Editor’s note: This reporter commented on the Facebook thread referenced below.

The Facebook Post

Council President Stephen Tamang posted to Facebook this week about finding cheap vodka shooter bottles on a walk with his daughter — calling it a sign of a problem the city has let become normal, and noting that the council has, in the past, rejected even modest proposals to limit early-morning alcohol sales.

Who was Making This Post?

Tamang isn’t only Rapid City’s Council President. He’s a board-certified addiction medicine physician — Monument Health’s Director of Community Health Services and medical director of a regional addiction medicine service, a Suboxone prescriber who has spent more than a decade treating the population his post describes.

He’s also helped build the University of South Dakota’s substance-use-disorder curriculum and advises Emily’s Hope, a Sioux Falls recovery and prevention nonprofit.

There’s no professional distance left in that arrangement.

The disease he treats every day at Monument Health is the same thing his own daughter had to step around on a walk near their house — a medical degree and a council seat don’t buy immunity from it.

That background matters, because this isn’t the first time Dr. Tamang has made this argument to this body. He’s made it before — and the council said no.

Not because it doubted the harm; the objections that follow were mainly about protecting local businesses and their employees from the cost of the fix, not disputing that the problem was real.

How the 2024 Failed Ordinance Got to Council

In August 2024, the council took up a proposal — brought by then-Alderman Josh Biberdorf, reviving a version the Legal & Finance Committee had tabled without discussion in 2020 — to push back the start of off-sale alcohol hours from 7 a.m. to 10 a.m.

State law (SDCL 9-29-7) allows South Dakota cities to set stricter hours than the state’s own 7 a.m.-to-2 a.m. window; Rapid City had chosen not to.

On Aug. 5, 2024, the council voted to direct the City Attorney’s Office to draft the amendment, citing public comment that Rapid City sees a disproportionately high volume of ambulance calls compared to cities of similar size.

On Aug. 14, the Legal & Finance Committee voted 4-1 — Biberdorf, Paul Evans, Lindsey Seachris, and Greg Strommen in favor, Kevin Maher opposed — to send the drafted ordinance to the full council without a recommendation.

Dr. Tamang’s 2024 Testimony

Dr. Tamang addressed the council during public comment at that Aug. 19, 2024 meeting, before he held any council seat, introducing himself as a physician who’d worked in the Rapid City community for about a decade.

He told the council that earlier in his career, he probably would have opposed an ordinance like this one himself — seeing it as unnecessary regulation on a legal product. A decade of practice changed his mind.

He described the hospital seeing an average of 20 to 30 patients dying of alcoholic cirrhotic liver disease at any given time, said the most common ER presentation is a gastrointestinal bleed severe enough to require blood transfusions, and pointed to slower, long-term damage like hepatic encephalopathy as the disease’s other toll. “It’s a horrible thing,” he said.

“I would say our health system lives in a quiet desperation — we don’t complain about it because it’s our job. We see them in the health system that I work in, as well as the community.”

He closed by arguing that a product causing this level of harm justifies reasonable precautions, including limiting the hours it can be sold.

Police Chief Don Hedrick backed the change too, describing it not as a fix but as a “window of soberness” — a chance for patrol officers to get a break from transporting intoxicated people, and for some residents to be reachable before they were drinking again.

The Case against the 2024 Ordinance

The opposition wasn’t just political caution.

Trevor Moyle, a liquor category manager at a Rapid City convenience store, told the council that a person’s choice to drink to excess isn’t the fault of the retiree who shops before the morning crowds, the tourist headed to the lake, or the clerk who loses hours when sales shrink — in his framing, the ordinance punished everyone to reach a few.

Then-Alderman John Roberts made a related point: that most 7 a.m. buyers aren’t, in his words, “raging alcoholics,” that the restriction would cost the city tourist tax revenue, and that no one gets help who doesn’t already want it.

Both raised a practical problem neither Tamang nor Hedrick fully answered: Rapid City doesn’t control Box Elder or the rest of the county, so pushing the start time back within city limits mostly means a short drive to the same product, not less of it.

The Vote

The ordinance reached its first reading that same night, Aug. 19, 2024, and failed 7–3 — ending the matter before a second reading scheduled for Sept. 3 ever took place. Only Seachris, Biberdorf, and Pat Roseland voted against keeping the status quo.

It’s also worth noting what Rapid City would have been doing, had it passed: no other South Dakota city appears to restrict the morning start time for alcohol sales beyond the state’s default of 7 a.m. Rapid City wouldn’t have been catching up to a common practice elsewhere in the state — it would have been the first to try it.

A Complication No One Raised

Severely alcohol-dependent drinkers who can’t access a beverage sometimes turn to what’s clinically termed “non-beverage alcohol” — mouthwash, hand sanitizer, vanilla extract — to stave off withdrawal.

It’s a documented pattern in addiction and harm-reduction research, particularly among people with the most severe, hardest-to-treat dependence. Those products often run a higher alcohol concentration than liquor and carry their own poisoning risks.

For the population Tamang’s testimony centered on — the patients he described dying of cirrhosis and arriving with GI bleeds — a three-hour sales gap may not reduce consumption so much as redirect it somewhere more dangerous.

It doesn’t undercut Hedrick’s point about overall morning call volume from the wider drinking population, but it’s a real gap in the case for the specific harm Tamang’s testimony was about.

The Same Doctor, A New Chair

Tamang won a council seat in 2025. In July 2026, his colleagues elected him Council President. And this week, describing the same problem in the same terms he used on the record in 2024, he posted about it again — this time as the person who runs the body that voted him down, without noting that history.

As of this writing, nothing on any Legal & Finance Committee or City Council agenda revives the 2024 ordinance or proposes a new one. Whatever the post signals, it hasn’t yet become a formal move.

Chief Hedrick is still chief, and the workload he described in 2024 hasn’t gone away. At a July 27, 2026 special council budget meeting, he told the council RCPD fielded roughly 157,000 calls for service in 2025, and is requesting a $30.6 million budget for 2027 — without asking for new positions, as the department works to fill existing grant-funded vacancies.

What Residents Are Saying

The comment thread under Tamang’s post split along familiar lines.

One commenter, writing about her own experience getting sober, argued the bottles aren’t the real problem — she said the real barrier is the hoops people have to jump through to get help “in the moment” — and added she’s more worried about discarded needles than litter.

Another pointed to a daycare, a casino, and a liquor store sharing a single parking lot as evidence of how little thought goes into where these businesses cluster.

A third called for a data-collection period and a task force before any new ordinance, plus a state bottle-deposit program to get containers picked up.

None of it is new information to the council. It’s the same debate that produced a 7–3 vote in 2024 — just with the physician who testified against it now presiding over the body that cast it.

How To Find Help for Alcohol Dependancy

Help for alcohol or substance use in Rapid City doesn’t require a court order or a diagnosis to access. Bed availability, hours, and intake requirements change, so call ahead to confirm before showing up:

Pennington County Care Campus (321 Kansas City St.) — walk-in assessments, first-come-first-served; sliding-scale fees; Medicaid accepted; a “no wrong door” admission policy.

Cornerstone Rescue Mission — shelter, meals, and case management; its new Respite Care Center (the first of its kind in South Dakota) partners with Monument Health physicians and RCFD’s community health workers to care for homeless patients too sick for the street but not sick enough for a hospital bed.

Addiction Recovery Centers of the Black Hills — outpatient treatment groups serving Pennington and surrounding counties

SD Dept. of Social Services, Division of Behavioral Health — call or text 988

Native Needs and Resources
Oyate Health Center (Canyon Lake Drive) — direct care and referrals for Native Americans, including sweat lodge ceremonies.

South Dakota Urban Indian Health (SDUIH) — culturally centered recovery support, including Red Road Approach groups, Talking Circles, and Inípi ceremonies

Native Healing Program (1205 E. Saint James St.) — Lakota-culture-grounded counseling integrated with traditional ceremony

Rapid City Service Unit (Indian Health Service) — behavioral health and substance use treatment for eligible American Indian and Alaska Native patients

Sourcing

Stephen Tamangs Political Facing Facebook Page

Rapid City Council YouTube Feed from 8/19/2024