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Editorial Cartoonist from South Dakota

l3wis

MIDCO Aquatic Center Planning Commission Sioux Falls Sioux Falls Parks and Rec

City of Sioux Falls’ settlement for Midco Aquatic Center windows

l3wis 0Comments

I wasn’t sure if the city did a press release on this or if this was in the media, so I requested a copy of the settlement from the city in which I received last week. Pursuant to state law, settlements have to be released to the public.

LETTER from CITY, COPY of SETTLEMENT

While the city providing me a copy of the settlement was good, the settlement itself was questionable.

Basically the city didn’t get a CASH settlement so they could hire another contractor to fix the issue. This would have been the best way to go. Instead the contractor that built the facility agreed to replace the windows at NO cost. The kicker is they are taking NO responsibility for the 24 windows being defective, and will not guarantee or warranty the replacement work. Like I said, it would have been better to get a CASH settlement from them so we could hire a NEW contractor to FIX and WARRANTY the windows. We should also acknowledge that the contractor did shoddy work and exclude them from working on future city projects.

You will also see the conflict of interest in the settlement with a Planning Commission member signing off on the architectural portion.

While this settlement won’t rock our city to the core, it certainly wasn’t handled correctly. We should have sued them and hired a reputable contractor to do the job correctly.

Mayor TenHaken Planning Commission Sioux Falls

Kevin Smith returns to the City of Sioux Falls Planning Department, with a promotion to boot

l3wis 3Comments

Only in the bizarro world of cruise control government these things occur;

Smith will serve as assistant director of planning and development services under director Jeff Eckhoff.

So Smith works in the private sector for 6 years and returns to public service with a promotion. WOW. Only after some certain people have mysteriously disappeared and rumors of several retirements the chess pieces start to move around. It seems Paul’s administration is getting so desperate he is calling up old employees to come back. Pretty soon he will hire MMM to be his consultant 🙂

Mayor Stoneless wouldn’t know leadership if he was hit with it over the head with an Ironman medal.

And nothing against Kevin. I heard last month he was returning. I learned a long time ago, most city managers, especially directors and assistant directors are animals of opportunity. I was surprised Kevin lasted 6 years in the private sector.

I heard our former, former, Fire Chief mows golf courses.

Planning Commission SF City Council Sioux Falls

UPDATE: Sioux Falls City Council Agenda August 3-4, 2021

l3wis 6Comments

UPDATE: The Planning Agenda is NOW posted, if you go to the Med MJ Item 5B, you will see how convoluted they have written it. Read the final two paragraphs first. Basically, they want any dispensary to apply at the 1000′ foot variance, but they can request to be at 500′ feet through conditional use. In other words, every dispensary will have to go begging to planning and likely the city council for the variance. They have made this much more complicated than it needed to be. They should have just reduced to 500′ feet for ALL dispensaries. There is NO difference between Bob’s MJ Dispensary or Mary’s MJ Dispensary, they do the same thing, why would the variance change from store to store? This is what happens folks when you have legislators not listening to the public, a big fat cluster.

Notice the agenda for the Planning Commission meetings have NOT been posted yet. This is not unusual, they have until tomorrow to do so for the briefing. Remember, the Planning Commission is scheduled to vote on the zoning restrictions for Medical MJ on Wednesday. The proposal is for 1000 feet, but advocates have asked for 500 feet. I have no ideas what is going on behind the scenes. I have had radio silence with ALL councilors, city officials and moles and planning commission members. My guess is that there are some very ‘delicate’ negotiations going on. Hopefully we will know more Monday afternoon.

On the council agenda is the budget hearings and the regular council meeting.

Item #6, Sub Item #13, More money for screwing around with SAM on demand, $140K. Interesting that we have NO idea how the first round went, too bad they couldn’t have a PTAB meeting to tell us, oh that’s right, they couldn’t because that would have been a violation of open meeting laws for not posting an agenda 24 hours in advance.

Item #41, 1st Reading, TIF for Cherapa II. As you know I am opposed to this, as I am with ALL TIFs in Sioux Falls that don’t help with affordable housing. If you glance at the 92 page document attached to the item, you will notice that the land purchase agreement was signed back in November of 2019 by the mayor. Once again not only are we giving TIFs to wealthy developers who have the resources to do these projects on their own, we hold onto the land for them for almost 2 years tax FREE. You know who owns and runs this town, and it ain’t you and me.

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