Hey man, I don’t have a problem with collaboration. I put on several Art of Jazz events and as a group we produced some pretty incredible paintings, I think they all sold within a few days.
When any group collaborates whether that is artists or legislators, that is a good thing, but it also must be executed for the COMMON GOOD. Collaborating for the sake of being a rubber stamp for the executive branch to protect or help a special interest isn’t collaboration, it’s collusion.
In this final year of the city council with this mayor it seems the council wants to return to the status quo of the past 15 years, rubberstamping projects and expenditures in the name of this new (old) form of governing and calling it something different, collaboration.
You can put lipstick on a pig, and it’s still a pig.
Our 3 branches of government in Sioux Falls should be ‘collaborating’ for the best interest of its citizens, if that isn’t the collaborative goal, there should be dissent, debate and discussion. We don’t elect our councilors and mayor to do the bidding of their biggest donors, we elect to do the work of the citizenry, and any other kind of collaboration is just counterproductive and quite frankly destructive.
Like I said, I am all for them working together to achieve a common goal, but if that goal hurts us, I would prefer they don’t get along.
With diminishing taxes, it will be interesting to see how this final year plays out, and how collaborative the council will be. So far the silence on the ambulance issue and the parking ramp development worries me, and it seems the only thing they have been collaborating on successfully is deafening silence while moving farther away from transparency.