Michael Calabrese for State Senate
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Michael Calabrese · State Senate · District 34

A senator for the future of Rapid City.

Small-business owner. Father. Eleven years building a life and a business in the Black Hills. Running because District 34 deserves a legislator who works for what matters here.

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Michael Calabrese, Democratic candidate for South Dakota State Senate District 34

My name is Michael Calabrese. My wife Jennifer and I own Black Hills Vinyl on St. Joseph Street. We moved to Rapid City on Christmas Eve 2014, and we've spent the last eleven years building a business and a life here. We bought the building our shop calls home. We hired our neighbors. We're raising our daughter here.

I'm running for state senate because the people and families who live in District 34 deserve a legislator who works for what's truly important to them.

That is what I'm running on.

The platform

Four things I'll work on in Pierre.

01

A place to live that a working family can afford.

Our daughter is going to grow up in a Rapid City where young working families can rent an apartment without two roommates, and eventually buy a starter home. That isn't the city we have right now.

Property taxes are climbing, rents are climbing faster, and Pierre's answer so far has been to shift the burden onto a sales tax that hits a young family's grocery run harder than it hits anybody with a second home. I'll push for real property tax reform that doesn't get paid for at the checkout line, steady state investment in workforce housing so Rapid City can build what it actually needs, and protection for the starter-home market, not more giveaways to out-of-state developers who leave town with the profit.

02

Healthcare that doesn't bankrupt the people who keep this town running.

In 2022, South Dakotans voted by a clear majority to expand Medicaid. Thirty thousand of our neighbors have healthcare today because of that vote. Now the legislature is asking us, through Amendment I, to put a kill switch on the whole thing. I'm voting no, and I'll work to protect what voters already decided.

I'll fight to keep rural hospitals open, push back on prescription costs and insurance denials, protect a woman's ability to make her own medical decisions without the government in the room, and expand the kind of mental-health and addiction care that families in the Black Hills deserve.

03

Public schools worth sending our kids to.

South Dakota is near the bottom of the country in teacher pay. The 2026 budget gave our schools a 1.4% bump while inflation ran past 2.5%. That's a cut, whatever the press release says. Our daughter, Melody, starts school in a few years. I'd like her to have great teachers that are paid fairly for the difficult jobs they do.

I'll push for a real teacher-pay floor, full funding for special education and student mental health, affordable childcare and pre-K so parents can actually work, and career and technical education that connects Rapid City kids to Ellsworth, the skilled trades, and the tech economy that's already growing here. Public dollars should go to public schools, not to vouchers that drain districts of resources they can't afford to lose.

04

Good jobs, and the people to fill them.

I've spent my career in Rapid City on both sides of the local economy, running a small business on St. Joseph Street and working in the tech industry. What I see every day is a community with a solid foundation and enormous potential. The growth is visible everywhere you look, and we need leadership focused on creative solutions that keep that growth going.

Too many young South Dakotans graduate and leave because they can't find the job, the pay, or the future they want at home. Too many talented people who'd love to move here take one look at our wages, our housing costs, or our policy choices and decide somewhere else. I'll support the Main Street businesses that are the backbone of every town in this district, invest in the industries where Rapid City is already winning, and make South Dakota a place where the next generation chooses to stay, and where the next wave of newcomers chooses to build.

I'm not a career politician. I'm a small-business owner, a dad, and someone who has spent more than a decade invested in the future of Rapid City. I'd like to spend the next two years in Pierre doing the same thing.

Housing. Healthcare. Schools. Rapid City's future.

That's the job to be done.

— Michael Calabrese

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