‘Team Rapid City’ Launches to Support Destination District, $10M+ Infrastructure for Sports Complex
RAPID CITY, S.D. (November 6, 2025) – A new coalition of community members, parents, and business leaders today announced the launch of Team Rapid City (TRC). The group is leading the public campaign for a Yes vote on the upcoming January 20th special election for the Destination District Tax Increment Financing (TIF).
The campaign will officially kick off with a press conference this Thursday, November 6, at 3:00 PM at the entrance to the new Sports Complex. The News Media are welcome to attend and learn about the upcoming campaign. Team Rapid City is focusing its message on the TIF’s critical support for public infrastructure, particularly its direct and immediate benefits to the adjacent Sports Complex. According to campaign organizers, a “Yes” vote will fund the widening of Seger Road, the extension of Tish Boulevard, and essential sewer and drainage work. These public improvements are required for the entire area’s development and will save the Sports Complex project an estimated $10 million in infrastructure costs that it would otherwise have to bear. “This is our town. We’re a team. Together, we will win,” said Brad Jurgensen, of Team Rapid City. “A Yes vote is the key to unlocking an undeveloped area of Rapid City. It brings new entertainment, dining, shopping, and housing – while creating city streets, sewer, signals, and drainage at no cost to existing taxpayers. It doesn’t cost us 10 cents.”
The campaign’s new website, TeamRapidCity.com, highlights the broad public support for the project, noting that polling shows nearly 60% of residents want new entertainment and housing options. It also emphasizes that the risk is on the developers, not the citizens, as it is paid for only by the new tax revenue it generates.
“This is our chance to say ‘Yes’ to growth and ‘Yes’ to our children’s future,” Domico Rodriguez of the Sports Commission added. “A ‘Yes’ vote is a vote for new jobs, additional sales tax, and vital infrastructure for our new Sports Complex. The project has been approved twice by the City Council. Now it’s time for the citizens to join the team and vote ‘Yes’ on January 20th.”
As you can see by the exhaustive list of public support, Team Rapid City is strong!
Our history has always been written with an eye to the future. As a group of volunteer citizens, the community of Rapid City will come together and turn out in favor of a Yes in January. A full campaign schedule is developing, and Team Rapid City is looking forward to meeting with every possible group, association, team, and public forum. To get a meeting scheduled, don’t hesitate to get in touch with team@teamrapidcity.com
Media Advisory: Press Conference Details
- WHAT: Public Launch of ‘Team Rapid City’ Campaign
- WHEN: Thursday, November 6, 2025, at 3:00 PM
- WHERE: The entrance of the new Sports Complex and Destination District (Liberty Land) development. (Corner of Seger Dr and 143rd Ave)
- WHO: Members of Team Rapid City, local parents and youth athletes, and business leaders.
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About Team Rapid City
Team Rapid City is a grassroots campaign of Rapid City citizens, parents, and business owners. It is organized under Citizens for Responsible Growth, a group dedicated to supporting healthy growth, long-term economic development, and securing a prosperous future for the next generation of Rapid City residents.
Holy buffalo chips!
What is the total cost of all of these projects? The gun range, sports complex and “Liberty Land”? Over $150 million? For a town the size of Rapid City that has mostly summer tourism?
Build it and they will come. Maybe.
I’m not impressed by Homeslice.
Liberals trying to pretend to be conservatives doesn’t work. They can’t relate to the voters they want to reach.
As to this Mr. Jurgenson, it seems odd to have a rude, interrupting, and donkey guffawing fellow as your spokesperson. grudznick is not an advertiser with this homey slice group so perhaps they are more effective than they seem.
Is thia the same as Libertyland, just by a different name?
Taxxy Howard isn’t gonna like this.
Bunch of suckers schilling for the wealthiest family in Rapid City to use taxpayer money to line their own pockets.
Raising tax dollars to keep private investors from having to pay for their own project?
Have you looked at the developer’s agreement as it relates to this TIF or are you just regurgitating what Taffy says. Sheep.
No one reads anything. Just spouts the nonsense they hear from someone else who may have read it but doesn’t understand it. I agree that there can be a saturation point with TIFs and they aren’t appropriate for every circumstance, but some of these people are being downright disingenuous with how they work. TIFs don’t line the pockets of developers. And, believe it or not, we are at a point where developers can’t actually pay for the infrastructure and make projects work. Appropriate use of TIFs is about the only way to grow. Growth fuels more tax dollars into the community and creates jobs and a stable economy. Kind of the republican platform from back in the day.
I don’t think you are gonna find any developer who is gonna pay for infrastructure that is the responsibility of the municipality. The city cannot afford to put the infrastructure in place so that the developer can begin a project. This is the dilemma and the crossroad. Now if the developer is paying for fancier lighting or facades with the Tiff, this should be able to be negotiated in the developers agreement and taken out. The State of South Dakota and many municipalities are in trouble financially. If you think your property taxes are bad now, just wait. Without additional revenue of some kind we are in for a wild ride.
We are headed to Sioux Falls this weekend for an athletic event for our kid, an event that Rapid City probably could not pull off. We are projecting to spend between $1500-2000 when it’s all said and done. There will be around 5000 athletes. Every hotel in Sioux Fallsnis booked up with many families having to stay in Mitchell/Brookings/Yankton. Trying to find a restaurant on Saturday night is tricky. We have reservations for 5 and got the last table at 9pm at a large restaurant. Sioux Falls thanks us.
Most families could never afford to spend as liberally as you have boasted about here. And yet, you want to tax those same families to subsidize your lifestyle.
You know nothing of me nor my finances and how I got to the point where I save up for this trip to this one race for my kid every year. I would much rather spend this money on Rapid. So you believe Developers should be on the hook for city infrastructure that they will never own?
Choose to spend your money as you will. Don’t force the rest of us to pay higher taxes to subsidize your hobbies.
So once again, you believe Developers should be on the hook for city streets, sewer, traffic lights, etc? Dou you realize how expensive housing is going to be if this is the thinking. Rapid City and South Dakota are gonna be f#$ked if this is the attitude. No one is gonna want to do business here. How much did your taxes go up because of Cabelas? How much did your taxes go up because of Rushmore Crossing? My real estate taxes dropped over $1500 last year based on a TIF that created affordable housing in my small community. The TIF is paid off and growth and increased sales tax revenue has caused my property taxes to decrease.
I agree
tif is certainly popular. leafing through the state’s annual tif report for 2024, rapid city had 16 active tifs, pennington county had three. it leverages many millions of infrastructure dollars, without which a lot of rapid city just would not exist.
“Choose to spend your money as you will. Don’t force the rest of us to pay higher taxes to subsidize your hobbies”. — this is an odd comment. The author appears to not understand how a TIF works.
Under a TIF, the infrastructure that taxpayers would have been paying for, gets built out sooner by the TIF developer. When their done, the TIF district generates a much larger tax to the local government to reduce the burden on the rest of the taxpayers.
In reality – the TIF does exactly the opposite of what the poster is afraid of or concerned about. For the sake of Rapid, i hope they get the bulk of the community to understand this issue, and not get trapped in the CAVE* people stories.
* Citizens Against Virtually Everything
1) The government takes out a loan and uses the money to invest in infrastructure which will benefit the developer.
2) The developer’s initiative, if successful, generates tax revenue with which to pay back the government’s loan.
3) What happens if the venture fails and not enough tax revenue is generated to cover the loan the government took out?
Great questions. It would all depend on how the developer agreement is written. Most TIFs I’ve seen the developer fronts all the cost through a bond. There isn’t a government loan. If the TiF doesn’t generate enough money to pay off the bond, the repercussions are based on the developers agreement. It would be a good idea for Team Rapid City to be transparent with the agreement and be able to answer these questions because if they don’t opponents and will just make up their own stories and draw their own conclusions. From Team Rapid City website: “The risk is on the developer, not the city. It’s up to private businesses to develop, which will increase the entire tax base and pay for the Infrastructure. Target, Scheels, Cabelas, countless housing projects, streets, sewer, signals, police and fire stations –
all from TIFs”.
This. If the monument can’t fill for events and the city has multiple school buildings in dire need of massive renovation (or possibly replacement given decades of facility neglect) how is funneling more tax dollars towards a pollyannesque fantasy anywhere near fiscal responsibility for the community?
Add in the reality that tifs effectively freeze sections of the school tax base for decades, leaving RCAS on the hook for increased expenses while kneecapping their income stream. Riddle me that Lee.
Annon. Right now you get little from that piece of ground to address those problems. You would still get that little. What you loose is the big $ the project gets you for those problems. The sales tax alone would be huge, besides the future property tax revenues
Doing nothing results is no help for the things you care about. It’s called an investment in your communities future. But ,you decide
I notice you ignored the question of what happens if the business venture a TIF was created to support fails to generate the needed revenue to pay back the cost. Is the city on the hook?
I live 75 miles out of Rapid City. Attended the Hockey Game at the Monument on Friday night, spent the night with my family and shopped and ate on Saturday before attending the sold out Zach Top concert on Saturday night. It was all awesome.
Great explanation, true, easy to understand and directly to the point . CAVE’ers live in the past and refuse to look into the future.
Yay! Let’s not solve the issues with drunks and crimes downtown and north side, lets just keep building out away from it. Look out New Underwood, here we come.
Maybe I’m confused but will the police officers assigned to downtown and north rapid be reassigned to working for the developer pouring concrete annd laying sewer lines and not be able to provide law and order? How is this even related. Additionally by North Rapid do you mean the empty BLIGHTED decrepit hotel frequented by meth heads and squatters that will be tore down and replaced with a Chic Filet and Panda Express or the BLIGHTED Bostons restaurant with boarded up windows that will be replaced with an Athletic Complex at no cost to tax payers? Your talking points are right from Tonchi and Taffy’s talking points. Read the developer’s contract and the TIF regulation, please. And contrary to what Odenbach is using for scare tactics, we will never be the front range of Colorado. Can’t happen with the amount of public and federal land we have.