Category: Investigations
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Shooters on the Sidewalk: Why Rapid City Council President Tamang is Taking a Second Look at Single-Serve Alcohol
It started with a walk. Council President Stephen Tamang posted on Facebook about what he found on a recent neighborhood walk: empty vodka shooters, scattered along the route like they’d become part of the landscape. It read like a small, personal observation. It wasn’t. That Facebook post has become the starting point for what Tamang…
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Two Sidewalk Waivers, One Agenda: Committee Grills Corporate Request, Punts the Other to September
Rapid City SD – The Rapid City Public Works Committee meeting opened with a chaotic public comment period. Concerned citizen Mark Millar was first to the microphone, telling the committee they were starting to look like a “bunch of clowns” before noting the state is stepping in to fix the deck of the bridge that…
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The Sidewalks to Nowhere: A Stroll through Rapid City’s Sidewalk Variance Routes
Rapid City SD- Tuesday’s Public Works Committee agenda is, for the most part, the routine business of running a city: a $129,450 tracked conveyor for the Solid Waste Division, a $21,102 change order for Well 13 pump equipment, $235,000 in advertised bids for upgrades at McKeague Field. Sixteen items, most of them numbers nobody will…
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Filed Under a Hotel Tax Board: How Rapid City’s Sports Complex Financing Hid in Plain Sight
Rapid City SD- For nearly a year, the entity actually bonding money for Rapid City’s new sports complex has not been the City Council, not Parks and Recreation, not even the Rapid City Sports Commission whose name is on the original feasibility study. It’s been the Business Improvement District No. 2 District Board — a…
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The Sports Complex, Full Circle? What’s Coming to Wednesday’s Legal and Finance Committee and the History that Got it this Far
Rapid City SD- Next Wednesday, the Legal and Finance Committee will take up a naming rights agreement that would lock Sanford Health’s name onto the city’s new sports complex for the next 21 years. It’s a small procedural step on its face — an origination at Legal and Finance on August 12, ahead of a…
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The Optics Check: A $10 Million Trial Balloon and the Shadow Over Rapid City’s Youth Sports Complex
Rapid City SD – Running the 20-minute game clock on a municipal maneuver — and a name barely three weeks in the ground. 20:00 — The Premature Celebration On Thursday, Aug. 6, at 10:30 a.m., Mayor Jason Salamun and Sanford Health officials stood in a parking lot along East Mall Drive to celebrate a $10…
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With Sanford’s $10M Locked In For Rapid City’s Sports Complex, City Council Eyes Next Steps
RAPID CITY, S.D. — Rapid City officials and the Rapid City Sports Commission announced Thursday morning that Sanford Health will hold the naming rights for the city’s planned multipurpose sports complex. The multi-million-dollar corporate partnership is a significant milestone, but several major structural pieces are still slated to fall into place next week, when the…
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The Holding Cell for General AG: Precedent Set for Rapid City – Cartoon
The Holding Cell Playbook: A Rezoning Batch That Passes the Paper Test, Not the Sniff Test The Samco Road Fire Sale: Inside the AG Zoning Rush Along Cement Plant Road
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Rapid City’s Hemp Crackdown Was Already Underway. Now It’s Part of a National Fight.
Rapid City, SD. — When South Dakota Attorney General Marty Jackley signed onto a 35-state coalition letter this week urging Congress to keep a stricter federal definition of hemp in place, it read like a routine statehouse press release — one AG among three dozen, weighing in on a Washington fight over a 2018 Farm…
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Same Land, New Ribbon: What Today’s Press Release Left Out Regarding the Elevate Business Park
Correction, Aug 5 2026: This piece originally stated that 24020 Hardesty Road has served as Hills Construction, Ltd.’s registered office “since 1995.” State filings show the company’s registered office moved away from that address in 2008–2009 and has not returned there since, most recently relocating to Keystone in 2026. The piece also described the paper…