Nothing like the Chamber Advocate for a little light reading about how the city of Sioux Falls is running like a well oiled machine.
First they would like us to know OUR rights when it comes to Public Input and the 1st Amendment;
However, if a public body agrees to hold public input sessions, then some limited constitutional rights are extended to the speakers. Still, the U.S. Supreme Court has recognized that a public body has the right to put time, manner and place restrictions on speech as long as those restrictions are generally content neutral and serve a governmental purpose. Courts have also noted that the purpose of these meetings, City Council for example, is to conduct city business and not to take public input. That recognized purpose permits the Council to legally restrict public input.
We of course have had this debate here before, and I have come to the realization that the city council CAN restrict public input. I get it. That wasn’t my point. My point is, that IF the city is going to allow Public Input, which they do, then they shouldn’t restrict our 1st Amendment rights during that time period by chastising us for speaking. If you don’t want us to ‘redress our grievances’ than eliminate public input, which I think would be difficult. As pointed out above, these meetings are for the city council to conduct business, a lot of decisions are made, based on input from the public, or at least should be.
In other Advice from the Advocate, they would like us to believe an OPT-OUT by the school district is for our own ‘safety’;
In other words, increasing the opt-out puts a safety net in place and ensures the District is able to provide a high-quality education for all students for years to come.
Make no mistake, if a governmental entity has the power to increase your taxes, they will use that same power to spend that money. Their is no such thing as a ‘safety net’ or ‘savings account’ in government. They WILL spend every last penny that they suck out of us, and you can almost guarantee that $5 million dollar ‘possible’ increase is already spent. The Chamber of course advocates for property tax and regressive increases on food taxes to help fund education because they are protecting members from an income tax.
The Chamber also decides to weigh in on the ambulance service in town. They have determined that it is what we are willing to pay for that determines what kind of quality of care we are getting . . . imagine that, always about the bottom line with the Chamber;
We will close with this. It appears our emergency medical response system is working when the objective data is considered. Also, the REMSA Board, not an elected lay council, is the right way to manage the system. The Council, by Charter, is a policy setting and legislative body and is to avoid administrative and management issues. It also appears that six of our councilors generally agree the system is working and the structure in place is valuable while two spearheaded the critical questioning.
However, we also understand that if your 911 call is one where there is a delay, you will have a concern. The provision of public services is always a balance between resources and expectations. If we expect (as an exaggerated example) a two-minute ambulance response for every emergency call, we can probably achieve it – but you won’t want to pay for it. Quality assurance conversations are important and we encourage them using the right data and in the right context.
We wouldn’t need more than two mutual aid agreements if PP would just staff more ambulances, but they won’t, as the Chamber has pointed out, too expensive. Yet, ironically our first responders, the SFPD and SFFD seem to show up first, subsidized by the tax payers while PP rides to bank with the profit from the transfer and delivery of a patient. All the more reason showing us a PUBLIC ambulance service not only would save patients money, it would probably save tax payers money (because we would be reimbursed for those calls), but more importantly, it would probably be 10X faster and more reliable than a FOR PROFIT ambulance service.
The Chamber has members to protect, we get it.
The Chamber is consistently opposed to minimum wage increases, guaranteed benefits for workers, improved working conditions for workers, family leave rights, and they support trade policies which ultimately shift good jobs overseas and are most likely complicit in local wage suppression too.
The same Chamber, then locally, helps to fund a study to address affordable housing in the city of Sioux Falls.
Your Honor, I rest my case…..
The purpose of the chamber is to promote business. They’re not a political or social entity. STFU and focus on bringing in and trying to keep businesses. Your job is to cut ribbons with big scissors. You’re not elected by the people. Just primp and use your imposed status to sell BS. This is a time when credit cards are leaving and new agriconomy is locating in SW. Minnesota. Sioux Falls doesn’t have housing and taxes food/clothing such that business can’t find or afford employees. Vietnamese I’m assisting choose Luverne and Worthington.
Yeah, funny how Flopdation Park would have been a perfect location for Harbor Bay’s Shrimp Farm, but it seems they will now build right across the border in Minnesota and suck labor from SF while paying taxes to Minnesota. Way to go CHAMBER!
Speaking of foundation park. Something I would love to see the argus follow up on. This I know. 820 acres were purchased by whoever for $24,000 an acre. The anchor tenant just bought 54 acres for $106,000 an acre. How did this land come to be worth so much? It came to be worth so much on the backs of SF water users. Getting the needed infrastructure to foundation is costing tens of millions of dollars. To pay for water and sewer to foundation the city raised those rates. Not once, but each year. The gift that keeps on giving. In the 2018 CIP the city allocated $29,000,000 to just get sewer to foundation. Stop and think about it. That is more than the admin building. 5 million more than the indoor pool. All for what? So somebody, don’t know who for sure, can make $80,000 an acre in profit. For 820 acres. Not a bad deal, once you consider who made that land worth that much.
Someone at the next Annexation meeting needs to bring this up. Why do corporations and the development foundation get welfare and free infrastructure upgrades by these islands do not?
What does it say when a company chooses to build a plant in a much smaller city, Luverne, that’s in a closed shop state over a nearby much larger city that sits in a right to work law state?
Well, to me it tells us all something about the quality of worker that a closed shop state produces over a right to work law state. We often hear about how great the work ethic is in South Dakota, but my guess is that a worker from a closed shop state has a historic memory of greater pay and benefits and thus a better attitude when it comes to work. Because such workers with a positive historic memory have a vested interest to be team players and to better understand and appreciate how their work, their production, and the quality of their work will determine the success of the business that they work for and benefit from more fairly.
If you offer workers only a subsistence level of employment with no future, then such a work environment eventually comes back to bite you as a employer and it works to degrade overtime the quality of the work force amongst you.
I mean, how else can you explain Harbor Bay’s Shrimp Farm choosing Luverne over Sioux Falls?
I also think that the Harbor Bay move speaks to how in South Dakota we do not do enough to develop our smaller towns in South Dakota. All of the emphasis seems to be on Sioux Falls, Rapid City, and Brookings and Watertown because they just so happen to be on I-29, with the rest of the towns in South Dakota just being ignored by our state economic development leaders for the most part.
There could be lots of work force in Sioux Falls if employers gave Meth breaks and comp time for petty theft and waiting in welfare lines.