Funny, as a homeowner you are not allowed to have non-operable vehicles in front of your house or in your driveway, but apparently the city can just park them in a park (Frank Olson) for weeks at a time. Maybe someone should call code enforcement. Oh, that’s right, the city doesn’t have to follow it’s own rules.
Sioux Falls, South Dakota: Today, Mayor Paul TenHaken unveiled the One Sioux Falls framework to the employees of the City of Sioux Falls.
One Sioux Falls is the framework that the administration and City employees will use to guide their work to provide excellent quality of life in Sioux Falls.
Each of the four focus areas fall under the umbrella of innovation and investments in foundational growth for our growing community.
Safety and Health: Provide a safe community in which the health and well-being of our citizens is above the national average.
Accessible Housing: Foster the availability of housing options at all income levels, throughout the city.
Workforce: Continue to develop a community with a quality of life that will attract and retain the best employee base in the United States.
Engaging People: Engage, collaborate and partner with the community to solve our challenges and seize our opportunities.
“Sioux Falls is a growing city with growing needs, and that requires a clear vision and shared set of goals for success. The One Sioux Falls framework will guide my administration’s efforts to move Sioux Falls forward so we can be better today and be prepared far into the future,†said Mayor Paul TenHaken.
While only about .05% percent of Sioux Falls residents give a rat’s ass about the Sanford International Golf Tournament, it hasn’t stopped our news media from covering it for days, including the mini-city built on the Minnehaha Country Club greens that took several weeks.
Instead talking about the massive tax increases we are facing with the new jail, new schools, new water treatment plant, lack of food tax relief in the legislature’s special session, and another property tax increase on Tuesday at the City Council meeting, our local media wants to focus on the important things; Golf.
While healthcare costs continue to sky rocket, food banks grow faster than crab grass, soup kitchens continue to expand, and treatment for addiction isn’t available in our community, one of top employers and healthcare providers decided that hosting a pro-golf tournament on an exclusive country club course was a good idea.
Will there be economic impact? Oh, probably. Will Sanford and the MCC make money from the event? Maybe.
But the golf tournament highlights something more than anything else, the gap between rich and poor in Sioux Falls.
The irony only gets thicker when you realize the tournament is being played on land that should be sold to the city for a better east-west route for commuters.
While our news media stands in line like they are at the Banquet for Sanford advertising dollars, the rest of our society is slipping through the cracks. But, hey, we are not a real news story unless we steal a pizza buffet gift card.
Yeah, I know, a week late, but worth the listen.
Let’s face it, we still have a lot of questions. Why would anyone leave a successful business they helped build in the private sector to work in city government? I don’t know the answer to that question.
We also don’t know how Jason’s salary was compiled when he lacks a college degree and is solely based on the last person’s pay.
We do know that Mayor TenHaken is extremely happy about his pick since he has been having difficulty getting people from the private sector to work for him. My guess is because of how the last mayor ran the place like a dictatorship. Nobody wants to work for a dictator.
Even if all 8 councilors voted against his appointment, I still believe Paul has the power to override the consent. I do believe Jason will be appointed on a (7-1) vote. Even councilors I talked to who may have their reservations about Jason understand that the Mayor has the executive power to appoint anyone to his team, and they certainly won’t stand in the way of his duties. It’s really his responsibility.
But a bigger question still remains that I think I will try to answer. How can a mayor appoint someone to this highly technical post without the professional experience?
Well this didn’t start with TenHaken or even Bucktooth & Bowlcut, or Dave or Gary, this kind of culture of political appointments has been around for a long time. Only in the last administration we saw it to be more obvious. Corporate marketing types like to surround themselves with other corporate marketing types in some strange attempt to ‘change’ government to run more like a business. While some aspects of that may have worked under the last dude, it certainly didn’t look good for the taxpayers debt load, increased taxes and fees, transparency in government and public trust.
I was hoping Paul would have seen that, but apparently not.
Corporate gurus in government often replace their best talent with people like them. We saw this with Debra Owen. Not only a talented City Clerk, legislative researcher, but one heck of a lawyer. She wore 3 hats well and did it for a lot less pay. It took 3 people to replace her (with a lot less experience and no law degrees) with a combined salary of around $230K.
As I have told several councilors over the past few days that Jason will get easily frustrated with the speed in which government moves. He will also find out that hiring and firing civil service employees isn’t an easy task. He may also get discouraged by having to make important decisions in the open with other directors, city councilors and the public instead of behind closed doors in a corporate board room and a Crown Royal in his hand.
If anything we can take from Councilor Stehly’s Facebook kerfuffle is that Jason is easily tempered. Can he calm these reactions once he starts working for the citizens? Not sure.
While I hope he does good things, and I think he probably has some good ideas, otherwise Paul wouldn’t be so Gung Ho in hiring him, I think he will become easily frustrated and probably not make it very long in city government. But I wish him well in the short time he will be working for us.
l3wis