Public Input continues tonight at Club David
l3wis 
6:30 PM, DTSF. Across the street from Carnegie Town Hall. It will be pretty uneventful, except of course for public input at the beginning.
SF City Council
Sioux Falls City Council Agenda, October 2-3, 2018
City Council Informational Meeting • 4 PM (Oct 2)
TIF, Historical Summary Presentation by COS, Beck. There is NO supporting documents in SIRE.
Executive Session for contract negotiations with employees or employee representatives.
City Council Regular Meeting • 7 PM (Oct 2)
Item# 1, Approval of Contracts, (They are now being more descriptive with the line items).
• Apparently we hired one of the most expensive ad agency’s in the state to do marketing about awareness of the Emerald Ash borer. They did do $14,500 in pro-bono.
• Moving forward with ADA upgrades to our city parks
• Sound System Upgrades, $102K. Not sure what entertainment facility will get them (Events Center or Pavilion)
Item#36, Subdivision ordinance changes
Item#42, 1st Reading, They are finally gifting the Veteran’s Cemetery land.
City Planning Commission • 6 PM (Oct 3)
Item#7, Remodeling of Callaway’s for Restaurant.
Item#9, The Controversial Rezone for apartments has returned, owned by First Assembly of God Church.
Item#11, We have officially became BIG TIME! Bring on the Ramen Restaurant!
Minnehaha County Commission & Sioux Falls City Council fight over joint jurisdiction
The CC and CC just can’t agree on whether or not to allow a wedding barn to be built in the middle of a corn field. Yes. You heard me right. You would think with all the big decisions to make, that a wedding barn (outside of the city limits) would be the last thing to debate about. Oh, and it’s painful.
Ironically the Sioux Falls Planning Commission and Minnehaha Planning Commission both agreed it was ok. The kicker? Jeff Schmidt with the city’s planning office is concerned that in 12-30 years from now a housing development may be built around the wedding barn, and it may hurt the growth of the development because of the ‘noise’ from a wedding barn.
Are wedding barns noisy? Hmm.
The biggest problem with this is that the city and county agreed on joint jurisdiction in the growth area of Sioux Falls. In other words, land that is still not annexed into city limits but could be in the future. Most of the time it’s fine, but Schmidt with the help of councilor Neitzert decided to nitpick about streets, drainage and commercial/residential development 12-30 years down the road. Right now the land is a corn field and zoned ag in the county, they need to re-zone so the barn can be built.
County Chair Heiberger reminded the bodies on the dais that the joint jurisdiction is a more or less a ‘polite’ agreement, and if the city continues to nitpick about stupid crap, the county may get rid of the agreement (well she really didn’t say that, but you get the feeling).
Towards the end of the meeting during public input I told both bodies to try to remember to bring legal counsel to these meetings (neither side had one present) and that they need to stop cooking up their legislative priorities in private with only leadership in the room.
UPDATE: Why is a Zeal Center board member trashing councilors on FB?
As you may or may not know, the Zeal Center is part of the USD Discovery Center (that recently got funding from the city council for infrastructure) and share many of the same leaders, like Rich Naser.
UPDATE: I am being told Zeal is a joint venture between the Chamber and the Development Foundation and the USD Discovery District is a USD project. Rich Naser works on both of them, but Zeal receives no DIRECT city funding but the Development Foundation DOES.
One of the board members of Zeal, Matthew Paulson, decided to trash city councilor Stehly on FB recently (she supported the funding).
While Matt certainly has a 1st Amendment Right to say what he wants about an elected official, NOT sure it shows a lot of professionalism when your organization just got a big chunk of money from the city’s taxpayers in which Stehly approved of. Remember, the city council holds the purse strings (not so much under the last mayor). Maybe the next time The Discovery Center or Zeal come asking for funding they won’t be getting much support from city council.