A municipality may not be incorporated unless it contains at least one hundred legal residents and at least forty-five registered voters. For the purposes of this section, a person is a legal resident in the proposed municipality if the person actually lives in the proposed municipality for at least ninety days of the three hundred sixty-five days immediately preceding the filing of the petition or is an active duty member of the armed forces whose home of record is within the proposed municipality.
S.D. Codified Laws § 9-3-1
Minimum population of municipalities
Applied in 3 court decisions — leading case Lippold v. Meade Cty. Bd. of Comm'rs (2018)
Most recently applied in State v. Buffalo Chip (November 2020)
Source: PolC 1877, ch 24, § 2; CL 1887, § 1023; RPolC 1903, § 1418; SL 1909, ch 73; RC 1919, § 6172; SDC 1939, § 45.0302; SL 2016, ch 48, § 1.
How often courts cite this section
Court decisions citing this, by year. The dip in the last several years is a data-coverage gap, not a real trend — our corpus holds fewer opinions from the most recent years, so recent citations are undercounted.
Official source: South Dakota Legislature. Reproduced from public-domain South Dakota statutes; confirm against the official source for the current text. Not legal advice.