Rapid City SD- Tuesday’s Public Works Committee agenda is, for the most part, the routine business of running a city: a $129,450 tracked conveyor for the Solid Waste Division, a $21,102 change order for Well 13 pump equipment, $235,000 in advertised bids for upgrades at McKeague Field. Sixteen items, most of them numbers nobody will debate.

Then, tucked between the equipment purchases and the parks funding, are two requests to waive Rapid City’s sidewalk requirements — and the gap between how they’re being handled says more about how this city makes land-use decisions than anything on the rest of the agenda.

One will pass without a word of discussion. The other is getting pulled out for a vote — because staff is recommending the committee say no.

On the Table – The Concrete Divide

PW081126-08 (Permit 26ZE019): Sam Larson of Powder River Construction, on behalf of Admiral Beverage Corporation (Pepsi Cola of the Black Hills), is asking the city to waive the sidewalk required under RCMC 12.08.060 along Creek Drive as a condition of a warehouse expansion permit at 2720 Creek Drive.

PoLarson’s July 30 letter to the Council lays out the case: Creek Drive dead-ends about 2,200 feet south of the property with no through traffic and no residential access; the nearest continuous sidewalk is roughly 2,800 feet away on East Saint Patrick Street; and building the required ~2,700 square feet would cost the company an estimated $40,000. It’s item 9 of 10 on the Consent Calendar. Staff recommendation: Approve.

PW081126-10: Advanced Design Engineering & Surveying, on behalf of Murphy Ranch LLC, is asking the city to waive the sidewalk required under RCMC 16.16.050 along Rigby Loop and Glock Street — new streets being platted as part of Murphy Ranch Estates Subdivision, Phases 10D-1 and 10D-2.

This isn’t a request to skip sidewalks altogether. Engineer of record Jeremy Schnell’s letter asks that the developer not be responsible for installing them, and that the obligation instead fall to individual homebuilders “when the home is being built” — which the letter says is how prior phases of Murphy Ranch have functioned.

The subdivision sits in the county but inside the city’s three-mile platting jurisdiction, which is why it’s on a Rapid City agenda at all. Pennington County Planning does not support this variance — and neither, notably, does city staff. This is one of only two items pulled to the Non-Consent agenda (items 11-12). Staff recommendation: Deny

Ghosts of Variances Past

The two requests cite different sections of city code for a reason. RCMC 12.08.060 is the building-permit-triggered sidewalk requirement — the same section a homebuilder in Murphy Ranch would eventually be subject to when they pull a permit to build.

RCMC 16.16.050 is the subdivision-level requirement, imposed on the developer at the platting stage. Murphy Ranch LLC isn’t asking to eliminate the sidewalk obligation; it’s asking to move it from one code section — and one point of financial responsibility — to another, years down the line, house by house.

That’s not unprecedented in Rapid City. In November 2017, the Public Works Committee approved a nearly identical request — same ordinance, 16.16.050 — from Hewey Clemmons to waive sidewalk installation along Reservoir Road, Green Valley Drive and Greenfield Drive for the Clemmons Subdivision, just off the same Reservoir Road corridor that borders Murphy Ranch Estates today.

Whether those Clemmons Subdivision sidewalks were ever built when homes went up there — or whether the obligation quietly expired — is an open question this reporter has not yet run down.

A closer parallel showed up eight months ago, on the same kind of agenda. On Nov. 12, 2025, the Public Works Committee took up a request from Dean Kelly Construction (Ryan Kelly) to waive sidewalk under RCMC 12.08.060 — the same code section Admiral Beverage is citing now — for a single-family home at 102 Belleview Drive.

Same staff contact, Todd Peckosh. Same “sidewalk to nowhere” framing Powder River Construction would use for Creek Drive eight months later. This time, staff recommended denial — partly because a proposed mid-lot crosswalk connecting handicap ramps wouldn’t meet ADA standards — and the committee voted 3-1 to affirm it, per the Nov. 17, 2025 Council agenda itself.

What happened when it reached full Council that night is on the record on video. Councilor Roberts, the lone dissenting vote at committee, explained his dissent had been procedural — he’d voted against the denial specifically to send the item to Council so Dean Kelly Construction would get a chance to make its case in person.

Nobody from the company showed up. With no one there to argue the variance, Councilor Lehman moved to deny it, Roberts seconded his own earlier dissent away, and Council voted to kill it outright, all inside about 45 seconds of meeting time. No compromise, no continuance — the request simply lost by default.

That’s a different failure mode than Murphy Ranch is facing, but it’s the same underlying gap: a sidewalk obligation’s fate turned less on the merits of the slope, the code, or the ADA question staff had actually raised, and more on whether anyone bothered to show up and argue it.

The same Nov. 17 meeting also denied a separate, unrelated sidewalk variance on 1st Street, filed by Renner & Associates on behalf of Black Hills Outdoors — worth noting mainly as a reminder that these requests move through committee routinely, not as one-off oddities.

Clearing the Air on Accessibility

It’s tempting to frame a sidewalk waiver as an ADA problem. The actual law is narrower than that.

The Department of Justice has said directly, in guidance dating to 1996, that the ADA does not require a jurisdiction to build a pedestrian walkway where none is planned — the obligation attaches once a walkway is built or altered, not before.

What the ADA does require, per the Ninth Circuit’s 2002 ruling in Barden v. City of Sacramento, is that once a city builds or maintains a sidewalk system, that system — curb ramps, surface conditions, access points — has to comply with Title II accessibility standards. The 2023 federal Public Right-of-Way Accessibility Guidelines (PROWAG) now spell out exactly what that means for new construction.

In other words: nothing on Tuesday’s agenda is illegal under the ADA. The Murphy Ranch site plans still label future sidewalk segments on Rigby Loop and Glock Street as “future 4′ wide sidewalk” — meaning if and when they’re built, they’ll need to meet those standards. The live question isn’t legal compliance. It’s whether “future” has an enforcement mechanism behind it, or whether it’s a placeholder on a civil drawing that outlives everyone in this meeting.

Loose Ends & Open Threads

• Does the city track sidewalk obligations deferred to homebuilders under prior 16.16.050 waivers — including Clemmons in 2017 — to confirm they were eventually built?
• If a Murphy Ranch homebuilder later seeks their own 12.08.060 waiver at the building-permit stage, is there anything stopping the sidewalk obligation from being waived twice for the same lot?
• Does the committee typically follow a staff Deny recommendation, or does Non-Consent status mean this one is genuinely contested?
• Whether Dean Kelly Construction ever pursued the sidewalk waiver through a new application, as they’d have had to after the outright Nov. 17, 2025 denial — or dropped it and built the sidewalk instead.

Sourcing

Aug. 11, 2026 Public Works Committee agenda

• Full agenda, rcgov.org: 2026 08 11 Public Works Committee Meeting
• PW081126-02 — Well 13 equipment/Cahoy Pump Service change order
• PW081126-07 — tracked conveyor purchase, Solid Waste Division
• PW081126-08 — Admiral Beverage/Permit 26ZE019, plus Sam Larson (Powder River Construction) sidewalk variance letter to Council, July 30, 2026
• PW081126-09 — McKeague Field Vision Fund Upgrades
• PW081126-10 — Murphy Ranch LLC, plus Jeremy Schnell (Advanced Design Engineering & Surveying) variance letter and Murphy Ranch Estates Phase 10D-1/10D-2 site plans submitted to Council

November 2017 precedent

• 2017 11 20 City Council Agenda — item PW111417-12, Hewey Clemmons/Clemmons Subdivision

November 2025 precedent

• 2025 11 17 City Council Meeting Agenda — items PW111225-07 (Dean Kelly Construction/Belleview Drive) and PW111225-08 (Renner & Associates for Black Hills Outdoors/1st Street), with staff and committee recommendations; this is the primary source for the committee’s 3-1 vote, confirmed directly from the agenda text
• Dean Kelly Construction (Ryan Kelly) sidewalk variance request letter to Public Works Engineering Services, Oct. 30, 2025, and the related Nov. 12, 2025 Public Works Committee agenda summary
• Archived Nov. 17, 2025 City Council meeting video: youtube.com/watch?v=rpJJ096p7VM — primary source for what actually happened when Item 28 reached Council (42:11–43:05): Councilor Roberts explaining his committee dissent, no representative from Dean Kelly Construction present, Councilor Lehman’s motion to deny seconded by Roberts, and the vote to deny

ADA / legal background

• U.S. Department of Justice, technical assistance letters on the ADA and sidewalk/curb-ramp construction (1996): letter to Rep. Lazio, letter to Rep. Walker
• Barden v. City of Sacramento, 292 F.3d 1073 (9th Cir. 2002)
• U.S. Access Board, final rule for Public Right-of-Way Accessibility Guidelines (PROWAG), effective Sept. 7, 2023: Federal Register notice