Not sure, but I will lay this out for you. Around a year ago or so MPO (Metropolitan Planning Organization of Sioux Falls) had a zoom meeting. At the meeting were several city administrators I believe from Tea, Canton and Mayor TenHaken. The city manager of Harrisburg could NOT attend so he designated a private contractor who was the city’s acting (part-time) planning director at the time (they just recently pulled back after hiring Watertown’s Planning person). The ‘fill-in’ at the meeting said the discussion quickly turned to the dividing line between SF and Harrisburg and Poops adamant distinction of HWY 101 being that line. The ‘fill-in’, a former city of Sioux Falls engineer, disagreed with the mayor and said that is not ‘definitive’ and never has been. Then the mayor proceeded to accuse this person of lying about what he ‘knows’ and what he believes (I am still waiting for the minutes from the meeting). Besides the meeting itself being a little rough and contentious it was what Poops did after the meeting that was really petty. He instructed that MPO changes it’s meeting rules only to include city employees as fill-ins and not private contractors. While I agree, seemed it a little odd you would send your private contractor to this meeting, BUT, they were discussing planning and development and he was the acting planning director for Harrisburg, so it made sense at the time. I just find it incredibly insecure and petty to make a rule change because you didn’t like a private citizen telling you what was up in an a official meeting so you change the rules. You got a lot of issues man.
UPDATE: A city official told me this proposal was purely administrative and the council had little to do with this idea.How can the mayor authorize funds that are Federal housing grants at 0% interest? Good question. The council controls the purse and they need to put their foot down on this one and base the interest rate on income.
So the city has decided to create a whole new set of grifters, historic home owners;
The City’s Historic Preservation Loan Program offers a zero-interest loan to homeowners who live in residential historic districts or have an individually listed property on the National Register of Historic Places. The goal of the loan program is to help homeowners restore historic properties.
Don’t get me wrong, as you know I am a gigantic proponent of Community Development loans as I was once a recipient, and I have suggested to city council over the past decade to ramp up the program and have city employees engage homeowners in lower income neighborhoods. Former councilor Janet Brekke actually tried to get some legislation passed that would offer a pilot program doing just this and she was told to pound sand by not only City Hall but her fellow councilors.
Just drive around Whittier and Pettigrew and you will find that a large percentage of these properties need repair and this is where our community development could step in AND SHOULD.
I have a feeling a certain grifter who has received thousands of dollars from city coffers for his ‘historic projects’ pushed for this. One grift just isn’t enough for this guy.
I don’t have a problem with giving these people actual loans, I believe historic homes need to be preserved, but a 0% interest rate? Really? While most people who own these homes are wealthy and own multiple properties we literally have homes falling apart in these other neighborhoods, why not a 0% interest rate for these folks? Why does the mayor dislike poor people so much?
Welcome to ‘Grift Falls’ where the wealthy get to play with our money and pay no returns. I encourage the council to get involved and change the interest rate based on income, like MOST community development loans work (I think I paid a 2% rate, but could have avoided paying any of it back until the home sells). In other words, many of these folks won’t even make one payment back to the coffers and wait until they croak or sell before we get our money back.
The most frustrating part is that I warned previous planning chair Janet Kittams that they need to say why they are recusing themselves, what item, who they work for, etc. She blew me off, but no surprise, they all eat from the same government trough. In fact, it is in city ordinance and state law that they MUST disclose why they are recusing themselves. I noticed a couple of years ago that the Planning (rubber stamp) Commission started pushing stuff in the consent agenda. And for good reason, the members have so many conflicts they started pushing those conflicts into a consent agenda so they would seem ethical. But when you recuse yourself you MUST tell us WHY and what ITEM. The new chair, Bradyn Neises, who works for Bender Realtors, has a clear conflict, but he can’t tell us what it is. Our city government is so corrupt it is almost laughable. The planning commission should consist of RETIRED developers who don’t have a skin in the game, or just regular folks who work in development or construction. The planning commission is made up of grifters. Every single one of them has grifted from the city, and they sit on this board to make sure the grifting continues. That’s it, there is NOT one single person on that board that is not benefitting from taxpayer revenue, and it is disgusting.
It also got better at the end of the meeting where the chair decided he had some muscle after eating cookies in the anti-room while they were approving his projects and he cut off a public comment inputer before they were adjourned. It was a serious DICK move, and totally militant anti-open government. Why do they even record these meetings? Why not just do it in an opium den in the basement of Carnegie? You obviously don’t want to be honest and forthright with the public, so why keep putting on the act? The Planning Commission is a ‘Basket of Grifters’ and little else. It’s time to ween these sucklings.
A tweet by mayor PTH on December 31, 2024, praising a contractor city bond lawyer, suggested potential coming economic disasters we must prepare for, likely to start in 2025, affecting us for many decades to come.
Every time a bond payment is made on any for the local play palaces our mayors Paul or Mike insisted get built, it costs us taxpayers. Every one of the payments is part of our tax burden. Each of the buildings, swimming pools, event centers, offices, and parking ramps, was a creation of their egos at our expense. Every one of the bond payments came from somewhere, starving something else. Now the city is planning to build roads using bonds over time with interest expense paid to be paid by the limited 2nd penny. These bonds must have money from somewhere. The city adopted the infrastructure 2nd penny sales tax to build required infrastructure. It is still money coming from taxpayers. Very little of the 2nd penny is coming from out of town. Debt is debt and must be paid somehow by us. None of the bonds have benefited the many, only the few.
Remember a few short years ago when mayor Paul got upset because a city council member clearly articulated the infrastructure project was going to strip money from the taxpayers by increasing water & sewer bills? The councilmember wanted a clear statement of how much it was to cost and how the burden was to be paid. The mayor and his staff claimed a low figure just to say she was wrong. Guess what, they lied. Each of our mayors have tried to be clever by claiming their projects were not going to cost us anything. In the end, each one of their projects were not built to the claimed high standards or for the price stated. Once built, each were not taken care of properly because the city didn’t have the 1st penny operating money necessary for upkeep.
Each convinced us the “great investments” in play palaces, will not cost us, only pay dividends. There is no way to get something for nothing and the worst part it is usually only for a place to play. The average taxpayer must be burdened so the developers and flim-flam promoters can play. Sure, every tourist who comes to Sioux Falls to witness our boom town by the falls may pay some sales tax, but like the Denty, the minuscule sales tax collected by the activities don’t come close to paying the wear and tear upkeep on the buildings, much less cover the bond payments. The dividends went to the contractors hired to save the mess from disaster.
We the taxpayers lose money on every act or show that comes to Sioux Falls. The minuscule sales tax does not replace the dollars that are stripped from our local businesses and their chance to survive. These events send our potential economic multiplier out of town promoters, stopping the circulation of the money in our town by sending to far off lands, never to be seen again. Temporary memories for long term pain. Dividends at our expense.
Sioux Falls has historically suffered less when the national economy has tanked, because we have had good local multiplier effect. By promoting the ego gratifying celebrity groups coming to Sioux Falls every year, takes hundreds of millions of multiplier dollars out of our area economy. Just to say Pink, Elton John or some half-assed Nashville celebrity is coming to town to take away more of our money. Dividends at our expense.
So, we already have witnessed how stripping money out of a community kills solid future growth of many cities. We already have experienced the waste, building of play palaces we can’t afford to keep up. Just look at the poor construction of the Denty, the financial frauds and lies committed in the administration building, the settlements and huge payments on the underused and poorly conceived bunker ramp and you will see the egos of the bonders and city officials had to be protected. Dividends at our expense.
Being proud of bonding $545 million is jarring and now our “wise city leaders” want to scam an unnecessary $70 million for pools plus another $400 million out of us taxpayers for more farfetched dreams of reviving a dying convention business, by building another set of buildings we will never be able to afford. If the rumored insider deals being discussed are true, we Sioux Falls taxpayers will be paying in many more ways than just taxes and lost economic multipliers, we may see court hearings and more. Dividends at our expense.
Do you remember The Music Man? The production could have been based on the music men parked in 9th and Main corner offices. Our leaders are still playing the parts written by Meredith Willson, that of liars, charlatans, and just plain scammers, like the Iowa based Music Man civic leaders. They all drank the juice of the salesman selling dreams. Dividends at our expense.
The Music Man was about a con man promising to teach the town’s children to play in a marching band, if they people buy his scam. The musical was set in 1912, in the fictional town of River City, Iowa, based on the writer’s birthplace of Mason City, Iowa. The production popularized songs like “Seventy-Six Trombones,” “Trouble” and “Gary, Indiana”. Well, the show had a happy ending, but it showed the gullibility of our midwestern small towns dreaming of being something that they can never be, except to be gullible to the flim-flam salesman. We small towners continue to compare to big cities and dream of being something that can never be except gullible to the latest flim-flam salesman selling bonds. We never seem to learn the lessons of our past. Dividends at our expense.
The Music Man may have had a fictional happy ending, but I don’t hold out hope for Sioux Falls. I will leave you with this final thought, when will we not be gullible suckers of the latest our community’s Music Man?
The city’s parking ramp on Mall Avenue also remains a prospective redevelopment site.
“It’s not costing the taxpayers a dime to have it sit there, so we’re not in a huge rush to have something,” TenHaken said. “The time will come and the market will change, and it’s still a valuable piece of land. We still get interest and inquiries.”
Maybe it was Poops attempt at humor at the end of the year, but it’s not funny, and it is definitely NOT FREE. In fact a major chunk of the parking department’s revenue goes towards the bond payments, there is also maintenance and paying workers to maintain the facility. I figured a few years ago about 60-80% of the years total revenue in parking goes towards the bonds and maintenance on this ONE facility which takes away from other parking upgrades downtown.
It’s costing us . . . a lot.
Poops knows he f’d this up and he could have stopped it but he cowered to the bondsters and gave in (because he is an extremely poor leader). He could have gained support on the council to cancel the bond but he did what he normally does, ignore the gorilla in the room hoping they will go away. Many want to blame Huether, but old elbow assaulter didn’t sign off on the bonds, Poops did. This is all on him. I still laugh at the presser he gave with Lamont saying he was good for the investment because he gave the city a letter saying so (a last will and testament on a bar napkin would have more legal precedent). Poops does everything by the seat of his pants and wonders why they turn out the way they do, then lies about the result. Here’s the deal, PAUL, we are paying dearly for your F’up, DEARLY, but instead of taking the blame you just lie. When you call yourself a Christian, I just shake my head. I attended Catholic and Lutheran services growing up, and I never recall a minister or priest saying it was okay to lie as long as you are covering up a screwup. You are a fraud.
l3wis 