Friday afternoon I noticed that a new episode of Inside Town Hall appeared on the City of Sioux Falls You Tube page. It was the normal setup. City councilor Kiley had on the Director of 911, Matt Burns (SFPD) and the chief of the fire department to talk about their working relationships. The one thing I noticed when I started viewing the video was that it was 44 minutes long (most episodes are 30 minutes). While there was nothing revealing in the show itself, right at the 30 minute mark it went into a 14 minute (muted) video of the building collapse rescue efforts. There were several breaks in the video and it looked professionally shot, at one point it seemed also a drone was used (or shot from a fire truck ladder).
I gathered that this video was probably shot by City Link crew. While I commend them for doing this, it also got me thinking about a lot of other angles.
• What did it cost to have a city film crew on site for that long?
• While we won’t film parks board meetings, somehow the city found it necessary to film this event?
• Why would the city not do an investigation when they had this kind of crucial footage, which included them marking the cracks in PAVE’s wall, a crane holding up the wall, and pulling away the damaged car?
• Was the footage turned over to the insurance companies and OSHA?
• Why shoot this video (which included the rescue of the apartment dweller being pulled from the wreckage) when we don’t send a film crew to every fire rescue event?
• Were they planning on using this video as some kind of propaganda?
• And lastly, why was this posted to YouTube and now has disappeared from the site?
After watching the video, I talked openly about watching it to a group of friends at Drinking Liberally Friday night at the Taphouse. Did someone in the group (or near the table) report this back to the city?
It’s funny how transparency works in this town.
It seems the city has transparency confused with propaganda. Perhaps this video was not intended as a matter of record. Maybe it’s clips for future political advertising. The city was negligent regarding building inspections. Somehow they’re trying to make themselves a hero. One thing is for sure, the city cannot be trusted. They prevent public meetings video yet they’ll present an untruthful Hollywood production at taxpayer expense.
The city of Sioux Falls sponsors a sitcom on FOX at 6PM. Something’s terribly wrong when they fund private broadcast but can’t video public meetings. Veto That!
i don’t know what the city’s propaganda budget is, but per your post the other day with the city salories, there are videographers/editors making over 70k a year.
The city has been awfully quiet on the collapse issue. Obviously there’s a huge liability hanging out there for someone to soak up and I would bet the city is/has been keeping a close eye on this. I just find it interesting that the media whore (our mayor) has kept his mouth shut about it.