South DaCola

Editorial Cartoonist from South Dakota

December 2013

Rex Rolfing SF City Council Sioux Falls

Pulling items from the SF City Council Consent Agenda

l3wis 5Comments

tex1-golfing

Councilor Staggers has recently been pulling items from the consent agenda. During yesterday’s informational, he asked to pull the minutes from the last meeting (for a correction) and the Phillips Avenue Holiday Lights expenditure. Well that did not sit well with councilor Rolfing. He went into a tirade about inconveniencing city employees who might have to come to a council meeting and answer a question.

WHAT?!

First off, the consent agenda is at the beginning of the meeting, if a department head had to come to a meeting to answer a question, they would be there 20 minutes tops. Secondly, most department heads are at the meeting anyway for other agenda items, and lastly, THEY ARE GETTING PAID like the councilors to do the public’s work, which may include attending the council meeting. If there are certain department heads and city employees that feel like they are being inconvenienced, I haven’t heard that. In fact for the over ten years I have watched the city council meetings I have only seen one person complain about how long the meetings are, a councilor, De Knudson. Rolfing seems to be crying wolf about a problem that does not exist.

Fortunately, councilors Karsky, Anderson and even Erpenbach defended the practice of pulling items from the consent agenda and the city attorney agreed to help with a better process.

Personally, I have not been a fan of the consent agenda, I think every item should be pulled and voted on separately, but since that is not the case, as Karsky pointed out, it is well within the power of the council to pull items from the consent agenda.

Censorship Sioux Falls

UPDATED: City of SF gets a ‘Salute’ in Government Video Magazine

l3wis 17Comments

Silent smiley face

And the award goes to . . .

The web channel we’re saluting for the week of Nov. 8, 2013, is the City of Sioux Falls’ YouTube channel. At a crossroads between the nation’s east and west, Sioux Falls has arts, culture, parks, scenery and — of course — the needs of any city for basic services, safety and overall management. All these are represented well on Sioux Fall’s active YouTube channel, including public chats with the mayor that would be hard to imagine in many cities. For the mayor of Sioux Falls, it’s just another day at a restaurant with some friends.

Okay, I will give the city some credit, they have a YouTube Channel, WOOT! WOOT! So do many elementary students featuring videos of them farting and making funny faces. But the ‘salute’ to the YouTube channel isn’t my issue, it’s the assumption that Government Video makes about transparency in our city;

For doing a great job of making government friendly and accessible, Government Video salutes the City of Sioux Falls’ YouTube channel.

Friendly and accessible?! Okay. Let’s go;

SIRE is broken, it has been broken for several years. (SIRE is the online program used to watch public meetings & to see documents related to public meeting agenda items)  Issues include;  long intros to videos (sometimes up to 20 minutes dead air before meeting starts), missing videos, bad audio, missing documents, and documents not showing up on the online until minutes before a meeting starts. This is not ‘friendly accessibility’ it is form of ‘soft’ censorship hiding behind perceived software issues.

While Central Services, Media Services and the City Clerk’s office has been told several times that SIRE isn’t functioning properly they have given many excuses, including denying it isn’t functioning properly. The Clerk’s office blames Central Services. CS has denied to me there is any problems, even though there clearly is. Weekly, there is at least one or more public meetings that doesn’t work right, disappears for several days, or has other issues. Remember, the city spends over $1,000 a month for the maintenance of SIRE by the software company that makes it. The city has also spent thousands of dollars over the past year on software upgrades and a backup cooling unit for the server room at city hall.

I find it hard to believe that Central Services, the clerk’s office and Media Services are all this incompetent, that is virtually impossible.

My speculation is that certain employees within the city are being ‘instructed’ to make the appearance that SIRE isn’t working properly. Remember, the city budget address wasn’t handed to the city council until a few minutes before the address. Is that the kind of transparency you want between City Hall & the City Council? I know what kind of ‘Salute’ that deserves. I have this underlying assumption that somebody is tampering with our ‘accessibility’ as citizens. And until SIRE is fixed and working properly, I will have no reason otherwise to assume this is NOT happening.

So a SALUTE to the city for accessibility is laughable at best, sad, disheartening and distasteful, and I encourage Government Video to retract their salute.

SiouxFallsYouTube

UPDATE: (H/T – GP)

Follow the links on the upper right hand corner (screenshot above). The person in charge of the channel has some weird fetishes.

Please note how Google relates the City Of Sanford Falls channel to others, then read the descriptions.

Related channels on City of Sioux Falls’ YouTube channel (upper right side of page):

SUPERIOR HISTORY (The rarest and best military history videos on the internet for the serious and technically disciplined. Stay on subject or get hit in the head with a ratchet.)

nuclearvault (Atomic Films Courtesy of National Nuclear Security Administration / Nevada Site Office)

Primeda (Tales of the Gun – Early Guns)

DarkFellowships (WW2 – WW1 – Third Reich)

Vasile Iuga (Scorched Earth S1/E1 – Panzer Battles)

lord lucan (some old news of the day when britian was great, purely for educational purposes)

Verrrry Interestingggg. You see when you do not clear your cache files before setting up your channel, Google takes your  computer’s tracking history and links to it. Now we know what they are doing while they are supposed to be working and it certainly isn’t repairing SIRE.

christmas SF City Council Sioux Falls

City spends almost $13,000 for 8 blocks of Holiday Lighting on Phillips Ave.

l3wis 6Comments

lights

What?! is the city participating in the war on Christmas? Holiday lighting?

Kind of confused about this (Item #1), because I was always under the impression that DTSF paid for the holiday decorations and lights downtown while public works assisted in hanging them. Hopefully there will be some kind of explanation about this expenditure come Tuesday night.

Developers Development SF City Council Sioux Falls

More citizen advocacy after out of touch SF city council decision

l3wis 14Comments

I watched in disbelief when only two councilors voted against the RMB project;

Neighbors of an apartment housing development planned in south Sioux Falls are challenging the city council’s decision to allow for more apartment units at 85th Street and Western Avenue.

Original plans were for a village-style development with retail shops on the main level and housing on the upper two levels. Owners RMB Associates instead want to build three-story apartments with a total 182 living units instead of 40 or 50.

The council approved the change with a 5-2 vote Nov. 5. Neighbors who say a large apartment complex does not fit the area are asking for another vote, having filed a challenge petition Friday, Nov. 29.

The city GIS department will verify the number of landowners within 250 feet of the property. Signatures from at least 40 percent are needed to prompt a second vote. In that vote, at least six of the eight councilors would need to agree to change the plans for the development.

As I talked about in the past, the council’s decision was not motivated by property rights, if it would have been, the neighbors would have won this decision, hands down. The land was already zoned properly for commercial use, which the neighbors approved of, but when the landowner realized they made a bad investment decision, they wanted to change the use of their land to all apartments.

Agree or disagree with me on that is really not the issue here. The issue is simple, the neighbors agreed to a particular retail setup of the area, they were on board, they were there first. The council had a simple decision to make, denial of the amendment. Denial would not put RMB out of business. They would simply have two options, develop it the way it was zoned originally or sell the property. But they made it sound like you are in dire straits, hardly the case, FREE enterprise only prospers when their is competition and government, especially local government, stays out of your business.

There is too many private developers looking to get bailed out from the city. So I ask the question, who does the city council represent? The private citizen? Commercial developers? or both? It is obvious in this case, the citizen’s concerns outweigh the developers, but once again, if falls on the deaf ears of the council.

IN OTHER city development news, I noticed that former city planner, Erica Beck, who worked on the Sanford Sports Complex TIF, is now working for Lloyd (Item #16). Interesting, but not surprising.

County Commission Developers Development Minnehaha County Sioux Falls

Why TIF’s are hurting us . . .

l3wis 5Comments

This quote from County Commissioner, John Pekas, pretty much sums it up;

“We are the constant underfunded entity in the state of South Dakota,” Pekas said. “This is the perfect poetic situation. The state has a surplus, the city has a surplus and we are out of money.”

I have often felt that there should be a shift in property tax dollars towards the county, I have also felt that the School Board, the County Commission and City Council should all have to approve a TIF with a 60% majority.

Trust me, if the law changed to allow this kind of approval process, no more TIF’s would be approved, and ironically, development would continue.

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