I got a chuckle out of this the other day, I have been noticing when you google candidates in the upcoming city election, guess who shows up on the first page?
Check it out;
vernon brown mayor sioux falls
pat costello mayor sioux falls
kermit staggers mayor sioux falls
mike huether mayor sioux falls
bill peterson mayor of sioux falls
michelle erpenbach sioux falls
And the list goes on . . .
That was Eugene’s answer to councilors when they asked him what they should do in response to the survey.
During Inside Town Hall councilor Jamison talks about the (unscientific) city survey. Of course they were all hyped up because they got a 93% on people saying Sioux Falls is a great place to live. What does this have to do with government? Not much. What makes a community great are it’s people, not it’s politicians. During the interview when Jamison is talking about the negative results he said that street maintenance was at 32% (without saying what that 32% meant) The actual suvey said “32% think our streets are good to excellent”. That means 68% think either that our roads are either poor or fair. That is why it is important to spend the 2nd penny on what it is for, roads, not monkey crappers and wood thingies in parks. They also forgot to mention that only 40% of citizens think that city government listens to them. Rowenhorst said that the survey cost $21,500 and only 922 people responded. That is well under 1% of the total residents. The survey cost $23.31 per response. You could have paid me that per respondent and I would have knocked on doors and did a realistic survey. Also left out is that the survey was only mailed to registered voters. This is not a surprise, but it does tell us that the city isn’t interested in your opinion if you don’t vote. I’m okay with that. I think people who don’t vote and are not registered need to get a clue and start participating in this thing we call a democracy. I have often felt there should be an income tax surcharge of $500 for every person who is not registered to vote.
In the second half of the show, Mark Cotter and Bob Litz came on to defend the poorly formulated arterial road funding. Litz went on a little rant about the media not giving them time to explain themselves that is why he came on Inside Town Hall. Give me a break. The proof is in the pudding, the numbers don’t lie. Taxpayers have put in over 13x more then the developers have. What is there to explain? Cotter also changed the formulation to 70/30 now (taxpayers put in 70%) Originally it was going to be a 50/50 partnership (LMAO). Litz blames the economy for developers not putting in their share. REALLY? If the economy is so bad then why are you taxing citizens more? It’s okay for developers to skirt their responsibility but taxpayer’s are forced to pony up?! We warned you on the night of the vote that the economy was tanking, and you ignored us or watched the Olympics. Read the above paragraph; YOU NEED TO START LISTENING TO CONSTITUENTS AND STOP MAKING F’ING EXCUSES! Bob said that we need to just hold tight and the developers will start catching up with the taxpayer’s contribution. I won’t hold my breath.
I couldn’t have said it better myself;
Even without the fact that it’s not possible to gather the required information, the benign nature of the majority of local blogs renders this bill unnecessary. Blog-owners routinely remove offensive comments; too many don’t allow comments at all. Even those that have an “anything goes†mantra have little to worry, as Dakota Today owner Douglas Wiken points out. “The best weapon against anonymous, fallacious comments is criticism of those anonymous posts and providing truth as an antidote, (along with) a healthy skepticism with regard to the validity of information in posts by those unwilling to include their actual names.â€
This is the greatest debate about how Palin is an idiot
Another back door deal, luckily it fell through;
The negotiations had been a closely guarded secret, and some city councilors were unaware of them. As late as Monday night, administration officials were declining to talk about the issue. But on Tuesday, Mayor Dave Munson confirmed that talks had ended.
“They looked at what they felt they could do,” Munson said. “It just wasn’t close to where we were at, so we dropped it.”
What I can’t figure out is why ‘some’ councilors were let in on the secret and some were not? Does the mayor view some councilors more important then others? He sure does. According to this article, at least one person knew about it.
“I know that there really wasn’t an appetite for us to spend money,” Councilor Greg Jamison said. “It was supposed to be on the cheap. I told them that it was the only way I could support this.”
I can bet that Knudson was probably also let in on the secret. Government works best when it is out in the open, transparent and has checks and balances. Why were there only a couple of councilors serving as those checks and balances? This stinks, but is no surprise. Here is an example of the partisianship that exists;
But back to the original topic. I have often felt that the city should have refurbished the coliseum for a performance hall and converted the old Washington High in joint offices for the county and city and left Carnegie as a museum. But it is still not too late. The city owns the Pavilion and has dumped over $20 million into it’s maintenance and upgrades since it opened over 10 years ago. I have suggested all along they close the Science Center (except the Cinedome) and make the space into offices for the city. It wouldn’t cost us a penny.
l3wis