It used to be when you saw the agenda on Friday afternoon before the Tuesday informational meeting you could click on agenda items and have linked documents so you could see what was being discussed. Mayor Bucktooth and Bowlcut moved away from this, and our current jellyfish, transparency hater Mayor Stoneless won’t even give us a hint until a couple of minutes before the meeting starts.
Either way, these two items have me curious;
• Update on Downtown Development, AND
• Land Use Ordinance Updates
My guess is we will hear some watered down B.S. about the Sioux Steel project, but I’m not sure what the land use ordinances are about, but I am guessing they are going to make it easier for developers to side skirt neighbors concerns, or give less rights to neighbors, or both. I honestly don’t know. But I think presenting these two items on the day of the most important election in our lifetime has me a bit concerned they don’t want a huge audience. The steamrolling is coming folks, and it is not going to be pretty, and will mostly be done in the dark.
This was the scene about 4:30 yesterday at the election center in Downtown Sioux Falls (photos by Theresa Stehly) the line was several blocks long.
This of course could have been avoided a couple of different ways;
• Do what I have done for almost a decade, vote as soon as early voting starts. I believe I voted about a week after it started and there was about 3 people voting when I walked in. I have done this for a long time because I got tired of the musical precincts in every local election (something else that should end, another form of vote suppression).
• We should mail every registered voter a ballot, NOT an application, in at least state and national elections.
• We should have dozens of drop boxes available throughout the county at city and county properties (this of course would be possible if we didn’t have a political hack as the mayor of Sioux Falls who belongs to a party that promotes voter suppression).
What is crazy is that while we hand out $20 million dollar TIF’s and build $26 million dollar mural substrates, we can surely afford to make voting easier.
We live in a great country that allows us to choose our officials, but we make it really f’ing hard, even right here in South Dakota. I never thought I would see the day that people had to stand in this long of a line in Sioux Falls to vote. These pictures made me very sad.
****Note; if you have not mailed your ballot in yet DO NOT! I won’t make it to the election center by Tuesday. Drop it off in person or have a friend do it for you!
I have noticed over the past couple of years the kids painting the plows are getting more clever with how they show their wintry love for Jesus. While they don’t mention the Christian ghost on this plow, they cleverly turn the ‘T’ into a crucifix. I know, pretty cute.
Cute or not, it is still a violation of the separation clause (or better known as the establishment clause). Of course, I know the city’s public works department will just ignore this, because if you remember with the tornado cleanup last year, it seems our public works department is being replaced by church volunteers.
I fully expect to see members of a local Mega-Church this winter shoveling our emergency snow routes so we can use our taxdollars on more useful projects, like $26 million dollar bunker ramps to nowhere.
Basically Mr. Cunningham is filing a writ of certiorari because he was NOT allowed to present evidence during the hearing is asking for a new one. If you read the linked PDF above you will see that John cites city ordinance that says he should have been allowed to present evidence with his legal counsel, he was not. He is saying the council performed an illegal hearing, and in my humble opinion, I agree;
It gets better though, because in the city’s consent agenda on Tuesday night they are hiring private counsel for this;
UPDATE: As you can see the council and mayor are moving forward with their plans (Items #40-41) on a night when most people will be paying attention to the election. The items are also misleading because in the titles it says NOTHING about moving public input or meeting time moving. Only if you read the red notes you will see the changes.
This change could also be construed as unconstitutional in the public input ordinance;
Notice that currently public input at the beginning of the meetings doesn’t allow you to comment on pending business coming up in the rest of the meeting, which is also unconstitutional, but they are saying with this NEW ordinance that you can’t comment on what happened during the meeting though the items have already been voted on and the business of those items is closed. The SCOTUS has ruled very recently that you can discuss ANY city business at public input whether it is on an agenda or not. I think they said as long as a citizen is commenting on business that is ‘germane’ to that government body, it is allowable. I guess now the Mayor thinks he knows better than the Supreme Court. Not only do they suck at transparency, they are getting very sloppy legal advice.
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I just found out this afternoon that the mask mandate isn’t the only controversy coming on Tuesday. There are two items that will probably get first readings on Tuesday night also that have not been presented to the public in an informational, which is no surprise. I knew that both of these were coming after Stehly’s seat was bought by the banksters and developer welfare queens, and they have to do with shackling citizens;
• The first is a move rumored to be brought forward by Councilors Erickson and Jensen that would move the regular council meetings to 6 PM. This of course would give citizens very little time from when they get off of work to attend the meetings on time in person and an obvious assault on open government.
• The second is rumored to be proposed by Mayor TenHaken himself to move public input to the end of the meetings.
I have no doubt both will get the 5 votes they need to pass. These actions come after just a few weeks ago the Mayor ended the traditional mayor/director meetings with council leadership on Friday mornings and also the move to remove red notes from ordinances that are being changed.
This of course is NO surprise since this mayor and council has had a full on assault on transparency and their hatred of open government and more importantly citizen input and advocacy. They despise more than anything else and won’t be happy until they lop off the citizens rights to dissent their government, or at least make it more challenging to do so.
Messing with public input and citizens rights to advocate for themselves is a whole new level of disgusting behavior by this administration and city council. I would ask if they have any shame, but you know the answer.
So why are they so Hellbent on silencing the public? Because they have several plans to hand over MORE of your tax dollars to the elite who fund their campaigns and they are tired of the public making that process messy and in the open.
And if you think the steamrolling won’t happen, wait until Starr leaves the council (hopefully) and they replace him with another rubberstamper.
Prepare for your taxes and fees to rise exponentially while your voice and services get stifled. This is what happens when you let a non-partisan government get controlled by political hacks of the Republican Fascist Party with no governing experience and deep, deep, deep hatred of citizen activism and transparency.
We have a virus destroying our city alright, and the only way to stop it is with lots of Sunshine.
l3wis 
