John Hult

jhult@argusleader.com

Only a gun range and radio station remain of the entertainment emporium that was Chuck Brennan's Badlands Pawn, Gold and Jewelry.

That was the latest news in the ongoing saga of Initiated Measure 21, the interest rate-capping ballot question that’s shut down the payday industry in South Dakota.

Badlands Motor Speedway is up for sale, and all 11 of Brennan’s Dollar Loan Center stores are closing.

That’s left a lot of people out of a job. The businesses represented 400 jobs in total, Brennan said, half of which were full-time.

That accounts for each employee at loan offices statewide, Badlands Pawn full-timers who sold everything from Rolex watches* to corned beef sandwiches and another 200 part-time seasonal workers who tended to the speedway during warmer months.

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Supporters of the measure expected a shutdown and consistently said the industry did more economic harm than good for the community.

But Brennan thinks there’s more job- and tax-related damage coming than payday loan opponents might recognize. Dollar Loan Center, after all, was just one payday lender.

“The tax impact to the state is staggering from Measure 21 and will be felt for a long time,” he said. “Employer/employee taxes, sales tax, bank franchise taxes, local and state taxes, licensing fees, all of the 138 locations that were paying rent and those taxes, etc.”

With Brennan’s businesses, the job loss could sting a little harder. His shops paid above-market wages to draw talent from other employers in a city starved for labor, and he leveraged his businesses’ entertainment focus as a selling point.

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“Not many gigs come with free concert tickets, race tickets and all kinds of other perks. That is what made our business unique in Sioux Falls,” Brennan said.

The total number of employees impacted is large enough to trigger a federal layoff notice, but Badlands and DLC employees didn’t get one.

Federal law requires a 60-day notification for mass layoffs from a single employer through the Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification (WARN) Act. But a layoff notice comes only if those employees work at the same location or if the layoffs impact 500 or more people.

Brennan’s businesses are scattered, thus outside the “single site of employment” that triggers a two-month notice requirement for employers.

Even so, the passage of Measure 21 two months ago served as a notice of sorts. Brennan was among the industry leaders who had warned of a total industry shutdown if the 36 percent rate cap passed.

Notice or not, Dawn Dovre of the South Dakota Department of Labor said the Sioux Falls jobs office is ready to help large groups of people find new jobs in the city.

“Our Sioux Falls office is prepared to offer all of our services should there be any layoffs from Badlands Pawn or Dollar Loan Center,” Dovre said last week.

Here's a link to the DOL's layoff assistance programs.

* Correction, Jan. 4, 2017: This article originally misspelled "Rolex."