UPDATE: Apparently city employees were told they were getting bonuses 5 weeks ago assuming the comment below is from an anonymous city employee;
You predicted something a week after it was published on the city employee website! Wow, what a clairvoyant!
I have known for awhile that city employees have a secure sharepoint website. Many private employers and other government agencies have this. I also find it ironic that if the city is struggling to find people they only have 22 jobs listed with 17 of them being internships that don’t pay a living wage.
But what I find even more revealing is that the city employees were told 5 weeks ago that they would receive this bonus even though the city council hasn’t approved anything. In fact they could vote down the proposal all together or amend it to find the money in each of the departments budgets.
So how can the Mayor, the Unions, HR, Finance and Legal departments of the city PROMISE city employees a bonus on a taxpayer funded secure website when the policy body and more importantly the public know nothing about it?
Cruise control government corruption at it’s finest. BTW, anon city employee, thanks for the tip.
As you can see in the city council agenda for Tuesday (Item #39) TenHaken plans to give around $2.49 million in a ‘Retention Incentive Pay’ bonuses to city employees. If you do the math that is around $2,000 per employee, which likely excludes management, but I am not sure because the presentation for this program will be done 2 hours before the first reading with NO attached documents.
I know, the secrecy is sooooooooo surprising.
While we could argue back and forth about whether city employees deserve this or not and the (non-existent) metrics, there is a bigger question of timing and where the money is coming from.
The city could have easily used ARPA funds to give a bonus for working through Covid (mostly from home) but they had tennis courts and butterflies to fund with that money. The money is coming from the General Fund;
That the Mayor has certified that there are available for appropriation unassigned fund
balances carried forward from prior years or revenues in excess of those estimated in the
budget to provide funding to supplement the 2022 budget.
So where did this money come from? Let’s do a brief economics course. In the private sector when you have money left over at the end of the year, that is called a profit from running a successful business by marking up goods and services. In the public sector when you have money left over that means you are NOT fiscally responsible because you are overtaxing the citizens and NOT managing a balanced budget that takes care of all the services and debt. In other words, if the city has over $2 million laying around for operations, what other departments have money leftover? If you look at the city departments and sub departments, the city has a couple dozen.
I have always felt that the city should spend every penny they receive from us from taxes and fees on services and infrastructure back to the citizens, not bribes to the city employees and socialist welfare handouts to the developers, banksters, bondsters and friends of Prince Poops.
Our city employees are well compensated, they have amazing benefits and pensions, not sure why we also need to give them a bonus? Oh and if you look at item #38, they are also getting more vacation time.
Besides dubious funding of this ‘Bonuses for Votes’ plan you have to question the timing and secrecy of planning, only weeks from a city election.
When people challenge me to stop questioning the ethics of our current mayor I say, just look at this proposal. It has nothing to do with keeping city employees, it’s just plain corrupt.
*It will be interesting to see how the media spins this.
SPEAKING OF CORRUPTION, A STORM IS COMING
We learned this week that the Feds and FBI seem to be concerned about some low hanging fruit by entrapping a low ranking officer for sending images of his penis to someone he thought was 12 years old.
Let’s be clear, it is disturbing.
But what’s more concerning to me is why the FBI is lurking around Sioux Falls. We have known for a long time that sex trafficking in our state and city is a problem and my speculation is this isn’t about one person.
I will actually defend our police chief and mayor on this issue, and getting ahead of this problem and being very public about the solution will only gain you accolades in the end. Choosing to keep this secret will only blow up in your face.