UPDATE II: Is the City of Sioux Falls still sharing data with Bloomberg?

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UPDATE II: The mayor put out a brief statement about his trip. He didn’t mention that he took Shawn and Mark;

“Local government is the catalyst for community progress, and I know our City’s participation in the City Data Alliance will help us double down on our data efforts to ultimately benefit residents.”

So you have been participating in this program for several years now, wondering when you are going to start sharing those benefits with the citizens?

I also found it interesting that out of the 11 American mayors participating only one was Republican, TenHaken, and one Indy (who leans Democrat). All the other mayors were Democrat.

UPDATE: A South DaCola foot soldier pointed out to me after posting this earlier today that there is another issue with this trip.

The city pays a consultant for the software that helps with sharing data thru the Bloomberg initiative. As I understand it, that money DOES NOT go towards trips city employees or elected officials may take in coordination with Bloomberg.

‘IF’ and only ‘IF’ Bloomberg Philanthropies paid for the trip and NOT the taxpayers of Sioux Falls that is an ethics violation because of quid pro quo. By Bloomberg providing an all expense paid trip to the mayor of Sioux Falls, or ANY mayor or municipal employee for that matter, there is an appearance that Bloomberg provides these conferences and in return gets to use the data from the city, probably even sell it.

I am NOT sure who paid for the trip, but if it was Bloomberg, Paul and his cohorts have some explaining to do.

I’m wondering when they are going to start sharing information and data with the citizens?

I see that the city was not only represented by Mayor ONE, but the Public Works Director and the Finance/Tech Director at the conference. I wonder who was running the city . . .

I understand the concept behind the data sharing, but what I am curious about is how this is helping us in Sioux Falls? There have been NO major initiatives by this administration to use the data sharing with Bloomberg to improve our city. On Demand is a joke and will be repealed, so that doesn’t really count. But when it comes to crime, neighborhood cleanup, infrastructure, transparency, climate change, housing and better wages we sit at a standstill. Heck, we can’t even approve a mural!

So what do we get when the 3 most important people in city government spend a week yucking it up with Bloomberg?

We will never know.

Maybe this is the reason Sioux Falls is limiting credit card parking meters

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So what do most people do if they are in a hurry? They say ‘F’ck it’ and move on. If someone is in a hurry and they find a parking spot DTSF but don’t have any change to feed the meter (that doesn’t have a CC reader) they will probably not go looking for another spot and just risk the ticket. Maybe that is what the city is hoping for.

You can either listen or read the interview;

GRABAR: I think so. Essentially, parking enforcement serves as a subset of what is now known as revenue-driven policing. And the idea here is that cities take advantage of these parking laws to try and get as much money out of people as possible, but not in the way that you would think, right? I mean, I think this is a common misconception. Meter rates are actually, for the most part, pretty low in most cities, which is to say they are below the market clearing price that would create empty spaces on every block. Most cities make more money from illegal parking fines than they do from meters and garage taxes put together. So, for example, New York City in 2015 made $565 million in parking fines. It’s the biggest category of fines that the city issues. But they made just $200 million from parking meters.

So what’s essentially being run here – and I don’t know if cities are conscious of this – is a system that is poorly designed that almost seems like the incentives are in favor of illegal parking because for the city, that’s where they make their money.

I would have loved to been a fly on the wall when the Parking Director, Matt Nelson and Mayor TenHaken had a conversation about getting creative with raising more parking fees. Probably went something like this;

Nelson says, “Paul, we just gotta find a way to get people to park in the ramps more.”

TenHaken responds, “Thank goodness I stopped that naked Indian mural, because that certainly would have drove drivers away.”

Canton proposes building swimming pool with garbage fees

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You got to hand it to them for being creative;

  • Right now, Canton has private garbage services, meaning residents choose whichever provider they’d like to come collect their trash.
  • In a city-run garbage collection system, Canton would put out a bid to trash collectors and choose the lowest offer.
  • Because the city would take care of billing logistics, Gannon anticipates collectors would offer much lower rates to the city than they’re able to offer directly to customers.
  • Customers’ bills won’t go up, but because costs are lower, the city would have extra income from garbage collection to then help pay for the pool.

While I will leave it up to the citizens of Canton to determine if they want to pay for their pool with garbage fees, I do support the idea of municipal garbage. I have argued for a long time that if the City of Sioux Falls did this you would save consumers because the billing could be processed thru your water bill and the private contractor(s) the city would hire wouldn’t pay tipping fees and would have shorter planned routes.

I also would implement a city ambulance service since right now the city is already assisting in mutual aid, sometimes showing up before the private ambulance, and we are getting NO reimbursement from the private ambulance provider for our aid.

Some argue against having these services provided by the city, but if done correctly they can be very beneficial and cost effective for citizens.

Is the Carbon Pipeline really for Carbon?

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It’s not what is in the pipeline but who is burying it.

There has been a lot of chatter about the proposed carbon pipeline and some of the extraordinary actions taken to get it in the ground.

Of course none of this is surprising considering some of the players in this and everything done so far has worked in their playbook.

I asked someone recently who has been around in politics since the late 60’s, “Do you think there is some kind of other agenda when it comes to this pipeline?”

Let’s be brutally honest, grain ethanol is NOT the solution to our energy problems. Green energy is. We should be using all the available farmland we have to grow crops that feed PEOPLE not create waste with an energy source that really isn’t that sustainable. Which brings us back to the ‘agenda’ question.

This person pointed out to me that once the easements are set and the pipeline is approved and buried in the ground the servicer of that line can transport any material thru the line like oil from North Dakota or Canada.

Is it much easier to sell a carbon pipeline that will somehow trickle down to benefit farmers or an oil pipeline?

We know the answer to that question.

The affected landowners need to start asking the carbon pipers what exactly will be in this pipeline because right now there is something flowing and it ain’t carbon.