Even though the city has over 1,200 employees we still have to spend $34 million in professional services
l3wis 
Sioux Falls
Consulting and Professional Services fees doubling over the past three years for the City of Sioux Falls
Tonight’s informational meeting for the Sioux Falls city council could get a little ‘dicey’ to say the least. The audit that councilor Staggers asked for last summer has finally came out, and the results are astonishing. City Hall has done it’s best to stall the audit, saying Staggers’ request had political motives and what good would it be to know those amounts. As you can see below, there is a reason City Hall has been delaying the audit.
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Consulting fees jumped almost a 100% in two years and the most shocking is professional services jumped from $16 million to $34 million in 3 years. This is appalling on two fronts. First off the city should be spending less, not more, especially in this economy and I don’t care how out of control inflation may be, there is no excuse whatsoever for a $16 million dollar jump over a three year period. It is pretty obvious that there is a lot of hogs at the trough of city hall and Munson has the feeding pail. I hope Staggers takes them to task tonight over the out of control spending, we’ll see if Northside Davey has the gonads to show up to the meeting tonight.
And Monkeys might fly out of my ass
Toto, we are not in Kansas anymore – we are in the fantasy world of Sioux Falls
What many do object to, though, is the past practice of the city lowballing the cost estimates of such projects in order to gain civic approval. In particular, this time the city must be upfront with the taxpayers about the full cost of a new center, including the planning, financing and bonding costs and interest on borrowing.
Chet, I don’t want you to think I am insulting your intelligence, just your ignorance, by saying this; in order for the city to ‘sell’ this project to us, they must lie, they lied about the Pavilion (told us $21 million, we are at $40 million and counting).
1) They are bad managers of money
2) There solution to every problem is raising taxes
3) They know they must mislead as much as possible to sell us the Event Center
I think the Event Center is a good idea, but I disagree with almost every thing they are doing to get it built. Not only is the planning and cost estimates skewed, their funding solution (raising general retail taxes) is a horseshit way to pay for this thing.
It seems dishonesty in politics is the norm these days – and you can expect it when selling us the Event Center.
The irony of this goes back to that old saying, “Doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results.” I sometimes wonder if anyone at city hall knows what that means?
Munson’s State of the City Address
A couple more of these in Sioux Falls, and we will be living in Nirvana
I listened to this yesterday and was actually kind of impressed by Dave’s demeaner. The speech was chocked full of positive things going on in Sioux Falls. He touched on unemployment, but added we are doing better then other cities. There was some strange parts to the speech though, he talked about the Daly Village project like it was the stairway to heaven and if we didn’t complete Hwy 100 we would be missing out on other ‘big box’ store projects. This may be good news for city coffers in more tax revenue, but I am not sure how having two ‘Targets’ in Sioux Falls is going to make my life better. I thought he focused too much on that project, I felt it was pertinent to mention, but not that important. He also had to put a plug in for the event center, which was good – but no mention of how they plan to pay for it (get ready for the bilking). He also bragged about the task force he appointed and mentioned 3 members (ironically the only 3 that are regular Joes like the rest of us, and one of them handicapped). No mention of all the same old business men that sit on these boards (remember there is 18 members total). Like I said earlier, the speech was good, and I was pretty impressed by Dave’s optimism, especially that he mentioned the successful community development program and it’s positive affects on the community, but he still has very skewed priorities when it comes to government centered around citizens, and I still think we take a back seat to developers and big business.
A strange part of the speech was when he was talking about code enforcement. He made it sound like citizens needed to be ‘trained’ on how to maintain their property or pay the consequences. This kind of pissed me off, okay, it really pissed me off. Like I said in the Project TRIM meeting, 99.9% of property owners in SF are responsible people, why treat us like a bunch of little bratty kids for the .01% that are bad. Code enforcement should be ‘complaint basis’ only, I feel the city is overstepping their bounds with blanket code enforcement and I hope recent lawsuits and the next council and mayor put an end to the big brother mentality of the city.
I’ll leave you with a quote from Costello;
“As negative as things might have been in 2008, it was really a pretty good year for the city,” said council member Pat Costello.
Huh? sometimes I wonder if Argus Reporters just need to fill space so they put in a quote that has no relevance. I’m sure Pat meant that in a positive way, but reading it out of context makes you scratch your head and say, “So I’m losing my job or my paycheck is shrinking but the city keeps steaming ahead, with no cutbacks? How is that fair to me?” Well it is not.
Temporarily closing the city bike trail may save us from the Apocalypse
Apparently the Four Horseman could be riding in on the Big Sioux Creek, but don’t expect them to be on bikes.
Sam Trebilcock, a city transportation planner, said the trail will close from 49th Street to the dam just north of where the river and creek meet northeast of 26th Street for a city flood control project to raise the levees by 5 feet and build a dam.
“You know very well what happens in the news if we don’t do that,” Trebilcock said. “Grand Forks happens. What happened in huge catastrophic (quantities) in New Orleans happens if you don’t have a good levee system.”
First off, Sammy, Sioux Falls isn’t a soup bowl sitting below sea level. In fact you and I both know the real reason why the levees are getting built; an overly paranoid FEMA after Katrina started running around the country like a chicken with their heads cut off. Secondly, several studies have shown Sioux Falls is experiencing a moderate drought, and everyone knows we have low water tables here. I find it ironic that the same city that is begging the Feds for money to build the Lewis and Clark water pipeline (That we have borrowed millions to build, well because, we don’t have much water in Sioux Falls) would be going to the same Feds to ask for money for our levees.
Does Sioux Falls have the potential to flood? Sure, and precautions should be taken, but don’t act like it is the end of the world and cut the crap.