Rapid City is hosting the “Real America Birthday Bash,” a multi-day downtown festival celebrating America’s 250th anniversary from July 1 through July 5, 2026.

With 10,000 to 20,000 people expected downtown at any given time, knowing where to park — and where not to leave your car — could be the difference between a good memory and a tow bill.

All event details are based on information available at time of publication. Schedules, routes, and restrictions are subject to change. Readers are encouraged to verify current information at :

https://visitrapidcity.com

The Parade

July 2, 7:00 PM
For the first time since 1991, Rapid City will host a downtown community parade during the Independence Day holiday period. The parade is organized in partnership with the Festival of Lights and follows the same route used for the annual winter parade.

The parade kicks off at 7:00 PM at East Boulevard and Main Street, traveling west down Main Street to Seventh Street, then looping back east along Saint Joseph Street.

Staging Area: The block stretching from East Saint Patrick Street to East Boulevard closes to all vehicle traffic at 4:00 PM on July 2.

Parade Route: The entire route closes to traffic at 5:00 PM — two hours before the parade begins. Plan accordingly.

Downtown Parking Restrictions & Tow Zones

No-parking zones go into effect at 5:00 PM on July 2 across the downtown core.

Vehicles remaining in restricted zones after that time are subject to ticketing and towing. This is not a warning system — enforcement will be active.

Restricted Roads Include:
Main Street from 5th Street to North 7th Street

7th Street between Main Street and Saint Joseph Street

Saint Joseph Street starting from 5th Street

These restrictions mirror the exact footprint used for the annual Festival of Lights Parade.

Bottom line: If you’re coming to the parade, arrive early and park outside this perimeter before 5:00 PM.

Mount Rushmore

Ticket Holders Only
Mount Rushmore National Memorial will be closed to the general public beginning the evening of July 2 and will not reopen until the morning of July 4. Access during this window is restricted exclusively to lottery ticket holders for the ticketed fireworks event.

The lottery closed months ago. If you do not have a ticket, do not drive to the monument during this period.

Shuttle transportation for lottery winners departs from Rapid City.

Expect significant traffic delays on US Highway 16A and SD Highway 244.
Highway closures: US-16A and SD-244 will have temporary closures beginning July 2 at 11:00 PM and lasting until approximately July 3 at 11:00 PM.

Fireworks Schedule

Five fireworks shows are scheduled within or near Rapid City during the holiday weekend:

Thursday, July 2 — Post 22 Baseball Firecracker Tournament fireworks display

Friday, July 3 — Black Hills Speedway and Rapid City Elks Golf Course;

Free Mount Rushmore fireworks LIVESTREAM at Main Street Square at 9:30 PM

Saturday, July 4 — Official Rapid City Fireworks Show at Executive Golf Course; Arrowhead Country Club private display

The Drone Show

July 2, 9:30 PM
The nationally recognized drone show launches from Central High School at 9:30 PM on July 2, immediately following the parade.

Hundreds of illuminated drones will form patriotic images over the Black Hills sky. This is a free, public event visible from much of downtown.

Downtown Festival Hubs

The festival footprint stretches through the heart of downtown along a familiar corridor.

Main Street Square (6th & Main) — Primary entertainment hub, livestream watch party for Mount Rushmore fireworks July 3 at 9:30 PM, and starting line for the America 250 Freedom Run 5K on July 5 at 7:30 AM

Memorial Park Bandshell — Secondary stage for live music and performances throughout the festival

6th Street Corridor — Touch-A-Truck displays, Kids Zone, vendors, and food trucks

Central High School — Drone show launch site, July 2 at 9:30 PM

Executive Golf Course — Official July 4 fireworks launch site

For Full Event Schedule and Live Changes Go Here

https://visitrapidcity.com/real-america-birthday-bash

DETAILS ARE SUBJECT TO CHANGE

SOURCES

City of Rapid City Office of Public Information; KOTA Radio; Festival of Lights RC (festivaloflightsrc.com); Visit Rapid City (visitrapidcity.com); South Dakota Department of Tourism; National Park Service.

The post Navigating the Real America Birthday Bash: Rapid City Closures, Parking, and What you Need to Know appeared first on THE RAPID CITY SENTINEL.

Paul E. Evans didn’t mince words.
On June 18, one week before the Rapid City Planning Commission was scheduled to consider five simultaneous rezoning requests covering 127.95 acres of undeveloped land north of Mall Drive, Evans — president of McMahon Investment Inc. — filed a formal written protest with the City’s Department of Community Development.

It read, in part, in all capitals:
“McMahon Investment Inc. DOES NOT WANT ANYTHING TO DO WITH THIS AT ALL OR ELEVATE RAPID CITY. IF ANY OF MY PROPERTY IS INVOLVED IN THIS, PLEASE REMOVE MY PROPERTY FROM THIS IMMEDIATELY.”

The Planning Commission heard the rezoning requests anyway. All five passed.

Five Re-zones. One Morning.

Wednesday’s Planning Commission meeting opened at 8:00 a.m. On the agenda was five simultaneous rezoning requests filed by Avid4 Engineering, Inc. on behalf of Elevate Rapid City.

The five files — 26RZ014 through 26RZ018 — covered parcels in Section 24, T2N, R7E: north of Mall Drive, east of Haines Avenue, west of the future extension of Maple Avenue.

All 127.95 acres currently undeveloped. The developer’s pitch was simple: Rapid City has a “critical gap” in pad-ready light industrial land, and this massive reclassification is the only way to keep the city competitive.

Two of the five files involved residential land. File 26RZ016 (Medium Density Residential to Light Industrial, 77.72 acres) aWhen Elevate Rapid City asked the Planning Commission to rezone 127.95 acres north of Mall Drive, one landowner said no — in all capitals. The commission moved forward anyway. A Sentinel investigation traces the land, the LLC, and the TIF that was approved ten days before anyone voted.nd File 26RZ018 (Medium Density Residential to Office Commercial) together account for the full residential conversion within the package. Combined, 77.72 acres of land designated for housing will no longer be zoned for housing.

In their own reports, planning staff cited the city’s 2025 Comprehensive Plan goal to “Increase Housing Affordability, Accessibility, and Availability.”

The commission then voted to erase nearly 80 acres of residential zoning — sitting adjacent to a future school — to build industrial lots.

The Holding Cell

Fisher offered something useful during her presentation at timestamp 1:25:36.

Explaining why portions of the parcels carried General Agricultural zoning designations, she said: General Ag acts as a holding cell. Minimum of 40 acres, they zone it general ag — it helps with taxation.

A holding cell. Fisher’s words.
General Agricultural zoning — the lowest-intensity designation in Title 17 — is being used, by the city’s own description, as a tax management tool for large undeveloped parcels. It is not agriculture. It is a placeholder, useful to the landowner, convertible on demand.

The Pennington County Equalization Office confirms the mechanism in practice. Tax ID 39296 — 77.72 acres, owner MDD LLC — carries a 2026 assessed value of $20,600, classified entirely as pasture. Tax ID 69248 — 50.23 acres, also MDD LLC — assessed at $6,200, also classified as pasture. Neither parcel has a property address. Neither has a building. Total improvements on both: $0.

Ten Days Prior to this Vote

The rezoning requests were heard June 25.

Ten days earlier — June 15 — the City Council approved Resolution Case 26TI006: Amendment #1 to the Project Plan for the Rapid City Catalyst District Tax Increment Financing District #101, incorporating the proposed business park project that would result from this rezoning.

The financial groundwork was already laid before the Planning Commission voted on what the land would be.

The staff report for File 26RZ016 confirms the sequence explicitly, under Rezoning Criteria 1: “On June 15, 2026 the City Council approved an Amendment to the Catalyst District Tax Increment Financing District’s Project Plan to incorporate the proposed project that would result from this Rezoning. This represents a changing condition of the city generally.”

Public money, committed before the land use designations were settled. Infrastructure subsidies locked in before the public process concluded.
The Funding Source and Fiscal Impact table in the same staff report — the section where public cost is supposed to be disclosed — was left blank.

Who Owns The Land?

The official record lists the property owner on the largest residential parcel as MDD LLC. Elevate Rapid City is the applicant. The distinction matters: a private LLC owns the land. The nonprofit is driving the rezoning. The city approved it.

Pennington County Equalization Office records show that the 2026 property tax bills for both parcels — Tax ID 39296 and Tax ID 69248 — are mailed directly to 24020 Hardesty Rd, Rapid City, SD 57702.

A Google search of that address returns Hills Construction — a Rapid City contractor — listed at 24020 Hardesty Rd. A South Dakota Secretary of State filing, Document B0071-3682, dated August 28, 2018, also lists 24020 Hardesty Road as the registered address.

The mechanism used to move the land into the holding company is documented in Pennington County’s own sales records.

The sales information for Tax ID 39296 — the 77.72-acre parcel — shows it was transferred via Warranty Deed on March 23, 2018. The sale amount was $0. The county’s validity classification: “Related individuals or corporations.”

MDD LLC was formally organized on March 9, 2018, according to its Certificate of Organization filed with the South Dakota Secretary of State, signed by Secretary of State Shantel Krebs. Business ID# DL145107.
Two weeks after MDD LLC was organized, 77.72 acres of land changed hands for nothing between related parties.

There is also a name buried in the legal description of Tax ID 69248 that warrants attention.

The parcel is described as: “W1/2SE1/4 LESS McMahon Industrial Park #2, LESS EAST HAINES SUBD, LESS LOT A, B, & C OF SW1/4SE1/4, LESS ROW.”
McMahon Industrial Park. The same surname as Paul E. Evans, president of McMahon Investment Inc., who one week before the vote filed a formal written protest demanding his property be removed from this rezoning immediately.

The McMahon Protest

Deep in the public files for the rezoning requests sat a formal notice of protest dated June 18, 2026.

Paul E. Evans, President of McMahon Investment Inc., had submitted a blunt, unequivocal demand to the City’s Department of Community Development regarding Files 26RZ016, 26RZ017, and 26RZ018 — three of the five rezoning requests on Wednesday’s agenda.

By proceeding with the vote, the Planning Commission effectively bundled contested private property into a developer-led master plan without the owner’s consent — keeping the Catalyst TIF acreage intact while forcing a property owner into a corner he explicitly said he did not want to be in.

The commission did not pause. They did not send the items back for review. They moved forward.

Conditional Uses of Land

At timestamp 1:28:40, Commissioner Eirik Heikes asked Fisher for the breakdown — the delineation — between light industrial and industrial zoning. “Can you give us some examples?”

Fisher had already walked through what Light Industrial allows: bank, retail, offices, contractors yard, manufacturing, processing — all within an enclosed building.

Then came the conditional uses.
At timestamp 1:29:58, Fisher listed the uses that require additional approval under Light Industrial zoning: brewery, childcare center, church.
And correctional facility.

Rapid City has had an ongoing and unresolved conversation about where to site a new correctional facility. Multiple locations have been floated. No final decision has been made.

The mention of correction facility as a compatible conditional use on 127.95 acres of land in the Black Hills Business Park corridor — offered without elaboration, alongside brewery and church — was not followed up by commissioners.

These Are Not SmokeStacks

At timestamp 1:30:30, Garth Wadsworth of Elevate Rapid City addressed the commission.
He said: “These are not smokestacks. No commissioner had asked about smokestacks. No agenda item referenced smokestacks. The word smokestacks does not appear in any of the five rezoning files.

The Rapid City Sentinel has spent months covering GCC Dacotah — a foreign-owned cement operation sitting on 563 acres in a 25-year zoning void, seeking formal designation under a newly created Mining and Earth Resources Extraction district. The air quality implications of that operation, and the city’s handling of them, have been a thread throughout that coverage.

What Happens Next

All five rezoning requests passed Wednesday morning. City Council First Reading is July 6, 2026. Second Reading July 20, 2026.

As the 127.95-acre sweep advances to City Council, the public is left with a troubling precedent.

If a massive, TIF-funded economic development project can proceed by overriding the explicit written objection of a property owner, the process is no longer collaborative. It is compulsory.

Paul Evans filed his protest on June 18. He asked, in writing, in all capitals, that his property be removed from this immediately.

The commission still moved forward.

Rapid City Planning Commission 6/25/2026

The planning commission starts at 1:02:00

The post A Developer, A TIF, and A Landowner – A Rapid City Zoning Tale appeared first on THE RAPID CITY SENTINEL.

The April Victory

​In April, the Rapid City City Council voted to allow urban hen keeping, and the Sentinel was there to walk you through what that meant — six hens, no roosters, backyard only, coop 25 feet from neighboring homes. A win for residents who fought hard for it.

​What most people don’t know is what comes next.

​The Hidden Catch in Ordinance 6723

​On June 25, the Rapid City Planning Commission takes up Ordinance 6723, a proposed amendment to the city’s zoning code that would permanently embed your chicken permission into Title 17 — but with a critical condition attached. Under the proposed language, keeping hens is permitted “in accordance with Title 6” of the Rapid City Municipal Code.

​Title 6 is the Animal Control code. And what’s in there is more than most chicken owners realize.

​What the Code Actually Requires

​Here’s what Title 6 explicitly mandates:

• ​You must obtain a domestic chicken license from the Finance Officer before your hens set foot in your yard. There is an application fee.
• ​That license expires every January 31 and must be renewed in December.
• ​Two nuisance violation convictions within twelve months and your license is void.
• ​A conviction on any animal cruelty charge voids your license immediately.
• ​Your coop must be fully enclosed, windproof, and meet specific ventilation requirements — one square foot of window per 15 square feet of floor space.
• ​Droppings must be collected daily and stored in a fireproof covered container until removed from the property.
• ​Chickens must be secured in their enclosure from sunset to sunrise.

​The Zoning Trap: From Ticket to Property Lien

​If Ordinance 6723 passes — first reading at City Council on July 6, second reading July 20 — these Animal Control requirements become zoning requirements. That’s a different category of consequence.

​Here is the difference: an animal control violation is an incident, but a zoning violation is a compounding liability.

Under Title 6, a loose bird or a noise complaint usually results in a standard one-time citation. But under Title 17 zoning laws, every single day an uncorrected violation exists—such as a coop that lacks the exact 1:15 window ratio—constitutes a new and separate offense, carrying a potential fine of up to $500 a day.

​Lose your chicken license under Animal Control, and you just lose your birds. Rack up compounding daily fines under zoning code, and the city can eventually attach those penalties as a lien against your house.

​What’s Next

​The council voted 6-4 to give Rapid City its chickens. That vote stood. But the compliance framework that came with it is buried in a part of the municipal code most residents will never think to read.

​The Rapid City Sentinel will continue following Ordinance 6723 through its City Council readings on July 6 and July 20.

​(The Rapid City Sentinel covered the original Urban Hen ordinance in April. Those pieces are linked below.)

The Lost Art of the Break OR Why You Should Probably Just Get Backyard Chickens

Backyard Hens Can Roost in Rapid City – Ordinance 5714 Passes

The post Before You Count Your Eggs: What Rapid City Hen Owners Need to Know About Ordinance 6723 appeared first on THE RAPID CITY SENTINEL.

On June 15, 2026, The Rapid City Sentinel submitted a formal press questionnaire to both campaigns competing in South Dakota’s first-ever gubernatorial runoff election.

The questions were sent to Governor Larry Rhoden’s spokesperson Ian Fury and to Toby Doeden’s campaign at their public press address with a follow up email sent June 20,2026.

The deadline was today, June 22, 2026.

Neither campaign responded. Not a partial answer. Not a request for more time. Not a decline. Silence.This is not a complaint. It is documentation.

Independent press is not entitled to access. Campaigns are under no legal obligation to answer our questions. But voters are entitled to know who answered and who didn’t — and what was asked.

Gatekeeping?

The Rapid City Sentinel is not alone in navigating a closed door. KELOLAND Media Group, one of the state’s largest broadcast outlets, extended a debate invitation to both campaigns for a televised one-on-one forum. Doeden accepted, but Rhoden declined — with a spokesperson explaining in a written statement that responding to his opponent’s claims simply takes too much effort.

Now, as the July runoff approaches, the candidates’ willingness to answer direct, unscripted questions hasn’t vanished entirely, but it has certainly receded from public view.

It feels less like a targeted decision about which specific outlets matter, and more like a collective decision by both camps to simply retreat from scrutiny, lower the blinds, and stick to the safety of managed talking points.

The Weight of Silence

When the political landscape gets difficult, the standard playbook often calls for silence. But independent journalism is either part of the accountability mechanism or it isn’t. Transparency shouldn’t scale back just because the cycle gets tense.

Because here is what matters more than campaign access. The questions we sent were not abstract. They were grounded in active issues that do not pause for an election cycle, and problems that will land on the desk of whoever becomes or remains governor of this state.

The ongoing oversight concerns surrounding state land sales and the foreign-owned GCC Dacotah operation. The strain resource-heavy data centers will place on local infrastructure and the environment. The lingering gap in voter registration laws for those using Tribal IDs. These are not hypotheticals. These are the realities on the ground.

Rapid City’s own mayor would presumably like to know where the next governor stands on some of these questions. So would Rapid City’s residents. So would anyone paying attention to what is actually happening in western South Dakota.

Neither candidate offered an answer. Not one word.

The Rapid City Sentinel Gubernatorial Questionnaire

The questions we sent were these:

1. Inflation is hammering people at the pump and the grocery store. Beyond simply criticizing federal policies, what specific, measurable state-level actions will your administration take to ease this localized financial burden for South Dakotans?

2. How will you balance the integration of AI in state government functions with the strict need for transparency and municipal accountability to the taxpayers?

3. In the wake of the GCC Dacotah fallout and ongoing concerns regarding long-term industrial oversight, what specific, stringent compliance measures will you implement regarding state land sales to foreign entities?

4. As development expands, specifically regarding resource-heavy data centers, how will your administration weigh the environmental impact and strain on local infrastructure against corporate interests?

5. South Dakota’s relationship with the federal government is constantly in flux — sometimes a partner, sometimes an obstacle. When Washington and Pierre’s interests diverge, where does your administration draw the line, and what’s an issue where you’d actively push back against federal direction?

6. Tribal ID cards are accepted at the polls and now qualify as proof of citizenship under SB 175, but they still can’t be used on their own to register to vote. As governor, would you push to close that registration gap?

7. Why should the average resident care enough to show up for this runoff?

8. Prior to active campaigning, what was the last book you read?

9. The Rapid City Litmus Test: A Pterodactyl at Dinosaur Park—yes or no?

These are not partisan questions. They are not gotcha questions. They are the minimum any voter deserves before casting a ballot for the person who will hold the most powerful office in this state.

South Dakota’s runoff law, SDCL 12-6-51.1, exists because the legislature decided in 1985 that a plurality wasn’t enough. That legitimacy requires a threshold. That voters deserve more than whoever happened to finish first.

Both men asking for your vote on July 28 declined to meet the threshold this outlet set.The record is clear. They were asked. The deadline passed. You are reading this.

We asked if they believed in dinosaurs.

They answered by becoming one.

The Droehdon-A-Saurus – An Editorial Cartoon

The post The Runoff Plurality of Silence: The Gubernatorial Questionnaire They Ignored appeared first on THE RAPID CITY SENTINEL.

The Runoff Plurality of Silence: The Gubernatorial Questionnaire They Ignored

The post The Droehdon-A-Saurus – An Editorial Cartoon appeared first on THE RAPID CITY SENTINEL.

It’s grey over Memorial Park this morning, a thin drizzle that hasn’t decided if it’s committing to rain. The geese don’t seem to mind. The ganders are out in full force right now — necks low, eyes sharp, putting their whole bodies between their goslings and anything that moves too fast. Watch them long enough and you’ll see one charge something three times his size without hesitation. That’s not performance. That’s instinct doing exactly what it evolved to do.

It won’t last. By the time the goslings are nine or ten weeks old, that fierce vigilance starts to loosen. By next spring, the parents have moved on to a new clutch, and the offspring that once couldn’t leave their sight are simply… independent. No conversation happens. No falling out. It’s biology, clean and indifferent, scaled exactly to how much protection is needed and not a day more.

Humans don’t get that mercy. Our estrangements aren’t governed by hormone cycles and fledgling windows — they’re built out of things far messier: words said or never said, pain misdirected at the wrong person, distance that calcifies before anyone notices it happening. And sometimes a relationship doesn’t get to taper at all. Sometimes it’s cut off mid-sentence, and the people left behind spend years trying to find an ending that never naturally arrived.

That’s part of what makes today complicated for a lot of people who’ll never say so out loud.

The History of the Day

Father’s Day, as it happens, wasn’t always the institution it now seems. It traces to Sonora Smart Dodd, a woman in Spokane, Washington, who in 1909 sat in a Mother’s Day sermon and thought of her own father — a Civil War veteran who raised six children alone after his wife died — and wondered why no one set a day aside for men like him.

It took far longer to become official than most people assume. Woodrow Wilson tried to formalize it in 1916; Congress balked, worried it would become commercialized. They weren’t wrong to worry — they just lost the argument anyway. Calvin Coolidge backed it in 1924. It wasn’t until 1972, under Richard Nixon, barely over fifty years ago, that it became a permanent national holiday at all.

Which is its own kind of irony: a day born out of one daughter’s grief, fought over for sixty years by people who could already see the greeting-card aisle coming, now mostly observed through a phone screen.

The holiday used to look like burnt coffee delivered to bed and a tie nobody needed, a backyard grill, a card with a crooked crayon signature.

Now it’s increasingly a feed — a performance of gratitude staged for an audience, sometimes more about being seen having a good father than about the father himself.

None of that is a judgment on anyone celebrating today sincerely. It’s just worth noticing what got swapped out along the way.

For everyone for whom today isn’t simple — who lost a father, who never had the one they needed, who’s estranged for reasons too complicated to fit in a caption, who wanted to raise a child and didn’t get the chance — the geese might have something to offer after all. Not an answer. Just a reminder that protection and love don’t require a clean ending to have been real while they lasted.

The post A Different Kind Of Vigilance – Fathers Day 2026 appeared first on THE RAPID CITY SENTINEL.

The post Let Freedom Ring* – Juneteenth 2026 appeared first on THE RAPID CITY SENTINEL.

Rapid City’s Ordinance 6717 folds an existing Code of Conduct into municipal law, but complaints against elected officials stay sealed in executive session by default, with no guarantee the public ever learns the outcome.

The post The Opaqueness of Transparency – Editorial Cartoon appeared first on THE RAPID CITY SENTINEL.

There is a dangerous kind of alchemy that happens at City Hall when the cameras are rolling but the microphones go quiet.

On Monday night, navigating a grueling 34-item agenda, the Rapid City Council pulled off a masterclass in municipal sleight-of-hand, demonstrating exactly how to shift liability and bury history in plain sight.

The tone for the evening was set immediately. The very first item on the docket was a bureaucratic victory lap: a presentation honoring the Community Development Department with the “2026 American Planning Association Vernon Dienes Comprehensive Plan Honor award.” The room clapped. The plaques were presented. The photos were taken. The illusion of perfect municipal planning was firmly established.

Yet, the moment the photo op wrapped, the actual business of the city took a strange turn.

Right after the smiles and camera flashes, Councilwoman Meyers was spotted physically placing a piece of paper at each alderman’s seat. Was it an off-the-record distraction? Or was it the missing paperwork for the heavy-industry votes coming down the pipe? The public has no idea, and that is exactly the problem. Unrecorded, off-microphone handoffs on the dais immediately following a public celebration speak to a fundamental culture of municipal opacity.

With the dais now armed with whatever was on those papers, the council moved through the agenda, and the warning signs kept flashing.

Catalyst TIF Amendment – No Guarantee

At Agenda Item 19, Elevate Rapid City stood before the council to present the Catalyst TIF amendment—a massive ask that leaves taxpayers holding the bag without a personal guarantee if the project fails.

It was a structural blind spot so glaring that it couldn’t be entirely ignored. Councilor Roberts saw the trap, voiced the financial risk out loud on the record, and then pushed the “yes” button anyway. In the end, only Alderman Tamang refused to play along, choosing to abstain entirely rather than attach his name to the liability.

But the real magic trick was saved for the non-public hearing items.

GCC Dacotah and “Revised” language

Armed with their off-the-record handouts, the council pushed through Agenda Items 31, 32, and 33 without a single syllable of public debate.

Strip away the procedural sheen and look at what was actually approved.

Item 31 (No. 26RZ008, Ordinance 6718) rezoned property along Cement Plant Road to Cement Plant District.

Item 32 (No. 26RZ009, Ordinance 6719) rezoned a separate, larger tract—between Sturgis Road and the railroad right-of-way, south of the Pennington County line—to Mining and Earth Resources Extraction District, the same parcel whose boundary lines got rewritten without ever being spoken aloud in the room.

Item 33 (No. 26RZ010, Ordinance 6720) rezoned yet another tract near Industrial Avenue to Cement Plant District.

Three ordinances. Three readings. Three separate rezonings, covering ground most of the room likely couldn’t have pictured without a map in front of them, passed in the time it takes to clear a throat.

Let’s be clear about what these items actually represent. This wasn’t a standard industrial expansion. The council was quietly masking over a massive, 25-year zoning error for GCC Dacotah, using unanimous and near-unanimous votes to sweep a quarter-century of municipal failure under the rug.

The bitter irony? The formal applicant requesting these rezonings to heavy industrial and cement plant districts wasn’t just the corporation. It was the City of Rapid City Community Development—the exact same department that had just smiled for the cameras and taken a bow for their award-winning “master planning.”

Worse, they had the audacity to approve Item 32 (No. 26RZ009) with a “revised legal description.” The council voted to alter the map using boundaries that were not read into the record. They governed by placeholder, asking the citizens of Rapid City to blindly honor a blank check while they choke on the dust.

The illusion of routine procedure only shattered when the vote came down on that specific parcel.

Councilor Evans broke ranks and voted “no.” That single dissenting vote proves the structural flaws of this retro-zoning performance were visible from the dais. Evans saw the reality and refused to play along. The rest of the council lined up to keep the corporate machine fed.

Your “Status Quo” City Council ?

What makes this collective silence so bitter is the sheer lack of effort from the rest of the room.

Several of these council members just fought for and won their seats. The voters put them there to turn on the lights, not to quietly endorse the status quo.

Ignorance is no longer an excuse. The baseline of municipal failure has already been laid bare. Decades of data on local mining operations have shown exactly what happens when industrial oversight is treated as an inconvenience. The council had that history in front of them. Yet, given the opportunity to demand transparency, nearly all of them chose to pass the buck, hiding behind last-minute handouts and rushing toward adjournment.

What else is Passing without Proper Process?

And that’s the question I can’t put down: if a 25-year zoning error for a 563-acre industrial site can clear three readings buried at the tail end of a 34-item agenda, what else has?

Items 2 through 23 moved as consent items—a single vote, no individual debate, the kind of bundle where citizens trust that nothing buried inside needs a second look. Most nights, that trust is probably earned. But “most nights” isn’t a standard. It’s a hope. And hope is not oversight.

I watched the vote happen from home, and when the meeting ended I lay in the dark for a long time without moving.

The first feeling was just grief—for a process that’s supposed to protect people and chose not to. Then it turned into anger, because grief on its own doesn’t get you out of bed to keep digging. And underneath both of those, if I’m honest, was something closer to fear: not of GCC Dacotah specifically, but of how easily a city can decide that 25 years of looking the other way is something to vote on instead of something to fix.

I don’t need to be a doctor to know what decades of unregulated extraction can do to the people who breathe it every day—children especially. I just need to know that nobody on that council asked the question out loud.

I won’t pretend to know yet exactly what this means for Rapid City’s future. But I know what it means to spend 20 minutes staring at a ceiling because a council I trusted to ask hard questions asked none, and I’m not willing to let that be the end of the story.

The post Smoke and Mirrors: An Award-Winning Performance at City Hall: An Editorial appeared first on THE RAPID CITY SENTINEL.

​

The Collateral Damage of Small Town USA

Growing up, the shadow of the Millstone Nuclear Power Plant was a constant, quiet hum in the background of my childhood.

You learn early on what it feels like to live next to an environmental wild card—a facility where the true cost of “production” isn’t always something you can see until the alarms are already ringing. It instills a specific kind of dread: the fear of the invisible threat.

​History is littered with towns that found out too late that the invisible threat was already at their doorstep.

In the 1970s, the residents of Times Beach, Missouri, thought they were just getting their dirt roads sprayed to keep the summer dust down. It took over a decade for the EPA to admit that the “waste oil” coating their town was actually laced with deadly dioxin, turning the municipality into a toxic ghost town that eventually had to be bulldozed and buried.

​When corporate cost-cutting meets regulatory silence, communities become collateral damage.

​Which brings us to Rapid City, and the 563-acre industrial footprint of GCC Dacotah. For 25 years, this massive cement and mining operation has existed in a municipal zoning void—a quarter-century regulatory blackout in our own backyard. And while our roads aren’t being sprayed with waste oil, we need to ask ourselves: what exactly is being burned in those kilns?

​A 25-year administrative blackout doesn’t just mean misplaced paperwork; it means a critical lack of community oversight.

While residents are left in the dark, industrial giants quietly optimize their bottom lines. In the case of GCC Dacotah, that optimization looks a lot like what we traditionally call a tire fire — and the federal government already signed off on it.

What’s Already Been Approved, Quietly

​For years, the corporate playbook has leaned heavily on “alternative fuels” to cut coal costs.

Behind the clinical, regulatory language of federal correspondence lies a stark reality: in 2020, with almost no local notice, the EPA approved GCC Dacotah’s request to burn Auto Shredder Residue (ASR) — the plastic, foam, rubber belts, and scrap left over after junked cars are stripped of metal — as fuel in its Rapid City cement kiln.

Let’s strip away the corporate jargon. The EPA’s own documentation reveals that 20 to 50% of this material is a highly combustible cocktail of dashboard plastics, foam seating, rubber belts, and scrap tires.

​Here’s the part that should stop you cold: the entire approval rests on data GCC supplied about itself.

EPA’s letter spells it out plainly — the agency would consider ASR a non-waste fuel “provided specifications in your request are maintained,” and warns that “if these specifications are not maintained, the Agency may reach a different conclusion.”

In other words, the federal government’s blessing is conditional on an honor system, based on test results from 2015 and 2018, administered from an office in Washington, D.C., for a kiln that sits at the center of a 563-acre footprint bordering our neighborhoods.

​Five years later, in a city that still can’t get its own zoning map to reflect what’s actually operating on that 563 acres, who is checking whether GCC is still meeting the conditions it promised back in 2020?

Nobody — because almost nobody here even knows to ask. This is the same 25-year pattern of administrative drift that produced the zoning gap, showing up again in what’s legally allowed to go into the air we breathe.

A Familiar Pattern

​And when it comes to accountability, GCC’s parent company has a track record worth knowing.

Grupo Cementos de Chihuahua spent years fighting a $36 million arbitration judgment — first losing in Bolivia’s courts, then watching a U.S. federal court in Colorado confirm the award and order company assets seized to satisfy it, then losing again on appeal to the Tenth Circuit.

An international conglomerate that fights a confirmed legal judgment across two countries and multiple courts for nearly a decade tells you something about how it weighs the cost of accountability against the cost of compliance.

That is the corporate culture standing behind the entity whose self-reported data is the only thing standing between “non-waste fuel” and a kiln full of shredded car interiors.

The Rapid City GCC on site Fatality

We do not need to look at international courts to see the consequences of this corporate culture; the tragic results are already on the record right here in Rapid City.

On February 22, 2025, a contractor died at the GCC Dacotah facility when a bridge providing access into the kiln shifted, causing the equipment he was operating to fall backward into a chute.

The subsequent Mine Safety and Health Administration (MSHA) investigation revealed that the mine operator bolted the bridge to a pedestal but failed to secure it to the floor as required by the manufacturer’s manual.

Furthermore, investigators found that the operator did not develop or provide the necessary installation training for the bridge assembly, directly contributing to the fatal accident.

​Whether it’s a bolt that was never secured to the floor or fuel specifications that were never re-verified, the pattern is the same: self-certification, minimal local oversight, and a community that finds out only after something goes wrong — or, in this case, only because someone finally asked.

Historical Environmental Disasters

​This isn’t an abstract corporate exercise. Look at Niagara Falls, New York, where for over a decade Hooker Chemical Company quietly buried 20,000 tons of toxic chemical waste in an old canal bed, then sold the land for a dollar with a buried liability disclaimer. Houses and a school went up on top of it.

By the late 1970s, the chemicals were leaching into basements, children were getting chemical burns on the playground, and the federal government had to evacuate hundreds of families and declare a state of emergency. Love Canal became the reason Congress created the Superfund program — because nobody had been watching what was buried beneath the neighborhood until it was too late.

​Look at West Virginia, too. The history of Appalachian coal mining is a tragic syllabus on what happens when communities surrender their backyards to industry.

It is the abandoned ghost towns like Hammond, where former industries extracted what they needed and eventually left only ruins behind. These tragedies all share the same DNA: corporations acting with impunity, regulatory agencies turning a blind eye, and communities left holding the bag.

Time to Take Our Backyards Back

​We build our backyards to be safe havens, not buffer zones for corporate fallout. But for 25 years, the residents surrounding the GCC Dacotah plant have been unknowingly living in a 563-acre regulatory blind spot — one where even the federal approvals that exist were granted on the company’s own word, five years ago, with no local mechanism to confirm they still hold true today.

​It is time to pull the plug on the 25-year blackout.

We need confirmation that GCC is still meeting the conditions of its 2020 ASR fuel approval.

We need our municipal leaders to finally draw a hard zoning line in the sand.

And we need to stop assuming that a federal letter from 2020 means anyone, anywhere, is still checking. Because the slow burn has gone on long enough, and it is time to take our backyards back.

The Health Risks of Burning Auto Shredder Residue & Tires

​It’s worth noting that EPA’s 2018 testing data — the data underlying the 2020 approval — showed most contaminants in GCC’s ASR fuel at levels comparable to or lower than coal, including zero measured sulfur.

That data is now several years old, self-reported by the company, and there is no public record of anyone re-verifying it since. The following is what the broader scientific literature says about what can be released when ASR and tires are burned — context for understanding what’s at stake if those 2018 conditions are no longer being met.

The Incineration of ASR and Health Dynamics

​The incineration of ASR (which inherently includes plastics, PVC, synthetic rubber, and tires) is a scientifically documented health hazard. When these materials are introduced to industrial kilns, they release specific, highly dangerous compounds into the surrounding air and ash:

• ​Dioxins and Furans: Created directly by the combustion of chlorinated materials like PVC plastics (found abundantly in vehicle interiors and ASR). The World Health Organization classifies dioxin as a known human carcinogen. Chronic exposure is linked to endocrine disruption, severe immune system suppression, liver toxicity, and reproductive health issues.
• ​Volatile Organic Compounds (VOCs) and Polycyclic Aromatic Hydrocarbons (PAHs): The burning of automotive tires and rubber releases highly toxic compounds including benzene, styrene, and butadiene. Butadiene is a potent liver carcinogen. These airborne emissions are directly linked to central nervous system damage, leukemia, and various other cancers.
• ​Heavy Metals: The combustion process releases heavy metals like lead, cadmium, mercury, and arsenic into the air and the residual ash. These metals penetrate the cardiovascular, neurological, and reproductive systems, posing a severe risk to long-term community health.
• ​Fine Particulate Matter (PM2.5): The smoke generated contains microscopic particulate matter that bypasses the body’s natural defenses and penetrates deep into lung tissue. This is a primary driver of long-term respiratory diseases, including asthma and chronic bronchitis, with children and the elderly facing the highest risk of hospitalization.

Citation Index

• ​The Rapid City Sentinel — GCC Dacotah 563-acre zoning investigation, ongoing series
• ​EPA Office of Resource Conservation and Recovery, letter to Jim Anderson, GCC Dacotah Inc., Nov. 12, 2020, Non-Waste Fuel Determination for Auto Shredder Residue (rcrapublic.epa.gov/files/14937.pdf)
• ​Compañía de Inversiones Mercantiles S.A. v. Grupo Cementos de Chihuahua S.A.B. de C.V., 58 F.4th 429 (10th Cir. 2023); U.S. District Court, District of Colorado, confirmation order, March 26, 2019 ($36.1M)
• ​Mine Safety and Health Administration (MSHA) — Feb. 22, 2025 Fatality, Final Report, GCC Dacotah
• ​Love Canal history — SUNY Geneseo, Britannica, Center for Health Environment & Justice
• ​YouTube: The Missouri Ghost Town Poisoned By Toxic Waste (Times Beach)
• ​Rapid City Council Agenda, June 15, 2026; Rapid City Planning Commission, June 11, 2026 meeting (26RZ011 continuance to July 9, 2026)

​CIVIC ALERT: TOMORROW’S CITY COUNCIL MEETING

Tomorrow, June 15, 2026, 6:30 PM — Rapid City Council Chambers, 300 6th Street.

Three ordinances affecting the GCC Dacotah 563-acre footprint are up for first reading tomorrow: Ordinance 6718 (26RZ008), Ordinance 6719 (26RZ009), and Ordinance 6720 (26RZ010) — all part of the 25-year rezoning correction this paper has been documenting. A first reading introduces an ordinance but doesn’t enact it; final passage typically comes at a second reading roughly two weeks later, often with a public hearing where residents can speak.

​A fourth related rezoning, 26RZ011 — covering the LDR-1/Mining and Earth Resources Extraction overlap near Hidden Valley Road — was continued by the Planning Commission to July 9, 2026 for further legal clarity on land use designations. Mark your calendars for both dates if you want to be heard.

The post What is Burning Next to Rapid City’s Neighborhoods? Inside the GCC Zoning Void appeared first on THE RAPID CITY SENTINEL.