MMM will address the citizens Thursday at 1:30 PM at Carnegie Town Hall. Watch it here.
The results of the city survey will also come out today. You can see them here.
Here is some quick highlights of the Survey (the percentages represent the amount of people surveyed who rate ‘Good’ or ‘Excellent’ ) 3,000 people were mailed surveys with 941 responding (33% response rate)
(Page 11) Traffic Flow on major streets – 45%
(Page 13) Street Repair – 45%
(Page 17) Affordable Housing Availability – 54%
(Page 20) To what degree, if at all, are run down buildings, weed lots or junk vehicles a problem in Sioux Falls?-5%
(Page 25) Safety in Neighborhood – 97%
(Page 41) Affordable Childcare – 52%
(Page 45) Public meeting attendance – 19%
(Page 61) Paying higher fees or taxes for snowgates – 57%
(Page 88) 50% of SF residents make under 50K a year.
We found 3000 people who agreed to say what we wanted to hear and here is the result.
57% either strongly support or somewhat support snowgates.
To what degree, if at all, are run down buildings, weed lots or junk vehicles a problem in Sioux Falls?-5% ROFL, no wonder they recently sent out the fancy brochure. To drum up business.
The fact that over 50% of respondents believe that traffic is a problem in Sioux Falls is good indicator of how much of the suburban sprawl kool-aid we’ve collectively swallowed.
Traffic is a problem in this city because some of our fellow citizens think a golf course is more important.
The members of this club refer to it as the “Jewel of the City”. I think of it more as the root to the “Bottleneck of the City.”
To the first commenter who was apparently too lazy to read the survey methodology before crying about Mike Huether’s black helicopters, the city had nothing to do with the administration of the survey, the selection of which households received the survey, the selection of to whom in the household the survey was addressed, the formulation of the questions, or the tabulation of the results. The National Citizen Survey is a uniform survey used by hundreds of communities across the nation.
Next time, try informing yourself before you speak.
The results, almost without fail, are better than those from the 2009 survey, most noticeably in areas like street repair, street cleaning, snow removal, land use/zoning, and code enforcement.
So while the mayor is not without his vocal critics (and in some instances justifiably so), it would seem by and large that the silent majority out there is pretty pleased with the direction Sioux Falls is heading – especially when compared to the surveys taken at the end of Dave Munson’s two terms.
Combine this with Huether’s big win on the arena and the average person’s ignorance of the sort of nuts-and-bolts types of process complaints people who follow city government most often make regarding the mayor and the council and it would seem like anyone choosing to run against the mayor is going to have to work awfully hard to convince people that their impressions of how things are going are incorrect.
I think the AL nailed the most striking component of this survey with the 53% don’t feel safe walking around downtown after dark. I’m sorry, but these people who replied this way are morons…our downtown is clean, lighted, the loopers are gone and other than the occasional unruly, drunken homeless person at Sids there’s absolutely nothing to fear downtown after dark. Half the bar crowd in this town goes to places like the Attic or 18th Amendment precisely because they feel there’s too much police presence downtown.
As for traffic, here’s another clue: We don’t have a traffic problem in this town, we might very well have a larger proportion than average of shitty drivers, both local and out of towners, but that isn’t the same as a traffic problem.
I leave my house with my kids at 7:45am every day, run to Rosa Parks (2 of 3 are Spanish Immersion), then I roll through the worst intersection in town (26th & 229) every day at peak times and without weather I’m at my desk by 8:10am, with weather 8:15am. My house is Northeast, school is East central, office is south corner of the City..10 miles from door to door to door. Try living in LA or even Denver, where that equivalent commute takes an hour and a half on good days: THAT is a friggin’ traffic problem.
@ Winston Again, what problem do we solve by plowing through Minnehaha Country Club? Do people have the right to be at the Mall from in corner of town in 15 minutes or less? Better question, is that 5 minute savings for the undefined masses who would benefit worth the $30 million replacement cost to find them a new & comparable course? MCC was there long before the Mall was, so I say leave your goddamn house 5 minutes earlier than normal when you need to get to Bed Bath and Beyond.
i agree with Sy. The downtown is unsafe stat is ridiculous.
This is a town built to abandon the core. I for one wish people would drop the golf course is messing up Sioux Falls traffic. When the golf course was built west of town, no one dreamed it would ever go any further. I don’t partake in the course so I have no skin in the game(s) played there nor do I care to cut across it any more.
Until Sioux Falls residents and visitors learn to drive in an urban environment there will consistently be a traffic problem here. Maybe driver training would be a better investment.
Not to derail the dialogue, but as an out-of-state transplant, hear hear to Testor’s comment on the driver training – and this is coming from someone who’s lived in highly urbanized areas with terrible reputations for this sort of thing.
I’ll take an aggressive South Florida driver over the hordes of clueless South Dakota drivers any day – the ones that meander along in the left lane, think that a left-turn onto a multi-lane road is a “pick ’em” scenario in which they can turn wide into the right lane, not-quite-parallel park their cars with 12 feet between them so that downtown streets accommodate about 60% as many cars as they should. Oh, and let’s not forget those four-wheelers on the road, which elicited an audible “are you f@#$ing kidding me” the first time I encountered it.
At least the intent of the aggressive driver is easy to discern. The only thing that strikes more fear than South Dakota plates are Iowa plates from Lyon or Sioux County, which is a virtual guarantee that they’ll drive like idiots because they prayed for Christ to watch over them when they got in the car.
Also, maybe 14-year-olds shouldn’t drive SUV’s – or anything at all – no matter what all those hillbilly Republicans in the legislature say.
I use my horn sparingly, and yet I use it more here than any other place I’ve ever lived. And this is the smallest city in which I’ve lived as an adult.
As most of us seem to know here, but many don’t, the shortest time between two points may not be the shortest line. I have driven from the Empire Mall area to 18th and Hwy 11 around 5:00 in about 15 minutes on more than one occasion. Drive the outside arterial roads and you are golden. Or drive streets some people seem to not have heard of – 18th st or 12th st eastbound from cliff. West siders, figure it out. Lots more options than we had years ago on that side of town.
This all telling survey from the masses was actually from just over 900 people…woopdie doo! Less than 1% of the population has weighed in and its newsworthy. Good use of $22,000 dollars on a survey that means nothing. Do you really think the Mayor is going to ‘talk to the Chief’ about improving Downtown and the law enforcement stats? Puh-leese.
Next time…I hope they try running at least a decent number – like 3 to 5 percent perhaps? 900 surveys is really pointless
@ Sy again, 26th St. straight through would greatly help to reduce the congestion on 12th St. and 41 St…. and I could not happen but notice based on your descriptions that you do not appear to be as accustom to those streets.
As far as Bed Bath and Beyond (i.e.,), a straight shot from the east, via 26th street would really only help those customers from the central core(Further east most would take 229 like you are accustom too), and I doubt if most of these central residents would match a significant portion of the B,B,&B demographics. But this straight shot would greatly aid those from the west going to work and school in an easterly direction. Did you know the third largest city in SD is actually not in Brown County, but rather it lies west of I-29?
This city is growing. It is not stagnant and having this end-around traffic flow is the result of a 1950s era planning model, ….. oh by the way…. how’s your golf game?
By the way, how much did the City spend in additional costs by building that cement dike near the MCC on the bike trail, or was it cheaper than dirt, or did the MCC pay for it???
But you are right about the LA and Denver comparisons… except… how many more people do they have????
Winston – congestion is not limited to the west side of town. Come on over and drive 26th st on the commutes. It does no good to have 2 lane traffic turn into one lane traffic once you are over the river. Traffic backup on both 26th and 12th st ramps in the evening. Southeastern has very heavy traffic in the morning. I go to all four hospital facilities some mornings. The traffic is already heavy on hospital row (22nd st) without people just driving through to get to work.
I’ll trade your golf course blockage for train blockage any day. You know the golf course will always be there. You never know when a train is going to take 15 minutes to get across 26th or 18th.
I’ll always question city conducted surveys. Everyone I know and those in line at the polls were against the events center. Had Lutz not taken the ballots home overnight, it would have not overwhelmingly passed. Yes, Huether’s biggest gig is the events center. If he builds it for 99 million, it can’t be safe. It’ll not be finished without another 100 million bond drive.
I grew up in the MCC neighborhood and Mom’s still there, so I’m very familiar with that whole neighborhood. I don’t bitch about it taking 15 minutes from my house to Mom’s because I chose where I live knowing full well it meant some additional drive time to work, shoppping or whatever. Also, I haven’t played at MCC in about 10 years so my golf game is stagnant at best. Nice try, but I really don’t have a dog in this hunt, beyond being someone who doesn’t like to see us piss tax dollars up a rope with no discernable ROI.
Also remember that things like work or school will not move closer to you, but all the retail, fast food and c-stores will move into or out of your neighborhood based on growth demographics. When we had only one Wal-mart there was excess snarl by the Mall, which was about the time the Country Club plan was first being hatched. Well, since then we got WM #2 on the East side and #3 & #4 in the pipe, all of which will help divert what traffic we have into more localized patterns.
As for the cement dyke, you can thank the Feds for never following through on their promised flood control funding while at the same time they changed the flood plain map to include a bunch more property, so the City got to do it instead. They negotiated and purchased the part of the golf course they needed to do the dyke, and MCC took that money and reconfigured the course. No one had to condemn anything and no one had to call an army of lawyers. If the City thought at any point the long term solution was to extend 26th or 22nd through the course they wouldn’t have gone through that process. First of all, MCC got the Sierra Club and other environmental groups to designate the course as habitat for some endangered species of birds and other critters, so there’s the first legal hurdle. Second, the costs beyond the $30+ million relocation of the course would also have to include the engineering & construction of a viaduct that deals with the severe drop in grade along with traversing two waterways so there’s another $40 or $60 million (depending on how long it would take to clear hurdle #1) on top of it.
So again, is this really a win-win or is there better places to spend our transportation dollars so we don’t turn into a Denver or LA traffic wise in 50 years?
hornguy, You presume that we have some ax to grind against Huether or your city council. We just moved here and couldn’t pick any of them out of a line-up. Your presumption says more about your biases than ours. Our objection is not about any local issue, it is about the general waste of tax dollars on these kinds of meaningless surveys (you can lump management consultants in there too). We have been involved in many of these in multiple organizations, and we doubt the methodology in this one is any different than those. They all start with a meeting where the group employed asks the stakeholders what they hope to accomplish. Then they have lunch catered, and afterwards the group goes off and writes a survey that will give management (business or government) the political and statistical cover to continue doing what they are already doing: reinforcing the status quo and avoiding radical changes. We already know what things are the most “popularâ€, that is why we have the city, state, country & world that we do. It is the result of ignoring innovative ideas, logic, fairness and science in favor of the continuing seach for what the majority wants to do.
Have not had the time read yet. Should be interesting. Just a couple of quick comments tho.
(Page 11) Traffic Flow on major streets – 45%
This is a complete joke. This town has red light running epidemic on its hands. Not because drivers want to run red lights but because they can’t help but run them. When the yellow times are adjusted for the posted speed limits and drivers are typically driving 10 to 15 mph over that limit, then red light running is the result. Some controlled intersections have even shorter yellow times than are recommended. Such was the case at 10th and Minnesota where big brother used to set up shop.
(Page 88) 50% of SF residents make under 50K a year.
I believe what you meant was households, not residents. Huge difference.