PHILIP - Chip and Julie Kemnitz have worried about the truck traffic through the middle of town for years.

Thursday they had a chance to share that worry in person with someone who might actually be able to help: Gov. Mike Rounds.

The Kemnitzes joined a small crowd of locals who went to the Philip High School gymnasium Thursday afternoon and evening for personal outreach from state government called Capital for a Day. Rounds and his wife, Jean, joined department heads or their assistants from all major agencies and offices in the gymnasium to answer questions, hear complaints and look for solutions.

Chip Kemnitz went directly to Rounds.

"Highway 73 runs right through town and close to the school. There's no sidewalks along the highway, and our kids walk right alongside it. Sometimes pretty little kids," he said. "I see them walking there and those semis coming down the hill and it scares me."

Rounds listened, then referred Kemnitz to the nearby state Department of Transportation booth, one two dozen from various agencies set up on the basketball floor.

"Usually it's the department heads that come along," Rounds said. "If not, it'll be a deputy or assistant. They're here to listen, to learn and to help."

The Capital for a Day concept began with Gov. George Mickelson, who served from January 1987 until he died in an airplane crash in April 1993. The program faded during eight years of Gov. Bill Janklow, to be revived by Rounds in 2003. He has since taken Capital for a Day to 33 communities, 11 of them west of the Missouri River.

"Our goal is to bring government to the people," Rounds said. "George Mickelson had it right."

Events Thursday included community tours, an education course on child-restraint seats, a hands-on course that simulating impaired driving, a community dinner and the expo of state-government booths.

It also included an invitation-only meeting between the governor and about 30 current and former Philip High School students. Rounds used the half-hour meeting to promote state internship programs, explain college scholarships and encourage young people to consider staying in South Dakota to make their careers.

He also answered a succession of first playful, then probing questions.

"I thought we should start out with your name," Marissa Mann, a junior, said in what was clearly a lighthearted setup for an explanation.

Rounds offered it gladly, admitting that his full name is Marion Michael Rounds and that he was named after his Uncle Marion, who was killed at Okinawa during World War II.

Students questioned Rounds on the state's commitment to ethanol production, wondering if there were more efficient food stocks than corn and worrying about the higher corn prices and impacts on cattle feeders. Rounds defended corn-based ethanol as an important bridge to other energy sources, including ethanol made from other natural products, as well as nuclear, wind and solar energy.

And he said Canadian oil would be crucial to the United States in the future, and that the nation should act to develop new pipelines and refineries and secures a stake in supplies north of the border prior to other countries, particularly China.

"We've got to have more ethanol. We've got to have more biofuels. But we've got to have the Canadian petroleum to make it work," he said.

That inspired a lively exchange between Rounds and Stacy Weller, a Philip High School graduate and freshman in pre-medicine at Black Hills State University. They bantered about the tougher recovery process for Canadian oil reserves, the potential environmental impacts and comparison in lifestyles and attitudes between people in the oil-hungry United States and the oil-rich Middle East.

Weller was gracious in the exchange, but clearly not afraid to challenge the state's chief executive. Nor was she surprised that the governor would be sitting in a Philip High School classroom in an intimate conversation with students.

"It's kind of what you expect here in South Dakota," she said. "It's a pretty open place."

Contact Kevin Woster at 394-8413 or kevin.woster@rapidcityjournal.com