The rumor has been swirling for awhile and the other day councilor Thomason said in the council presser that they could take in private donations. It is also no secret that for years Denny has been estate planning for when he bites the big one and there are a lot of folks at the grifting and feeding trough. The zoo could get up to $35 Million from him, for example (just no money for the dusty monkeys).
If Denny did donate $100 million and another $100 million came in private investment, the city could borrow the money on our current tax base, the problem is that would be a $20 million dollar bond payment for a very, very, very long time taking out of our 2nd penny.
I’m am still opposed to a taxpayer funded convention center or even an indoor rec center. Let a private company come in and provide the space. As I have said before private indoor rec centers are doing great and they are building more! I see the same in the convention business. Hotels and event centers are booked out for months. There is absolutely no reason the taxpayers of this city need to subsidize these things.
What about Denny’s Tomb? Will they stuff him one day like Lenin or a bunch of animals? #PredatoryArsenic
i saw t denty being wheeled around at an augie hockey game a couple of months ago. he looks like he could go anytime.
The more we investigate and look deeper into our city government, it appears more like a corrupted city government, but has it been this way since day one? With day one being when two different businesses came to this area to speculate, plant a seed, and develop two competing towns side by side with the hope of profiting from the land. Land that sat pretty much inside the Great Bend of the Big River. Think about it. the People of Dubuque, IA who created the Dubuque Land Company came here and established Village of Sioux Falls above the waterfalls – today we got the Steel District losing Seney Island. Soon after, a group of Business leaders, Democrats/D.C Politicians arrived from St. Paul-MN under the name Dakota Land Company and established Sioux Falls City to the south of 6th street. Today, these two groups became Downtown Sioux Falls, and in 1978, incorporate themselves into a corporation, soon-after, creating the Mainstreet Business Improvement District.
But it well known, the real power here vests with the landowners and property holders to who hold the purse. From this small faction of people, you get 99.8% of the members today that sit on our city boards, committees, commissions, and most importantly, our city council. Knowing that a city cannot do anything, example – planning, zoning, street creation, street re-naming, you name it without first petitioning the landowners/property holders, we begin to see where the true power lies. And who is it where the city sells bonds to – mainly this same group of men and women, perhaps event today, they sell on the bond market as well. But it is really this small faction of persons that control everything. The landowners hire developers, to who contract out to real-estate brokers to who speculate future land values based on residency, commercial space, mixed-use space, to determine the most profit for their bargain. Some even donate their land knowing they will profit from the activity on it, others simply donate their time and money to invest in public infrastructure knowing they can profit from the land itself in the future. Sioux Falls has always been a grifting town, our political leaders are not so much elected by the voters, they are massively handpicked, and chosen from this small faction of people who protect their interests. Finally, think what happens if our residency should ever fall below 250 residents should this “city management” ever begin to mismanage itself, become to burdened to debt, to highly taxed – according to state law, it goes through a 10, 20 year (sometimes 30 year) period to which it must be dissolved. The current Mayor and City Council would remain in place, and all public assets placed in escrow watched over by the county circuit court. Their main job, pay of all debts, liabilities, expenses, collect all the recievables owed to the city, sell off all public held assets (land, infrastructure, buildings, properties), depositing all profits in that public trust. What remains thereafter, is the proceeds. Today, this city has a net position of $2.5 billion dollars. That is unusually high for even larger cities than Sioux Falls. This figure represents the proceeds from dissolving the city, where the circuit court would proportion the money to be paid to all remaining “landowners, property holders” left behind, whereas when it is all said and done, all land and property resort back to the townships, where the landowners, property holders govern themselves by terms and agreements adopted by their township. Does the City of Sioux Falls truly care about its residents? Or are they only caring about how much profits they can make from the land in a short amount of time, prior to their time coming to an end?
To best answer that question, I would like to know what the net position of Sioux Falls was in 1993, versus what the net position was in 2023, exactly 30 years after the creation of the Home Rule Community and its centralized government being created…
How and why do so many in the city communications staff make $100k or more? Several Do. Waste of our tax dollars. We still don’t know when the bike trail is closed with all the mega civil service salaries.