Sioux Falls Parks and Rec

CORRECTION: I guess if your car has a flat tire you need to get rid of it

l3wis April 24, 2019 4Comments

CORRECTION: I just realized these are two different locations. The top one IS being repaired and the bottom one, well, that floated away. Sorry for the confusion.

I was looking at pictures during the informational meeting last night of the recent flood and was shocked to see these pictures. Apparently the city decided to tear down this whole picnic shelter that had one broken post. WHAT?! Even if the other posts were bad to, it would have been a lot cheaper to just replace the posts and put a new coat of paint on this instead of tearing the whole thing down. Ridiculous.

Cathy B. Makes a pitch to help non-profits

l3wis March 28, 2019 0Comments

During the last Parks Board Meeting, Cathy asks the board to discount the booth rates during festivals in city parks for non-profits. She confessed this wasn’t the first time she asked, but was told she had to go thru the proper channels (we will get to that in a moment).

Cathy showed the board how other cities charge non-profits less during festivals. Seems like a great idea. They did their normal ‘Thanks for your time.”

But what I found interesting was Cathy was told she needed to go thru the Parks Board first before the city council. I guess they have to put their ‘blessing’ on it.

Hogwash!

The Sioux Falls city council is the policy making body of the city (it’s written in charter) not the Parks Board (volunteers) or the Parks Director (appointed). The city council could easily move to change the non-profit rate, with or without the ‘blessing’ of the parks board, the director or even the mayor.

Steps into the River, Huge Fail

l3wis March 14, 2019 7Comments

I understand we are having massive flooding, so this post isn’t really about the flooding, but about why this project was way over the top. You can READ HERE all my posts going back to the beginning of the project 9 years ago and how something modest turned into a monster overnight due to a greedy developer making legal threats over a contract signed in the middle of the night with Mayor Munson.

That all aside, I did fight to keep the project modest, speaking at city council meetings and talking to councilors (Kermit was the only one that agreed). One of the options discussed, which would have been very reasonable and would have prevented any long term damage like the current situation we have was redoing the trail extra wide (like they did) and landscaping the entire area with natural rock and natural flowers and plants lining the river. Not only would have it been beautiful, it would have been very low maintenance. Instead we wasted millions on high maintenance infrastructure, as you can see above. And now we want to put a $2 million dollar effigy to egos on top of it all.

When a city decides to do projects like this, they really need to look at the long term costs of building such structures. I don’t even want to know what it will cost to repair all the damage from this latest flood. If we would have went with plan B, as I suggested, cleanup would have been a couple of people with rakes and some re-seeding, but instead we have Bread & Circus.