A year late and a couple of million short. Rumor has it King Dave is going to announce major cuts to 2010 budget today. I guess he doesn’t want to pass those difficult decisions on to the next mayor 🙂 This should have been done a year ago, or at least before the budget was put together. Cuts should always be up front, and hey, if you save a little money you can pass those savings on to tax payers.
I had an interesting discussion about a week ago with someone in upper management in the city. They told me that there is a lot of waste in most of the city departments, they see it first hand. They also inferred that some departments horde money and when they realize at the end of the year they need to spend it, they do so in one lump sum to make sure they get it the next year. I could rant for several paragraphs about this, but I won’t, because this comes as no surprise. What bothers me the most is that this is OUR money being pissed down the drain instead of being spent on infrastructure upgrades and customer service to citizens.
l3wis. I forgot. Are Informational meetings broadcast live from siouxfalls.org?
Yup. Go here;
http://siouxfalls.granicus.com/ViewPublisher.php?view_id=2
or watch it on Channel 16
Decided to watch this dog and pony show yesterday on your advice l3wis. Could not do it without incorporating it with something else, so I watched it while doing my normal evening treadmill routine. Damn near fell off a couple times as the backpedaling by some, Jameison in particular, was quite comical.
A couple of things that I noticed. Beninga? Congratulated the city on having a 11.6 million dollar surplus over the last eight years? I know it is easy to fudge numbers. What am I missing here l3wis? Haven’t you said the city has somewhere around an 8 million dollar deficit over the same timeframe?
And costello? Maybe it was just me, but he sure seemed to think he was in the mayors seat thruout the whole damn show. All in all, good entertainment value. Who needs an ‘Event” center when stuff like this is on channel 16.
The only thing that was missing was De’s babblefest. Munson has actually racked up about $220 million in debt since he has been mayor with about $100 million of that in ‘quality of life’ projects. So yes, talking about surpluses is comical at best.
They also need to change the name of ‘Inside Town Hall’ to ‘Inside Task Force Failures’ on this week’s show they had on Litz and Schwan to talk about the funding source. They just can’t get it thru their thick skulls that the funding source will never be approved.
http://www.siouxfalls.org/CityLink16/Programs/Regular_Programs/inside_town_hall/ith_2_19_2010.aspx
City leaders must have fairy tales to escape from realizing their treason and corruption. Shwan is not a fairy princess, more like ‘Tokyo Rose’ taunting citizens with plain old propaganda.
Munson has actually racked up about $220 million in debt since he has been mayor with about $100 million of that in ‘quality of life’ projects. So yes, talking about surpluses is comical at best.
OK, I’ll buy that. So what were they talking about when they (Rowenhurst, Beninga) mentioned the 11.6 million surplus?
Oh, that was the money they saved last year. The city budget in 2009 was $501 million. Notice that no one talked about that in the meeting.