Rapid City SD – At the July 20, 2026 council meeting, Ordinance No. 6726 came up for its first reading — a measure that would hand a single city administrator the authority to waive zoning rules, including the exact rule Council President Stephen Tamang’s own property has allegedly been violating for eight months.
Here’s what the record shows.
A neighbor, a complaint, and a council member who confirmed it himself
Kathy Minnick lives next door to a house at the center of this. In a letter she submitted to the council ahead of the July 20 meeting, she laid out the timeline plainly. In July 2025, her neighbors sold their home. Before closing, she learned the buyer intended to lease the property to Oxford House as a sober-living residence for eight or nine adults — in a four-bedroom, single-family home.
Minnick’s first call was to her Ward 1 representative: Stephen Tamang. According to her letter, Tamang confirmed to her directly that he’d purchased the property and intended to lease it to Oxford House. She then called the city’s zoning department, where she was told that Rapid City’s single-family zoning caps occupancy at five unrelated adults without a Conditional Use Permit — and that the rule applied to everyone, in her words, “not even a City Council member” exempt.
After Oxford House publicly listed more than five residents at the address, Minnick filed a zoning complaint on November 7, 2025. What followed, by her account, was months of being told the city was working with Oxford House on the required permit — and then discovering that the city’s own notice of violation didn’t even cite the correct violation.
Her confidence collapsed further, she wrote, when she learned the June 10, 2026 Legal and Finance Committee meeting on this matter was actually the second closed-door meeting on the issue — held despite Community Development Director Vicki Fisher having specifically requested Minnick be invited. Neither Fisher nor city staff contacted her until two days after that second meeting had already happened.
“The perception within our neighborhood,” Minnick wrote, “is that the City is changing the rules after a complaint was filed, and that those changes appear to benefit one of its own elected officials.”
More than one house, and no permits filed
A second letter, from resident Markie Zacharias, sharpens the point: Tamang owns more than one property leased this way, and has not filed a Conditional Use Permit for any of them. “As a sitting council member,” Zacharias wrote, “he is very aware that he is violating current zoning laws.”
Zacharias’s letter also lists, cleanly, everything the proposed ordinance would remove from the existing process: no requirement to notify adjacent property owners, no public hearing, no City Council review of individual decisions, no published record of administrative decisions, and no ability for anyone but the applicant to appeal a ruling.
“Is the City changing the rules,” she asked directly, “to benefit one of its own officials and to allow city officials to skirt the scrutiny that every other resident must face? Currently my answer is yes to both questions.”
What the ordinance actually does
Ordinance 6726 isn’t a fix to an existing process — it creates one from scratch. Rapid City has never had an administrative path for a zoning exception tied to disability accommodation; today, that route runs through a public Conditional Use Permit process, with neighbor notice and a hearing.
The new ordinance would replace that, for accommodation requests, with a process run entirely by the Director of Community Development.
The text is specific about what’s on the table: reasonable accommodations may be requested for “any zoning or land use regulation, including but not limited to use standards, dimensional requirements, parking requirements, occupancy limits, spacing requirements, or procedural requirements.”
Occupancy limits — the exact rule Tamang’s properties are alleged to be violating — are named directly. The review authority section is equally direct: “The Director shall have authority to review requests for reasonable accommodation.” One person. Nowhere in the ordinance is there a requirement to notify neighbors, hold a hearing, or allow anyone but the applicant to appeal.
The city’s case is real, too
None of this means the ordinance is being proposed in bad faith. The City is legally obligated under the Fair Housing Act and the ADA to provide a path for disability accommodations, and the city attorney’s office has cited real case law — including Support Ministries for Persons with AIDS v. Village of Waterford and Innovative Health Systems v. City of White Plains — where municipalities were found liable under the FHA specifically because neighborhood opposition was allowed to influence a zoning decision on an accommodation request. An administrative process, kept away from public hearings where community bias can creep in, is a genuine, defensible way to avoid that liability.
A representative from Black Hills Works spoke in support of the ordinance at the meeting, saying a streamlined process is less of a burden on clients who’d otherwise have to sit for interviews or public scrutiny of their disability. That’s a real and sympathetic argument, and it deserves to be weighed honestly against the transparency concerns — not dismissed because of who else benefits from the same process.
What the numbers actually show
It’s worth being precise here: this is not a story about problem houses. A citywide comparison the city itself compiled, current as of June 22, 2026, tracks code enforcement and police activity at every single-family residence used for a reasonable accommodation — Oxford House, New Beginnings, and Black Hills Works properties alike. Across all of them, code enforcement issues are minor and resolved — a snow-and-ice complaint, a tree overhanging a sidewalk.
The handful of police cases on record all involve residents as victims of crime, not perpetrators: an assault in which the resident was the victim and the suspect wasn’t part of the household, an identity-theft case, a theft from a vehicle. Nothing in the city’s own data shows a pattern of trouble at any of these addresses, Tamang’s included. Whatever the concerns here are, they’re about process and disclosure — not about the residents themselves.
Where it stands
Several council members raised the optics of the ordinance directly with Tamang at the meeting. Tamang abstained from the vote, as he has before on this same underlying issue. The matter was pushed back rather than advanced to a second reading as originally scheduled.
What replaces the current draft — whether that includes a second signature from the city attorney’s office, sign-off from departments like fire, or something closer to what Minnick and Zacharias are asking for — is still an open question the council will have to answer when this comes back.
Sourcing
Public comment letters submitted to the Rapid City Council by Kathy Minnick (July 16, 2026) and Markie Zacharias (July 17, 2026); Ordinance No. 6726 and the City of Rapid City Department of Community Development’s May 27, 2026 memorandum (File #26OA005); the City of Rapid City’s citywide reasonable-accommodation property comparison (current as of June 22, 2026); the July 20, 2026 Rapid City Council meeting.
Leave a Reply