Janet Brekke

UPDATE: Why is the City of Sioux Falls offering 0% interest loans for Historic Homes?

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 water problem with Wholestone’s packing plant

Recently Joe Kirby wrote a post about why another slaughterhouse is NOT a good idea for Sioux Falls;

Slaughterhouses are a horrible fit for our community. Affordable housing and workforce availability are already huge concerns. The idea of adding lots of difficult, low-paying, low-skill jobs, the type that have traditionally been a drag on our progress and success, makes no sense to me. And expanding the presence inside our city of an industry which has long caused pollution problems in our river and air makes no sense. I simply don’t understand why we would want more of this in Sioux Falls.

I agree, I don’t want another slaughterhouse built, but I would much more prefer there was an effort to not only STOP Wholestone but to close down Smithfields.

The issue with this entire fiasco has nothing to do with Wholestone vs. the Citizens vs. the City, it has to do with South Dakota voters, including right here in Sioux Falls who vote against their own interests. When the City Council passed Shape Places, several citizens said this was a bad thing and wanted to see some changes to the zoning ordinances, so they referred it to a vote. The development community along with some councilors said nothing to see here, move along, and the voters ultimately passed the original plan.

The argument then is still the argument today, Shape Places took power away from the council to make conditional use decisions, and when you take power from our citizen representatives, you take power from us.

I think if the council still had that power instead giving total control over to the developers Wholestone would have been denied by the Council or scaled way back and it has little to do with water quality or air quality, it has to do with water supply.

Where do you think WF will get their water? The reason WF is building within the city limits has nothing to do with the labor market, it has to do with using city resources, they will be using a lot.

Besides letting the developers take over almost all branches of city government we have also let them plan this city instead of the government and citizens;

Granted, the city does a lot of planning. It has a parks plan, a capital spending plan, a downtown plan and much more. But I am not aware of any sort of comprehensive plan for our city with direct participation of the mayor and council.  In support of that, some council members and candidates have told me they wished they could be involved in that sort of big-picture, strategic planning. If there was such a plan, I doubt it would have included the phrase, “add more slaughterhouses”.

This is something Janet Brekke stressed in her entire 4 years on the council. Her colleagues on the dais ignored her and did nothing. I think if she would have gotten re-elected and we would have changed a couple of other seats, Brekke would have been successful moving it forward.

Once again, in Sioux Falls and the rest of the state we continue to vote against our own best interests, and until that changes, you will see NO change in the status quo; DEVELOPERS RUN OUR CITY.

Mayor TenHaken pens rare Op Ed

Imagine my surprise when I found this Op Ed by the Mayor in the Argus today. I can’t remember the last time he wrote an Op Ed in the Argus (or should we say one of his minions). I suspect there has been some push back by VIPs in the community about crime prevention;

Our per-capita violent crime rates have been largely flat for the past decade, and that is true again for 2022.

While this is true when you compare to population growth, the crimes have become more violent and drug related. I’m not putting this entirely on PTH, even though he has had 4 years to do something about it. The past two police chiefs essentially hid in their offices doing little to address the drug related crimes. Chief Thum has decided to tackle it with 1,000 times more transparency than the last couple of guys but he does need the mayor, his boss, to step up.

The Sioux 52 Mentoring Initiative was set up to intentionally begin addressing challenges we were seeing with juvenile crime. 

I commend this program. Mentoring is essential to help keep youth out of trouble. After winning re-election PTH handed the program over to the HelpLine Center. I’m fine with that except when an elected official starts an initiative they need to stick with even after leaving office. It’s one thing to applaud mentoring programs but on the other hand turn them over to a private entity.

Crime largely has to do with economic status. I don’t believe middle class and lower middle class individuals in Sioux Falls ever fully recovered from the 2008 recession in which wages were frozen for several years. While businesses complain they can’t find workers and can’t afford to pay more, the problem is they never kept up to begin with, wages were stagnant for over a decade while the cost of housing has skyrocketed. The math just doesn’t add up.

It’s the tale of two cities. Over the summer I have decided to ride my bike through neighborhoods (logging almost 3,000 miles since last November) and came to the conclusion that 18th street (west to east) is the dividing line. The further South you go the better the residential neighborhoods, the further North, not so much. While there are pockets like extreme NE and NW for the most part the city is divided in economic status, infrastructure upgrades and housing.

When Janet Brekke was on the council she pushed hard for a pilot program to fix up some of these neighborhoods which would have required a heavy lift from the city when it comes to infrastructure. The solution the city offered was slab on grade tract homes between Brandon and Washington HS. Hardly what Brekke was envisioning. If we don’t address building density in our core for affordable housing in this community ASAP I’m afraid crime is only going to get worse.

Fighting crime means fighting for a more sustainable economy in Sioux Falls, FOR EVERYONE! As that line on 18th street gets wider crime is only going to rise.

The Ethically Challenged Council votes against Ethics Training, 3-5

To tell you the truth, when a majority of the council voted against Councilor Brekke’s Ethics training tonight, I started laughing, because the ones that voted NO looked like complete fools.

During the 2nd Reading, Janet even added that the ethics training was endorsed by the Ethics board.

Without discussion they voted. Brekke, Starr and Selberg (I think he was confused) voted Yes and the rest NO. The best part was when councilor Neitzert was the last vote and he had to think about it, you know, the guy who was impeached for an ethics violation.

These people are so tone deaf.

They also deferred Janet’s annotated agenda ordinance to July (which means it will be killed). Janet said it best, “You can still pass this tonight and tweak it later.”