By Dave Baumeister
County Correspondent
SIOUX FALLS – Even though the matter had previously been resolved, the dropped Home-Rule charter came back up at the end of the Tuesday, Aug. 6, Minnehaha County Commission meeting.
The regular agenda had been filled with items of a more routine nature, but toward the end, when it came time for public comments, John Cunningham of Minnehaha County spoke in favor of the idea behind Home Rule, although he wasn’t specifically referring to the latest draft that had been brought up and dropped last month.
In his comments, Cunningham spoke of the blanket autonomy of elected county officials.
He gave two examples of things that could happen under the present system. These were both “what if” scenarios and did not apply to anything that is happening now or has ever happened in Minnehaha County.
First, he referred to a possible sexual harassment complaint against an elected official, and second, he spoke of a “white supremacist” candidate being elected and deciding to purge his staff of “undesirables.”
Cunningham said that in those cases, the elected official would keep his job, but the county and county commissioners would be the ones sued.
“If this would happen with another department head, whom you appoint, you have lots of options to make sure it doesn’t happen again,” he said. “You can demote, retrain, dismiss the person, but you have ways of making sure it doesn’t happen again.
“With elected officials your only option is to wait for the next lawsuit.
“That’s not a good organization. No management professional would ever recommend this.”
(County commissioners are different than other elected county officials, in that the commission has its own set of rules which govern the behavior, and ethics of the members.)
After that, frequent commentor Gary Meyers, also of Minnehaha County, demanded commissioners to tell people what the status was of the Home-Rule issue, and waited for a response, even though commissioners reserve public comment time for just that, public comment.
Commission chair Dean Karsky did feel the need to explain this again, and he added that questions could be addressed by commissioners during the agenda item for non-action business, which was exactly what happened at this meeting.
During the final non-action item, Commissioner Joe Kippley explained that the same day Home Rule was originally discussed at the July 16 meeting, it was apparent that the majority of commissioners were not interested in pursuing it at that time, effectively killing the issue for now.
Karsky further explained that while the proposal they had had gone through several steps of vetting by various groups, he added that if Home Rule were to be considered again, it would need to come from a citizens’ group.
Although there was never a time when the date of “August 6” was established for any kind of vote on the issue, Karsky said that if the matter were to go on the November General Election ballot, that would need to be agreed to by Aug. 6.
However, that point became a moot issue on July 16.
The next meeting will be at 9 a.m., Tuesday, Aug. 20, in the third-floor meeting room of the Minnehaha County Administration Building at 6th and Minnesota in Sioux Falls.
