Sioux Falls School Board President Cynthia Mickelson currently does NOT have a challenger for the seat. As I have mentioned before, there is only one official race for the April 14th School Board/City Council election, the race in the Northwest District between Neitzert and Beaudion.
There are 3 other council seats up for re-election.
While I do suspect Alex Jensen will have a challenger for the At-Large position, I’m not sure the other 3 races will see any challengers.
Mickelson steamrolled her way into the seat spending an unprecedented $16K for the seat, even placing signs in the Tea School District. I find it ironic that Cynthia serves on the SFSD board while her husband is busy wreaking questionable havoc on the environment with his CAFO business, while costing taxpayers thousands of dollars in legal fees for pushing unconstitutional laws against petition gatherers. Of, course, many would say, that has nothing to do with Cynthia, but if you look at her donor list from when she ran the first time, I think it is very relevant.
There continues to be a Monarchy in Sioux Falls and South Dakota, and I think Cynthia’s title as Board President should be changed to Dutchess of Schools.
Does this guy even understand how a representative government works? Well first you would have to show up to the office a few days a week.
While I agree with him using an app, or the city website to report potholes is a good idea, it doesn’t always work, especially with government. Sometimes the good old fashion way of calling or emailing an elected official gets results. Besides, isn’t that their job? Representing us and getting results? I can see PTH’s 2022 campaign, ‘Re-Elect TenHaken, there’s an app for that!”
Only agenda item is a going away party for Departing Members Pauline Poletes and Robert Thimjon. They accomplished their very successful shut down of charter amendments. Party on Garth.
Sub Item #25, $136K to YMCA for after school programs and
Sub Item #26, $111 to VOA for after school programs.
I wish the merits of these four items would have been discussed in the regular meeting instead of stuffed into the consent agenda.
Item #7, Change orders, we will be handing about $1.5 million to Journey Construction for the Village on the River Bunker Ramp.
Item #20, Transfer of 2020 Retail Liquor License, with video lottery terminals, and 2020 Package Liquor License from Badlands Gaming LLC, Badlands Gaming, 1600 West Russell Street, to South Dakota Veterans Alliance Inc., 1600 West Russell Street. It looks like this deal is moving forward.
Item #25 (29-30), 2nd Reading of TIF agreement with Lloyd Companies and Sioux Steel Development. As I have said in the past this will pass. I guess councilor Stehly will be absent from this meeting and NOT voting on the issue due to previous commitments. I have said that a better approach would be to gift them the River Greenway property (so they can develop it at their expense) and give them a $10 million dollar TIF only for that redevelopment. I think it is a crying shame that local lawmakers across the country are suckered into these kind of agreements which are truly developer handouts and little else. I’m praying for an amendment, but I don’t think it will happen.
Item #26, 2nd Reading, ordinance on campaign financing and elections. I feel there will be some amendments to this item and it will be an interesting to see what is slipped in. I still think that this ordinance should be amended so it is NOT implemented until after the municipal election.
Item #27, Supplemental appropriations for police overtime pay for special events. Like I said yesterday in a post, I fully support this, but I think a discussion should have occurred with the council before the mayor’s office proposed this. It is the council’s job as laid out in charter to be the legislators, not the mayor’s office.
Item #28, Parks and Rec fee increases. You will notice that some of the biggest increases are at the Midco Aquatic Center.
Item #31, Resolution approving preliminary plan for the controversial Golden Gateway addition.
Item #32, A RESOLUTION REMOVING UNCOLLECTIBLE, DELINQUENT ACCOUNTS FROM THE RECORDS. Interesting that these accounts are confidential?
Item #34, Resolution, allowing Landscapes Unlimited to modify the noncompetition clause under the Management Agreement.
Item #35, Charter Revision Commission presents their ballot amendments. I’m urging a vote NO on amendment ‘B’ which would increase the number of signatures needed for a charter revision petition.
But guess what, we are stuck with thebeautiful $10 Million dollar mortgage for the next 15 years;
Recently, however, there are signs that the venue’s initial luster has faded. The Premier Center is more profitable than ever, but ticket sales and attendance have failed to match the Garth Brooks-fueled bump of 2017. Along with turnover in management, there have been fewer sellouts, and a smaller portion of the acts coming to town are the big names blowing up box offices in other markets.
It’s a different market out there, not to mention the Denty has just been a money vacuum from day one;
City staff declined a request to interview Mayor Paul TenHaken for this story.Â
I found this very odd since PTH has nothing to do with booking acts at the Denty. He is also not responsible for selling the white elephant to us. I can tell you why he turned down the interview, because he doesn’t have a clue what is going on out there.
And while it has proven to bring in more revenue (net operating) we never hear what the actual sales are. Why is that? Ticket sales and attendance is also down;
Pollstar ranked the Premier Center as the 84th top performing arena in 2017. But more recently Sioux Falls’ largest facility fell to 125th in 2018 and 136th in 2019.
Tickets sold also plummeted, according to Pollstar. Those fell from 239,089 in 2017 to 117,411 last year.
In 2019, just 43 percent, or nine out of the 21 concerts that performed at the facility, were ranked in Pollstar’s Top 100 worldwide acts ranking, which is based on ticket revenue a band or artist brings in. In 2018, 53 percent of Premier Center’s music entertainers cracked that list and in 2017, the last full year that Semrau did the booking, 72 percent of the 22 concerts were among Pollstar’s top-ranked acts.
Then Terry ‘left’;
Not long after, Torkildson himself left the Premier Center, though his departure came after being let go by ASM when it was still SMG.
Terry took a job a few months back up North and is already back in Sioux Falls. He promised me once he would give me an ‘off the record’ run down of what happened out there, than told me later he was just bluffing me. But he did tell me the interior walls of the Events Center are thinner than the walls of a Japanese cat house (those are my words, not his). He basically said, don’t lean to hard on them.
When acts return for a second or third time, it’s harder to sell out. People who have budgeted their money for entertainment find it more difficult to spend money on a performer who they’ve already seen live, Opp said.
That line right there explains why the Pavilion really hasn’t increased attendance much over the past 20 years, because they do the same stuff over and over, and still cater to a certain demographic and not the entire city.
The Denty was built for a small window of time, and once that clock runs out, we are still stuck with mortgage payments, maintenance and operating, whether we use it or not. But hey, we can’t afford to trim boulevard trees, because that is a ‘hand out’.
l3wis 
