Tag: Mining
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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…
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Deja Vu Zoning: The Cement Plants Other Half Isn’t Getting Rezoned – And That’s The Point
Rapid City SD – Case 26RZ029 goes before the Rapid City Planning Commission July 23, 2026. What is 26RZ029 Case 26RZ029 asks the Planning Commission to rezone two parcels currently sitting under South Dakota Codified Law § 11-4-30 — the state statute, enacted via a 2000 special legislative session, that froze the cement plant’s land…
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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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What is Burning Next to Rapid City’s Neighborhoods? Inside the 25 Year GCC Dacotah Zoning Void
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…
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RETRO-ZONED: Rapid City is Changing the Map to Match the Ground for GCC Dacotah
RAPID CITY, SD – On June 4, 2026, the Rapid City Planning Commission considered four simultaneous rezoning requests covering 562.68 acres of active mining and cement plant operations within Rapid City limits. The petitioner on all four requests was listed as the City of Rapid City Community Development Department — acting on behalf of GCC…
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Permitted but Unzoned: How Rapid City’s 25- Year Zoning Gap for GCC Dacotah 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 – GCC Dacotah and Rapid City’s Zoning Dance
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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The 25-Year Blind Spot: How a 563-Acre Mining Operation -GCC Dacotah- 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…