Rapid City SD – Ten items are on Rapid City’s Public Works Committee this week — nine of them routine enough to pass without a word of discussion, and one a developer’s second attempt to get out of building a city-standard road next to Sanford Health’s new Medical Mile campus.
When: 12:30 p.m., Tuesday, Sept. 15, 2026
Where: Council Chambers, City Hall Administration Center, 300 6th Street
How the Agenda Works
City committee agendas bundle most of their business into a “Consent Calendar” — items nobody expects to generate debate, voted on as a single block unless a committee member or a member of the public pulls one out for separate discussion.
Everything numbered 1 through 9 below is on that consent block. Item 10 isn’t — it’s been set aside as Non-Consent, meaning the committee is expected to discuss it.
The Consent Calendar
1. Air Quality Program funding renewal. The city is asking the mayor and finance director to sign a one-year sub-recipient agreement with the state Department of Agriculture and Natural Resources — $60,000 in federal pass-through money (CFDA 66.605) plus $25,714 in required city match, for a total program budget of $85,714 running Oct. 1, 2026 through Sept. 30, 2027.
In exchange, the city’s Air Quality Program keeps doing what it does:
Staffing the Rapid City Area Air Quality Board
Running at least annual inspections on any facility with a compliance plan
Reviewing those plans against Pennington County Ordinance No. 12 and the city’s own Air Quality Ordinance
Issuing construction permits, running the wood-burning and dust-control public service campaigns each season,
Forwarding complaints to the state within five working days.
Staff have to maintain EPA Method 9 visual-emissions certification to do the inspections at all.
If the program ever spends more than $750,000 in federal funds in a year it triggers a full federal audit — it’s nowhere close. The state side is signed already (Hunter Roberts, DANR Secretary, Aug. 20); this item is the city catching up.
2. More design money — and six more years — for the Highway 16/16B utility project. A $196,980 amendment to the city’s contract with Avid4 Engineering for the Highway 16 & 16B Utility Reconstruction Project (Project 2782 / CIP 51418), which relocates city sewer and water lines around SDDOT’s Highway 16/16B interchange rebuild.
The original 2024 contract assumed SDDOT would bid its interchange work as one project; SDDOT has since split it into three separate projects bid over roughly six years, and the amendment pushes Avid4’s original $324,220 contract to $521,200 and stretches the completion date from Dec. 31, 2026 to Dec. 31, 2032.
The amendment also tacks on a second, unrelated scope: preliminary, final, and bidding-phase design for a new water main along Energy Park Drive, meant to pull the water system out of the Highway 16 & 16B intersection entirely.
The money splits $136,980 from the Water Enterprise fund and $60,000 from Sewer Enterprise. This authorization form hasn’t picked up any internal city sign-offs yet — every approval line on it is still blank.
3. A project manager for the city’s new fleet maintenance facility. The city wants to formally sign what The Tegra Group, a St. Louis Park, Minnesota firm, already has: a contract naming Tegra as owner’s representative for a planned municipal Operations and Maintenance Facility (Project 2891 / CIP 51477) — basically a new fleet-maintenance building the city doesn’t currently have the in-house architectural or engineering expertise to oversee alone.
The contract is capped at $240,000: $37,000 a month for six months (September 2026–February 2027) plus $3,000 a month in reimbursable expenses, funded half-and-half from two separate line items ($120,000 each).
Notably, that’s for Step 1 only — helping the city write a request for proposals for a design-build-finance team. Steps 2 through 5 (schematic design, design development, construction documents, and construction administration) get authorized separately later, scope still to be worked out.
There’s a small timing wrinkle worth flagging: Section 6 of the agreement sets completion “on or before March 2027 based on a notice to proceed on or before September 11, 2026.”
The city can’t issue that notice until the contract is actually signed — which, per this agenda, happens at the earliest Tuesday, four days after that date.
Tegra’s side has been signed since Aug. 20 (Nate Pearson, Partner); the city’s routing paperwork shows internal sign-off — project manager, CIP manager, city attorney, department director, finance appropriation — all completed by Aug. 31. The mayor’s signature is what’s actually pending.
Nothing in the contract appears to hinge on that Sept. 11 date in a way that costs the city anything, but it’s the kind of internal deadline that quietly slipped before the paperwork caught up.
There’s a bigger thread attached to this one, too. The Tegra Group is the same project-management firm the city didn’t renew past July 2026 for its role on the Sports Complex build — a contract worth 1.5% of construction cost.
At the Sept. 2 Legal & Finance Committee meeting, Finance Director Daniel Ainslie cited ending that contract as a $660,000 savings, offered as partial justification for a 67% increase in the Sports Complex operator’s own monthly fee.
But by the time he said that, the paperwork tells a different story: Tegra had already signed this new $240,000 O&M Facility contract on Aug. 20, and the city’s own internal sign-off — project manager, CIP manager, city attorney, department director, finance appropriation — was complete by Aug. 31, two days before Ainslie’s comment to committee.
The firm wasn’t gone from city work. It had already been handed a different building.
4–6. Three bid authorizations. Staff is asking permission to advertise for bids on three capital projects:
An $850,000 coating replacement for trunk sewer siphon structures at two Rapid Creek crossings (Project 2834.9)
A $140,000 motor replacement for Well 5 (Project 2912)
$450,000 in access-road and site work at three unrelated locations — South Pinedale Reservoir, the Elk Vale sanitary sewer force mains, and Well 12 (Project 2834.5).
The siphon-crossing and access-road items share a CIP number, 51293, but they’re not the same project — they’re bundled under the same capital-improvements bucket and were signed off by mostly the same staff on the same morning (Sept. 4).
7. A sidewalk waiver on Garden Lane. J Bickett Rentals LLC is subdividing roughly 6.5 acres near the Elk Vale Road interchange — legally the “Balance of Lot 5,” Section 9 — into three tracts: a 5.7-acre Tract A with two horse sheds and a water tank, a third-of-an-acre Tract B with a garage, and a half-acre Tract C with a shed and a mobile home.
As part of building on Tracts B and C, the company wants out of the sidewalk requirement along Garden Lane at 2926 and 2918 Garden Lane, citing the same justification this committee has heard twice already this summer: no sidewalk exists anywhere on Garden Lane, the nearest connected one is about 1,485 feet away on S. Valley Drive, and a single isolated segment would connect to nothing.
In exchange, the owner is dedicating an extra 16 feet of right-of-way along Garden Lane, on top of the roughly 13 feet that already exists from centerline. Staff is recommending approval, and the survey work (All Aspects Inc., dated May 7, 2026) is already filed.
8–9. Two board reappointments. The Mayor’s Office is asking the committee to confirm the reappointments of Jenn Johnson, Emily Calhoun, and Pat Roseland to the Historic Preservation Committee, and of Lee Geiger to the Historic Sign Review Committee.
Off Consent: A Developer’s Second Try on Moon Meadows Drive
Founding Equity Land Partners, LLC — doing business through HME Companies, whose VP of Development Lane Warzecha filed the paperwork — is appealing the city engineer’s Aug. 19 denial of its request to skip building out Moon Meadows Drive to full city standards as part of subdividing its 40-acre parcel near Healing Way.
Staff’s recommendation to the committee is to deny the appeal and uphold that denial.
This is actually the second time the city has said no to this exact ask: the exception form notes it was previously denied under a different file number, 24EX074, before this year’s version (26EX075) was denied again on sight, the same day it was submitted.
The location matters. FELP’s undeveloped acreage sits directly adjacent to Sanford Health’s newly announced Medical Mile campus.
A master site plan submitted with the appeal, prepared by Stroh Architects and dated November 2025, labels FELP’s land “future development to which Moon Meadows will be developed to support,” sitting just north of Sanford’s medical office and mixed-use lots and the 17-lot single-family block already platted along the curve of Healing Way Court.
FELP’s case, in two parts:
First, the original exception request: the company already built and sold homes along Healing Way in 2022, and extending Moon Meadows Drive now — a planned “large arterial street” — would run its right-of-way adjacent to roughly half the lots in the new phase, none of which would even take direct access from it; egress would run through Healing Way and a proposed Celestial Court extension instead. FELP says the cost would erase the profit margin on the lot sales, that fewer than 60 existing units currently rely on the Healing Way/Moon Meadows junction anyway, and that the road will need to be built eventually regardless, once the eastern part of the 40 acres develops.
Second, the appeal itself, filed after the denial: FELP says it now has a purchase agreement in hand to sell 12 new lots — plus two previously built but never-platted townhome lots, 14 total — to a local homebuilder who’s ready to start “as soon as the infrastructure is completed and approved.”
The appeal frames waiting 3 to 5 years to build Moon Meadows, until it’s clearer how the Sanford expansion shapes the area, as the more responsible sequencing, and pitches the housing itself as filling a near-term gap for “professionals working in the area surrounding and including the Sanford Health facilities.”
A preliminary plan attached to the appeal packet — covering water, sanitary, and storm tie-ins for a 13.68-acre “Phase IV” of what it calls Moon Meadows Ridge — lists the developer not as Founding Equity Land Partners or HME Companies, but as SLH Holdings, LLC, based in Brookings, South Dakota.
State filings resolve it: SLH Holdings is Kirk Simet’s company, and Simet — signing as “CEO of SLH Holdings, LLC” — is one of two organizers listed on FELP’s own founding paperwork in 2020, alongside Mike Kuntz of Grand Forks. HME Companies, the entity that actually filed this exception and appeal, traces back to the same Brookings address and the same registered agent as both SLH Holdings and FELP.
In plain terms: this isn’t three separate companies working together. It’s one operation wearing three names.
FELP’s Managing Member on the appeal letter, Casey C. Peterson, is a step removed from that side of the operation — he’s the founder of Casey Peterson, Ltd., a regional CPA and wealth-management firm with a Rapid City office, and his tie to FELP is established only by his own signature on the appeal, not by an independent state filing (South Dakota doesn’t require member-managed LLCs to list every member).
What’s still open
Nothing on this agenda is finalized until Tuesday’s vote.
Worth watching: whether Item 7’s Garden Lane waiver clears without comment given the precedent set in August with Admiral.
Whether committee members press FELP on the gap between “3 to 5 years off” and a purchase agreement the company describes as ready to move the moment the exception is granted.
Whether FELP’s Healing Way and the TIF-financed Healing Way extension toward Catron Boulevard turn out to be the same physical road.
Sourcing
City of Rapid City Public Works Committee agenda, Sept. 15, 2026 (rcgov.org); Sub-Recipient Agreement (SD DANR/City of Rapid City); Professional Services Agreement and authorization form (City of Rapid City/The Tegra Group, Inc.); Exception to Standard Specifications form and appeal letter (City of Rapid City Public Works–Engineering Services; HME Companies/Founding Equity Land Partners, LLC); sidewalk variance request letter and subdivision plat (J Bickett Rentals LLC).
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