During regular public input at the beginning of the meeting several citizens spoke out about moving public input, including myself.
It was the last agenda item on the meeting and during that discussion they voted to move it to the end but did take Barth’s amendment to leave it at 5 minutes instead of 3. He was the dissenting vote.
I reminded the MCC that this was the public’s time and the word DISSENT is in the 1st Amendment.
I saw this coming when people concerned about election integrity and opposition to the CO2 pipeline started showing up to MCC meetings;
But having those comment sessions at the beginning of meetings delays other work. And members of the public who are at a meeting for a specific item have to sit through lengthier public comment sessions.
The new policy, which hasn’t been adopted yet, would also reduce comment from five minutes to three.
(See Former Mayor Mike Huether’s 9 minute public input at the MCC meeting as a private property owner)
They of course are using the tired old argument that the ONE person asking for a rezone has to wait through public input, as if the public’s sentiments are not important.
“When I started, we didn’t have a time constraint,” Commission Chairwoman Cindy Heiberger said. “People rarely came to talk to us.”
That has changed, particularly in recent months with people who doubt the county’s election integrity.
Besides lowering the time limit to three minutes, the new policy would forbid speakers from using electronic recordings in their presentations, and paper handouts would have to be handed out in advance.
The reason people rarely show up to the meetings is because you have them at 9 AM on a Tuesday morning when common folk are working, it has very little to do with people being HAPPY with county government, they simply don’t know what you do because you conduct your business in non-opportune time slots and take days to post the replay of the meeting.
Commissioner Jeff Barth, who is soon to be retired from the commission, said the status quo has worked “pretty well” in his two decades as an observer and member of the commission.
“The fact that there has been some abuse in recent times isn’t a reason to throw the baby out with the bathwater,” he said.
But that is what authoritarians do. When a couple of supposed bad apples show up and actually DISSENT the government their first reaction is to squash that dissent. The Sioux Falls City Council literally changed their public input policy because ONE person called the mayor an SOB, guess what, that person still comes and speaks at the meetings. You accomplished nothing except disenfranchising the rest of the public who have legitimate dissent.
As I have told the council in the past, general public input isn’t for birthday announcements and back patting it is to make our representative government aware of issues in the community. Sometimes those issues don’t have cute names like ONE, 52 or 437.
The more you limit the public to express themselves the more out of touch our government becomes.
I have heard from a couple of reliable sources that the aggregate company that wants to buy the fairgrounds has been circulating a presentation on different concepts of what to do with the old quarry once they leave it and start using the fairgrounds quarry (if the sale is successful). One concept is a quarry lake hotel like they recently opened in China. It is probably highly unlikely since it would cost hundreds of millions of dollars to construct and somewhat funny that they are even throwing the idea around. As I told someone about the concept, “It’s kinda of like what we were promised with the Denty and instead we got a polished (dented) turd.”
The below information was sent to me by Mike Zitterich (he notated where he got it)
Depending on what county and school district you live (within city limits) your debt could be anywhere between $2,000 and $3,000. My debt is $2,100 (Minnehaha, SFSD, City)
Besides the fact that the commission gave the green light for the pipeline to move forward (4-1 vote, Barth dissented) they also told the attendees there would be NO public input because the chair said it ‘wasn’t a public hearing.’ Ok, what the Hell would you call a public meeting with a posted agenda item? A church potluck?
14) Consider a Temporary Zoning Ordinance on Gas and Liquid Transmission Pipelines
They did follow state law by allowing general public input at the beginning of the meeting, but you are NOT allowed to comment on agenda items. I would encourage attendees to file an open meetings violation against the commission for denying them their 1st Amendment Rights and the use of Prior Restraint by the Chair. Barth asked for public input and the chair said they have pretty much heard enough thru phone calls and emails. So are those emails and phone calls going to be posted online so people can see those conversations?
l3wis 
