March 2014

‘ADVOCACY’ vs. ‘EDUCATION’

l3wis March 2, 2014 20Comments

I did a little cuttin’ and pastin’ of the Power Point presentation of the city’s ‘ADVO-CATIONAL’ presentation of the OUTDOOR pool pool issue. This ‘supposed’ educational piece is chucked full of ‘persuasive language’ and misleading ‘facts’.

Where to begin?

1) There is NO indoor pool on the ballot, only a simple question. Do you want a new outdoor pool at Spellerberg. If you vote NO a number of things could happen. They could keep the existing pool, they could fill it in and have green space. There is NO guarantees that a NO vote would result in an indoor pool at that location.

2) The photo of bundled up folks walking to the pool in a romantic winter wonderland setting. What about pictures of kids riding their bikes to an outdoor pool in the summer?

3) True, there is a ‘proposal’ to replace Spellerberg with an Indoor pool. But that is all it is. The city council will have to approve the budget again this fall and approve the bonds to pay for it. Would the NEW council do that? There are NO guarantees.

4) They claim that the outdoor pools are obsolete, but continue to use them.

5) Need for indoor water. Huh? According to who? Past city surveys have shown that the public would support an indoor facility but only IF it is self-sufficient or subsidized (like the Ice Hockey facility). The support drops to almost 10% if we would have to subsidize the facility.

6) There are plenty of opportunities throughout the community for indoor swimming. Also, the VA has said nothing about a joint venture with the city and a therapy pool.

7) The skewed numbers. While it is true that it is more costly to operate an outdoor pool hourly, the real numbers are about $100K a year for an outdoor and $700K a year for an indoor.

8) The traffic/parking analysis is strange on many levels. They are pretty much admitting that we would be building and subsidizing a year round facility (360 days a year) for only 2-3 swim meets. So please, explain the NEED. As for the traffic increase for the outdoor facility, I am confused. Drive by Drake Springs sometime on a hot day, while the pool is packed, the roads are not, but you will see a multitude of bicycles and kids walking.

9) This is a lie, there is around $6.4 million set aside for Spellerberg, for either an indoor or outdoor facility. But like I said above, the council still has to approve the expenditure this Fall. A $13 million bond will also have to be approved that citizens can get revoked in a referendum if the council approves it.

So while the city claims they are ‘educating’ us, they are really ‘advocating’ their position, while misleading voters on an outdoor facility. Are they stretching state law or simply flat out breaking it? I think it is time the AG’s office do an investigation of the city’s ‘educational’ programming.

Ice rinks closing due to warm weather? (H/T – GP)

l3wis March 2, 2014 8Comments

Here we are in a record cold season and the ice rinks in Sioux Falls are being closed due to ‘warm weather’. Ellis asks a great question?

The fine people over at the parks and rec department sent out a press release this morning that says the city’s six ice rinks are shutting down for the season on Sunday because of “warm weather.”

Maybe the parks and rec department is vacationing in Palm Springs right now. It’s currently -4 right now, according to my trusty Weather Channel app. It’s going to be really warm tomorrow, at 24. Then Saturday a high of 0, followed by another high of 0 on Sunday, the day the ice rinks close because of warm weather.

Indeed, in the entire 10-day outlook, the high temperature doesn’t break the freezing mark once.

Is it warm weather? Or is it an unwillingness to spend money to keep the ice rinks open?

UPDATE: The city has sent out another press release announcing the season-ending closures. This time the release doesn’t give a reason. Must not have been in the park and rec budget to go beyond the first weekend of March.

We could ask others… OK, it reminds me of how:

• Close pools early in August so they do not have to clean or do repairs?
• The city quits the upkeep on a pool because they decide years before to quit keeping it up, so they could force the citizens to accept a new indoor pool after the people kept rejecting their previous plans?
• Decide to quit upkeep on the concrete streets and roads, making the roads unsafe? We drivers are so pissed off we finally accept crappy overlays.
• The city quits updating utility infrastructure, so we end up with one disaster after another to make a mayor ‘look good’ saving us?
• Our city puts in such cheap / bad infrastructure throughout or is it the consulting engineer who tell the city, “Put in this crap and we will have another project in a few years.”
• We citizens must accept the fact of old or cheap piping ready to blow at the first sign of stress. How many hydrants, water mains and sewer lines have blown up in the last few years due to more poor planning…
• We must accept 14^th Street being torn up every few years because someone made another major mistake causing another failure.
• Accept a ‘fiction’ as ‘fact’ to get the voters to accept the salesman’s inevitable conclusion.
• City spending millions of dollars to save an old high school building, putting nice frosting on a cow pie, then wondering why we have to replace the windows, roofs, and spend another $85,000 to convert a closet. It will probably cost $85,000 to clean up all the other impurities lingering in the building with all the extra-curricular goings-on there…
• We are promised a 15,000 capacity events center but to get it under budget, the salesman slyly gets it downsized to 12,000 with telling us? The 50 year hatred of the current Arena by several well placed SF citizens to have special seating in the building their grandparents wanted? Why do we have to suffer under the debt so the mayor has another building he can have his name permanently attached to?
• Instead of…. Well you get it by now, each of us could add to this list.

Kermit Staggers asked a simple question at a recent city council meeting, don’t we have a designer or engineer employed by the city who could design something for Lyon Park instead of hiring a ‘consulting firm’? Word is, Jeff Schmidt has turned away landscape engineer applicants because they have it handled (whatever this means).

We citizens are going to pay for years for all the frosting on the cow pies located around town this mayor and council have approved. We have a subprime credit card salesman who only wants to make things look good and blame us if it does not look like he wants it to.

Look at each of his top ten list, it is opposite land of Orwellian proportions. Each of the top ten (BTW, campaigning on the city’s dime?) are the an attempt to direct our attention away from the failures of this administration by making them look like successes.

There is more, Sioux Falls are you ready for more failures to put naming rights on?

Insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. Albert Einstein