South DaCola

Editorial Cartoonist from South Dakota

Sioux Falls

Employment Mayor TenHaken Sioux Falls

Does the City of Sioux Falls really have a full-time employment shortage?

l3wis 11Comments

When you factor in the city having well over 1,000 employees, it is hard to fathom that they have a retention and worker shortage problem. I clicked on this web ad today and out of 27 positions, only 8 are full-time and the remainder 19 are part-time.

My guess is if you are only looking to hire 8 full-time people when you have over 1,000 current employees, you are sitting pretty good as an organization. Ironically, besides more officers, that we supposedly need, and a mechanic most of the other positions are not really applicable to the service of the public when it comes to infrastructure and public safety (really the only main expenditures a city should have). Does the finance department really need another accountant (as of 2021 they had 6 in the finance department) or a Librarian (they have 9 with 40+ Librarian associates) I will agree though hiring a full-time counselor is a good idea since the current private contractor we are using has a counselor director that is a Federally convicted criminal.

I’ll say it again, the retention bonus had nothing to do with retention, it had to do with an election and a mayor who has done almost absolutely nothing for 4 years for either the citizens or the city employees and is trying to play catchup 30 days before an election.

Open Government Open Meetings Sioux Falls

Sioux Falls isn’t the only one struggling with Public Input issues

l3wis 9Comments

It seems the war on open government is being fought across the state;

Two seemingly harmless words added to a state open meetings law in 2019 have sparked a debate over the rights of citizens to publicly comment at official government meetings in South Dakota.
Those words, “regularly scheduled” were added in front of “official meetings,” launching a legal tug-of-war between public officials and advocates of community input. Some government bodies have used the language as a legal loophole in which they have denied the public the right to speak at some official meetings.

This is often the game played with these kinds of complaints. Recently a Sioux Falls citizen filed a complaint with the Minnehaha State’s Attorney about open meeting violations when Mayor TenHaken was chair of a city council meeting in which he didn’t call public input on two pulled consent agenda items. It was pretty obvious that he didn’t call the public input on purpose because it concerned a bar that was in the middle of a pending sale and if their liquor license renewal would have been denied it would have affected that sale. I cannot connect those dots yet, but once we find out the new owners, it will look a little more clear. So what happened in that case? While MSA Dan Haggar admitted that city ordinance was probably violated, he said he has no authority to do anything so he sent it to the AG’s office. The AG’s office said this was a city matter and that the complainant had to take it up with the Sioux Falls Ethics Board (you know the place where complaints go to die). She also could have hired an attorney and took it to court. I have encouraged they at least file an ethics complaint to get it on record before they throw it out (this is probably one of the most cowardly boards we have in city government). Like the two examples in the SD News Watch story, you can see the run around you get when you challenge public input and how to remedy it. There is no remedy.

I have told the city council on many occasions that NO local government in South Dakota has ever gotten in trouble for being too open.

Elections Mayor TenHaken Sioux Falls Vernon Brown

Don’t use kids as political props

l3wis 6Comments

As I said in 2010 when council candidate Vernon Brown did it;

I do not respect any politician that uses their children as political props, in fact, I consider it desperate. 

Well, at least Vern was using his own daughter. In TenHaken’s (small) defense, he was at a public school helping kids make dog treats (so he could feed his campaign goons?), nothing wrong with that . . . but to post it to your FB page where you are posting campaign endorsements? Really? I also question if the parents of these kids are aware of this (I blocked out their faces).

What I find so ironic about this is that one of Paul’s campaign goons was just bitching on his blog a few days ago about an altered headshot of a candidate? Really? What about this?

If I were the parents of these two young girls, I would demand Paul takes these photos off his FB page and remind him that kids are NOT political props.

*I am aware that Paul’s opponent, Islam, also uses her kids as props too. Nothing wrong with getting your kids involved with the political process, I encourage it, but leave them out of the promotion and advertising. It’s not cute, it’s just tacky.

Crime SFPD Sioux Falls

Sioux Falls Crime rate to Population growth doesn’t add up in other cities

l3wis 3Comments
Is using taxpayer resources again to campaign for re-election a crime?

Stormland TV actually did an interesting story comparing the crime rates of Sioux Falls to Lincoln, NE and Overland Park, KS.

While our mayor and police chief (and mayors and police chiefs before them) have been saying our crime rate grows with population, there is a different story in other towns, also factor in Lincoln has about 100K more people and they have around half the incidents that we do.

Why is that? Well I attribute it to having a community conversation when hiring a police chief instead of a fashion competition.

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