With summer travel in full swing, Rapid City Regional Airport continues to make improvements and upgrades for the future.
In the meantime, officials have made changes to parking.
One of those changes is the closure of the cell phone lot, which is closed until construction is complete on the west car-rental lot — scheduled for sometime around July 24.
Another change is parking fees. Patrick Dame, the Executive Director of the airport said as of July 1, each hour of parking is $2, even if someone parks for only 10 minutes. Previously, the airport did not charge for any parking under 30 minutes.
"Over the first half of the year, we really saw that the parking lot was running 90 percent and above," said Dame. "We did have times over the winter where we exceeded our capacity in the parking lot, so we were beyond 100%. Based on that, we needed to add parking. So we needed to go through and address our rates and charges on that to look toward being able to develop what’s going to be our future parking as well in the process.”
While waiting for passengers might be challenging until the cell phone lot reopens, Dame reminded everyone not to leave their cars unattended along the curb around the terminal building.