I just replace ‘Winnipeg’ with ‘Sioux Falls’ and it makes soooo much sense. The last line in the song nails it;
And up above us all, leaning into sky A golden business boy will watch the North End die And sing I love this town Then let his arcing wrecking ball proclaim
I hate Winnipeg (Sioux Falls)
So a foot soldier who actually reads regional news sent me this article about TIFs. Talking points are always the same and I encourage you to read the entire piece;
Politically, TIF is seductive. It allows elected officials to claim they are “doing something” about development without raising taxes today. The costs are deferred, opaque and spread across future taxpayers. But the long-term consequences are real: higher property taxes, underfunded schools, distorted development patterns and growing dependence on subsidies for projects that should stand on their own.
Pretty common sense stuff. Right? And the folks who wrote this article are not a couple of jokesters;
Julie Risser is an Edina City Council member. She previously served on Edina’s Planning Commission and Energy and Environment Commission. David Schultz is Hamline University Distinguished Professor of Political Science. Previously he served as a city director of planning, zoning and code enforcement and also as a housing and economic planner.
I have read hundreds of articles over the past decade about the destructive nature of TIF’s and have never understood why local governments get sucked in, besides the fact they are getting their personal palms greased, but I have never heard the word ‘SEDUCTIVE’ used. It makes SOOO much sense now. Not only are our national politics ruled by money and power (The taxpayers of this country just paid for a military operation to take the oil resources of an independent nation, wrap your F’ing head around that!!!) but now our local politics are now too. I think the upcoming city election is an opportunity for citizens to stand up this money machine and elect folks who won’t tolerate it any more. Don’t be ‘seduced’ by snake oil salespeople.
MY HOPES FOR THE NEXT ADMINISTRATION (Mayoral)
Somebody asked me last night what would be my ideal outcome of the next city election, and I gave a longer answer then I expected;
Greg Jamison as mayor, Christine Erickson as Public Information Officer, Joe Batcheller as his Planning Director and Jamie Smith as his Housing and Community Development director AND I would hire a trained monkey to be the city attorney. Notice I said ‘trained’.
I can guarantee you the reason funding was cut from the MCC was because DHS and the Feds threatened ALL Federal Funding to the city if they didn’t cut immigration services funding to orgs like LSS. This has nothing to do with making ‘tough choices’ this is just blatant racism from Sally and his cohorts and the city could have lost millions in Federal grants for infrastructure projects. Will the city ever tell us this? Highly unlikely.
I’m telling you, the RICH PARTY in Sioux Falls stays on TOP because they control the money and they take the money.
Notice I call it Falls Park and not THE FALLS. The first thing the next mayor needs to do is take down that stupid looking 1982 jacket vest colored sign and replace if with a new quartzite sign that says ‘Falls Park’. So if any future mayors try to do the same thing, it will be a little bit harder to replace. I still don’t know how a mayor can just make that decision on his own with executive authority? That should have gone thru public hearings with the naming committee, historic board, the parks board, the planning commission, the rubberstamp arts commission and a vote of the city council. Heck, the next mayor needs to do just that to get it changed back! So much corruption at city hall. When I bitched to someone about this who works at city hall they kind of said to me like ‘Who cares.’ and I was like, ‘How would you like it if he renamed Fawick Park, Sanford Park and replaced David with that goofy Happy Chef looking statue that sits on the Sanford campus.’ They had a change of heart.
LOOK HOW BEAUTIFUL WE COULD MAKE FALLS PARK WITHOUT SPENDING MUCH ON PERMANENT INFRASTRUCTURE
If you have ever been to the Butchart Gardens in Victoria, BC, Canada, you know what I am talking about. It is one of the gems of this coastal city. When I lived in the Pacific Northwest I made a couple of trips to Victoria (before 9/11 so all you needed was an ID to enter the country and empty your pockets before getting on the ferry. I saw them make an old lady cry because she couldn’t take her peaches with her. The attendant was like, ‘Mam, this is a 45 minute ride and there is a huge food court at the dock’.) Victoria is on a peninsula thingy so driving there is a pain in the ass, so peeps drive from Seattle to Port Angeles and take a 45 minute cruise in open ocean. I tell you this because we came back on high tide once and I was as green as cucumber.
Internationally renowned, the 55-acre display garden located near Victoria, British Columbia was created in 1904 by Jennie Butchart. Still privately owned and operated by family descendants, The Gardens is a National Historic Site of Canada. Open every day of the year, welcoming over one million visitors annually.
You just get lost in there. I would recommend the city fund a trip so a councilor, parks manager and parks board member can go see this in person. We could do this at Falls Park using native flowers and grasses and really turn Falls Park into a nature wonderland instead of a Six Flags.
There is also a bigger idea in all of this. If you read the Buchart website you will notice it is privately owned with volunteers. You could get corporate sponsorship’s for the garden beds at Falls Park that could pay for the little maintenance they will need or even have a team of volunteers. If the Pavilion can use volunteers to operate it’s Great Hall, then why can’t the city have volunteers maintain Falls Park?
There are so many opportunities to bring in the community on this and make it the talk of the midwest, but if contractors in this town don’t get a contract every 5 minutes to poor concrete over our parks, they get nervous and city hall folds like a cheap suit.
So someone tipped me off that the sudden change in the board at Mt. Pleasant Cemetery had to do with the forced sale of Gage Brothers to a competitor in Minnesota. Read the comments from the above post. WOW!
Complicated. I encourage everyone to read all the posts from the beginning (if you FF thru the deer pics and remodeling projects 🙂 there is some juicy stuff in there, like this;
Oct 27
I’m posting this morning about my conversation today with Kayla Kleman in the department of consumer affairs in the attorney general’s office.
Her response was that all complaints were forwarded to the new board for response to all of your complaints.
My previous letter of August 29th states that she sent the complaint to the previous board and they did not respond in 20 days. She would not send me anything in writing. Please contact Marty Jackley and ask why this problem is being pushed off on the new board!Call 1 800 300 1986. Remember he said he would help if enough people were involved. NO HELP SO FAR!
Funny how Marty gets in front of the camera a lot these days trying to track down cartoon porn, drug dealing prison guards and extensive fraud throughout state government, but when there is obvious tax fraud, malfeasance, and disappearing funds the AG office goes radio silence to protect certain folks. Reminds me of Marty covering up the sexual harassment scandal at DCI and claiming Pat and Gant did nothing wrong in the SOS office because they didn’t steal money from the petty cash draw (just historic flags and intellectual data, no biggie) all the while our current mayor was playing server musical chairs with Dakotawusscollege.
I guess if I was the NEW board of Mt. Pleasant, I wouldn’t want Marty’s help, I would go straight to the Feds. If you think you are going to get any help from Pierre you would probably have better luck finding the LOSER that stole your Christmas Wreath.
I would see if you can get a retired attorney to help you navigate this fiasco and sue the former board and get your money back.
This is a classic case of established rich folks in town taking regular folks to the cleaners and suffering no consequences. No surprise, this state is so corrupt I’m not surprised it hasn’t collapsed on itself.
UPDATE: I guess Rich Merkouris talked about the MCC and Data Centers on this podcast. Ellis tried to claim that if this Data Center meets the criteria of the rezone the council doesn’t have a choice but to approve it. Yes, this is TRUE, but they DON’T meet the criteria;
As you can see compatibility should be somewhere between 1-5. If any of those numbers are 4 or below they CAN deny the re-zone. This is EVEN worse since the Compatibility is NA. WTH?
As for the MCC they did apply for funding and were denied. But it sounds like they may be working on something. Sneve asked him if the public is perceiving the council as prejudice towards immigrants by cutting these programs. Merkouris said he didn’t see the correlation because they fund the Dudley house and that population is diverse. That is true, but most of them are natural born citizens and not immigrants, also there is difference between teaching English and housing someone on a cold night. A big difference. And if you don’t educate immigrants they may end up at the Dudley.
We all know why this happening. It’s Trump’s war on brown people and the orgs that provide services to them. It has been a wet dream of Republiscum for decades to kill Luthern Social Services. I guess I don’t care WHO teaches immigrants English, maybe the School District should be doing it but killing needed services without having a full review of their programming is awful. According to Merkouris this went thru several review processes (all in closed door behind the scenes meetings). They just never learn!!!! And that is the one thing that bothered me most about the interview. Ellis and Sneve of course take the side of government and feel they should approve the Data Centers because they are simply following the law (they are NOT) and the citizens opinion doesn’t matter (Sneve made a wisecrack about it.) I would expect those two to say these things, but what astonished me was how Merkouris kept justifying these steps by following the proper procedures (they are not, because this stuff is not being done transparently). Not one single time did Merkouris acknowledge he works for the people of this community, and I think that says it all. We know who butters the council’s bread, and it ain’t Joe Smoe.
As for approving the Data Centers under current zoning regs that part is also troublesome. It is obvious to me they are trying to pull permits and break ground before July 1, 2026. Why? Because if the legislature passes regs this session they would likely go into affect on July 1st, so if they start building before then they don’t have to follow the new laws because they will be grandfathered in.
To tell you the truth, the council should just defer this rezone until July 2, 2026, and force them to follow the new regs. But that would take foresight and vision. 🙂
Original Post ——–
So when the mayor dropped his bomb right before Christmas eliminating funding for MCC and several other non-profits I suspected the council would be working behind the scenes to restore the funding or work out a long-term solution. Who am I freaking kidding?! So I went radio silence after the announcement because I wanted to see how the council would handle this without me rattling them. I usually email, call or text 1 or 2 councilors a week. Ever since this announcement I have said nothing and I have not gotten any messages from them about what they are working on.
They are ‘probably’ working on something behind the scenes, but it is radio silence. I also found the timing of the cancellation a total A$$HOLE move. But we don’t need to go into that.
When there are hot topics with the city I usually have a couple of people ask me about the issue. On this one, people are crawling over each other to talk to me about it. No kidding. Last night at the Orion Pub I had over a dozen individuals ask me about it. I know that’s not scientific, but shocking to me. It’s bad and the little game of cutting funding right before Christmas when city government is on a 2 week vacation is NOT encouraging.
Believe it or not, I am urging the council to do NOTHING. Let this funding relapse occur.
So why do I want them to do nothing?
I watched the library funding fiasco and how the council was put in a corner because of the turd in the corner office. Don’t do this again! Let the mayor own this. Let the public inform him of his bad decisions. You let this guy get away with soooo much, then you take the blame, and cry in the corner. Probably one of the weakest councils I have seen in 20 years. You need to eat more STEAK! LOL.
DATA CENTER NEEDS TO BE KILLED AT THE BALLOT BOX
As I mentioned before I think a petition drive CAN be done to stop this, but it will take HUNDREDS of volunteers and the cooperation of many orgs. I have mentioned these before;
• Sustainability Task Force (these folks spent months developing a plan only for the mayor to have his pumpkin pusher take a leak on it).
• National Dem Party, the State Dem party or at least the Minnehaha County Dems.
• The mayoral campaigns of Batcheller and Smith.
• Knobe’s group The Change Makers.
• Indivisible 605 (They organize the No Kings Rallies, and actually have one planned on the same day the council will approve the rezone on Data Center. The rally ends at 5 PM and I would encourage everyone to attend and speak at the city council meeting at 6 PM against the rezone, even if they will still vote yes, this will be important to the petition drive publicity).
I think these folks, if teamed together could get 10,000 sigs in less then 24 days! I would also unify advocates! I often roll my eyes at supposed local advocacy groups who write a couple letters to the editor and send STERN emails to legislators. Give it up. Real advocacy happens in the field, talking to folks on the ground.
I think this petition drive could be uniting, even if you don’t get the sigs or some judge with deep pockets in the city throws it out, it will send a clear message that the citizens are fed up with the city council making poor decisions that affect our daily lives and expenses.
We WILL SEE if these groups act or just drink tea, eat gummies and write letters that no one reads 🙂 Kinda like how I run my blog 🙂 and that is why I could never do it alone. Hey folks! It takes a village! But yah gotta leave your hut.
l3wis 
