The Best Little City in America
Before I could drive, before I had a campaign, before I ever set foot in a council chamber — I already knew what kind of city Sioux Falls was supposed to be. I learned it in the dark, somewhere between here and Chamberlain, reading a newspaper before most people woke up.
Four in the Morning
My dad worked the factory floor during the day. Then, at night, he delivered the Argus Leader.
His routes ran from Sioux Falls all the way out to Chamberlain. When I wasn't in school, I'd ride along. We'd stay up through the night, the two of us, moving through South Dakota darkness with a car full of papers and nowhere to be until the sun came up. It felt like an adventure. It also gave me something I didn't fully appreciate until much later: a front row seat to just how hard my dad worked.
Two jobs. No shortcuts. Just a man building something for his family, one delivery at a time.
The Phrase That Stuck
When I was old enough to read, those overnight routes gave me a small but real advantage: I often got to read the latest Argus before most of the city had even made coffee.
That's where I first encountered Patrick Lalley.
Over and over, in his columns and commentary, the same phrase appeared: The Best Little City in America. Lalley had a gift for naming things. And that name — simple, confident, a little defiant — stuck somewhere in the back of my mind and never left.
I was a precocious kid. I devoured everything I could find about Sioux Falls. Its history. Its growth. Its neighborhoods. The more I learned, the more I believed the phrase was true. Not as marketing. As a standard. A promise this city had made to itself.
I took it seriously. I still do.
The Morning the Parking Lot Was Gone
In 2016, my parents woke up to find their parking lot missing.
Not damaged. Not under construction. Gone. Along with the sign for their business on 12th Street. No notice. No warning. No one had called to explain what was happening or what would come next. The 12th Street Bridge project had simply arrived, and their small business — the building my parents had worked for decades to own — was left to figure it out.
I went to the City Council.
I quoted Patrick Lalley. I said that in the Best Little City in America — which I genuinely believed Sioux Falls to be — we don't do things like this. We don't leave the fate of a small business or a family's livelihood up in the air without so much as a conversation.
What Happened Next
Councilman Greg Neitzert heard it. Joe Sneve, then at the Argus, covered it.
With the added attention, the city stepped in. They provided storage for my parents' sign. And they created wayfinding signs as part of the detour routes — signs that listed affected businesses by name, so customers could still find their way.
It worked. People found us. The business survived.
And today, that approach is standard practice. When road construction creates a detour in Sioux Falls and a small business is affected, those businesses get named on the signs. A family showing up at a council meeting, holding a city to the standard it set for itself, helped make that happen.
That's what civic engagement looks like. It's not always dramatic. Sometimes it's just refusing to accept that a good city would let a family fall through the cracks.
Where It Led
That experience lit something in me.
A teenager who had grown up reading about his city, who believed in what it was capable of, who saw what happened when someone showed up and said we can do better — I wanted more of that. I started paying closer attention to local government. To elections. To the people who made decisions and the people who held them accountable.
At one point I volunteered on U.S. Senator Tim Johnson's reelection campaign. It was an early lesson in what it meant to believe in something enough to give your time to it.
The seed was planted on those overnight routes. Patrick Lalley watered it.
He's Still At It. So Are We.
Patrick Lalley is now the editor at Sioux Falls Live, still writing about this city with the same sharp eye he brought to the Argus. I read him regularly. I still look up to him.
Earlier this year, he published a piece about a guy named Pete — a weathered, no-nonsense working man who sat down at the Orion Pub and said something that stopped me cold.
"There has to be a way for families to work their way up. People have been coming here from all over the world for a chance to start over."
That's the same city Patrick was writing about when I was a kid reading his columns in the dark. The same standard. The same promise. Decades later, he's still finding the people who carry it — and putting their wisdom on record.
I've had the chance to meet Patrick and thank him in person for the influence his work had on me growing up. It's a strange and gratifying thing — to be able to tell someone that their words shaped how you saw your city, and to mean it completely.
That's why The Best Little City in America is still very much the frame for this campaign. It's on our website. It's in how I talk about why I'm running. It's the standard I was raised on — by a journalist I'd never met, in a car full of newspapers, somewhere between here and Chamberlain at four in the morning.
Words matter. They shape how we see ourselves. They set the bar.
Patrick Lalley set it high. This campaign is about clearing it.
It's always been our city, and now is our moment.
Let's rise together. ☀️
— Vince Danh
Candidate, Sioux Falls City Council At-Large | June 2nd, 2026