As you can see the City Council will meet on Monday instead of Tuesday this week. Have no idea why, because, as you know, this council and administration are not real big on transparency.
At the informational meeting they will discuss the September financials and a sewer study (which means spending more money 🙁 and a fun filled executive session. Is it just me, or does this administration have an unusual amount of these? Oh, right, the secrecy and corruption thing again.
At the regular city council meeting, it is pretty sleepy except for item #6, Approval of Contracts, Sub-item #9; Engagement Agreement to Provide Legal Services as Plaintiff’s Counsel, Woods Fuller Shultz & Smith P.C., $20K. Could we be more vague? It seems this administration is getting sued quite a bit. Who is the ‘Plaintiff’? Is it a city employee? An elected official? Shall we play Bingo to figure it out?
Item #31, 1st Reading, addresses the Historic Neighborhood vote the Planning Commission decided to throw into the consent agenda and have a zero discussion about.
Item #43, 1st Reading, raises the vacant building fee from $200 per year to $1,000 per year. I fully support this. I have a property owner in my neighborhood who has had 3 vacant houses and several other commercial buildings for several years (10 years? 15th and Cliff). They have now become a dumping ground for his junk vehicles, tractors, trailers and whatever other crap he can throw there. I have pressured the city numerous times to at least get him to clean up the property and rent out the houses with NO avail. But as I have said in the past, it isn’t happening on White Church Lane, so it doesn’t matter.
Items #45-46, resolutions, more (Covid) money to welfare queens, Lewis & Clark. Once these guys see a government tap of money, they come a running, and now strangely, the Sioux Falls, South Dakota, City Council is authorizing monies from the State of Iowa. Did GOP chair, Iowa Dan Lederman have something to do with this?
Item #47, As we all know, the city plans to sell the parking lot directly South of the downtown Ace Hardware to Lloyd properties to build an apartment building. I may be wrong about the developer, but this sh!t show has been in the works for so long, if they sold it to someone else I would be totally shocked. This, of course, is what happens when you have a former executive from the company working as the mayor’s chief of shaft. It will be curious what kind of ‘deal’ they receive for the property and other tax incentive goodies for building an apartment building in the heart of downtown.
Item #48 is curious since there is NO attached documents telling us what this surplus property is. Shady I tell yah, very Shady!
