The speaker arrangement will change tomorrow at Forum. Due to a family emergency Rose Grant will not be able to attend. Cory Heidelberger will speak in her place, and Jeff Barth will remain on the docket also.
I couldn’t agree more with Michael about this;
Significantly, for a poll at the beginning of a broad-based community-wide engagement strategy, there was no option for respondents to indicate they were undecided or not sure whether they would support the initiatives being proposed. Most questions required a response, so there was almost no option to leave a particular question unanswered.
The closed and bureaucratic approach to garnering support for initiatives promoted as benefitting the community as a whole may have the opposite of the intended effect. There are reports that an independent group may be formed to support the bond issue. Perhaps they’ll do a better job of engaging the community.
The problem is they don’t want to ‘engage’ the public. They want a small group of supporters to vote this in on a special election in September. Let’s just say some of my foot soldiers and I have been keeping detailed notes, and if they move forward with the current plan, they may have some surprises awaiting them.
We checked on Michelle Lavallee’s voter registration to see if she recently changed it, but in past tense she is showing up as a Republican and has a very poor voting record.
I also found it interesting that Billie would pick a person who co-chaired Paul TenHaken’s mayoral campaign. While tapping a Sioux Falls Woman with savvy in running a campaign within Sioux Falls is a good idea, Billie really needed to tap a Democrat (you know, the party you are running in). I saw Heidepriem make this mistake when he did the same thing.
Why is it when Democrats run for statewide offices in South Dakota they think they can win as ‘Republican Light’? Either just run as a Republican/Democrat or not at all. This STRATEGY has NEVER worked, and I have no idea why the SD Democratic Party keeps playing this card time and time again.
Is it too early to congratulate Governor Noem on her win?
The Sioux Falls City Council wants to point out that some people from the public are disruptive, unprofessional and disrespectful at the council meetings.
Really?
While that may be true, they should take a good look in the mirror. Before TenHaken took the helm there was backroom negotiations leaving several other councilors out of the process, in the open meetings there was often public shaming of fellow councilors from both sides. The chair himself would often cut off councilors or tell them they out of order (when they were not). Than there was the threats of ethics violations, etc, etc.
Trust me, while the public watching the meetings whether in person or on TV, they see this. We hoped with the new administration that some of this would end, NO more backroom deal making, NO more fighting at the meetings. It hasn’t.
Some have suggested to me since the Tuesday meeting that maybe instead of just making rules for the public, Â maybe there should be some rules on how the council treats each other at the meetings. It certainly lacks decorum. Not only is a lot of their actions uncalled for, some of it may violate open meeting laws (cutting deals via private phone conversations and emails without including ALL of the council in on the discussion).
I will say that some of the ideas about a compromise are worth taking a look at, but the process to come up with these compromises is not above board. The council really needs to either defer, or better yet, kill the current proposal and go back to the drawing board. This starts with having an open conversation in a working session hashing out the details. Wouldn’t it be refreshing to have the public be included on a discussion about public input in the open? I think so.
We have had enough of ramrod negotiations by the previous administration and his team of council rubberstampers. In fact, many times the council meetings got contentious because of this awful way of governing. Mayor TenHaken needs to demand that the council drops the current backroom conversations going on right now and move this out in the sunlight, otherwise we have accomplished nothing but maintaining the status quo.
You can listen HERE.
As I understand it there may be some amendments to the proposal on Tuesday, ultimately leaving it at the beginning of the meeting with some other restrictions. At this moment that train is still moving, so I would prefer not to elaborate.
Gotta love Stormland-TV’s version of this topic. Thirty-Seven people talked Tuesday night about public input. Out of those people, ONLYÂ 2 supported changing it, and both are former public/government employees. So guess who they interview? You guessed it, the TWO who wanted it moved, oh, and they threw in June Staggers to make it look fair.
Make no mistake, the Media wants this moved to the end so they can make their 10 PM news deadline.
l3wis