Five Native American women are running for seats on the Rapid City Common Council and mayoral position.
Mayor Steve Allender is facing a challenger, and native women candidates are running in four of the city’s five wards.
Native American women are making up five of the 15 candidates running in this year’s municipal election.
At the center of the campaign is a recent panhandling ordinance the council unanimously passed in February. It’s aimed at regulating aggressive panhandling, which includes soliciting money while someone’s at an ATM, preventing someone from entering their car, or harassing for money.
Natalie Stites-Means is challenging mayor Steve Allender. She says city government should operate with more compassion.
“Downtown and the Mt. Rushmore corridor aren’t the only places that matter here, in this city,” Means says. “We have potholes, we got bad lights. And while it seems on the surface a prosperous city, if we were so prosperous, why wouldn’t we be compassionate and charitable to the panhandlers who are just trying to survive, who literally are not trying to die today.”
This is the first challenger Mayor Steve Allender has faced since becoming mayor in 2015. He says it’s unfortunate he has a challenger this election, because he’ll have to coordinate a campaign.
Allender says he stands behind the ordinance. He says the ordinance change was aimed at problems the city is facing primarily downtown.
“Its apparent that people walking and shopping and working in Rapid City, especially the downtown, deserve to do so without being physically threatened," Allender says. "That’s really what this ordinance addresses. It requires a level of appropriate, non-threatening behavior. That’s it. You can still walk up to someone and ask them for money.”
Allender says the panhandling ordinance before the change was likely unconstitutional.