Something just smelled too fishy about this data center rezone the other night. I was astonished that not at least ONE councilor voted this down. Their asses were so puckered up Tuesday night you could have stuck a piece of coal up there before the meeting started and it would have been a polished diamond by the end.
Go back a few weeks before Christmas when Poops’ Christmas card included eviction notices to non-profits across the city (It was one of the most Christian things he has done 🙂 Most of the NGO’s cut service immigrant. I said that this was a threat from DC to cut ALL of our Federal funding (health, infrastructure, parks and rec, police, fire, housing, landfill, public transit, etc.)
This has been going on across the country, Trump has been cutting Federal funding to cities that don’t follow his agenda on immigration and AI and data centers.
It was NO coincidence that the developer of this project was associated with Peter Thiel who is a close advisor and investor with our president. Oh and the lobbyist who used to work for the former ND governor and now Secretary of Interior then In comes royalty from Castlewood, Kyle Peters who is married to one of Noem’s daughters, and the list goes on, even a professional link between the lobbyist and Mayor Metro-Yeti Karen Poops.
You know why the legislature is proposing a sales tax break to Data Centers? Because new Federal Regulation requires it and NO roadblocks to data centers or they will sue and cut Federal funding.
The sad part is that if this is what REALLY happened, the council needs to hold a press conference and be truthful with the public. This has all the signs of a shake down. Believe it or not, if the citizens see our local elected officials being bullied by DC, we WILL defend you. F’ck Em anyway, they can keep their dirty tariff money for more orange makeup, or is it hand cream this week?
The interesting factor will be if this makes it to the ballot? And if so, the citizenry votes it down. Will Sally still slice our tomato in half? We will see.
And where is Ironic Johnny, Marion and Dustbowl telling El’ Dictator he can’t dangle this crap in our faces?
Out to lunch.
Rounds was on Barfrage the other morning trying to justify the murder of a lesbian mother poet who was trying to help officers push out their stuck vehicle, then he went full hypocrite. He says that the corruption in MN state government needs to be reigned in and blamed Walz. That is real f’ing rich Marion! Mr. EB-5 and Gear-Up murder cover ups? A five foot branch, a murder suicide with a fire proof safe melting and millions in Federal funds missing? Let’s just say Janks may have invented state government corruption but you perfected it. You should be calling Walz and advising him on how to bury the bodies better, we hear you are a specialist, or at least that is what the wall of yarn tells us.
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.
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.
Make it easy for your customers to shop directly from their feeds. Sprout’s social commerce solution integrates social media into your sales funnel to offer faster customer service and sell instantly.
They specialize in social media marketing for major retailers. When will our city leaders figure our that city government isn’t a business? And if I have one more rich POS in Sioux Falls tell me government needs to run like a business and we need a CEO as a mayor, I am going to just remain silent and walk away.
I have been enjoying my almost weekly response to Jodi’s Journal. For full disclosure Jodi and I have a ‘news’ relationship. We talk when we see each other in public and we email frequently about things going on in the community and if you ever have a chance to speak with her in person, you are fortunate, because she is a loaded with information about our community, business and the economics of it all. So I found her article about shopping local intriguing, but the same old tired holiday journalism. I guess I am of the opinion that I would shop local if I could get what I wanted. I can’t. And most agree with me, just look at the latest financial report from the city;
The only retail sales that have weathered the storm is online remote retail in Sioux Falls (which I am thankful for). If this part of sales tax collection was NOT this strong in town, we would be so under water right now, it would be silly.
So why is this? Like I said, finding certain products at local retailers is a challenge, but it is NOT just that. There is the convenience of online shopping, also the speed of delivery is insane. Had a friend recently order a gadget he needed from Amazon and it was in stock at the SF warehouse. He had the piece in 45 minutes. There is also the cost factor. I have bought stuff on Amazon (same quality and brand) for a third of the price of a local retailer.
This is plain and simple economics. People are going to find the best deal. And if I can buy a case of Ramen noodles for a third of the cost of buying the same product at HyVee, which will I choose?
I think local retailers should specialize in unique items you can only get here and stop chasing some Little House on the Prairie merchantile.
But the article gets more juicy when our mayor, who is apparently a Metro-Yeti (c) says this (when talking about participation at the new refrigerated ice rink);
The numbers are “good but not great,” TenHaken said. “And it’s South Dakota. We expect this.”
Well, we should expect it. We also maybe need to be a bit better at powering through it. I’ll acknowledge it’s more convenient for me to sit inside, do phone interviews and write on days like we’ve had lately. But I also criss-crossed the town several times on our snowier days recently and was reminded it’s really not that difficult to go about the day more or less like normal.
“I grew up in Minnesota, and Minnesota learned to embrace winter. It’s in their culture. It’s in their DNA,” TenHaken added. “They have snow vests and Surly Brewing tasting events out in the snow. I think Jacobson Plaza is our first attempt to really embrace winter, and we need to go outside in the winter, whether it’s Great Bear or Jacobson Plaza or the downtown Holiday Plaza. You don’t have to stay inside.”
I know it is rare, but I agree with Paul 1,000%! When it comes to outdoor winter rec in Sux, peeps are gigantic p……………..!!!! GRAND CANYON SIZED!!!!
But, knowing that, why would you dump $16 million into a facility that would rarely get used? I think an indoor/outdoor ice facility would have been a better route and you could have ditched the playground, piss park, dog toilet and hamburger shop for a facility that people would actually use. But that takes vision. Doesn’t it?
The ‘Shop Local’ mantra makes me chuckle, because there is only a handful of developer welfare queens that run this town while stealing your money and making your lives miserable with low wages and crappy taxpayer services.
When I hear the mayor, any mayor, say ‘Shop Local’ in Sioux Falls, I just feel like saying, ‘DUH’ then look for my Amazon login.
l3wis 
