March 2009

Munson’s State of the City Address

l3wis March 27, 2009 9Comments

A couple more of these in Sioux Falls, and we will be living in Nirvana

I listened to this yesterday and was actually kind of impressed by Dave’s demeaner. The speech was chocked full of positive things going on in Sioux Falls. He touched on unemployment, but added we are doing better then other cities. There was some strange parts to the speech though, he talked about the Daly Village project like it was the stairway to heaven and if we didn’t complete Hwy 100 we would be missing out on other ‘big box’ store projects. This may be good news for city coffers in more tax revenue, but I am not sure how having two ‘Targets’ in Sioux Falls is going to make my life better. I thought he focused too much on that project, I felt it was pertinent to mention, but not that important. He also had to put a plug in for the event center, which was good – but no mention of how they plan to pay for it (get ready for the bilking). He also bragged about the task force he appointed and mentioned 3 members (ironically the only 3 that are regular Joes like the rest of us, and one of them handicapped). No mention of all the same old business men that sit on these boards (remember there is 18 members total). Like I said earlier, the speech was good, and I was pretty impressed by Dave’s optimism, especially that he mentioned the successful community development program and it’s positive affects on the community, but he still has very skewed priorities when it comes to government centered around citizens, and I still think we take a back seat to developers and big business.

A strange part of the speech was when he was talking about code enforcement. He made it sound like citizens needed to be ‘trained’ on how to maintain their property or pay the consequences. This kind of pissed me off, okay, it really pissed me off. Like I said in the Project TRIM meeting, 99.9% of property owners in SF are responsible people, why treat us like a bunch of little bratty kids for the .01% that are bad. Code enforcement should be ‘complaint basis’ only, I feel the city is overstepping their bounds with blanket code enforcement and I hope recent lawsuits and the next council and mayor put an end to the big brother mentality of the city.

I’ll leave you with a quote from Costello;

“As negative as things might have been in 2008, it was really a pretty good year for the city,” said council member Pat Costello.

Huh? sometimes I wonder if Argus Reporters just need to fill space so they put in a quote that has no relevance. I’m sure Pat meant that in a positive way, but reading it out of context makes you scratch your head and say, “So I’m losing my job or my paycheck is shrinking but the city keeps steaming ahead, with no cutbacks? How is that fair to me?” Well it is not.

See the spectacle here