Full House at Sioux Falls Annexation meeting
l3wis In the main chambers and overflow room at Carnegie right now.
April 2017
It seems a majority of Sioux Falls city councilors are still moving forward with Legacy developing DT parking ramp
Councilors Starr and Stehly are not buying it though, and questioning investors;
“There will be zero conflicts of interest. They’ve made a commitment since day one and it was part of the request for qualifications that they can’t have any conflicts with city employees,” Ketcham said. “They will not accept any city participation.”
There is also a partnership between Legacy Development and Aaron Hultgren, whose company, Hultgren construction was fined roughly $100,000 by OSHA on Monday for the downtown building collapse, which killed 24-year-old Ethan McMahon, where the new mixed use parking ramp would be built.
Hultgren is an employee at Legacy and the site of the building collapse, which Hultgren Construction, LLC had been working on at the time of the collapse, had been sold to Legacy by Tim Kant, the owner of the Copper Lounge, in 2015.
When asked whether there was any sort of reconsideration about the partnership between the City and Legacy Development as a result of the building collapse in December 2016, or in the past 24 hours as a result the fines imposed by OSHA, Ketcham only said Hultgren Construction wasn’t involved in the project.
Besides the fact that Legacy has financial ties to Hultgren construction and has used them on several projects, somehow they seem to think they can wash their hands of the tie with the new parking ramp because they are using a different construction company.
Hey, I say, use the different construction company, the engineers and architects, but DO NOT allow a development company with such poor judgment to manage the project.
Also, the FINAL judgment and REPORT from OSHA does not get released until June, and that’s when the civil suits could rear their head. Could Legacy be on the hook for damages? We don’t know, and this ‘not knowing’ is a good enough reason for the city to find a different RFQ for this project.
GOP big mouth blogger claims Heidelberger politicized a murder
What Pitty won’t do to twist the truth, like the fact he owns all the copyrights to photos of Noem (I won’t go there). He claims Cory politicized a murder, when in fact all he did was report the news.
What I gathered from Cory’s post is that a lobbyist for Muslims, the Iowa Jewish business man and head of a SD right wing Christian GOP party, Dan Lederman, needs to provide better security for his employees for his Iowa bail bonds business so this doesn’t happen in the future.
Gee, who would expect a guy with this many (opposing) irons in the fire would have ANY enemies?
UPDATE: The Pavilion’s strange job posting for the VAC Director
UPDATE: The job posting has REAPPEARED.
The job posting and job description was created on April 4, as you can see above (DOC:VAC Director April 2017) but the Pavilion didn’t post it to their employment page until today, for a short period of time that is, then poof it was gone. Even though it still exists on the interwebs, for now.
There is some legal hoops an organization like the Pavilion has to jump through when posting a job to the public, apparently for a couple of hours is OK.
So why wouldn’t they have posted the job longer then a few hours? Could be a glitch in the website, but my guess is that a candidate was already picked before the job was posted to the public. I guess we will have to wait and see if the new director (if they picked someone already) has any ‘connections’ to the board or other dignitaries in Sioux Falls. If not, then they need to have a long talk with their webmaster.
Property Tax paying voters left out of school start date decision
While I think most are OK with the August 23rd start date some wanted to see the last week of August instead, but it is unfortunate how the School District came to the decision;
However, survey conducted earlier this school year showed that more than 55 percent of 5,177 parents surveyed wanted the start date moved back to before Labor Day. Two-thirds of more than 2,000 staff surveyed also said they wanted school to start before Labor Day.
I still think this decision should have been left up to voters with the June 6th school board election. I think leaving non-parents and non-teachers out of the decision that still help fund public education in Sioux Falls sends the wrong message. Parents and teachers that are registered voters could have voted with non-parents and non-teachers that pay property taxes in our community and had an equal say also, instead of tipping the scales in their favor with a dubious survey. An election would have been the COMMON SENSE way to decide the school start date, and with an election less then two months away, it would not have been inconvenient to the school district. It seems the school board and school administrators still struggle with the concept of a democracy.