PIERRE — Paul Lepisto hoped for a record-making weekend for the Tony Dean fundraising committee.

He got just that as weekend activities and a $5,000 donation brought in about $21,000, ending a goal of raising at least $100,000.

“We have met our goal of what the steering committee set out to do when we started this last January,” said Lepisto, a Tony Dean Acres steering committee member.

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At the beginning of the year, the then newly formed steering committee set a goal of raising at least $100,000 to trigger a four-to-one match from four organizations, turning $100,000 into at least $500,000.

Lepisto said after a weekend that included a pheasant hunt, a silent auction, raffle and dinner, the committee has about $118,000.

Lepisto said early in January that the committee will meet with the four organizations — South Dakota Game, Fish and Parks, U.S. Fish and Wildlife, Ducks Unlimited and Pheasants Forever — to formally move in the money and discuss what to do next.

Lepisto said the big decision is now to spend the money on buying land for the public use and education or to pursue a North American Wetland Conservation Act grant for more money for more land.

“Timetable will be a consideration — how quickly the partners or Tony’s family may want to see this come to a completion, also how large the block of land is and how large people want that to be,” Lepisto said. “If we do the grant route and have more funds coming, the size of the project could grow substantially.”

Lepisto said he didn’t know how much money could be brought in if the grant is pursued and approved.

“We’ve been pretty much in a fundraising mode for the last year plus,” he said. “Now through the generosity of people, we’ll have to shift gears and decide which is the best route for this go, what is the best use of the funds and how can we make this project what we hoped it would be at the onset 11 months ago.

“We’ll have to take a little bit of a step back. We’ve gotten this far. Which path do we take?”

Lepisto said once land is purchased, money will be needed to offer education on the outdoors, which has been an objective of the committee to honor Dean, a nationally known outdoors broadcaster, who died October of 2008 at his home in Pierre.

“It’s been very, very gratifying to reach that financial goal we had set out in January of 2009,” Lepisto said. “We were talking, given the economy, it may be 15 or 18 months before the steering committee reaches its goal. We did it in a little over 11. The generosity of the people in South Dakota and across the Midwest and even from other areas of the country has just been tremendous.”

The committee held various auctions and events in the state, relying on donations of items from organizations that worked with Dean and money from people who were his friends.

“We worked hard,” said John Cooper, steering committee co-chairman. “We had a lot of grassroots help — people who knew Tony and liked him or enjoyed his television and radio shows. A lot of our contributions are those $35, $40, $50. Those kind of things really helped us out.”

Cooper said not being able to go to companies for financial donations made fundraising difficult.

“A lot of people he knew in the sporting goods industry that were sponsors of his or people he had come in contact with — they helped us with product,” Cooper said. “That helped us raise money at these two big auctions.

“We knew this economic time hurt the ability for us to go to large corporations and companies and manufacturers and ask for large amounts. That just wasn’t forthcoming. We focused and concentrated on having things that were smaller in amount and people could afford.”