Imagine firefighters showing up to your house fire but not using all the water in their tank, even though the fire is spreading, because they brought too small a hose.
Imagine driving from Sioux Falls to Rapid City but stopping at Kadoka because you’re not sure you want to burn up the last quarter of a tank of gas that’s still in your car.
Imagine having a hundred pizzas at a really big party, but sticking 25 of them up in the attic and waiting for your hungry guests to figure out how the rickety old ladder folds out of the ceiling.
I’m sorry—I’m having to really rack my brains to think of a situation as absurd or performance as deliberately ineffectual as Governor Kristi Noem is presenting as she admits she hasn’t figured out how to distribute possibly a quarter of the $1.25 billion in coronavirus relief funds the federal government gave her to spend for the good of all South Dakotans:
The state received $1.25 billion in federal relief back in March. There’s about $585 million left unspent or unobligated that Gov. Kristi Noem and legislators want to give out as grants.
The grants are for businesses, business startups, nonprofits, community health providers and acute-care providers who can show they’ve been affected by the pandemic.
The application deadline was several weeks ago. About 6,000 applications came in. But those requests only total about $282 million – not quite half of the available funds.
…If some applications are denied, that would mean the final amount awarded could be even less than $282 million.
“At most, we would spend this amount,” [Bureau of Finance and Management Commissioner Liza] Clark told the Legislature’s Appropriations Committee on Wednesday. “The number will either stay the same or go down” [Seth Tupper, “State Struggling to Spend Hundreds of Millions in Remaining Covid Aid,” SDPB, 2020.11.18].
Is Kristi Noem really this stupid? The pandemic is raging through our state. Hospitals and schools are breaking under the stress. And even as the Governor pays a private firm $6 million to manage this massive private business grant program, she can’t get enough South Dakota firms to apply for all of the available money and pump that cash into their local economies to provide real help?
Kristi, this isn’t that hard. You could have that money coursing through our economic veins tomorrow if you weren’t waiting for a bunch of businesses to jump through all the hoops you’ve created in the business grant program. Write checks totaling $200 million to the school districts and tell them to hire all the extra teachers, tutors, and ed tech specialists they need to provide robust online education during their coronavirus quarantines. Write similar checks to the hospitals to hire more staff or just cover the medical bills of every person checking in with coronavirus.
Here’s a phrase you’ll rarely hear: Don’t overthink it, Kristi. Just spend the darn money.
The retired nurses that I know of, want to help but have health issues of their own so are afraid to get back in field because of this. PC should let nursing students get credit for assisting on supervised levels to help Aberdeen out. In the mean time don’t get in an accident, no room for other tragedies during this time. Abderdeen sent some patients to Gettysburg because of no room.
COVID Kristi, the Mistress of Doom & Profound Ignorance. Now I do think she is the perfect follow up to Trump. Who else is more capable of even greater incompetence than COVID Kristi?
“Way, way, way stupider” is always the answer to “Is Kristi Noem really this stupid”?
Just what one would expect in order that she can rally all the COVID deniers and deploy them to defend her around the state, effectively holding them and us hostage to herself until such a time that she disperses the $585 million.
I don’t think it’s as much stupidity as deliberate strategy on her part, however cockamamie and perverse.
To be succinct, my premise is that Noem is proselytizing those to her cause by holding them hostage to her inaction.
Noem only cares about herself and her own. Noem embodies ignorance unless it is to benefit her own!
All of which is to say that who question mask mandates with regard to how their business might be affected would just as well question why Governor Noem is sitting on some $585 million in undisbursed and appropriated funds meant for their COVID relief.
In South Dakota, it feels like we are living in a Hunger Games movie. The president and the governor have decided that massive numbers of people must die on the altar of economic prosperity and “personal freedom.” Enough people have been brainwashed to believe and act in this manner, that no matter what the rest of us say or do, the horror movie just gets worse. Covid-19 decides who must be sacrificed.
WTH is Noem and the GOP legislature not giving out the rest of the relief fund? What are they waiting for? Better watch them, SD. Was an allocation report even sent out to the people? MNs Governor Walz sent out a nice allocation report down to every last dollar which towns and cities and schools, hospitals and businesses were getting the funds. Open records like it should be.
In SD, you have to fight to see any simple transparency.
That money’s probably all gone on all the tourism/ move here ads she’s been buying around the country. Including in the latest issue of Martha Stewart’s Magazine.
Killer Kristi’s not necessarily stupid or ignorant but she is narcissistic, self-absorbed, and likely trying desperately to figure out how to get a share of those dollars for herself before either distributing them or turning them back. Expecting transparency from her or her Republican supporters will be rewarded with … nothing. They don’t have to, and they won’t. Remember, that a national poll said that the citizens strongly support her.
Maybe some more respirators would be good. We are running short here in Rapid City
Impeachment? Any Democrats up for putting that bill into Legislature?