Obviously, in the Free enterprise world, it is hard for the city to regulate what national franchises come to town, or how much of their profits they ship out of state. But when it comes to who the city chooses to do business with, they do have control, so why keep getting in bed with out-of-state contractors?
The latest is Lyft, which I think is great, as long as it has Uber to compete with. My issue isn’t with the convenience of Lyft, but how this National franchise probably isn’t playing by the same rules as our local cab companies, in other words giving the outsider the advantage. Seems odd that in the dead of the night under secret negotiations that did not include our city council, Lyft can now operate in Sioux Falls. So how did this happen so quickly? My guess is that Lyft isn’t following the same rules as the SF cab companies. Which is fine, as long as all of those regulations are lifted for the local companies also, which I’m guessing are not. Since our local cab companies will not be able to play the same kind of baseball as Lyft, they will eventually go bankrupt, and 25% of what you pay in cab fares from now on will go straight to California. So much for circulating in the local economy.
But there seems to be a trend here from the current administration. We also hired SMG and Ovations to run the Events Center. SMG is based out of Pennsylvania and Ovations out of Florida. Not only do their profits leave the state, they don’t promote any of the shows, so the out-of-state promoters all suck like a vacuum money out of our community. Add that to the fact that taxpayers have to pay around $10 million a year in a mortgage payment from our CIP (money that is supposed to be used on roads). As for the money the EC ‘makes’ that get’s put back into a rotating fund that SMG and Ovations uses as their disposal, so even if you believe the ‘operating in the black’ lie the mayor is constantly spouting, we as taxpayers in SF don’t see one red cent.
Besides Lyft, last week the city administration did it again, throwing more money out of town and out of state by hiring Nebraska company Landscapes Unlimited to run the municipal golf courses.
So while you can listen to our local politicians blame the Agriculture economy and Internet Sales for the lagging local economy, it is really the policy decisions of this administration that is sucking millions of dollars out of Sioux Falls each year.