South DaCola

Editorial Cartoonist from South Dakota

SF City Council

1st Amendment Open Government Open Meetings SF City Council Sioux Falls

UPDATE: Sioux Falls City Council Vice-Chair Selberg proposing ordinance to move public input to end of meeting

l3wis 10Comments

UPDATE: Apparently Selberg is proposing this because the meetings are supposed to be family friendly;

“They’re getting a show that’s not very family friendly sometimes,” he said.

Makes you wonder how ‘family friendly’ the Continental Congress was? What a putz.

So the first action/legislation of new Vice-Chair Selberg is to tell the public their input doesn’t matter. I knew it wasn’t a good idea to elect him vice-chair. He is proposing the first reading on June 12th to move public input to the back of the meeting, Councilor Rick Kiley is expected to support the measure to get it on the agenda.

As I have mentioned in the past, this could seriously backfire on them if they pass this. You could get citizens sitting through the meetings and commenting on every single item. Than at the end of the meeting chewing out the council for some of the crappy decisions they made throughout the night. If you think the meetings are long now, just wait.

But what makes this even more egregious is that there hasn’t been a public discussion about this. They just had a working session about public input and NO one brought this up, in fact Councilor Neitzert specifically said he did not want to talk about it – obviously he knew about the proposal. The rumor is that Mayor TenHaken is pushing this behind the scenes and getting Lloyd Companies Realtor Selberg to do his dirty work.

I also believe the developers are behind it. I think after Lloyd Companies got their asses handed to them over the failed apartment land deal on 6th street they saw the power of public input and how it can squash their devious plans.

Councilor Theresa Stehly said this to me about the action, “It’s an assault on citizens free speech rights. A direct action to suffocate and annihilate the citizens voice at council meetings.”

SF City Council Sioux Falls Theresa Stehly

UPDATE: Sioux Falls City Councilor Stehly asking for an advisory opinion from Ethics Commission

l3wis 15Comments

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EhMw7mOZgSc

She is wondering if it is OK for city councilors to circulate petitions. The ethics commission will give their opinion tomorrow at 3:30 PM. The meeting will be at city hall in the old commission chambers. While I support councilors wanting to circulate petitions, I have encouraged Stehly to try first to work with her peers on the council to get legislation passed and if that fails than do a petition drive. I know she has run into walls with council in the past, but I have argued that mainly had to do with the rubber stamp leadership of council and doing whatever the mayor told them to do. I think her opportunity to get legislation passed on the council is much greater now with the new mayor and council than what it has been in the past two years.

UPDATE: Stormland-TV is speculating that Big T is going to try to have a petition drive to change our form of government. Maybe. Doesn’t really matter, she should have the right to have any petition drive she wants to. I do know that her and I have talked for years about changing Project TRIM and having the city trim their own trees in the boulevard (if the citizen is unable to). With the Ash Bore crisis coming upon us, right now would be the time to get the city to take care of those trees. I do know, like snow gates, it may be hard for Theresa to get that past the council, even though Brekke does support it. We will see. Stehly hasn’t shared with me what her intentions are, but it would be interesting to watch a sitting city councilor lead a petition drive to change our form of government. Things could get very, very, very ugly.

Greg Neitzert Open Government Open Meetings SF City Council Sioux Falls

Sioux Falls City Councilor Neitzert believes we should ‘control’ salary data information

l3wis 10Comments

Well, I will give Greg credit on one thing, before he made the above statement, he admitted he would probably be criticized for it. Well, here comes your criticism.

During the informational meeting, Neitzert said that the recent compensation study done by the HR department should not have been released to the public ahead of time (before HR could explain it in an informational). Ironically, they haven’t released the full report (about 200 pages). Which IMO makes the presentation even more confusing, as several councilors pointed out. There wasn’t a breakdown of different departments (except that our Police and especially Fire Department are compensated well above other cities our size) and that Directors and Management (non-union) employees were left out of the study (which also confused some councilors). First off, that is because this study is for collective bargaining with the unions, which is the excuse HR Director Bill Da’Toole used for not releasing the full report to the public yet (if you give it to the public and unions at the same time what is the harm?) Secondly, management and director pay is pretty much determined by the mayor, and some goofy formula the HR department comes up with, which in turn makes it really up to the Mayor. That is how Former Mayor Coors Light & Olives was able to give corporate/executive like raises to his directors including ‘spiking’ the Finance Director’s pay by $16K before his retirement. I agree with councilor Stehly, city managers and directors are well compensated in our city compared to other cities.

But back to ‘controlling’ the salary data. First off, as I have had to remind our prestigious city council and past mayor, we own the government, the citizen taxpayer. We pay the wages of city employees for services they provide to US. It’s not the other way around. Talking about city employees salaries in a general sense when it comes to job description and not by name isn’t some top secret affair, especially after we paid $65K for the report. Besides, city employee’s salaries are listed HERE on the city website BY NAME (DOC: 2018-Wages), these are also not a top secret, because once again, we pay those wages.

The HR department should have just released the FULL report yesterday before the presentation, not only to the council, but to the unions, the public and the media, all at the same time. There really isn’t any excuse to ‘control’ salary data, it’s not like this is a Events Center siding report.

SF City Council Sioux Falls

Who was holding SIRE hostage for the past 5 years?

l3wis 4Comments

SIRE is the software agenda management program the city council uses to manage it’s meetings documents and videos. Some of us from the public have long argued it hasn’t worked properly, in fact in this presentation they will make today at the informational (DOC: SIRE-ONBASE) they admit that it really hasn’t been upgraded in 5 years and really didn’t work that well before that. In fact the last person who tried to get it working properly was terminated.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oK_2kHME8j8

We kept asking the same question? Why? As you see from the figures, it really doesn’t cost that much more to upgrade the software. So why was there a delay? And why now with a new mayor and council they are finally upgrading the system?

See, that’s the stickler here. While the city council has supposed control of their staff, and I know for a fact several past and present councilors have asked the software gets upgraded, somehow the council got trumped by the mayor’s central services department.

While some would say that our council wasn’t held hostage the past 8 years by a power hungry mayor, I beg to differ. His uncontrollable desire to control information is why the IT department virtually ignored the problems with SIRE.

Hopefully the council and new mayor won’t just stop at upgrading SIRE but fixing the entire website. Let’s move ‘Fast & Furious’ on this on to!

Open Government Open Meetings SF City Council Sioux Falls

So Far, Sioux Falls City Council falls short on transparency promises from the campaign

l3wis 5Comments

I can’t speak for TenHaken and his office yet. We haven’t heard anything from 9th and Dakota, of course there has only been one official meeting, and tomorrow’s city council meeting seems to be some hold overs from the former administration.

Sometimes hearing NOTHING is a good thing, sometimes it is not.

But when it comes to the city council it seems business as usual. The city council, who has complained about the former mayor’s transparency hasn’t opened their books up either. The city council posted their informational meeting agenda on Friday and as of noon today there is still no supporting documents on what those presentations will be.

I’m not sure who is responsible for the agenda of the informational but my guess would be the Clerk’s office and council’s operations employees. Of course it wouldn’t be entirely their fault either, they take their marching orders from the city council.

There is also nothing top secret about the three presentations, there would be no harm in posting the supporting documents ahead of time.

Transparency was the #1 issue in the last municipal election, but was our city government listening?

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