Politicking at Benson’t Flea Market
There were at least 4 booths at the Flea Market. Loetscher, Sutton (Nice homemade signs), Brekke and Hubbel.
There were at least 4 booths at the Flea Market. Loetscher, Sutton (Nice homemade signs), Brekke and Hubbel.
As I predicted there has been rumors that Huether plans to get even more done before he leaves office. On Belfrage’s show the other day he said he was meeting with directors to see what they would like to see tied up in their offices before the next mayor takes over on May 15. Rumor has it that there is well over 30 items on the RAMROD agenda so far. A City Hall insider gave me a brief list of some of those items;
There you have it folks, 3 more months of ‘Getting Things Done!’
Sometimes I think it may be a good idea to drug test legislators, especially when they come up with stupid crap like this. You are either brain dead or on drugs killing your brain cells;
The bill would cut the state’s tourism tax rate from 1-1/2 percent to 1 percent, which wouldn’t leave enough funding for the South Dakota Arts Council.
State Rep. Tom Pischke (R-Dell Rapids) sponsored the bill because he doesn’t like the way the money is collected.
“Let’s say for example, I live in Dell Rapids and I want to take my kids to the children’s museum in Brookings. So I don’t really consider myself a tourist if I drive 30 miles up to Brookings to take the kids to the Children’s Museum. But then again, I’m getting charged a tourism tax,” says Pischke.
The definition of Tourist;
a person who is traveling or visiting a place for pleasure.
Doesn’t matter if Tom lived next door to the museum, he is still a tourist. Oh, but Tom’s argument gets even better;
Pischke says he supports the arts, but doesn’t think the tourism tax should go toward things the SculptureWalk or JazzFest, two recipients of funding from the state art council. He says the collected funds should go directly toward tourism.
Public art is tourism. Do you think people would travel to Mt. Rushmore if there wasn’t a sculpture into the side of that mountain? Where do these legislators come up with this stuff?
How many South Dakota State legislators does it take to screw in a light bulb? Zero. They would be too busy arguing over how to pay for the light bulb, in the dark.
While this is great news, there seems to be something missing here;
The Premier Center was ranked 44th in the United States and 84th in the world by Pollstar, based on touring event ticket sales of 239,089, according to a release from the Premier Center.
A couple of big things are missing; 1) is the above ticket sales number just tickets sold by touring acts, not total tickets sold at the Denty? 2) What was the value of those ticket sales?
If you were to do just a rough estimate on sales from the number above, promoters and artists pulled in around $17 million last year from the Denty. This number of course doesn’t include food and beverage sales and other events. Total sales at the Denty in 2017 could have easily been over $30 million. But how much is the Denty itself profiting? Not much. Most of that $30 million gets sucked right out of town.
Like the admission as to who authorized the bent up siding job on the Denty, for some reason the Huether administration wants to keep us in the dark about the sales at the Denty and what the Denty actually gets to keep or spend on operations.
So we have a publicly funded facility that takes $10 million a year out of our 2nd penny road fund to pay the mortgage but for some strange reason we can’t tell the public the sales it generates. Instead they send out vague press releases bragging about attendance.
We could of had 10 million people attend concerts last year at the Denty, if majority of those sales are not re-circulating in our community, does it even matter?
Click to Enlarge