State Auditor candidate speaks at Demo forum

HURON – It’s been 60 years since a Democrat has been elected state auditor in South Dakota.
Tom Cool is hoping to break that six-decade drought for the party by becoming the first Democrat since Harriet Horning to fill the position.
“Anyone know her?” he asked a roomful of mostly long-time Democratic activists at Thursday’s weekly District 22 Democratic Forum.
No hands went up.
But folks were obviously surprised it had been that long since they had elected one of their own as state auditor.
Horning, the first woman elected auditor since statehood in 1889, was from Watertown and was elected in 1958, serving one two-year term.
“I think I would have been eight years old when she was elected so I don’t think I remember her,” Cool said.
Cool, executive director of the Council on College Admissions in South Dakota, said it was a bit of a surprise when he was asked to run for auditor at the South Dakota Democratic Party Convention last summer.
The first thing he did was to learn what the job entails.
“On the state auditor’s website, it points out that the state auditor is an independently elected constitutional officer that’s in charge of overseeing all of state government, every department, division, employee in state government,” he said.
“And it also says that that job is the taxpayer’s watchdog,” Cool said.
But he said that got him to wondering about the EB-5 and Gear-Up scandals.

“My big question is, where were these guys when all of this was going on and developing?” Cool said.
His opponent is Pierre veteran Rich Sattgast, who is running for auditor again after serving in the office for eight years before most recently serving as state treasurer.
“We need a watchdog, we don’t need a bureaucratic lapdog up in Pierre at that office,” Cool said.
Before his current position, Cool was executive director of the South Dakota Counseling Association.
He worked in public relations in Indiana, and for a short time was an investigative reporter. His stories led to the dismissal of someone from a federal program, he said.
“So I know a little bit about looking at the books,” Cool said. “I’ve also been a nonprofit administrator for the past several years, so I know how to manage a budget.”
He said he’s not a certified public accountant, but will hire good ones.
Cool is a Platte native whose mother still lives in that community.
For years, whenever he visited her, they would go for drives south of town where what he refers to as the Westerhuis compound was.
It was there in September 2015 that Scott Westerhuis shot his wife and four children, set fire to the house and then shot himself prior to the Gear-Up scandal coming to light.
On his visits leading up to that tragic day, he said his mother would say, “I don’t know what’s going on there, but something’s wrong, because number one they never had that much money and number two his wife has been hired as the bookkeeper for the whole operation.”
“This is before all this came out,” Cool said. “She knew it, people in Platte knew it, nobody in Pierre seemed to know it.”
If he succeeds Harriet Horning as the next Democrat to serve as state auditor, Cool said he will get out of the office frequently and travel around the state to talk to people, to learn things they might know are going on.
Since his nomination, he’s been campaigning throughout South Dakota, often with fellow Democrats running for the higher profile offices. Democrats have candidates running for all of the positions for the first time in years and he says, “I think we’ve got a really good chance.”
As director of the Council on College Admissions, Cool works with more than 100 competing institutions, not to promote particular ones, but to make sure students are making informed decisions so they do well in life.
“And if we can get the voters of South Dakota to make some informed decisions,” he said, “we know we’re going to have a lot of success.”