South DaCola

Editorial Cartoonist from South Dakota

2020

SF City Council Sioux Falls

Sioux Falls City Council Agenda, Jan 21, 2020

l3wis 2Comments

Informational • 4 PM

Presentations on;

• Weber Avenue Corridor Study

• Emerald Ash Borer Response Plan Update 

• Project TRIM Assistance Program & Project TRIM Pilot Project (this project presentation will be informative. I wonder what the city spent to experiment with this).

Regular Meeting • 7 PM

Item #6, Approval of Contracts. Apparently we are paying Sanford to rehabilitate injured city employees. While physical therapy is important, I think that city employees should have the choice of healthcare provider to go to for this service.

Item #43, Second reading, on premise sign regulations. This will pass, and probably should, but I question the timing right before a city/school board election.

Item #46, 1st Reading of TIF for Sioux Steel project. You know my feelings on TIFs, this will have little to NO economic impact on the rest of us, and will only increase our property taxes.

Item #47, 1st Reading, AN ORDINANCE OF THE CITY OF SIOUX FALLS, SD, AMENDING CHAPTER 38 OF THE CODE OF ORDINANCES OF THE CITY PERTAINING TO ELECTIONS. There is some language changes pertaining to municipal elections and finance reports.

Dusty Johnson South Dakotans Yankton

South Dakota Manufacturer builds surveillance trees, and Dusty says, ‘Cool’

l3wis 6Comments

Wouldn’t this be a fun Christmas tree to have? It could catch all the great moments when your grandchildren open their gifts (or their frowning faces when you give them crap). **Note: The family mentioned is NO relation, they spell their last name different.

“The system was designed to be able to get daytime and nighttime video of people as they are coming across the border, in real time, to a dispatch person that would then be able to dispatch certain patrol people to that area,” Taylor said. “It gives them a great way to see how many people are coming, be able to track them as they are going, and it can allow U.S. Customs and Border personnel (CBP) to know how many people to send. If there’s a potential issue or concern with that group coming across, then maybe it can help identify that prior to them getting here.”

Ironic, isn’t it? A family business in Yankton, South Dakota, that probably has immigrant heritage from Germany, Austria and Switzerland is building fake trees to stop immigrants. I won’t bring up that other famous German that thought this was also good idea.

County Commission Minnehaha County

Minnehaha County Commission limits public input to 3 minutes

l3wis 1Comments

For a long time, the MCC has never limited public input time, I don’t even know if they have a rule for it. Obviously with Roberts Rules, they can make up a rule before a special meeting, like they did on Tuesday before the refugee approval meeting.

While I understand telling people they should try to limit themselves to 3 minutes is a ‘nice’ suggestion, being a dictator about it, was a little annoying. MCC Chair Jean Bender was cutting people off left and right. At one point, the former director of the Multi-Cultural Center, Quadir Aware was told to end his testimony, and he went into a rant about the corruption of the MCC. Oh, the irony . . . .

I have seen public input that has lasted for over 20 minutes for one individual, and one time former Mayor Bucktooth and Bowlcut talked for well over 9 minutes during public input about drainage for his swamp lake home.

Like I said, the suggestion of 3 minutes was well within Roberts Rules, etc., but when it comes to a topic as important as refugee resettlement and our foolish president who implemented these rules, if someone went over 3 minutes, so what?! Besides, your meetings start at 9 AM, you really have all day to listen and hash it out, we all know none of you have ‘real jobs’ to get to, especially Jeff and Dean 🙂

Mayor TenHaken Paratransit Sioux Falls Sioux Falls Transit South Dakotans Transportation

AARP features a story on Mayor TenHaken

l3wis 4Comments

I was actually surprised they were able to track him down for an interview, wait, the article came with a photo shoot, so of course he showed up;

After the summit, TenHaken created a Department of Innovation and Technology, hiring as its leader Jason Reisdorfer, who had previously worked in sales. Reisdorfer got to work on redeveloping the city’s transit system. Among the city workers he and TenHaken picked for the Core Team, only one had previous transit expertise. The diverse team included a firefighter, a police officer, a librarian and a health care worker.

“We didn’t want to have a bunch of people in the same room who said, ‘This is how we’ve always done it,’ “ Reisdorfer says.

So he headed this team up with a former tool salesman (who BTW just quit) that came up with a plan that has failed in other communities across the continent. Seems like a good thing for the AARP to write about.

TenHaken allowed the team freedom to work on its own. “When a mayor gets involved in any sort of meeting, his or her voice trumps any other discussion in the room,” he says. But his presence was felt. The team communicated using a messaging app, and TenHaken frequently chimed in with uplifting emojis.

That’s because one of the first things PTH did as a Mayor was give his COS executive authority so he could jet set all over the country and world. As of right now I guess he is in Haiti trying to set up more missionaries over there with a team of local bankers and businessmen. While I am all for charitable work, all the mayor has to do is drive about a mile east from his city hall office to Whittier neighborhood and see people right here in our community that need charity and help.

If the pilot works, part of the bus fleet would be replaced with vans and cars.

TenHaken embraced the idea, but also the possibility that it might not work. “We’re experimenting and we’re innovating on a very public stage,” he says. “The alternative is to do nothing at all.”

And it won’t work, or it will work but help very few people. There is an alternative, fix paratransit and the fixed route system first, get ridership up and make it more affordable, than screw around with taxi apps.

Public Works Sioux Falls

Snowplow Cowboy?

l3wis 12Comments

A citizen has been telling me for awhile that a private contractor contracted for city snow removal that lives in their neighborhood is using a city contracted motor grader blade and snowgate to clear his personal driveway and the driveways of two of his friends in his neighborhood (as I understand it, one of his friends is a SFPO)*.

This occurred Monday, January 13th (when BTW, there was NO Snow Alert) between 5 and 6 a.m.  This citizen called to make the Street Department aware of this.  They were told a supervisor would address it.

OBVIOUSLY NOT, because he and a second motor grader were back in the neighborhood last evening (01-17-2020) clearing the same three driveways. 

Yesterday, the City issued a Snow Alert and notified the public that they would BEGIN to plow Zone 3 the morning of Saturday, January 18, 2020.

While some would say ‘this is a nice gesture’ I would likely agree, if it was a private contractor, but these maintainers are contracted by the city and outfitted with our tax dollars. In other words, a big no-no. What if some property got damaged while providing this ‘service’ or worse someone got hurt? Who would be responsible than?

*Who says POs in Sioux Falls don’t get fringe benefits? Free meals at the hospitals and now city funded snow removal of personal property.

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