What is the Home Rule Charter? What is a Charter? What is an ordinance? What does the City Attorney mean by policy? What does SDCL mean? How does the Constitution stuff work?
Why don’t most of us know these things? One reason could be our city attorney Fiddle Faddle has decided the rule books he has to follow are to be construed to be “Against the Citizens”. Hmmmm, the founding leaders of our national government set forth a nation to encourage our better natures.
The founding documents listed above and we live by were set up to protect us from the tyranny and the installation of tyrants. The one person, our city attorney, the administration and our elected city council are supposed work with on issues is there to move policy decisions toward being “against the citizen” we have a bit of a problem. We the people have no place to go in Sioux Falls City government for unbiased help without having to pay a lot of money to hire legal help.
Our City Council Public Input speakers are asking pointed questions to be answered about this thing we call Open Government and the lack of it being practiced here in Sioux Falls when they spoke on February 14, 2017.
We hear a lot of comments about the Constitution, what is it anyway? We have protections based on 18th century idealist thought of what a fair government was to them. It has served us well in the back and forth of politics. The Constitution won’t survive us if we don’t teach those coming along to understand it.
The city will not survive either. No city employee should ever start out with the thought or make the statement he is there to defend the city against the citizens. The citizens are owners of the town. The city attorney only works for the mayor. The mayor is elected to be our city manager. The city is not a business, it is a social contract between us. The Charter is not to be used as a means to go after citizens. The Charter is our contract allowing limited powers in helping us get along and get the our services we need.
Once again, there is very little our city government does where we learn from business acumen other than some accounting functions. The rest of our city, state and federal government is a social contract guaranteeing our peace and liberty. Once we think we have to run government like a business, we turn just a bit more toward fascism. Mussolini did make the trains run on time but it was a bit messy.