I stand corrected! I had a long post written last night about how On Demand doesn’t appear to go to the airport, but it does;
The airport, for example, wasn’t an option. I was instead prompted to take a bus and then a 50-minute walk.
As it was explained to me by a reporter, the app just gives you options and the first option was to take a fixed route or walk.
Uh, okay.
But my bigger concern is the data mining;
Via has its own app that you have to download, and there are quite a few steps to get it all set up,
While data can make the service much better, your personal information like credit card and tracking info should be scrubbed every 24-48 hours. I want to use the service, but not sure I can trust a 3rd party contractor partnering up with another 3rd party software provider (and who knows what other financial services they are partnering with?)
All this Bloomberg Institute of data mining is getting old.
Yes, in a town where most people are middle to lower income some rich folks in town want their own airstrip next to their homes. The two petitioners are involved with a large construction company and the ethanol industry. The developer helping with the project is former City Councilor and current State Legislator, Greg Jamison.
While the proposal was a tie/stalemate with Minnehaha County voting for it and the City Planning Commission voting against, that means it goes to the Minnehaha CC and Sioux Falls city council for joint meeting approval on March 23.
A city official told me today that it may not make that date because the FAA is rumored to have already put a kabosh on it. We will see.
As I posted about in 2017, the airport is building a fiscally responsible structure that maximized their parking needs at a fair price. But here is the real kick in the shorts;
But that’s not a long-term solution, so the Sioux Falls Airport Authority, the governmental entity that oversees the airport, has been saving for a permanent fix.
Did you catch that word ‘SAVING’. Maybe our city leaders could learn something about saving for projects, or at least completing them as planned. Not possible, that takes GUTS.
Besides the fact that Delta has stopped their non-stop flight to Atlanta from Sioux Falls, now Allegiant pilots may strike;
Pilots at Allegiant Air are prepared to strike if the airline doesn’t come to an agreement with them.
The dispute revolves around a scheduling system, which the pilots say has negatively impacted their lives and their families.
Also add that the airlines pay very low wages to ground crew and we could see many issues at the airport if they don’t start diversifying options for consumers. I have often wondered why it is so difficult for the state’s largest city to have good, reliable air service.
This was from a March 24, 2017 presentation Dan Letellier did at Democratic Forum (FF: 26:00 in the below video).
Notice they are getting 1,100 parking stalls for about $20-22,000 per stall. The Downtown parking ramp is proposing 525 stalls (over a 100 will be leased privately and not for public use) for $40,500 per stall.
Now if the DT ramp’s cost was even just a little bit more, I wouldn’t balk, but the proposed DT ramp is TWICE as much per stall than the airport.
As I have said, industry standard for building parking ramps is about $25,000 per stall. When this high cost for the stalls was brought up to the Community Development manager Daren Ketchum yesterday, he blew it off and said that he wasn’t concerned about the ‘stall’ cost. WHAT!?
It is pretty common in the parking ramp construction business to price parking ramps per stall. That’s just how it is done. Secondly the airport ramp is a very fair comparison because both ramps are being built on land that is already owned by the builder and the airport authority will be paying down the bonds using user fees. It is apples to apples.
Where this deal gets even more curious is that the developer of the hotel will be paying a one-time 80 year lease to the city of $1 million. This comes to about $1,042 per month for a 120 room, 13 story hotel. You can’t get a decent downtown loft for $1,000 a month.
So why so much? Well let’s start with the obvious. This is a taxpayer subsidized welfare to a developer, and mind you, a developer who was involved with the Copper Lounge collapse, which OSHA is still pending their investigation.
So why an extra $10 million to build this parking ramp compared to the airport ramp? Besides the obvious welfare, I speculate, it is because the ramp is on the bottom of the structure and will have to be extra reinforced to support the PRIVATE hotel construction. In other words we are subsidizing the hotel construction by $10 million.
I support downtown growth and a parking ramp. I do NOT support getting hosed by a private developer. The city needs to build this ramp for $10 million or build a ramp twice the size at a different location.
l3wis 
