Rapid City S.D.- On June 30, the Rapid City Public Works Committee took up Exception 26EX042 — a request from Longbranch Civil Engineering, on behalf of Buren Properties LLC, to skip dedicating right-of-way and building a collector street across a 42-acre unplatted balance north of Deadwood Avenue and I-90. Staff had already denied it once. This was the appeal.
The property owner is Elroy Buren, Vice-President of Complete Contracting Solutions (doing business as Complete Concrete, Inc.), a company he’s run for over 20 years. Buren attended in person, dressed formally. His engineer, Kale R. McNaboe, P.E. of Longbranch, argued the case on the floor.
Present for the committee: Callie Meyer, John Roberts, Kevin Maher, and Josh Biberdorf . Quorum was confirmed.
Why Staff Said No
The original Exception to Standard Specifications or IDCM form — File No. 26EX042, submitted May 26, 2026 — lays out the request plainly: an exception “to not dedicate the right-of-way for a Collector Street or construct the Collector Street in Accordance with IDCM Figure 2.1 including, water, sewer, curb, gutter, asphalt, street light conduit.”
The applicant’s own justification for the request echoes what would later be argued on the floor: the street alignment as proposed on the Major Street Plan “crosses an active water body,” and if built as planned, “the public would have no legal means of access to the street.”
That’s Buren’s side making the “road to nowhere” argument in writing, weeks before Maher made it out loud in committee.
Staff’s written response, dated June 9, 2026, and signed by the City Engineer, stated: “Based on justification provided, consider platting Lot 1 as a restricted lot to transfer the property as shown.” Their recommendation was a flat denial.
That line — written on the original form, before the meeting ever happened — became the spine of everything argued on the floor two weeks later.
Maher asks the Question
Kevin Maher opened the substantive discussion by pushing hard on the practical absurdity of building infrastructure the public can’t use: “Why would the staff deny this request? It’s gonna be a road to nowhere. If we can’t even publicly access this it just doesn’t make sense to me.”
What followed was a beat of dead air — a mic failure caused a brief, almost comic delay before anyone could respond.
It was only after that fumble that Vicki Fisher, the city’s Community Development Director, and Public Works Director Mike Theis got up from their desks and came to the floor to address the committee directly.
Fisher speaks from the Floor, not from her department
Once at the podium, Vicki Fisher was careful to frame her input as outside her actual authority.
Vicki Fisher explained she’d asked Mike Theis to join her because exception requests are submitted to and acted on by Public Works, stating, “I do not have a seat at the table when it comes to those discussions.”
She offered her read anyway: “From a process standpoint I think my input could be helpful,” noting the applicant’s stated intent was simply to move a lot line 33 feet west to enlarge a smaller parcel — a move she categorized as “housekeeping.”
It’s a familiar pattern for Fisher: distancing her department from jurisdiction while still asserting expertise on the record.
Three fixes on the Table. None resolved on the floor
Over the next fifteen minutes, three different ways around the collector-street requirement got floated. None of them secured a definitive resolution:
1. The Hickok Trail swap. Fisher suggested transferring 30 feet to the neighboring property — BGC Business Park LLC — and taking back 30 feet off the end of Hickok Trail’s turnaround, banking land for a future extension. No clear refusal was caught on tape before the discussion moved on to mechanics.
However, a procedural anomaly sits at the center of this proposed swap. Pennington County property records confirm BGC Business Park LLC owns the adjacent lot in question. The exception application lists both Buren’s tax ID and BGC’s tax ID side-by-side. Yet, the document was submitted only by Buren Properties, LLC, and signed exclusively by McNaboe as Buren’s agent. The application acknowledges it covers two ownership interests, but BGC’s signature is entirely missing from the paperwork.
2. The restricted lot. Staff’s original suggestion was revived on the floor: plat the smaller lot at its enlarged size, and leave the 42-acre balance as a restricted lot — held in reserve with no rezoning or building permits until a full land plan comes together. The committee chair put it directly to McNaboe: “Would you possibly be willing to do that? We could table this for now and then you could work with staff.”
McNaboe declined on the record: “No, I completely understand the stance that Vicki’s taking [on] making that a restrictive lot. The issue would be it’s a 42-acre lot and if Mr. Buren owns a construction company and if he wanted to build a parking lot to store equipment on, he’s back to building $2 million worth of collector street that the public can’t access.”
3. Unplatted storage interim. Fisher’s fallback was to leave the balance unplatted, letting Buren use it for equipment storage in the meantime “until such time as they know how they want to land plan it going forward.” The meeting moved to procedure before this was accepted or denied.
One solution explicitly declined on the record by the applicant’s own engineer. The other two didn’t get a clean yes or no. The item went to continuance instead of a vote, which is its own kind of answer.
The Map Argument
McNaboe made a separate case for why this location doesn’t make sense for a collector street at all. Pointing out that the city’s Major Street Plan shows a line trending north-south toward the end of a pond on the property, he argued it simply isn’t a sensible place to put a road. He compared the parcel’s likely future development pattern to lots backed against I-90 near Sturgis, which are served by a frontage road rather than a through street.
The chair later conceded the committee has moved collector streets before — “probably three” times — and that this particular siting “does look a little hanky” given the pond.
Process over the Applicant
At one point,committee head John B. Roberts leaned heavily into process rather than Buren’s specific request, stated: “If it gets built. When it gets built. It may never get built. You completely agree that we must have the right of way — that alone would keep me from voting for this.”
Meyer Votes Early, and Explains Why
Callie Meyer’s position was set before most of the discussion wrapped: “Sounds like approving this exception would just risk the taxpayers paying for collector[‘s] [street]… I’ll just be supporting staff’s recommendation to deny.” She came in prepared, and voted no almost immediately once given the floor.
The Vote, Sort of
There was no formal up-or-down vote on the exception itself. Instead, the floor devolved into a procedural back-and-forth over whether to deny outright or continue the item.
A thirty-day delay was floated, then narrowed to two weeks at McNaboe’s request. Following a motion and a second from the committee floor, the two-week continuance passed.
What’s Next
The formal path here isn’t ambiguous. The city’s own June 9 denial letter — signed by Administrative Coordinator Lorrie Knight — spells out the process: a denied applicant has ten working days to file a written appeal with the Director, which then goes to the next Working Session Committee agenda before moving to City Council for final consideration.
McNaboe requested the appeal the same day the denial letter went out. While the city’s original agenda-item record listed the City Council hearing date as July 6, the two-week continuance granted in committee pushes that timeline back, leaving the exact date for a final Council showdown up in the air.
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