A tale of two Janet Brekke for Sioux Falls City Council letters.

I just heard a bit of a wild tale.

Remember this letter from the other day from Janet Brekke for Sioux Falls City Council that hit mailboxes last week?

This is a physical photograph of the hard copy of the letter that arrived in mailboxes. Which if you recall, I pointed out it’s awfulness, and disbelief it came out from a campaign because of glaring grammatical errors, etcetera.

After the letter hit the streets, I started hearing word of another letter and people were said to be unhappy because the above letter that went out might not be the letter that they’d agreed to sign.   I’ve been scouting around for that letter, and I was just able to get my hands on a screenshot of what, allegedly, people had been asked to sign at an early stage:

Now, the second letter has substantial similarities to the first one, including the line about sending Janet to help Theresa Stehly and Pat Starr. But there’s a glaring addition to the early letter that was a bit more explosive than the first edit: The line about there being a “culture of secrecy” and “the allegations of doctoring/tampering with public documents” was not part of the above letter that had been circulated around for signatures… but it was sure in the letter that had been mailed out.

Clearly, what I’m told was the original letter was a bit long and needed some trimming and minor edits. But what it was replaced with took a sharp enough turn from the original that people would have wanted to know what their names were on, and should have been cleared with them all before it went out.

Sometimes in the heat of campaigns, people make snap decisions to expedite things. But it’s a good lesson that when other people are putting their names on the line, you should probably get their explicit say-so first.