Rapid City SD – Mayor Jason Salamun’s office marked this week’s “five key agreements” announcement with a Facebook post declaring the Indoor Sports Complex “a win for our community and the next generation.”
It’s a good press release.
It’s also a good moment to check the underlying paperwork — because the city’s own Tax Increment District ledger tells a story the public hasn’t been given about how the Catalyst District came to exist, and the mayor’s own numbers don’t square with the record either.
Two Districts, One Day
Tax Increment District #100 — the $125 million “Libertyland” Destination District — closed on January 20, 2026 with no money spent, after sustained public opposition to handing a private developer a $46.5 million grant for retail, lodging, and theme attractions.
What hasn’t been reported: TID #100 and TID #101 (the Catalyst District, applicant City of Rapid City) were created on the exact same day — September 2, 2025. They weren’t sequential. They were approved side by side, in the same Council action, more than four months before Libertyland was ever closed out.
The “youth sports fieldhouse” district wasn’t stood up in response to Libertyland’s failure. It existed in parallel with Libertyland from the moment both were created.
It goes back further. The City’s Tax Increment District History ledger shows two earlier, closed applications with the identical pairing: TID #96 (“Rapid City Destination District,” applicant Libertyland USA, LLC) and TID #97 (“Rapid City Catalyst District,” applicant City of Rapid City) — both closed, both predating #100 and #101.
The city had already tried pairing a private “Destination District” application with a public “Catalyst District” application once before, months earlier, and did it again with #100/#101.
That’s a structure, not a reaction: one district that carries a private developer’s name and draws public attention, and a second, quieter district — created the same day, filed under the City’s own name — that ends up carrying shared infrastructure and, eventually, other developers’ costs.
Libertyland’s defeat in January 2026 didn’t create the Catalyst District. It just left the Catalyst District standing alone, without the twin that had been sharing the ledger with it since the day both were filed.
The Business Park Riding Inside It
The Catalyst District was approved September 2, 2025 with total eligible project costs of $84,126,687, funding a Phase I/Phase II buildout centered on the sports fieldhouse (roughly $30 million of direct fieldhouse construction) plus road, water, and sewer infrastructure at 143rd Avenue, Seger Drive, and Mall Drive.
On June 15, 2026, the City Council approved “Amendment #1” to that project plan, adding Elevate Rapid City as a second developer to acquire and develop 128 acres near Mall Drive and Haines Avenue into a private business park, plus a multi-family development.
The amendment added $19,464,314 to the district’s costs — $10 million in capital costs (street and utility work, grading, and excavation for Elevate’s site) and $9,464,314 in financing costs — bringing the district’s total eligible costs to $103,591,001.
That $19,464,314 works out to 23.1% of the original $84,126,687 — just under, not exactly at, the 25% threshold in the City’s TIF Policy (Section F). The actual 25% ceiling would have been about $21 million; Elevate’s addition came in roughly $1.6 million under it.
Here’s why that ceiling matters: an amendment of 25% or less, filed within five years of a district’s creation, follows the same application, hearing, and notification process as an original TIF request under the policy’s own text — it still goes before the Planning Commission and Council.
What staying under 25% specifically avoids is triggering SDCL 11-9-23, which forces a full base-valuation redetermination for the entire district. It does not, on the policy’s own language, exempt the amendment from public hearings. Whether the June 15 hearing actually got the scrutiny a $19.5 million grant to a private business park deserves — turnout, coverage, public comment — is worth a separate look at that meeting’s own record.
Holding the Mayor to His Own Number
Mayor Salamun’s post states, in his name, that the city has “secured more than $66 million” toward the Sports Complex through “the Hotel BID fee, the Catalyst TIF district, the land donation, Vision Funds, and a soon-to-be-announced naming rights partnership.”
That number doesn’t hold up against the funding stack in the underlying agreements. Add up the four pieces that are actually committed — Catalyst TIF ($24.58 million), Hotel BID 2 ($28.28 million), the Pete Lien & Sons land donation ($6.2 million), and the Vision Fund ($5 million) — and the total is $64.06 million. Not $66 million. Not “more than $66 million.” The mayor’s own sentence overstates the secured total by roughly $2 million, and nothing in any document reviewed for this piece explains where the extra money is supposed to come from.
The naming rights clause makes it worse, not better. Salamun’s sentence lists a “soon-to-be-announced naming rights partnership” as one of the things contributing to the “$66 million secured” — in the same breath, with no distinction drawn between money in hand and money that doesn’t exist yet.
By the administration’s own account elsewhere in the same post, that deal isn’t signed: no sponsor, no value, no timeline. This project has a documented $12.1 million funding gap that naming rights is specifically supposed to close. Counting an unsigned sponsorship deal as “secured” funding doesn’t hold up. Either the $66 million figure includes money that doesn’t exist yet, or the naming rights language in the post is decorative rather than descriptive.
Two more figures in the post — “$11 million in direct annual economic impact” and “4.5 cents of every sales tax dollar collected in Rapid City” returning to the state — appear nowhere in any TIF project plan, feasibility study, or contract reviewed for this piece.
They may trace back to the Sports Facilities Advisory study cited in the Catalyst District project plan, which projects $244.5 million in cumulative economic impact over 20 years — a very different number, on a very different timescale, from an “$11 million” annual figure. If the mayor’s office has a study backing these specific numbers, it should release it.
What Checks Out
To be fair to the record: the mayor’s description of the RFP and contracting process — a council-approved call for proposals, a review committee with city leadership, Sports Commission representatives, technical experts, and legal counsel, and the five agreements now headed to Council (the Pete Lien & Sons land donation, the Sports Facilities Companies management agreement, TSP architecture/engineering, Scull Construction as Construction Manager at Risk, and the pending naming rights deal) — matches the terms of those same contracts as documented in city records.
What’s Still Unanswered
- Where does the extra ~$2 million in the mayor’s “$66 million” figure come from, if the four itemized commitments only total $64.06 million?
- What is the source and methodology behind the “$11 million in direct annual economic impact” and “4.5 cents of every sales tax dollar” figures?
- Did the June 15, 2026 Amendment #1 hearing receive Planning Commission and Council public notice and comment consistent with an original TIF application, as the policy requires — and how much public awareness or turnout did it actually draw?
- Given the pairing pattern going back to TID #96/#97, was filing a public “Catalyst” district alongside a private “Destination” or developer-named district a standard structural practice at the city, independent of how either project ultimately fared?
Sourcing
Rapid City Tax Increment Financing Policy (revised June 15, 2026); TID #100 (Rapid City Destination District) Project Plan, approved 09/02/2025; TID #101 (Rapid City Catalyst District) Project Plan and Amendment #1, approved 09/02/2025 and 06/15/2026; City of Rapid City Tax Increment District History ledger (rcgov.org); Rapid City Municipal Government Facebook post, “Rapid City’s Sports Complex is a Win for Our Community and the Next Generation,” by Mayor Jason Salamun.
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