Tag: Cement plant
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20 Acres of Breathing Room: A Win For Rapid City – Editorial
Rapid City SD –Let’s take a moment to celebrate a genuine, tangible victory for our local community. The GCC rezoning saga has finally crossed the finish line, and Rapid City is walking away with 20 fewer acres dedicated to heavy mining and extraction. If you watched the latest planning meeting, you might have caught the…
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Deja- Vu Zoning: The Cement Plants Other Half Isn’t Getting Rezoned – And That’s the Point
Case 26RZ029 goes before the Rapid City Planning Commission July 23, 2026 What Is Known Case 26RZ029 asks the Planning Commission to rezone two parcels currently sitting under South Dakota Codified Law § 11-4-30 — the 2001 state statute that froze the cement plant’s land into whatever use it had “as of December 28, 2000,”…
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Just When You Thought It Was Over: The Give- And -Take Between GCC Dacotah And Rapid City
Rapid City SD – The ink is barely dry on three newly passed municipal ordinances, but the multi-layered chess match over the future of Rapid City’s heavy industrial footprint is already shifting back to the planning boards this Thursday morning. The No Votes on Ordinance 6719 On July 7th, the Rapid City Common Council pushed…
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Smoke and Mirrors: An Award-Winning Performance at City Hall: An Editorial
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…
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The 25 Year Precedent Set by GCC Dacotah- EDITORIAL CARTOON
For Immediate ReleaseRapid City, SD –From the Desk of the Press Secretary, Office of Waterfowl Affairs, Memorial Park Division “The Office of Waterfowl Affairs notes the historical precedent set by the 25-year oversight of the aforementioned 563-acre mining operation. We applaud the city’s long-standing tradition of looking the other way when it comes to expansion…
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Permitted but Unzoned: How Rapid City’s 25- Year Zoning Gap Survived a $105 Million Expansion
The 2016 Groundbreaking On the morning of March 18, 2016, Governor Dennis Daugaard stood at 501 North Saint Onge Street in Rapid City and broke ground on a $90 million expansion of the GCC Dacotah cement plant. Mayor Steve Allender was there. The Associated Press covered it. An international cement industry trade publication covered it.…
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The Elephant in the Cement Truck – Editorial Cartoon
The 25-Year Blind Spot: How a 563-Acre Mining Operation Escaped Rapid City’s Oversight How Rapid City Homeowners Unwittingly Subsidized a Global Cement Giant for 25 Years Rapid City Proactively Moves to Define It’s Cement Plant Future
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How Rapid City Homeowners Unwittingly Subsidized a Global Cement Giant for 25 Years
When a city department leaves a massive industrial footprint unmapped for a quarter-century, it’s not a clerical oversight—it’s an unrecognized tax subsidy. A deep dive into Pennington County property records reveals a glaring disparity between how local heavy infrastructure companies are taxed versus how a multi-national cement operation, GCC Dacotah, is assessed. The Anatomy of…
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The 25-Year Blind Spot: How a 563-Acre Mining Operation Escaped Rapid City’s Oversight
At 7:10 on Thursday morning, most Rapid City residents were still asleep. The ones who showed up to the Planning Commission meeting came because the ground beneath their neighborhood had been shaking before dawn. What they learned—and what the city itself had only recently discovered—was that a foreign-owned cement company had been extracting minerals from…