2009

And Monkeys might fly out of my ass

l3wis March 29, 2009 0Comments

The Karate Kid buy

Toto, we are not in Kansas anymore – we are in the fantasy world of Sioux Falls

A letter writer asks the city to disclose the full costs of building a new Events Center . . . . bahahahahahahahahw!

What many do object to, though, is the past practice of the city lowballing the cost estimates of such projects in order to gain civic approval. In particular, this time the city must be upfront with the taxpayers about the full cost of a new center, including the planning, financing and bonding costs and interest on borrowing.

Chet, I don’t want you to think I am insulting your intelligence, just your ignorance, by saying this; in order for the city to ‘sell’ this project to us, they must lie, they lied about the Pavilion (told us $21 million, we are at $40 million and counting).

1) They are bad managers of money

2) There solution to every problem is raising taxes

3) They know they must mislead as much as possible to sell us the Event Center

I think the Event Center is a good idea, but I disagree with almost every thing they are doing to get it built. Not only is the planning and cost estimates skewed, their funding solution (raising general retail taxes) is a horseshit way to pay for this thing.

It seems dishonesty in politics is the norm these days – and you can expect it when selling us the Event Center.

The irony of this goes back to that old saying, “Doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results.” I sometimes wonder if anyone at city hall knows what that means?

Munson’s State of the City Address

l3wis March 27, 2009 9Comments

A couple more of these in Sioux Falls, and we will be living in Nirvana

I listened to this yesterday and was actually kind of impressed by Dave’s demeaner. The speech was chocked full of positive things going on in Sioux Falls. He touched on unemployment, but added we are doing better then other cities. There was some strange parts to the speech though, he talked about the Daly Village project like it was the stairway to heaven and if we didn’t complete Hwy 100 we would be missing out on other ‘big box’ store projects. This may be good news for city coffers in more tax revenue, but I am not sure how having two ‘Targets’ in Sioux Falls is going to make my life better. I thought he focused too much on that project, I felt it was pertinent to mention, but not that important. He also had to put a plug in for the event center, which was good – but no mention of how they plan to pay for it (get ready for the bilking). He also bragged about the task force he appointed and mentioned 3 members (ironically the only 3 that are regular Joes like the rest of us, and one of them handicapped). No mention of all the same old business men that sit on these boards (remember there is 18 members total). Like I said earlier, the speech was good, and I was pretty impressed by Dave’s optimism, especially that he mentioned the successful community development program and it’s positive affects on the community, but he still has very skewed priorities when it comes to government centered around citizens, and I still think we take a back seat to developers and big business.

A strange part of the speech was when he was talking about code enforcement. He made it sound like citizens needed to be ‘trained’ on how to maintain their property or pay the consequences. This kind of pissed me off, okay, it really pissed me off. Like I said in the Project TRIM meeting, 99.9% of property owners in SF are responsible people, why treat us like a bunch of little bratty kids for the .01% that are bad. Code enforcement should be ‘complaint basis’ only, I feel the city is overstepping their bounds with blanket code enforcement and I hope recent lawsuits and the next council and mayor put an end to the big brother mentality of the city.

I’ll leave you with a quote from Costello;

“As negative as things might have been in 2008, it was really a pretty good year for the city,” said council member Pat Costello.

Huh? sometimes I wonder if Argus Reporters just need to fill space so they put in a quote that has no relevance. I’m sure Pat meant that in a positive way, but reading it out of context makes you scratch your head and say, “So I’m losing my job or my paycheck is shrinking but the city keeps steaming ahead, with no cutbacks? How is that fair to me?” Well it is not.

See the spectacle here