Sioux Falls

I skimmed Bowlcut’s book today

I have been meaning to read our past mayor’s book, but haven’t had the opportunity. But today I decided to do some skimming thru it at the local bookshop. What I found interesting is that the chapters are extremely short (5-6 pages) double spaced in about 12 PT type. I literally read two chapters in about four minutes.

I went thru those two chapters today because they looked interesting and wanted to share a couple of tidbits I jotted down. First, he touches on getting his 50+1. Something I called when he was mayor ‘Winning at all costs – F’k everyone else’ He didn’t put it that way 🙂

CHAPTER: If you want everyone to like you, public service is not for you

In government, if you truly want to get things done, quit trying to please everybody. Stop singing “Kumbaya” and cease seeking everyone’s blessing before moving on. Get the minimum votes required, take your hits from those that disagree, execute a plan, and move on. You are not going to accomplish anything if you strive for perfection and appeasement. Make only one promise to those you serve: “I guarantee you, there will be times when we will have to agree to disagree.”

Strive for perfection?! LOL! It was no secret he had a ‘by the skin of his teeth’ mentality.

But he also feels the need to address the ‘Fake News’. I guess I really never thought of him as a Trumpist, but in a lot of ways he is. I saw this when he left the Democratic party (surprised they didn’t have a party).

CHAPTER: Don’ forget about earned media

My administration spent countless hours and taxpayer dollars dealing with made-up nonsense from a few that just wanted to criticize, stir up rumor, create falsehoods, or had nothing better to do. The brick-and-mortar news outlets now have fewer staff to actually discover the truth versus the fake or biased news. It is so hard for the news outlets, along with public servants, to correct the untrue blog post, inappropriate Facebook rant, or salacious Twitter bomb.

The only person making up ‘nonsense’ was you. And the SD Supreme Court agreed.

I will try to read the whole book eventually, bucket by my side.

Nancy Halverson at Dem Forum for Levitt at the Falls

I learned a lot today about the Levitt that I wasn’t aware of. Did you know;

• Levitt (Halverson) must raise approximately $605K a year locally to stay afloat.

• There will be no more Sunday concerts (it was too hot for them) they may do the family concerts on Friday mornings.

• At the Kory & the Fireflies concert the SFPD used it as a training exercise for a possible active shooter. There was a sharp shooter on top of the Lloyd building during the concert.

• JJ’s sold $41K in alcohol at the concerts. I want to applaud JJ’s, they did an excellent and professional job. I still think we should be able to bring our own 6-Pack.

• Approimately 58K attended the concerts this season.

• The city is planning on prepping the land North of Levitt for event space that will be tied into the Sioux Steel Development.

• Sanford wanted to be the leading major sponsor and Halverson had to explain to them that isn’t Levitt policy. In other words, Sanford wanted to pay more for corporate sponsorship then anyone else (and wanted more recognition of course). Halverson told them that ‘All corporate/major sponsors are treated the same and pay the same’. I thought that was refreshing.

It ended with Q & A, and I told Halverson she ‘Knocked it out of the park!’ and I encouraged everyone to go. I added, ‘Even if you don’t like the band playing, guess what, you can leave, you are NOT out of anything!’

Sioux Falls City Council Agenda, Sep 24, 2019

As usual, the city council rarely has a regular meeting the last week of the month. Next week is no different, but there still is a brief informational.

City Council Informational Meeting • 4 PM

Presentations on UDC Meeting, CVB-Bid Board Meeting and the finance department will be giving the August Monthly report.

It was funny, I saw four directors having a ‘patio’ meeting at the Blarney last night at 5 PM. It was Health Director Franken, Finance Director Pritchett, HR Director Bill O’Toole and a fourth one I couldn’t identify (But it looked like Public Works Director Cotter). I wonder if they were celebrating the $545 million dollar boondoggle of a budget? I was hoping they were plotting on how to tank PTH. One can only dream.

Could we see a lot more Jesus snowplows this winter?

A SouthDaCola foot soldier tipped me off recently that they saw several snowplow blades parked in different Church parking lots throughout the city. Normally the blades are painted by public school kids and some private Christian schools. Not sure if the blades are parked at the churches for this reason, but it will be interesting to see how many Christian themed snowplows we see this year.

I wonder if mayor Paul will ask volunteers to plow the streets this winter?

Enough of the FB Games (Guest Post-Bruce Danielson)

First of all, I, Bruce Danielson, do not belong to the website Facebook, so don’t go looking for me there because I do not partake in their invasive intrusion in privacy.

Second, don’t send me Facebook links because I cannot click on them to see what you are excited about.

Third, don’t expect me to go to Facebook if the world is coming to an end, because it is not the place I will be able to see it.

If you, like me, do not live in the Facebook or do not live in the pretend world of social media, the city of Sioux Falls Facebook page copy attached here, is a usual screen “non-friends” will get. It begs the question, if you do not let Facebook own your life, you will not be allowed to survive?

Our town recently spent $67,000 updating the city information system some call a website. The city spends millions of dollars per year on emergency services including items referred to as police, fire and ems. Our town also has a board that meets monthly to discuss something called emergency management and another board called REMSA to preparing for needed ambulances to actually show up where needed when called. It does not take much to remember the phantom 980 ambulances sent to defraud the taxpayers and insurance providers to know how far our administrations will go to hide the truth of competence.

Meanwhile back to story, many of these expensive services failed to perform on Tuesday night September 10, 2019.

What did the city “leaders” do? Blame the citizens for not being prepared to meet their version of God.

Our town of Sioux Falls experienced three tornados that night. Thankfully no one was seriously injured or killed. We again were lucky. I was up working on a project late that night when my house began to shake and the roof was pounded by the rain. Like I said, most of us were lucky. Certain parts of town were not so lucky and were put in more danger by our administrations lack of planning and miserable lack of candor in admitting their screwups.

Our Sioux Falls city government seems to think if they use their millennial social media accounts to announce danger to their “friends” or “followers” their special groups will be fine. To hell with the rest of the heathens seems to be their governing creed.

The administration seems to not believe in disaster planning, sirens or coordinated messaging. The administration leadership and members of the RS5 believe the public should be silenced like the emergency sirens were that Tuesday night.

Spooky Facebook social media broadcasts to only their “friends” do not make the cut in all homes during an emergency, but sirens have in the past and still do. The monthly first Friday at 11:00am siren tests are heard inside most houses and businesses with closed windows. The sirens have a specially designed waving siren sound was designed to play in all weather over most sound pitches. To say the sirens would not have made a difference is a lie or a far-fetched excuse with no merit.

If this town actually did regional emergency planning, like done in the region 30 years ago, the administration might have found out there are eight (8) switches to flip to activate the emergency sirens instead of a single main control. The lack of planning also shows in their plan to destroy our emergency shelter built in 1962. The design of the Arena was to allow it survive with thousands of people inside before and after a tornadic type event. During the recent Task Force discussions the members were frustrated by how much it would cost to tear it down because it was built to emergency management standards. So now we are going to tear it down because it is not pretty enough for our current delicate tastes.

Remember the use of the Fargo dome to fill sandbags in freezing weather when no place else could do it? This is was emergency planning in protecting thousands of people and property. Fargo did it right, why can’t we?

Remember the Sioux City disaster planning that made survival possible after the United flight 232 crash? It was actual emergency exercises and planning that brought in the thousands of people necessary to help the survivors. Sioux City did it right, why can’t we? Oh yea, we play Facebook games on our phones.

According to our town’s “leaders” Facebook social media accounts are needed to survive disasters. We really have a bunch of loonies running our town’s administration. No planning, just city “leadership” playing Facebook games with their phones. FACEBOOK SHOULD NEVER BE USED AS THE PRIMARY METHOD OF INFORMING THE CITIZENS OF ANYTHING! Is this clear enough?

Administration officials are blaming others for their lack of information delivered to the people. An information vacuum is caused by lack of planning. The administrations poor messaging shows they do not want to be leaders. I, with many others, ask them to get to work, quit blaming others for their screwups, quit replaying the election of 2018, quit using our poor lives to play 2020 election games and start hiring people with experience. If you can’t figure out how to lead, just get out of the way, hide in your offices or just help us all out by resigning.

Editor’s Note: This all reminds me of a docu-movie I watched about the campaign that secured the Brexit disaster. The campaign that won was spreading false information and half-truths all over FB. In fact there are serious investigations going on to this day of their campaign practices. Folks, FB is NOT the place to go to get official information about ANYTHING. Often when I read a story on FB that looks plausible, I search other sites to see if it is true.