To my surprise, but something I have been concerned about, at the beginning of the city council meeting tonight, Brekke put on the record her objection to a section of how public input is conducted.
Remember when the city council moved public input to the back of the meeting recently (a 4-5 vote with tie-breaker from person of the year Mayor TenHaken) they specifically said that members of the public could not talk about decisions that were made final by the council during the meeting.
This is a clear violation of citizens 1st Amendment rights, as Brekke pointed out in her objection it concerns prior restraint;
Definition
In First Amendment law, prior restraint is government action that prohibits speech or other expression before the speech happens.
OverviewÂ
Prior restraint typically happens in a few ways. It may be a statute or regulation that requires a speaker to acquire a permit or license before speaking. Prior restraint can also be a judicial injunction that prohibits certain speech. There is a third way–discussed below–in which the government outright prohibits a certain type of speech. Courts typically disfavor prior restraint and often find it to be unconstitutional.
Basically Brekke points out that since decisions were already made during the meeting, voted on and final, the public has a right to address them and the government (city council or mayor) cannot limit them.
Even though Brekke’s opinion is NOT alone (there are many Supreme Court rulings about this) City Attorney Kooistra vehemently opposed her and basically told her she was wrong. It surprised me, actually astonished me how little the city attorney knows about 1st Amendment rights. From the mayor’s performance during the objection, it is clear he has no clue what 1st Amendment rights are, that has been blatantly obvious for a long time, but for an attorney with a law degree that has practiced in the military and in the private sector I would think he would be aware where the Supreme Court stands on this issue.
If Mr. Kooistra really wants to try out his Constitutional chops on this one, I would love to watch him get pummeled by a free speech attorney when someone from the public challenges this when the chair tries to shut them down for this ludicrous and unconstitutional rule violation. He may just get his day in the spotlight. Well, Mr. Kooistra, you know what Andy Warhol once said, “In the future, everyone will be world-famous for 15 minutes.” Good luck.
Happy New Year! Before we get into the agenda I wanted to alert readers that there are a couple of issues I am working on that the TenHaken administration is ‘trying’ to keep away from public view, I will keep you updated once I get more information.
Sub Item #1, Planning and Housing, Offer to Purchase Real Estate; Gaukler Enterprises, Inc. – Closing costs, $226K. Some city hall moles told me that this is one to watch. I guess the city is purchasing this land for a supposed future Homeless Veteran’s shelter. Now I’m not sure if we are just buying the land and gifting it to the VA to build and maintain the shelter or if the city is planning on paying for the structure and maintaining it. Would have been nice to get an informational on this from the Planning/Housing department, oh I forgot, this administration HATES transparency.
Sub Item #13, another $19k towards the kitchen remodel at the Central Fire Station. With all the money being spent on this kitchen they may be able to make it into a new soup kitchen downtown.
Sub Items #20 Agreement to Provide Funding to assist LifeScape in providing transportation for their clients, $201k & #29, Provide partial funding to assist Dakotabilities in providing transportation for their clients, $400k+. It often surprises me when the city whines about how much public transit is draining the tax rolls than turns around and spends over $600K to assist private non-profits. While I do think the city should provide these rides there should be reimbursement through the Federal government. If there is, that needs to be explained to taxpayers.
Sub Item #21, Rail Yard Development – BNSF Occupancy Permit; Agreement for temporary occupancy, $4,781. After giving millions away for land that wasn’t worth more than a couple of million to this entity (and that Federal taxpayers probably already owned) BNSF has the nerve to charge us a rental fee for using some of their supposed land. Unbelievable. Who was the rocket scientist with the city that negotiated this deal?
Sub Item #33, Provide operation services for the downtown SculptureWalk Program, $32,500. While I support funding to SW, I’m wondering what they spent last year’s supplement on? As you may or may not know is SW was suspended and no new sculptures (or very few) were brought in. Maybe with the pandemic the city should forgo this supplement this year.
Sub Item #34, City Website Consulting Services, Consultant will perform all work to City Website including production of all materials, products and modifications. RoundedCube, $1,700 per month. I’m curious why we need to hire a company that is based in St. Louis, MO to do this, especially when there are many very capable companies in Sioux Falls. The bigger question is why isn’t the city’s own IT department maintaining the site? I also think the city website is a POS and has been for a long time. It’s a navigation hell hole and getting data is a crap shoot. If I were the mayor tomorrow, I would revamp the site and I would get it done in 90 days. Ironically when I looked up RoundedCube yesterday the website was working, but it seems the company we hired to maintain our website can’t maintain their own site, this was the message I got today when I went there;
Items #33-34, The Bonus Round Bar on Cliff & Downtown will be putting in Video Lottery terminals. I guess while the Cliff location will mostly be a VL casino the DT location will still keep all the other pinball machines and games with the VL terminals. While I am not a fan of telephone booth casinos, at least I will be able to walk a block again to get a tasty micro-brew, I’ll just have to wear ear plugs 🙂
Item #38, the use of the unobligated fund balance of $100,000 for the 2021 health budget is authorized to fund a public health education campaign to encourage preventative measures to mitigate the spread of COVID-19. While we continue to throw money at our Covid Tourism campaign we are counter reacting to it by throwing more money on how to keep yourself safe from contracting Covid. Oh the pathetic irony.
Item #43, 2nd Reading, AN ORDINANCE OF THE CITY OF SIOUX FALLS, SD, REZONING PORTION OF PROPERTY LOCATED AT SOUTHWEST OF W. 22ND ST. AND S. ELLIS RD. FROM THE O OFFICE DISTRICT TO THE LW LIVE/WORK DISTRICT, NO. 13281 2020, AND AMENDING THE OFFICIAL ZONING MAP OF THE CITY OF SIOUX FALLS. It will be interesting to see how many residents show up to debate this move Tuesday night.
Item #46, 1st Reading, AN ORDINANCE OF THE CITY OF SIOUX FALLS, SD, APPROVING TERMINATION OF THE RAILROAD SWITCH TRACK EASEMENT. I’ve read the supporting documents of this ordinance and it is about as clear as mud. It involves the downtown properties owned by Gourley and Sioux Steel. It seems like it has something to do with a rail track that isn’t used anymore.
Item #50, A RESOLUTION REMOVING UNCOLLECTIBLE, DELINQUENT ACCOUNTS FROM THE RECORDS. If you look at the supporting documents you will see 2 of the accounts were considered ‘confidential’. I’m not even sure if that is even legal. If the city, a public entity funded by taxpayers is writing off debt they need to make it public. The county commission does this every week. I’m still not sure if anyone competent is running the city attorney’s office. I still think my idea of terminating all the city attorneys and just hiring a para legal and a purchasing agent to run the department may be the best way to go.
Item #2C, we have another situation where we are changing a office zoned area to residential. Ironically the place is surrounded by office zoning. I think we are going to see a lot of this since the pandemic.
What do you get when a hospital lawyer, an ad agency exec, a banker, a developer, an angel fund investor and a guy who does business out of a UPS Store PO Box join forces? One heck of a political action committee. (PAC)
We all knew that there would be more money funneled into Jensen’s campaign chest after the last finance report before the election. He received an additional $13K coming from the Buffalo PAC. Curiously he didn’t spend it all, in fact he only spent about $3K on the campaign in it’s waning days (Full report). Curiously he spent around $8,500 on legal fees ($1,000 donated). I’m assuming that was for the recount. What I find ironic is that with all the money and power swirling around the SD GOP who helped get Alex elected that not one single lawyer took him on pro-bono for the recount. Stehly’s (a Republican) attorney, the Chair of the SD Democratic Party, Randy Seiler offered his services for free to Theresa. So basically the donors to the Buffalo PAC and ultimately Jensen funneled money to a Republican Law Firm (Redstone). I know, mind boggling.
Curiously the PAC is registered to a Sioux Falls residential address, a home owned by a SF hospital attorney (not the green one) and an ad agency executive (the big one in town). Both of them also have a connection (still trying to figure out) to a Sioux Falls city director that TenHaken appointed. Strangely they were only used as conduit because none of them donated to the PAC.
So who did? Well the usual suspects, with two of them pouring thousands of dollars towards Alex through various PACs, family members and individual donations. I’m surprised they didn’t find a way to get dead relatives to give since it is against the law now to use your toddler children.
BUFFALO PAC DONORS:
Matthew Paulson – $5,000.00 (Jensen’s campaign treasurer and suspected manager)
Dana Dykhouse – $5,000.00
Crescent Venture Capital (Kevin Tupy ) – $2,000.00
Daniel Costello – $1,000.00
Yes, I know, not surprising since most of these characters already had been throwing money at Jensen’s campaign. I wonder if they knew he gave half of their donation to a law firm?
Hopefully we will have Covid under control or at least manageable early summer. I have a feeling once the vaccine is available to the general public we will turn the corner very quickly. I also look forward to hopefully having a full season of The Levitt concert series. Heck even a half-season would be fine with me.
But my biggest concern in the city is the continuing decline of transparency in government. This is what happens when you put partisan hack authoritarian fascists in charge of local NON-PARTISAN government. Power goes straight to their heads and the way to control that power is thru secrecy. I also think these very un-democratic measures by our local government and state government may quell a bit when the orange menace in Washington is finally shown the door. The next 30 days is going to be the scariest and most embarrassing Trump circus we have ever seen.
I could certainly go on a very long rant about Mayor TenHaken’s lack of leadership and absence of intelligent decisions but where I really get worked up is his deep hatred for transparency. I really think his hatred comes from his years of being a partisan hack in the political advertising world. Keeping strategies from your opponent is essential to beating them. Unfortunately, Paul has carried that philosophy over to actually serving in office. He is also very keen on trying to punish his political enemies and it shows in his extreme paranoia he uses to justify his secrecy. I know he won’t make these changes on his own, so we may need to force his hand on a couple of these things in 2021;
• Hold weekly mayoral press conferences. This could be something as simple as 15 minutes of presentation and 15 minutes of questions from the press, at NOON on Tuesdays, live stream on YouTube and FB and replay in YouTube. This could be an essential step towards transparency. It would also require the mayor to educate himself with what is really going on in the city.
• Settle the Bunker Ramp lawsuit. This fiasco has been going on for far too long, this needs to be mopped up so we can try to promote a new development on the site. The bunker ramp is a prime example of the ultimate failure of local government on so many levels. City employees, dubious developers, two mayors and around 10 city councilors royally screwed us on this deal. I would really like to see a formal apology sometime in 2021 from those involved in this fraud against taxpayers. But like most authoritarians who love secrets, no one will ever come clean on this. The denial so pathetic I have often said everyone involved should either resign or be fired.
• Revoke Sioux Steel’s TIF. We still have no idea where this project is going, and since it has already been delayed for a year, it is time to revoke the original TIF. If they still do the project, it is obvious it will change from the original intentions, which means they must apply for a new, down scaled TIF, or better yet, NO TIF at all. This is another example of the highly secretive planning department that works quietly behind the scenes with developers to ‘recommend approval’ (ironically, something else that needs to be revoked in 2021 also).
• Overhaul the TIF program. As I have suggested for over a decade, the TIF program should be moved into the community development office and short term property tax rebates should be given to individual home owners and small rental properties for cleaning up properties in Central and Proper Sioux Falls. I actually believe cleaning up the core of our city (private properties, sidewalks, streets, curb and gutter, street lights, etc.) would have an enormous impact on the local economy. In fact studies done across the nation have shown that cleaning up cities from the inside out and creating strong density in the core boosts the local economy. Instead of dumping millions into new infrastructure in cornfields in Lincoln county we need to concentrate on cleaning up our core.
• Eliminate SIRE for good. This POS City Council online agenda reference service has been broken for as long as I can remember. If the software was an employee it would have been fired 15 years ago. The city continues to dump money into this joke of a system, and with all the technological advances you would think the city would have replaced it by now. But see, the city likes it this way, it gives them an excuse for hiding agenda items from us. The city’s legal department has also been titling agenda items with no direct references to what the agenda item is about. This is also an attack on open government and needs to end.
• City Council Ethics rules overhaul. There are no clear ethics rules. Every time the council gets tried for a possible violation, they slither out of it by claiming it is too vague or broad. And even if there is proof a councilor or mayor violated ethics, as did Neitzert and TenHaken, the majority of the council dismisses the charges. The ethics board isn’t much better, often claiming ‘law’ permits councilors to violate ethics, though they have nothing to do with each other. I also have the right to say ‘F’ck’ a thousand times a day in public, but ethically know that is probably not such a good idea.
• Public input needs to be moved to the beginning of the meetings again. Of course we will probably have to wait until the next municipal election in 2 years to overturn this moronic and authoritarian move, but in the meantime we plan to have a little fun with the move and some possible 1st Amendment ‘challenges’.
• A major overhaul of the Home Rule Charter. This was attempted with ‘Triple Check the Charter’ but the Rat Finks prevailed. Next time around we will take on a new approach and when the smoke clears, they will wish the last attempt passed because the 2nd attempt isn’t going to be pretty and if it passes, there won’t be a lot of people standing.
We need to return transparency to City Hall in 2021 and not only get it back, but make it more open than it has ever been and put the changes permanently in place. Open government not only saves taxpayers money but makes government more efficient. Also, a well informed public functions better and gets more involved with important decisions in our community.
Here’s hoping for a better 2021, one with more information and less viruses and orange people.
What has often baffled me about Mayor TenHaken being this supposed tech geek is that he hasn’t embraced the simplest of technologies, that are ironically free. Cities across the nation have been using the FREE service of YouTube to stream their meetings (and keep a FREE record of them) for a long time. The South Dakota cities of Rapid City and Mitchell use the service. Locally the Minnehaha County Commission and the Sioux Falls School Board use it. Even the City of Sioux Falls has it’s own channel but only posts a handful of CityLink propaganda shows and a few press conferences preferring to stream only on Facebook (which you have to subscribe to).
Besides the fact that there is NO subscription required to watch the meetings on YouTube and the service is essentially FREE to the city and taxpayers, it helps with access and transparency. Also, increasingly, the service the city uses to stream official city council meetings, SIRE, is failing us, it has for over a decade and it is getting worse and worse. Last week only half of the informational was streamed live in SIRE and there was another meeting where only audio was working (I think it was the planning meeting).
Is YouTube perfect? No. But it has a good track record and seems to work just fine for thousands of other local governments across the country.
I told someone that the city has probably chosen to NOT use YouTube streaming because they can’t waste money on it and it wasn’t one of their new fangled ideas. In fact the former mayor had the media department purge hundreds of YouTube videos on their site before he left office. To this day we don’t know why.
But the real reason this mayor and his administration refuse to do this is because THEY HATE TRANSPARENCY AND OPEN GOVERNMENT.
Bottling up all that Hate Paul isn’t good for you . . . or us.
l3wis 
