[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=arTBmh89iOw&feature=related[/youtube]
I could care less about him already having plans drawn up;
A day after the Sioux Falls City Council approved $500,000 toward a new events center, city officials aren’t revealing drawings or other information that Mayor Mike Huether showed councilors in closed-door meetings.
During those gatherings, small groups of councilors were shown a presentation with drawings of the location and other details of Huether’s vision for a $99.5 million events center.
Who cares. What bothers me is that he lied to the citizens in a public meeting about ‘Not having a plan’ and even worse five councilors jump on board with a plan based on a lie. Mike says a lot of crazy shit, whatever, but lying to the public is uncool. It may have worked in the CC industry, it doesn’t fly in the public sector.
I’m beginning to wonder how many different presentations he’s shown to which group?
The one shown at the CC meeting obviously was scrubbed of any detail and also managed to confuse the shit out of Jamison & Brown. To which Huether comes back with the “I guess we’ll repeat it..we couldn’t have been more clear” line.
Huether himself has tried to cover his bases with the aggressive (and at first glance, unrealistic) timeline of opening the doors in 2014. If he gets himself caught in the lie, he can say he was simply moving forward in the “spirit of getting it done”.
This thing’s heating up, Hilde’s FB group went from 100 to 500 members in 36 hours.
Has anyone here ever seen the Riverfront plan for downtown? They have some very, very nice drawings and plans for a mixed-use, urban development on the eastbank railroad land anchored by a new EC. This plan was released in 2004. It also has an alternative development plan in the absence of an events center.
If I were in a position of leadership in the city, THESE would be my priorities:
1. Vitality – Densify the urban core, make the city less reliant on automobile travel for EVERYTHING, and revitalize the older grid-based neighborhoods into something attractive even to wealthy residents. As it stands now, if you have money, you build your new house outside the interstates in the suburbs. The urban core is a last resort for most people.
2. Sustainability – Beef up our anemic transit system into something useful to more residents. More frequent service along major streets. Service even when the sun isn’t up. Continue adding bike lanes and trails for more than just recreational biking.
3. Competitiveness – Build unique attractions (like an events center) and encourage outside-the-box thinking to make Sioux Falls more than a giant cookie-cutter suburb out in the middle of nowhere. Determine what our city’s unique strengths are (healthcare, for instance) and flaunt them.
By my priority listing, an events center is a secondary (actually tertiary) priority for this city. If we have $100M to throw around, why not build a modern streetcar line down Phillips / Minnesota / 41st from downtown to the mall? That might encourage some truly urban and exciting development in the area.
From the story it seems like we are talking about more than just drawings. It was an entire presentation with many facts about the plans. None of this has been released publicly
Tom H.
” If we have $100M to throw around, why not build a modern streetcar line down Phillips / Minnesota / 41st from downtown to the mall? That might encourage some truly urban and exciting development in the area.”
All due respect, but that wouldn’t draw anyone new to downtown or out to the Mall, it would simply give people a new (old) and novel way to travel to either The land acquisition costs alone would be ungodly expensive, as the City vacated the railways that used to go that way years ago.
An Events Center is a proven draw, many Cities including our own have found that out firsthand. I like the idea, but in no way is it comparable to the feasibility of an Events Center.
Phil Hartman with a response to Tom H’s insanity…