May 31, 2026

I’d never seen a to-do list quite like it.

Former city planning director Mike Cooper handed it to me a few weeks ago — handwritten, the length of a single-spaced page and filled with unfinished business.

“Commercial development gaps,” it read on the first line.

Underneath were stretches of roads with underutilized development opportunities along them: Cliff Avenue from Rice Street to 26th Street, 10th Street from Cliff to Cleveland avenues, and 12th Street from Minnesota to Kiwanis avenues, to name a few.

From there, Cooper had gone on to list individual sites, largely downtown and in core neighborhoods. There were vacant properties in the Pettigrew Heights neighborhood, he pointed out. Empty properties on Russell Street. There’s the proposed Riverline site, the South Dakota State Penitentiary site and, of course, the still underdeveloped downtown parking ramp site.

I agreed with every line on that list — and easily started mentioning more locations that could lengthen it.

“What will we do about all these?” Cooper asked.

He meant “we” in the collective sense — as in the community — because if you’ve spent any time in public service, as we both have, you learn local government rarely accomplishes any visionary project alone.

But our conversation soon moved to the next mayor, whomever that will be, and the significant task of addressing this list in the years ahead.

I shared the list with Cooper’s successor, Jeff Eckhoff, who was equally struck by it.

He retired last week after seven years of leading planning and development services, overseeing multiple record building years as the city exceeded $1 billion. Cooper oversaw plenty of those, too, spending 14 years as planning director and 32 years total in city government.

Before him was Steve Metli, who served a record 31 years leading city planning, from the original concept for the River Greenway to the groundbreaking of Phillips to the Falls.

We have been fortunate to have had more than 50 years of solid leadership in that department. That’s incredible to consider. Now, one of the first, most critical tasks facing the next mayor is to choose a new city planning director. It’s one of multiple vacancies on the city department leadership team and also the one most crucial to the business community and the broader approach to how our community will be shaped in the years ahead.

It’s that person, likely more than any one mayor, who is in a position to influence whether the gaps Cooper addressed get filled.

All I know is if I were doing the job interviews, this list would be part of the conversation. “Tell me the first three items you’d tackle on here and the approach you’d take to doing so.” The answer would say a lot about the sort of leader who would serve the community.

From my perspective, we need someone in that chair inclined to think more like an entrepreneur than a stereotypical government official. I had a chance to speak to the planning department last year, and that was part of my message to them: If your job essentially involves simply waiting for an applicant to walk in the office with a building or development plan, you not only are selling your role short but also doing a disservice to the community and setting yourself up for the danger of disengagement.

These should be among the most sought-after roles in a growing city for people inclined to think entrepreneurially. For Cooper’s list to get any shorter, the next planning director must lead with that mentality. That means identifying opportunities for redevelopment and facilitating the conversations with public-private partners to help bring them to fruition.

Eckhoff was intrigued enough by the list to suggest that some of us who have done this for a while get together and brainstorm around it. I agree and would take that a step further — proposing that the next mayor assemble a small standing group of community-minded individuals to continually look for ways to optimize our underutilized properties.

Of all the challenges a growing city faces, these are the fun ones. The ones where if you let yourself think big and find like-minded partners, you can create incredibly powerful reinvigorated places that help distinguish our community and shape what it becomes.

As we elect a new mayor this week, there’s a lot to take into consideration. But I find myself coming back to a simple truth: The mayor truly functions day to day as the city’s CEO. When I form an impression of any CEO, I look first for the vision and then for the ability to execute it — which starts with the team and is enhanced by the strategy. We don’t need a new vision for Sioux Falls. I think the one that the majority of our community seemingly is embracing will serve us well. But we need to execute on it.

I shared one to-do list with you, but let’s not kid ourselves: There’s a much longer one when we look broadly at the city, and we need a leader who can build the team to tackle it.