Last night, the city council, mostly councilor Kiley got irritated with me because I pointed out the shell game they played with Covid money. Rick was even more frustrated with the fact that I accused the council of NOT being involved. While he did correct me that they were involved, I reminded them that it was behind closed doors with the mayor in private, non-quorum meetings instead of open to the public working session with the ENTIRE council. According to open meetings laws they can to this, but it really isn’t that ethical or transparent, you know, SOP for the TenHaken administration. (ironically they scheduled a working session today for this Friday at 2 PM, you know, so working people can attend 🙁 they had to schedule the session because of the executive session they had to skip yesterday because the city council meetings start to close to the informational meetings, 6 PM)
So how did they pull this off?
It is true that the city did follow Federal guidelines when spending the initial money, where they played a game with it is what they did after spending the money. The city basically paid for stuff that was already in the 2021 budget following those guidelines. Since the Federal aid paid for those budgeted items, they transferred the budgeted money to other projects that WERE not included in the Covid guidelines (Parks, Zoo, etc). Personally, I think it is questionably legal. The best way you could explain it is using car insurance money to fix the fender on your car to buy a big screen TV and turning around and hiring your neighbor Chuck to fix the fender at a fraction of the cost.
It’s sneaky, very sneaky and probably the reason it was arranged in the mayor’s office with the lights down low. Not sure if the Federal government would even look into this practice since initially the money was spent correctly. I have a feeling this has been going on across the state and country. I reminded the mayor and council this is what happens when you have bad leadership and decision making behind closed doors, rules are broken.
I also reminded the council at the informational public input portion that we are being extremely overtaxed and Downtown Sioux Falls needs to move towards a more walkable downtown.
PARKS DEPARTMENT ASKS FOR WAGE INCREASES FOR LIFEGUARDS
Ironically, this is because the HR department and the City’s chief liar, the parks director, are finding their jobs very difficult in hiring seasonal workers at $11.50 an hour (I think they want to bump it up to $13.00 an hour). During my public input on the matter I said it is because the city is setup like a for-profit corporation when it comes to pay (execs and directors get overly paid and the minions are underpaid). I also said that no manager, director or city employee should be paid more than the mayor (he makes $130K a year and 19 managers with the city make more than that, with his COF making $177K and almost 90 making over $100K). Which got a good chuckle out of Councilor Soehl (I am assuming because he agrees). Three separate councilors railed on the issue about how we need to pay our seasonal employees better. Which was good.
The police are also receiving two drones that they will share with the Fire Department. After that item passed an officer explained to me they have thermal cameras and will be used for fire inspection, traffic accidents and missing persons. He also told me that they had to follow National Civil Rights rules and objectives when using the drones. In other words they can’t hover over your house while you are having a drunken orgy in your hot tub 😊 While the drones themselves are around $2K, the thermal camera’s put the price tag in at $9K each.
During public input at the end of the meeting I reminded the council they need to put a public task force together to combat panhandling and they need input from the public. Believe it or not at least 4 of them were nodding their heads in agreement while the mayor continued to scowl and grunt into his microphone. That’s mostly all he does at every meeting.
Cruise control government at it’s best once again.
There is also a push to make newly elected CountCilor Jensen vice chair in next months council chair election even though both Starr and Brekke have been there longer and deserve the seat.