Denny Sanford Premier Center

The Denty (Huether’s Admin) still refuses to tell us the value of ticket sales

l3wis February 1, 2018 4Comments

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?

We have known for a long time what is wrong with the EC siding, we just want to know who authorized it!

l3wis January 30, 2018 4Comments

A letter writer points out the obvious problems with the Denty siding;

Would the mayor and his crew accept that kind of work in their own homes?

Apparently they would, because we speculate that is who authorized the installation. All the arguments over the appearance, structural integrity and silly settlement are secondary arguments to who authorized it.

During the mayor’s last ‘Shut Up and Listen’ episode the mayor said leaders should learn from their mistakes. You can’t learn from your mistakes unless you admit to them first. The mayor continues to deny a mistake was made by putting the flat panels on a curved building. It is obvious from the settlement details and the consultant’s siding review a mistake was made. In fact it is glaring. So why won’t the mayor just say he issued the code red? He continues to ask people to drop the subject, but until he ultimately takes responsibility, apologizes and than learns from that mistake by offering a long term solution it’s hard to drop it.

Please Mike, give us the documentation that shows you authorized the cost cutting installation, otherwise you can continue to hear about this topic until the election and beyond.

They’ll just find another loophole

l3wis January 24, 2018 1Comments

No matter how many laws Pierre wants to pass, municipalities like Sioux Falls will just find ways around them;

Senate Bill 84 would bar state and local governments from negotiating confidential settlements in lawsuits. Settlement agreements involving government entities would be public records, including the amount of money paid in the settlement and the parties involved.

The citizens of Sioux Falls were fortunate enough to have a multi-million dollar corporation willing to take the city to the Supreme Court, but in most cases, with individual citizens, that would be rare. We would ultimately be victims of the corrupt and closed government of the city administration.

It doesn’t help that the former head city attorney, David Fiddle-Faddle has his College BFF, Attorney General Jackboots, in his back pocket to kill DCI investigations (before even interviewing witnesses) or to refuse to investigate at all.

The city attorney’s office has always had it’s own set of rules it goes by, way before Fiddle-Faddle took over, and be damned if some dirt fool citizen with no lawyering deegrie and no money hires an attorney (if they can find one to represent them in Sioux Falls).

Pierre can goof around passing all kinds of laws about confidential settlements, doesn’t matter, the Mike Huethers, Marty Jackboots and David Fiddle-Faddles of the world will find ways around the laws.