January 2019

Sioux Falls City Council Agenda • Jan 8, 2019 • Massive Change Orders

l3wis January 5, 2019 6Comments

Informational Meeting, 4 PM

There will be 4 presentations/reports during the informational, that look very intriguing, unfortunately I have no supporting documents yet, so I have no idea what they will be about;

• Siouxland Heritage Museum board

• Property tax reduction programs

• Construction manager at risk (the timing of this is interesting considering the change orders in the consent agenda during the regular meeting that are very mysterious)

• Sioux Falls Thrive Update

City Council Regular Meeting, 7 PM

Item #6, Approval of Contracts/Agreements

The city is subsidizing transportation for a private Non-Profit and the School District at the tune of $226K;

Once again the city coffers are footing the bill for entities that should be able to pay for these on their own. Isn’t if funny how the SFSD has oodles of money for admin pay and brick and mortar buy can’t scrape money together for actual EDUCATION.

The Arts Council comes for it’s annual subsidy;

While most of the time I wouldn’t think nothing of this, usually in the past an Arts Council representative would do a presentation about what their programming is. To tell you the truth, ever since the last director left, several months ago, I have NO IDEA what they have been doing. Maybe it would be a good time for an update at the meeting. A city councilor needs to pull this agenda item and get some man splain’in.

MYSTERIOUS $468K CHANGE ORDER ON ADMIN BUILDING

Item #7, Change Orders

While change orders are not uncommon with multi-million dollar city buildings, almost a half a million on a $25 million dollar building is mysterious;

After I saw this on Friday, I started asking contractor friends if they knew anything. The ‘rumor’ going around is that the thermal system they were going to use for HVAC (which requires drilling into the ground) didn’t work because of water and quartzite issues.

This of course would be an engineering mistake, so why wouldn’t the construction manager at risk (CMAR) catch this? And if they did, why are the taxpayers on the hook for fixing it? If a contractor miscalculates or makes a mistake in engineering, isn’t that their fault?

If all of this is ‘true’, the city needs to put on their big boy pants and tell the CMAR to ‘EAT IT’ or at least get a judge to tell them to.

Hopefully the council will pull this item so we can get some more man splain’in.

Item #10, 2nd Reading, Ordinance to give a Heckuva Deal on a lease agreement to a major Communications company. Oh, and we don’t have a choice in the matter, because it’s the ‘FEDS’. Another contract the ‘powerless’ city council is voting on that they have NO input or control of. Silly.

Item #12, 1st Reading, Ordinance to repeal drone regulations in our city parks. While this makes sense, since the FAA regulates our air space, just another example of the FEDS telling us what to do. Thanks John Thune.

Sioux Falls City Council’s NEW SIRE numbering system a mess

l3wis January 5, 2019 0Comments

Cameraman Bruce has noticed some issues with the new SIRE numbering system, mostly that they are re-using older meeting numbers, which can cause major DATA issues. He has brought this up with the city clerk and several city councilors;

Sioux Falls is once again setting up to repeat the past by recycling SIRE meeting numbers. Why is it happening?

Since the December 2018 SIRE meeting system conversion, the meeting numbers have been recycled from the past. To the average user, this does not seem to be a problem, but for a historian or data manager, it is a disaster ready to happen.

All meetings should be set to unique identity numbers built on the key numbering field used in the past.

The recently recorded and posted meetings should be renumbered starting with at least #2797 to prevent future issues.

I’ve spent 40 years cleaning up the disasters caused by this kind of sloppiness. Is this the kind of disaster preparedness we can continue to expect from our city government?

It is hard to imagine a good data manager not raising a red flag to this disaster in the making. Is there a logical reason for recycling a unique key identifier field or just sloppiness? Is the plan to recycle all the previous numbers used? Is there any plan?

As with so many things done in Sioux Falls city government, there is no planning until there is a disaster. When we have the disaster, its always an act of the almighty causing it, not the lack of planning for contingencies. It’s as if we see our government setting up for the next disasters by the lack of planning. Why waste future money and time by letting this lack of planning carry on any longer? Fix the numbering system now while it can be.

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