August 2016

Sioux Falls City Council Public Input, August 16, 2016

The administration says “Let them eat cake” and the people are close to saying “Off with their heads!”

Thank you to the Sioux Falls and South Dakota media for the outstanding coverage the citizen efforts has received. This truly is a story the people of Sioux Falls have followed and wanted more information about.

We have signatures of half of the voters in the last city election.
This cause happened because there had been no information from the City of Sioux Falls justifying the project. If the administration had satisfied the public’s quest for knowledge, this effort might have never happened.

Our signers are involved because our elected officials became rulers instead of leaders. Our signers want a say in the process. Never before has the city been put into debt over the objections of the public and the will of the City Council.

This effort of thousands of Sioux Falls voters is close to completion. We knew we were up against almost insurmountable deadlines in this process but we continue. We are in the wrap up stages. We need the help of all to encourage circulators to turn in the outstanding petitions to our office.

Sioux Falls Public Works Director, Mark Cotter, stretches the truth a bit

image001 

As you can see from the chart above, that was presented to the Sioux Falls City Council during the budget hearing yesterday, Mark says we have $7 million in ‘DEBT’. He goes on to explain that we have extremely low debt for the water department.

At first I thought the number seemed a bit low, I wasn’t the only one. Councilor Stehly asks Mark what we have in the Water Department’s enterprise reserve fund, he tells her around $22 million. So then councilor Stehly asks, “Why not just pay off our debt?” Then Cotter admits that we actually have over $76 million in water department debt, and the $7 million number is actually ‘DEBT SERVICE’ for 2017.

These are the games the city directors play with presentations, they intentionally leave out certain words and key information in order to confuse constituents and councilors.

Most of debt is due to the Lewis & Clark pipeline (you know, that $80 million dollar pipe that trickles around 10% of our water supply to us).