Rapid City, S.D. – On Tuesday, June 30 at 12:30 p.m., the Rapid City Public Works Committee will hear what the agenda describes as a routine appeal.
The item is listed as Exception 26EX042 — a request to not dedicate right-of-way or construct a Collector Street for the Deadwood Avenue Commercial Subdivision and Farrar Business Park.
Routine. Clinical. Easy to scroll past.
It isn’t.
Who’s At This Table?
The exception was submitted on May 26, 2026 by Buren Properties, LLC. The contact email on the application is e.*****@****sd.biz.
That domain belongs to Complete Concrete, Inc., doing business as Complete Contracting Solutions — a Rapid City-based heavy highway and concrete contractor operating out of 7201 Mt. Rushmore Road.
According to the company’s own website, Complete Concrete was founded in 2006 and grew from $150,000 in annual revenue to $50 million by 2021. Their project portfolio includes the Meade County I-90 reconstruction, the LaCrosse Street and I-90 interchange, Hot Springs Urban Reconstruction, and the Hill City Streetscape.
In other words: municipal streets and public concrete infrastructure are heir business model.
The signatory on the exception application is Elroy Buren, Vice President of Complete Contracting Solutions, who the company describes as overseeing all project management and superintendence with over 20 years of construction experience.
Elroy Buren’s company builds roads for public money. Buren Properties, LLC — his property holding entity — is now asking the city to excuse him from building one on his own commercial subdivision.
The City Got It Right. Mostly.
To its credit, the City of Rapid City’s engineering staff reviewed the application and got the technical call correct.
City Engineer Ray Wall denied Exception 26EX042 on June 9, 2026. The denial was straightforward: as part of the preliminary subdivision plat for the Deadwood Avenue Commercial Subdivision and Farrar Business Park, the applicant is required under the city’s Infrastructure Design Criteria Manual — IDCM Figure 2.1 — to dedicate right-of-way and construct a Collector Street as identified on the Major Street Plan.
The exception request asked to skip all of it — the road, the water, the sewer, the curb, gutter, asphalt, and streetlight conduit.
Staff didn’t just say no. They offered a legitimate path forward: plat Lot 1 as a restricted lot, allowing the property transfer to proceed while preserving the infrastructure requirement for the future. It was a reasonable, professionally sound compromise.
The applicant’s justification — no active utilities, a water body crossing, a street segment that temporarily connects to nothing — describes conditions that are standard in phased commercial development. They are not exceptional circumstances. They are the reason the Major Street Plan exists in the first place.
Engineering did its job. The denial letter went to Longbranch Civil Engineering, Inc., the Rapid City firm representing Buren Properties that prepared the plat and filed the appeal on the applicant’s behalf. Principal Engineer Kale McNaboe, P.E. filed the appeal the same day the denial went out.
That appeal is what lands before the Public Works Committee Tuesday.
What’s Wrong With This Picture
Here is where the story gets more complicated.
Exception 26EX042 lists two tax IDs: 60618 and 60617. Both parcels are part of the Farrar Business Park and Deadwood Avenue Commercial Subdivision project. Both are subject to the Collector Street requirement. Both are included in the exception request.
According to Pennington County property records, Tax ID 60618 is owned by Buren Properties LLC. That checks out — it’s the entity that signed the application.
Tax ID 60617 is owned by a different entity entirely: BGC Business Park, LLC.
BGC Business Park, LLC was formed on August 21, 2018 — the same day the parcel at 4825 Hickock Trail transferred by warranty deed. Its registered agent is Jonathon Silva, also of 4825 Hickock Trail, Rapid City.
The 2025 annual report filed with the South Dakota Secretary of State lists the beneficial owner of BGC Business Park, LLC as the Culmer Living Trust, also at that address.
BGC Business Park, LLC is a legally separate entity from Buren Properties, LLC. Jonathon Silva is not Elroy Buren. The Culmer Living Trust is not Complete Concrete, Inc.
And yet BGC Business Park, LLC does not appear anywhere in Exception 26EX042. Not on the application. Not in the appeal email. Not in the denial letter. Not in the agenda packet published on the city’s website ahead of Tuesday’s meeting.
The denial letter from the city went to Longbranch Engineering. Not to BGC Business Park, LLC. Not to Jonathon Silva. Not to the Culmer Living Trust.
One LLC filed a municipal exception covering land it does not own. The owner of the second parcel is absent from the entire public record of this proceeding.
Whether BGC Business Park, LLC consented to being included in this application — and whether that consent was documented anywhere — is a question the public packet does not answer.
The Denial of an Exception
The city engineer denied this exception. That matters and it deserves to be said plainly: the technical system worked.
But the denial addressed what was in front of it. What appears to have gone unexamined is whether the application itself was complete — whether an exception covering two separately owned parcels can proceed with only one owner’s signature on record.
If the Public Works Committee approves this appeal Tuesday, that question follows the item to City Council on July 6. If the committee denies it, the question remains: what happens to Tax ID 60617 and the infrastructure obligations attached to it, when its owner was never formally part of this process?
Before the Gavel Falls
Before the committee votes, these questions remain on the table:
- If a $50 million heavy highway contractor whose entire business model is built on constructing public concrete infrastructure claims that building a standard municipal collector street is an unreasonable burden — why should any smaller developer ever be held to the city’s own manual?
2. When city engineering staff deny an exception and offer a documented legal workaround, whose interests are elected officials serving if they choose to override their own technical experts for a well-resourced applicant?
3. If this exception is granted and the collector street is deferred, how long before taxpayers see a request for public infrastructure funding to build the exact road that was dodged today?
4. And perhaps most immediately: did the owner of Tax ID 60617 know their parcel was included in someone else’s exception request?
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