America, top prize-winning ticket for Lucky for Life, or for the second prizes for Powerball and Mega Millions must be presented in person at a Lottery office. A jackpot-winning Powerball or Mega Millions ticket must be presented in person at the Lottery office in Pierre.
When are the South Dakota Lottery drawings held?
- Powerball: 9:59 p.m. CT on Monday, Wednesday, and Saturday.
- Mega Millions: 10 p.m. CT on Tuesday and Friday.
- Lucky for Life: 9:38 p.m. CT daily.
- Lotto America: 9:15 p.m. CT on Monday, Wednesday and Saturday.
- Dakota Cash: 9 p.m. CT on Wednesday and Saturday.
- Millionaire for Life: 10:15 p.m. CT daily.
This results page was generated automatically using information from TinBu and a template written and reviewed by a South Dakota editor. You can send feedback using this form.
RAPID CITY, S.D. (KOTA) – A Rapid City church is hosting a free community event Thursday to raise awareness about human trafficking, with organizers saying the danger may be closer than people think.
The Lutheran Women’s Missionary League at Bethlehem Lutheran Church is opening the presentation to the entire community because organizers say awareness alone can save a life.
“If we can get 20 people to understand what to look for — if we can get 20 people to understand that this organization exists — then we can start shining light into every corner, and suddenly it’ll be a better world,” said Alexandra Loverink, co-president of LWML Bethlehem Lutheran Church.
Event details
The free presentation is Thursday, May 14 at 6 p.m. at Bethlehem Lutheran Church on Rushmore Street. The speaker is Reverend Tess Franzen, founder of Freedom’s Journey, a Rapid City-based ministry that has assisted hundreds of trafficking survivors over more than a decade.
Franzen said the problem in South Dakota is far more widespread than most people realize.
“We see mostly sex trafficking, but much of what we see is — some people might call it homegrown or familial,” Franzen said. “We see trafficking here where young people are being trafficked out, their family members are selling access to them when they’re children. And in many cases, they don’t really even realize there’s anything wrong with it.”
Organizer Cari Garwood-Beard said Franzen’s presentation changed how she sees her own neighborhood, and she wants others to have that same wake-up call.
“She told a story about her neighbor one time — just a good old guy — and found out that he was a trafficker. Her neighbor, who she thought was above boards,” Garwood-Beard said. “And it really hit home. My next-door neighbor could be.”
A freewill offering will be collected for Freedom’s Journey at Thursday’s event. Bethlehem Lutheran Church is at 1630 Rushmore Street.
Resources
If you suspect trafficking, dial 9-1-1 or the National Human Trafficking Hotline at 1-888-373-7888.
For more information about Freedom’s Journey, visit their website or call 805.380.8009.
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Copyright 2026 KOTA. All rights reserved.
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