(Found photo on FB)
Well, as I look back on the year, I suppose I could talk about all the politicians that died this past year and how great the SD GOP is and how worthless the Dems are, but I will leave that up to the other ‘bloggers’. I want to highlight some of the stuff DaCola touched on this past year (and trust me, most of it wasn’t good news)
With the help of Guest Poster we were able to uncover that the SOS’s deputy, Pat Powers, was running a campaign consulting business while working for the state. When he got caught, he decided to make a joke out of the business website, then play musical servers with the domain. Senator Adelstein asked the AG’s office to launch an investigation, and Powers and Gant were found not guilty (of something they were not doing anyway). While the investigation results were disappointing, we were able to get Powers to resign his position with the state. Unfortunately Gant remains.
In less then 10 weeks, community organizer and advocate, Theresa Stehly collected over 8,000 signatures to put snowgates on the ballot in 2013. Unfortunately, 5 city councilors decided that a Spring 2013 election wasn’t a good idea and pushed the election to 2014. As Stehly said to a local TV station, “We got Scrooged!”
The city continues to hand out TIF’s like candy, taking millions from the property tax rolls, the county and school district’s budget. Besides the Sanford Sports Complex receiving a TIF, the city gave a TIF to an apartment complex that the mayor’s wife is an investor in, Dunham’s COSTCO property (even though they already agreed to come to SF) And the multiple TIF’s Lloyd has received for luxury hotels and apartments downtown, because golly, gee, they just can’t scrape enough money together to clean up these developments themselves. Sioux Falls has become the model of corporate welfare with many of these TIF’s.
Dictator Pam Homan continues her reign of terror on the SF School District. Besides denying sub teachers a pay increase, she continues her practice of nepotism, school consolidation and hidden contracts.
The SF City council has also had a busy year. They were reprimanded for breaking open meetings laws after firing the city’s most valuable employee (which they had to replace with 3 separate employees). Council Chair MacErpenbach continues to limit free speech and advocates censoring citizens and even other councilors. Councilor Staggers tends to ignore her and mock her publicly, but I have a feeling it will take some other kind of citizen recourse to remedy her censoring ways . . . 2013 is going to be a fun one 🙂
How does someone worth hundreds of millions not get a better statue?
2012 was also the year everthing became known as Sanford. How about the rigged events center vote when Lutz took the ballots home overnight. It magically passed the next morning with a majority.
Corruption has become common. Now there’s also tyranny and treason.
Citizens have become sheep. Huether and Homan lead them over the cliff. No matter because (here) dead people vote.
PL, I didn’t believe you before, but I told GP tonight that I believe more and more the EC vote was rigged, somehow. I don’t think Lutz took them (he isn’t smart enough to be let in on the scheme). But after watching the same players vote down the snowgate election, I see how they knew they could not manipulate that election, because it was with the school board, so snowgates would pass. They don’t play fair, in fact, I have never seen such dirty politics in my entire life.
I firmly believe the actions being taken by the School Board and City Hall will be a combined storm hitting the incumbents in the next couple of elections. L2wis and PL are right, some if not all of the ‘officials’ are too stupid to realize they are setting themselves up for an expensive hit to their elective lives.