SF City Council

Mike Cooper’s Hissy-Fit

l3wis February 11, 2009 2Comments

Follow this diagram or suffer the consequences of Sioux Falls code enforcement.

Mike Cooper from the City of SF responds to the code enforcement audit: audit-response

Highlights of his rant;

1. Audit was overstepping and not within city ordinance (how dare we expect our audit committee do their job and be critical of the GREAT Mike Cooper)

2. Opposes a citizen review committee of code enforcement (because golly - he has other protections in place to ensure everything is running in tip-top shape)

3. Complains the flowchart in the audit report has the appearance that code enforcement is ‘overly bureaucratic’ (Hey, Mikey, because it is!!!!!)

4. And finally he defends the fact that the process is NOT bureaucratic and tedious, than says the final audit report should be struck of any recommendations that would make code enforcement less bureaucratic and tedious, by telling them they need to follow bureaucratic ordinances (I think I had a heart murmur in the middle of typing that sentence.)

Enjoy – it’s red tape and bureaucratic pissing matches at its best!

Wanna know what city employees make? Get out a calculator and magnifying glass

l3wis February 7, 2009 0Comments

Hopefully you found the above decoder in your Argus ‘Cracker Jack Box’ Leader in yesterday’s issue.

Did you hear? The city released the salaries of all the city employees in Friday’s newspaper. Didn’t see it? Yeah, well it was buried in 6-point type in the real estate section of the newspaper. In an almost impossible to read columns something the city labeled as ‘City business’ they didn’t print the yearly salary, but instead gave you a handy formula to use when taking their bi-weekly amount times 26. Not only is this very poor open government and an obvious distraction to get people not to read it, it also shoots a hole in the Argus Leader’s ironic argument about printing public notices in a newspaper. If this were online, it could easily be downloaded whenever, you could also copy and paste it into an Excel spreadsheet and do a quick calculation of the salaries. I know the Argus is not responsible for the layout, they have to do what their client instructs them to, but they could have put it in a more visible section of the newspaper, especially since they charge the City $75,000 a year for the service. The rumor is that Munson’s office fought tooth and nail to get it printed this way? Why? Well several city employees got significant raises. Do I think that city employees are overpaid? No way, quite the contrary, I think most are underpaid, just like the rest of us in this city, but I also think that several administrators (Cough, Jodi, cough, cough) are overpaid. They conveniently mixed their salaries in with the maintenance men and parks workers in these columns.

DOWNLOAD PDF’S OF THE SALARIES HERE: untitled-1, untitled-2

This is normal par for course with Munson; don’t let the citizens know how much money he is spending (wasting). Keep it up Dave – we are watching and taking notes.

UPDATE: The Argus Leader Editorial Board woke up Sunday morning from a very deep sleep:

City officials, however, aren’t planning to institute any layoffs. As a matter of fact, they’re poised to proceed with adding 25 positions that already had been budgeted.

With so much economic uncertainty, though, it’s time to reassess whether Sioux Falls can afford to expand government right now.

Duh?!