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SF City Council Sioux Falls

Sioux Falls City Council Agenda, Feb 19, 2019

l3wis 1Comments

Informational Meeting, 4 PM

Updates on Midco Aquatic Center and Falls Park Safety Report. These should be interesting presentations, NO docs provided at this time.

Land Use Committee Meeting, 4:30 PM (after informational)

Amendments to Shape Places. I was also unaware that there would be changes.

Regular Council Meeting, 7 PM

Item #15, Notice of hearings, Transferring wine license to Stensland from former Overlook Café management. This is strange considering I don’t remember the city council approving the new management contract with Stensland yet. Maybe I missed it. Of course this is just a hearing, but since they were the only one to bid on the new management, maybe they just assume they have it in the bag?

Item #23, I guess Fleet Farm is going to have a beer and wine department. Weird.

Item #30, 2nd Reading, changing council races back to plurality. I hate to say it, but I think this is going to fail. I think after Stehly, Starr and Brekke voted against the street vacation, the other 5 councilors are going to go into vengeance mode and vote against it. As I told one of the three councilors this week after the street vacation vote, “It’s seems the majority of the council only wants to support the illogical.”

Item #33, 1st Reading, Rezoning by Avera for the nun apartments. While I am pleased that they will try to move the houses if the rezone happens (it will) Once again we are seeing affordable homes in our core being pushed out.

Item #36, Resolution to extend employment of police officer so they can cash in on 15 year tenure benefits. Not sure if that is the case, but my assumption.

Items #37-39, Hearings and Resolutions, I guess in one quick, clean sweep, Raven is asking the city council to demolish an historic building. The testimony on this should be interesting. I guess I found it surprising that the old Goodwill building was considered ‘historic’.

5G Sioux Falls

Municipalities challenging 5G rollout in court

l3wis 6Comments

Over 80 counties and cities are filing suit against the FCC over local control and price fixing what they can charge the telecoms;

More than 80 cities and counties have filed lawsuits challenging the new FCC rules, and the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit in San Francisco is expected to render a decision in the lead case in April.

This was my biggest complaint against 5G, local control and what we can charge to use OUR lightpoles;

In an email to The Washington Times, Tom Cochran, executive director of the U.S. Conference of Mayors, accused the agency of reinterpreting “federal law as part of its efforts to ‘nationalize’ city and other local public property in its quest to grant special and unlawful rights to private enterprises that seek to occupy local rights-of-ways and public property for small cell deployment.”

“Instead of working with local governments to win the global race to 5G, the FCC is forcing cities to race to the courthouse to defend the most basic of local government rights — the authority to manage and seek fair compensation from private users that seek to employ public assets, owned and paid for by local taxpayers, for their personal profit without any obligation to serve all of the community whose assets are occupied,” Mr. Cochran said.

Yet the nimrods that occupy our city hall decided to bend over for Thune-Bag and do as he wishes, while closing the public out. Heck, even the National League of Cities, an organization we help fund as taxpayers, opposes the FCC rules. Hopefully the courts will rule in the cities favor so we can end the nightmare called 5G.

Another STORY on the TOPIC.

Kristi Noem Mary Jane

Noem makes incredibly ignorant statements about industrial hemp

l3wis 3Comments

I guess I have never thought Donita ‘Noem’ Trump was the smartest knife in the drawer, but I also didn’t think she was a total idiot, until I heard her make this statement;

“I believe if we move ahead with industrial hemp and we aren’t prepared with it from a regulatory standpoint, from an enforcement standpoint, if we don’t have the equipment and dollars to do this correctly, we will be opening the door to allowing marijuana to be legalized in the state of South Dakota,” Noem said.

Industrial Hemp isn’t the gateway to legalizing recreational pot. Never has been. Two completely different industries, not only in the products they provide but how it is grown.

“The plant looks exactly like a marijuana plant because it’s exactly the same plant as a marijuana plant,” Noem said.

Lesmeister disputed Noem’s claim, saying that they’re two separate plants and “standing in a field, there’s a vast difference.”

Why would any farmer in SD want to risk losing their entire farm over a rotational crop by sneaking in illegal cannabis? It’s ignorant. First off if the plants were hidden in the field, they would be overpowered by the industrial hemp, and secondly, and more importantly, the plant that contains THC, has to be grown in a greenhouse. You could plant it outside, but your results wouldn’t be something you would want to sell. If you have ever seen a grow house you would realize that it is a very delicate plant that has to be watered properly, lighted properly, special organic fertilizers and hand pruned to make it a viable crop to sell. Industrial hemp is pretty much planted and harvested (outside), that’s it. I’m amazed that someone who calls herself a farmer and sat on the ag committee knows very little about a crop that actually built our nation. Even Ellis agrees with me;

We can debate the pros and cons of marijuana legalization another day, but let’s first dispense with the asinine argument that hemp and marijuana are the same.

Well, we choose the hills we want to die on. Noem has chosen hemp.

Like I said in my first post about this, Kristi, grow a brain. It makes you wonder what she has been smoking?

Elections Sioux Falls Voter Registration

Sioux Falls Voter Analysis; More to Come

l3wis 7Comments

Cameraman Bruce has been crunching the latest numbers when it comes to ‘Likely’ voters in Sioux Falls. While we have much more data coming, some of the early results show of the approximately 17,000 consistent households that vote, only 3,000 are in Lincoln County. For all the talk of a “fast’ growing Lincoln County, the Sioux Falls resident voters still don’t like to vote in local elections.

It also seems that $100K VOTE YES for Schools campaign was able to encourage a lot of first time voters or people who rarely vote.

MORE TO COME!

Paul Ten Haken Planning Commission SF City Council Sioux Falls

Has the Midco Aquatic Center caused parking issues around the VA?

l3wis 4Comments

I won’t get into the argument about whether we needed an indoor public pool or not in Sioux Falls, that ship has sailed. But I do know the neighbors of Spellerberg opposed the location, mainly due to parking issues with the VA. We all knew at the time that the VA wasn’t going anywhere and was expanding. We also know that the VA has a quit claim deed on Spellerberg, so if they want to expand either buildings or parking, they have the right to do so in Spellerberg park. SAVE Spellerberg warned of these issues before the vote. They fell on deaf ears. Now we have an expanded VA, which needed more parking, so they cancelled their lease with Lifescape and we have an indoor pool with a parking lot next to the VA that sits empty most of the time. Earlier this week, a member of SAVE Spellerberg and a Veteran and Volunteer at the VA sent an email to the City Council, here is a portion of it talking about the parking issues;

Parking is a problem with all city projects going back decades.  The city and NFPs intentionally build where there is insufficient parking expecting residential street parking to be a cost savings option.  City leaders have routinely handed over streets to business for their convenience, making homeowners/taxpayers second class to the business of city hall.

Not only do I personally think Spellerberg Park was a bad location for an indoor pool, the evidence is showing that it was a HORRIBLE location. Destroying a park for larger parking, and not having any space for expansion of the facility.

I truly believe if the pool would not have gone in there, the VA would have been able to expand parking to accommodate their future needs as well as Lifescape. I found it interesting that NO ONE brought up the reason why there is congestion, because all of the facilities next to each other. Maybe this SAVE Spellerberg person is right;

Lifescape’s poor planning the last 30 years has caused them with the help of city leaders to promote the decline of the very neighborhood that has supported them.

Maybe this is one of the reasons they put Midco at Spellerberg, so they could institutionalize the neighborhood. Seems their plan hit a snag Tuesday Night.

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