Just when you think Christine grew a brain, she pulled a Hannibal Lecter and ate half of it.
Last night when the council discussed funding educating the public through our health department about Covid ($20K) she suggested we pause the ‘Sioux Falls Alive’ program, or as I call it ‘Covid Tourism’. I guess the CVB has said they would, but of course we have nothing in writing from the CVB they will do that, we also have nothing in writing from the contractors, TenHaken’s former(?) ad agency Click Rain that this program will be paused. As a person who has worked in marketing, I can tell you, once you sign advertising contracts, sometimes it is hard to turn off that faucet. I guess time will tell, but as of this morning, the website still exists. So in other words, like the mask mandate, it was just a strong ‘suggestion’. But what made Christine’s suggestion more ironic is that she voted against the health education funding as did Nutzert and another pup. Go figure. She really needs to put away her ugly pills.
What makes the irony even better is when the 1st reading for city employees vacation holdover to 2021 passed,  Nutzert said, “It has been hard to travel during this pandemic.†Who needs to travel to take a vacation? How about a Sioux Falls Alive ‘Staycation!’ Who says we can’t have fun in Sioux Falls during Covid? All the bars and restaurants are open, and if you don’t want to wear a mask? Who cares! The cops will not do anything anyway . . .
. . . speaking of that, it seems the SFPD has been listening to Detroit Lewis when it comes to mask mandates;
Sioux Falls Police spokesman Sam Clemens clarifies how the new mask ordinance will or won’t be enforced at Wednesday’s briefing.
“If the business owner or manager tells them, ‘you have to have a mask. It’s our policy.’ and if the people refuse, and they (the manager) says, ‘Well, you need to leave,†and they don’t, then it’s trespassing or causing a disturbance, according to Clemens. “If somebody leaves, then there’s no issue. There’s no problems. There’s no reason for police to be involved.â€
Gee, what have I been saying for WEEKS about enforcing trespassing?!!!!! I may just be qualified to not only be the Chief of Police, but the City Attorney, an unlike the Fire Chief I live in Sioux Falls!
Speaking of eating out during your staycation, it just got easier, the lingering ordinance failed in a 5-4 vote (TenHaken, Neitzert, Erickson, Selberg, Jensen – NO). Erickson also attacked Brekke (who proposed this) claiming she is targeting certain businesses (uh duh). While I get the argument, I will tell you as a person who has worked in the hospitality industry this is the busiest time for them through the New Year, but not this year, and distancing tables at restaurants are not going to change their already dismal sales. Usually January-March restaurants are deader than a doornail. I would encourage restaurants to sell the crap out of gift cards right now, it may be the only thing that keeps you afloat. I warned months ago that the hospitality industry will be the hardest hit, especially when the patios have to be closed. If I owned the building my restaurant was in, January 1st, I would close my doors until April 1st and make sure all of my full-time employees get on unemployment. If restaurants right now are slow, it will be even worse January 1st. While I get restaurants wanting to make decisions on their own, this ordinance would not have harmed their business anymore than what Covid already has. I want to remind these business owners, if your customers are sick or dead, you are NOT going to have much business moving forward. We need to look over the horizon. This is temporary. Once the vaccine starts to get distributed, hopefully by late Spring, early Summer most people will be vaccinated and Covid virtually disappears, but until that happens, we need to get our sh*t together and take precautions.
I also found it a bit suspicious that suddenly SIRE* stopped working yesterday at 4 PM *(Meeting Agenda platform and Video) and the city cancelled the informational meeting. Shortly after that the city did a patch on the agenda page with a link to a PDF of the agenda and a YouTube Livestream for the regular meeting at 7 PM. First, the obvious, I have argued for years that the meetings be livestreamed on Youtube and replays be stored in YouTube. This costs taxpayers NOTHING. It has worked for the Sioux Falls school district of years and even the City of Omaha.
But I have a feeling this was done intentionally to save face from last week’s embarrassment of not having enough bandwidth in SIRE to watch the meeting. So this week I’m sure Mayor Stoneless and Chair Nutzert devised a plan to save face and not be embarrassed by people telling them the meeting wasn’t working in SIRE so they claim their was ‘technical problems’, yeah, sure, you betcha. Funny how the technical problems occur right at 4 PM, and once the regular city council meeting ended at about 12:07 AM, magically at 1:00 AM, SIRE started working again and the meeting popped up this morning.
Trust me, there wasn’t any technical issues just a couple of rats hiding cheese.