I spoke at the city council meeting Tuesday night about the importance of the 1st Amendment and FREE SPEECH. It truly is the greatest right we have as Americans to dissent our government, remember this while celebrating our Independence today!
I think we have some pretty good guesses though;
“The cause of the accident hasn’t been determined yet. It’s easy to assume that it was flood-related and that may be very well what caused it, but we’re not going to make an assumption at this point,” Williams said.
I find it interesting that the FEDS haven’t said the cause yet. Where are our investigative reporters when you need them? The stories coming from Doon shortly after the derailment was that the train decided to cross the tracks that were covered with water. Why?
I would think that protocol would say NOT to do such a thing, or at least send a test vehicle across the water covered tracks first to look for damage. With the massive cleanup effort I suspect that BNSF knows exactly what happened and are trying to ‘cleanup’ or at least ‘coverup’ the mistake. The public deserves an answer ASAP, but will we ever hear it?
While we are holding steady at around 4.2% from last year on our first two pennies, we are down in entertainment taxes and lodging is down 16% from last year. I guess lodging is down across the state.
Doc: May-Monthly-Finance
When Lalley was asking Brian today about moving the school bond issue to the General Election to save taxpayers money on a stand alone special election, Brian went with the old standby argument that their budget must be turned into the state by September 30. Than Lalley asks, “But you could amend it after September?” and Brian says, “Yes.” Lalley also talks about how stand alone elections are expensive, he guesses $100K. Actually, if you do an entire city election, using ALL the precincts, it would be around $60-$80k. If they were to do it with the general, it probably wouldn’t barely cost them $20K.
When Lalley asked Maher about what kind of election would it be, whether it would be super precincts or NOT, Brian dodged the question and said that was up to the school board.
Make no mistake, they want a super precinct stand alone election to control the electorate, even though I still don’t understand how that will work. I still think it has a better chance of passage during the general.
Maher also said that the $190 million bond will be for 25 years. But when asked what the final cost of the bond would be, he said that he “Didn’t have that number.”
WOW! You are trying to sell the community on this bond and you don’t have the payoff amount? Poppycock! You know exactly what it is, and that is why you won’t give the public or the media that number.
Brian did say they were hoping for a 4% rate. If that was the case, that would put interest and principal at around $95 million, which would put the bond at about $285 Million payoff.
Maher also kept trying to sell us on the $2 a month tax increase without talking about the taxes compounding each year.
WHY CAN’T LOCAL GOVERNMENTS WORK TOGETHER?
I asked Commissioner Barth this today when he told me about the possible County opt-out. I said, “Why is it that the county has to build a jail the same time the school district has to build schools at the same time the city wants to upgrade the water treatment plant? Can’t we spread this out over 4-5 years?”
SPEAKING OF THE WATER TREATMENT PLANT
I guess city officials have been throwing the 5,000 a year growth number out a lot when talking about the the new treatment plant. What they are NOT doing is saying where that number came from (the former mayor’s butt) and it’s breakdown. In other words, how many NEW workers are we seeing in Sioux Falls each year compared to new births and retirees? Also, I would like to know what percentage of our treatment plant is used for outlying towns that are paying us to treat their water? Why not double their rates instead? This would encourage them to either help pay for our expansion, or force them to build their own, which would increase our ability to treat more SF sewage.
l3wis