The City Council meeting tonight was cutting out and skipping and finally ended at item #33 before the vote. (Now it is working) I was watching online. I tried it on 3 different devices and all had the same result. A friend also called me and told me he was having the same problems.
I am wondering with all the money we have invested in a new recording system and SIRE for Carnegie Town Hall, why we continue to have these problems?
We plan to to invest another $1.5 million in a new tech center at the administration building in a no bid contract, yet we can’t even manage to get information out to the public. It is unacceptable.
I did have an attendee call me afterwards and tell me that the beekeeping ordinance passed the first meeting in a 7-0 vote with NO public opposition and an Augie student supporting it. I guess councilor Erickson made a reference to bees stinging people. Really? That’s news to me. LOL. She also mentioned that people called into the Belfrage show concerned. LOL2X. So if this passes and someone gets stung, will we know it is a bee already living in Sioux Falls or a bee from a private hive? I hear they both rarely sting, but if they do, they do it the same way. 🙂
A presentation on Cherapa II. We will get to see what the city and the developer have been cooking up over the past couple of months. I wasn’t made aware of the deal until last month.
There is an item to pay $73K+ to reconstruct the buffalo run images by Kiwanis and 18th Street. I still think just fixing the wall would have cost a lot less, and would have kept it’s artistic integrity. Hopefully a city councilor will pull this item so we can get an explanation.
There is an outside legal counsel expense of $41.5K for consultation on state loans for the water reclamation expansion. So explain to me 1) why do we need legal counsel to take out a loan from the state, who, BTW, receives about 40% of it’s sales tax revenue from Sioux Falls and 2) why this can’t be handled internally between the state and the city? So we need to hire a private firm to give us advice on how to loan money from another government agency? WOW!
We are getting a gift of a sculpture of a coach running that no one knows unless he was your coach, and even if he was your coach, he looks like all the other sculptures of a coach running (not sure how many other ones are out there).
It seems we have a couple of legal expenses concerning our lawsuit over the firefighting foam polluting our water wells. I still find it interesting that 1) we are suing over something that the city has told us publicly never harmed the public and 2) why do we even have a legal department when we consistently hire this stuff out? I still think we should just change our legal department into a two person staff of a paralegal/receptionist and a purchasing agent.
While I understand why we need to pay for a coin collection service for our downtown parking meters, why is the SF airport in on the deal? Are they paying the city for this service? Seems some explanation is needed.
Item #8, Change orders. $31K+ for ‘Unforeseen conditions’ at the Pavilion. Can you imagine getting a mechanics bill and there was a line item that was 33% of your bill that said this? Oh, yeah, you would question it.
Item #13, one of my favorite pizza places, Papa Woody’s is applying for a beer and wine license.
Item #32, 2nd Reading, Ordinance, the city council will be approving having ONE employee running TWO casinos to circumvent state law like many podunk towns across the state have been doing. I think this is a bad for employees safety and I agree 100% with Stehly’s opposition on this item. I suggested to her that she should offer an amendment that there should be only ONE unisex bathrooms in VL casinos to. She just laughed at me.
Item #38, 1st Reading, Ordinance, Beekeeping. It will be interesting to see how many peeps from the public oppose this. I guess when Belfrage posted about this on his FB page, he got his ass handed to him. My guess is that many supporters will show up to talk about how this is a great idea. On an unrelated note, today when I was closing up all my windows today on my house in preparation for winter, I found a sleeping bat. It was not happy I pushed it away from my house with a stick. I think that is the first time I heard a bat hiss. Creepy. I ran like a little girl.
Item #39, Resolution, Lyons Park is finally getting a sculpture placed on the lonely pedestal sitting at the intersection of 14th and Phillips. I kind of smiled when I heard about this at the Neighborhood Summit. I created a sculpture for this pedestal about 3 years ago that I was going to place anonymously one night and chickened out and never did it. I still have the piece, and who knows, it may show up downtown one of these days. Keep your eyes peeled. Let’s just say, you will know it was my work when you see it.
The Commission will be discussing numerous items brought forward by citizens. They of course will ‘probably’ be deciding if the items below will continue to be discussed before they decide to put them on the Spring city election ballot or they may kill them all together. I’m not sure. My guess is that ‘most of the items’ on this agenda list will be killed. The interesting part will be the arguments they have against them. Let’s review;
Items A-B, Plurality voting presented by two different citizens. Even though the council passed a majority ordinance with a slippery amendment process (by former councilor Rolfing) the council has since refused to change it back claiming this should be ‘up to the voters’. So will the CRC decide to put this on the ballot? This one is hard to tell. Since the city council has refused to change this, it really is up to the voters, so it would seem logical to let them decide. But I can see the CRC’s argument against this that it hasn’t been ‘tested’ yet, so they will want to keep it around. When Senator Rounds spoke at an event last week he made a very ‘chilling’ statement, an attendee told me that he said towards the end that ‘More business people need to run for local races.’ In other words regular folks like piano teachers shouldn’t be on city councils, because they care too much about the rest of us working stiffs and not ‘business’. The majority rule is a game to disenfranchise the ‘little guys and gals’ from running for office.
Items C-D, these items are also similar and were suggested by the same two citizens as the above items. Requiring a super-majority to pass bonds (6 votes). I think the CRC will kill this right away. But it will be interesting to watch is if CRC member Anne Hajek recuses herself from the discussion since her husband Doug Hajek is an attorney for the largest bonding company in the state and the agency the city always uses. Ethically, this is a conflict of interest. In fact, Doug has told me to my face he opposes this (right in front of Anne). Of course he does, anything that makes it harder to pass bonds isn’t good for business. I hope Anne does the right thing and steps out of this discussion.
Item E, is something the CRC has been throwing around, making the city attorney a ‘member’ of the CRC but a non-voting member (or a voting member). Not sure what they are trying to accomplish with this one, since he already sits in the meetings already and advises. It seems they are playing a legal game. This discussion will also be intriguing and hopefully revealing.
Item F, they will go over their list of recommendations and other stuff they have yet to discuss.
I highly recommend people tune in to this meeting. The CRC will be laying the groundwork to kill a lot of these recommendations.
At Tuesday’s Sioux Falls City Council meeting, councilor Kiley argued that they shouldn’t put the IT expansion project out for bid because the delay would end up costing taxpayers more money. Pulling a crystal ball from his rear aside, that is not always the case.
Back in 2008, the city faced a similar dilemma, a bid was handed over to a contractor to replace the windows on the Pavilion, the problem was that when the Pavilion’s Operations Director turned the bid into the city, he realized later that he forgot to include labor and would have to resubmit the bid.
The controversy caused by this error got the attention of the media, so a lot more contractors bid on the project the second time around.
The city saved over $300K by resubmitting the project, in fact they had to amend the 2009 CIP budget to reflect the cost savings;
Improvements, by deleting $300,000 in year 2009 for windows (CIP p. 2-145).
We have NO IDEA if we are getting a ‘deal’ on the IT expansion because we never put it out for bid. And I can guarantee if it is put out for bid ‘after the fact’ there would be someone who would come in under $1.5 Million.
Open bids save tax dollars, and for councilor Kiley to say otherwise is just ludicrous and ignorant.
Presentation on microblading. Not sure what this is about, maybe more regulations. I don’t know enough about theprocedure to know what regulations there should be, but I do know if I were a woman I would never let someone take an exacto blade to my eyebrows.
I guess at least five councilors will be missing from the meeting due to a Municipal League meeting (I believe in Aberdeen).
Item #2, Invocation, Jerry Fogg will be doing the invocation, he is Lakota from the Yankton Sioux Tribe, and he will probably ‘smudge’. If you haven’t seen this before, it is intriguing.
Item #4, Siouxperhero award, I am assuming this is the award they are giving to the city employees for getting paid to pick up branches. Bravo!
Trust me, I realize that the Belfrage show is just ‘talk’ and NOT news, in fact I would go so far to say it is the epitome of fake news. Day after day his moronic audience calls in defending a president that has taken the constitution and wiped his butt with it. So it is NO surprise his ignorant listeners would call in and agree with him on saying a bee keeping ordinance is a bad thing.
If you watch the city council informational meeting at the end of this article, you will see many questions answered by a person who educates people on bee keeping. So let’s look at some FACTS that Greg’s listeners chose to ignore;
• Bees already exist in Sioux Falls, and there is a lot of them. In fact it has taken me about 3 years to get my flower beds built up in my backyard to where they are almost all completely full of cover. I had tons of bees this summer in my backyard. Never got stung. In fact I ran into them accidentally quite a bit, and they just flew away. When a bee stings it commits suicide, once the stinger is left in your body it pulls their guts out killing them.
• Most people who get stung in the city are stung by wasps and hornets. They have a stinger that detaches from them without killing them, so they have no problem with stinging people.
• Bees are essential for vegetables and flowers. How do you think people in the city grow flowers and gardens without bees? They don’t, bees are already here working hard.
• Bee keepers will be required to be licensed, take a course and get neighbors permission. They approximate that about 5-10 people will apply for the license if this ordinance passes. The hives will also have to be limited in size. In other words, they won’t have massive bee farms. People will mostly have the hives for personal honey use and their own gardens. While bees will travel 2-3 miles to pollinate, most likely they won’t go far if they don’t have to.
• People are allergic to bee stings. I get it, people are also allergic to peanuts. Should we ban peanuts in Sioux Falls? If you are allergic to something you take some personal responsibility for that.
• Mosquito spraying is more harmful then bees. The chemical compounds that the city uses to spray actually kills bees and butterflies and many other beneficial insects in our city. In fact, one of the reasons I don’t have a garden is because those compounds are most likely leaving a residue on your vegetables that can’t be washed away, and if young children eat those vegetables it can have an affect on their nervous system. I have told the city on numerous occasions they need to use a ecological safe organic spray on mosquitos instead. There is an organic compound out there right now that can be put into standing water like drainage ponds that kills larvae.
Once again, many people are saying the ‘sky is falling’ and I’m not sure this ordinance will pass. In the video below you will notice that Neitzert and Erickson were gunning against it. You will also notice that NO ONE came to public input in opposition to this. If it gets a reading, I suspect there will only be one or two people opposed to it at the regular council meeting.
Without bees we don’t eat, and if we don’t eat, we die folks. Grow a brain.
l3wis 
