Is it need or is it greed?

The Sioux Falls city council will vote on a resolution Tuesday night that would declare the city a "recovery zone."  What that means is the city could take in $1.5 to $2 million in stimulus money to pay for the interest on the 41st street bridge project.  But in order to qualify as a recovery zone, a city must have high poverty, high unemployment and general distress. And at least one city council member thinks that's not an accurate picture of Sioux Falls.

Sioux Falls hasn't totally been isolated from the recession. Jobs have been lost, businesses have closed and homes have been foreclosed.  That's why Sioux Falls Mayor Dave Munson feels strongly about passing the recovery zone resolution. 

"The program is there and it meets all the criteria we're asking it to meet and the federal government wants it to meet, so I don't have a problem with it," Munson said.

But one councilman thinks Sioux Falls shouldn't pass the resolution just to take easy money.

"To qualify you have to have high unemployment, you have to have high poverty, general distress and things like that," Kermit Staggers said.

Sioux Falls' unemployment rate right now is 4.7 percent. Nationally, it's 9.8 percent. Staggers thinks there are other cities around the country in worse economic shape than Sioux Falls.  Sioux Falls' poverty rate is 10.4 percent. South Dakota's is 13.1 percent.

"When I talked to people, one person said, 'Are you kidding that Sioux Falls has high poverty and has general distress and so forth?' And another person said, 'This is just greed here on the part of the city, wanting to get some easy money from the federal government,'" Staggers said

If the city passes the recovery zone resolution, it plans to use the money to raise the 41st Street bridge, so the 1,600 property owners in the new flood zone don't have to pay high flood insurance.

"If we don't do anything, the cost of what the insurance is going to be to cover that flood plain is going to be pretty dramatic.  It does have an economic impact directly on all those businesses in the Meadow out there that have a number of retail businesses," Munson said.