Two Sidewalk Waivers, One Agenda: Committee Grills Corporate Request, Punts the Other to September

Rapid City SD – The Rapid City Public Works Committee meeting opened with a chaotic public comment period.

Concerned citizen Mark Millar was first to the microphone, telling the committee they were starting to look like a “bunch of clowns” before noting the state is stepping in to fix the deck of the bridge that prompted the city’s railyard relocation study — a reference to the Campbell Street Bridge.

He was followed by another Rapid City resident, who read a raw, unedited AI-generated script straight from their phone, complete with robotic pronoun corrections spoken aloud mid-sentence.

But once public comment ended, the agenda paired two unrelated sidewalk-waiver requests — one from a national beverage corporation, one from a residential subdivision developer. Only one of them actually got discussed.

A $40,000 Ask from a $900M Giant

The first item, PW081126-08 (Permit 26ZE019), came from Sam Larson of Powder River Construction, acting on behalf of Admiral Beverage Corporation (Pepsi Cola of the Black Hills).

Larson requested a waiver under Rapid City Municipal Code 12.08.060 along Creek Drive, triggered as a condition of a building permit for a warehouse expansion at 2720 Creek Drive.

Per Larson’s letter to the City Council, Creek Drive dead-ends roughly 2,200 feet south of the property, and the nearest continuous sidewalk sits about 2,800 feet away on East Saint Patrick Street. Installing the required ~2,700 square feet of concrete would cost the company an estimated $40,000. City staff recommended approval.

Passing the Concrete Buck to Homebuilders

The second, unrelated request came from Advanced Design Engineering & Surveying — engineer of record Jeremy Schnell, PE — on behalf of Murphy Ranch LLC. The request sought a waiver under RCMC 16.16.050 along Rigby Loop and Glock Street, two new roads being platted for Phases 10D-1 and 10D-2 of the Murphy Ranch Estates Subdivision.

This wasn’t a request to skip sidewalks entirely. Schnell’s letter asked that the installation obligation shift away from the developer at the platting stage and onto individual homebuilders as homes go up down the road — which the letter describes as consistent with how prior phases of Murphy Ranch have worked. Pennington County Planning formally opposed the variance; staff recommended denial.

That debate never happened Tuesday, though. At the applicant’s request, the item was continued to the committee’s September 1 meeting before it came up for discussion — leaving Admiral Beverage as the only sidewalk waiver the committee actually took up.

Rejection on the Dais: No Rubber Stamp Here

Discussion focused entirely on the Admiral Beverage request. But several council members raised the residential comparison unprompted anyway — bringing the same corporate-versus-residential double standard into the room that the agenda itself only implied.

• The Corporate Contrast: Councilman Bill Evans led the pushback on Admiral Beverage, noting the company’s parent headquarters in Worland, Wyoming, is fully surrounded by sidewalks. I7″This is not a hardship on this company at all,” Evans said, later adding: “We’re forcing a housing development that’s pinching pennies to do it… but here’s a company that has no problem with a budget where their CEOs are making millions of dollars.”
• The Bridge Counterargument: The contractor’s defense — citing a nearby one-lane bridge over Box Elder Creek with no foot traffic — didn’t hold up once City Engineer Roger Hall noted that bridge is going out to bid for replacement this fall, with pedestrian access built into the new design.
• The Future Cost: Councilwoman Armstrong rejected the variance on financial grounds, arguing that waiving the $40,000 requirement now just defers the cost — potentially turning it into an $80,000 or $120,000 problem once sidewalk connectivity becomes necessary later.
• The Political Pivot: Councilwoman Meyer initially floated tabling the item, citing a pending land-use map update and offering the applicant the option to push it out. She then pivoted, suggesting — per a recommendation from Director Mike Theis — that the city retroactively require neighboring industrial properties to install sidewalks if they’d previously received temporary variances. But when the committee moved toward a vote, she hedged, saying she didn’t know whether “the sentiment is to vote this down today or to let the full council decide.”
• Evans and Armstrong moved to put the motion to deny on the floor.

The ADA Reality Check: Placeholders vs. Promises

It’s tempting to read a sidewalk waiver as an ADA problem. The actual law is narrower. DOJ guidance dating to 1996 says 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 has to comply with Title II accessibility standards. The 2023 federal Public Right-of-Way Accessibility Guidelines (PROWAG) now spell out what that means for new construction.

In other words: nothing on Tuesday’s agenda was illegal under the ADA. The live question wasn’t statutory compliance — it was whether deferring sidewalk construction relies on an enforceable mechanism, or an unenforceable placeholder.

Council members Evans and Armstrong ultimately forced the issue to a vote. The committee voted unanimously to forward the Admiral Beverage variance to full City Council with a recommendation to deny.

The Murphy Ranch request — and the developer-to-homebuilder shift it proposes — is still undecided, and will get its own hearing on September 1.

Sourcing

Reporting for this piece is based on this reporter’s review of the archived Aug. 11, 2026 Rapid City Public Works Committee meeting video, agenda documents (PW081126-08, PW081126-10), and Sam Larson’s and Jeremy Schnell’s letters to the City Council.