Rapid City looking at home rule charter, downsizing city council

Pat Powers

Interesting story just posted at the Rapid City Journal. As part of promoting a change to a home-rule charter for South Dakota’s second largest city, Mayor Allender is talking about cutting city Government by streamlining the number of City Council members:

“The number one benefit of a home rule charter tends to be the ability to appropriately resize the city council for the community being served,”  Allender said.

He said most home rule communities have 5 to 7 council members instead of 10 as Rapid City has now.

“One of the obvious and immediate benefits of a smaller city council would be our recruiting efforts would be more appropriate for the typical number of citizens willing to run for public office,” the mayor said.

Read the entire story here.

What are your thoughts?  Will they actually start to tame the wild west of Rapid City politics?

5 thoughts on “Rapid City looking at home rule charter, downsizing city council”

  1. the next logical step would be a strong city manager form of govt, with a five member council where the mayor is basically the city council president with some extra p-r duties. interesting discussion ensuing.

    1. You could go one of two ways: The Brookings route, where the mayor is chairman of the board and the city manager has day-to-day oversight; or the Sioux Falls strong-mayor format. Given that RC already has a full-time mayor, it seems like the SF path is the more likely one, but who knows?

  2. RC’s problem isn’t finding a typical number of citizens; it’s finding a number of typical citizens…

  3. Warning – SHARP THOUGHT.

    Rapid City is run by the military, anyway, isn’t it? Aren’t city council members just the dashboard to representation of the interests of the base?

    Maybe I’m short sighted in this, but Tucson seemed to be the same way.

    If you reduce the number of representatives, it still won’t matter. It’s like the difference between orbiting 1000 miles from the sun vs 2000 miles from the sun .. you’re still going to get burned trying to do something orthogonal to the interests of the big swinging planes in the area.

    I’m not sure how to solve this other than perhaps having the base just annex Rapid City and get it over with?

  4. This would be a move away from representative government and into an executive one that is more open to control by special interests. Not a good thing at all.

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