City Council Informational Meeting, 4 PM
April Financial Report
Falls Park Master Plan, there is an online survey, the problem with the survey, while thorough, it makes you submit your home address to complete the survey. I find this a violation of privacy. I think a ZIP CODE should be good enough. As I said before, the city is gathering information on us as individuals. It’s creepy and sad.
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Of all the interesting politicians I have met over the past 15 years, Mike was one of the most memorable. Tenacious as all get out. I often was amused of the way the political establishment (he was a registered Independent his entire life) and the media treated him as a gadfly. As a candidate for governor, he was the most qualified person to ever run for the position. A former journalist, CEO of Mayo and USD Law Professor, people often ignored his resume. But it was Mike’s personality that made him a winner.
In this video, campus police at USD tried to tell him he was trespassing in the law center. He was sent a letter from the University basically telling him he was not welcome, something they call ‘Persona Non Grata’ which is a fancy legal term that doesn’t mean a pile of beans. This is why we asked for the court order that they could not produce. We will miss you Mike, you will not be forgotten.
I’m not sure how many of the people on this council are Republican, but I can count quite a few;
When I think of a ‘Leadership Council’ I think of people from all political stripes. It will be interesting to see who fills the open seats. I know of only ONE Democrat on the School Board (after Alberty leaves, and that is Kate Parker. On the city council it is only Pat Starr, who would make a great addition to the council). The reason this concerns me is that when such a large group of mostly Republican ‘leaders’ get together, it usually is about the bottom line first;
“Minnehaha County is excited to expand upon existing relationships in building a collaboration that will engage both public and private sectors,†Heiberger said.
I anticipate to see strong partnerships, but I also expect to see these ‘private’ partnerships watching out for their business interests first. I suspect them to sacrifice very little while the taxpayers pick up the tab.
The Council will begin regular, quarterly meetings this fall.
It will also be interesting to see if the council meets in public, or the forum they decide on to meet in public. Â
The first two meetings were several hours long with Bruce’s camera present. A foot soldier attended the 3rd meeting yesterday, it was a whopping 25 minutes long. This person got the feeling that the group is now meeting in sub-committees privately to avoid being transparent in the bigger picture. It will be interesting to see their final decisions come out of nowhere with no prior discussion (at least one out in open).
It seems the more we scream for transparency, the more they go underground.
UPDATE II: The AL has a great story this morning about ‘top heavy’ administrative pay (the story should have been done before the election, but better late then never). You can take it the way you want to, but I love the goobly-guck the SFSD uses to justify the enormous pay gap between administrators and teachers. They say SF should pay administrators more because we are a bigger city. LOL. You also have MORE administrators. Over $9 million of this year’s budget goes toward administrative pay which hovers at around $100K average per administrator.
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CORRECTION: I had originally posted that the votes were counted twice, that is not the case. I jumped to conclusions. A commenter pointed out that you have a possibility of TWO votes per ballot. I feel like a dumbass. But I still stand by what I wrote below. The undervotes are NOT being shown correctly. I also wonder what the odds are of the top two vote getters TYING?
Just look for yourself, according to the SFSD results page, 4,239 votes were counted and 4,247 were cast.
UPDATE: OKAY, this isn’t as bad as it looks, but it’s still questionable, once you figure out that each ballot ‘can’ contain TWO votes. But it also can contain just one or none.
But if you add up the vote count of the four candidates and undervotes you come to a grand total of; 8,478 votes. If if you divide it by 2 you get 4,239 ballots (actual number of ballots counted).
By these numbers they are saying that everyone voted for two candidates. While you certainly could vote for two, some people only vote for one. Where it gets even more complicated, if they seem to have counted the undervotes TWICE. In other words, they consider one blank ballot as TWO undervotes.
I’m even more confused now.
MORE TO COME.
l3wis