LETTER: City needs to take a close look at spending

Talk about it

To the Editor:

This is a sincere compliment to The Daily Republic for several different current and past issues. I would like to connect some of the dots.

Current issues are a new events center and a new city hall costing about $10 million. Past issues are the water treatment plant, the Hitchcock swimming pool and the balloon museum.

Their total cost was about $10 million. The water treatment plant is non-functional and operating at 1 percent of capacity, according to my information. The swimming pool was a recent subject of an article and not supporting itself. No additional parking was funded (where the tennis courts are) which has created the most dangerous location in Mitchell for young swimmers to cross a busy street. Also, it is one lane short for competition and for not much more could have had a roof for all season use. The Balloon Museum turned into a joke and we were lucky to have an investor bail us out of that.

So, what am I saying here? We should have beamed ourselves forward when they were on the table to discuss their frailties which have now surfaced. Let’s beam forward on any new project. Your newspaper just discussed going digital for public records and with 66 counties in this state; I can predict this is the future for all records.

When there is an empty drill floor on the second floor of city hall, there is literally no end to what that space can be used for instead of constructing a new city hall. What with the new Sanford Pentagon in Sioux Falls, and Rapid City constructing an events center, there is no way for Mitchell to compete. We bonded to replace the city hall to discover (afterwards) it is a historic building. We bought into property of no value near Main Street to discover demolition costs and we still do not have all estimates.

I could go on and on, but the city council needs to be seated where they have a mirror to look at themselves during a meeting instead of looking at each other.

Tags: city council, opinion, updates, letters, budget, spending, local, mitchell