Long awaited changes to the Rapid City Vision Fund are coming. After public concern was voiced in opposition, the mayors’ plan will remain largely in place.
A percentage of Rapid City sales tax dollars go into a pot of money called the “Vision Fund.” It’s a $91 million public capital improvement effort to fund items like community outreach, the arts and infrastructure, with an emphasis on community enhancement.
In the next cycle, that includes over $6.5-million towards the debt of the Summit Arena.
The Vision Fund was initially distributed via a citizen oversight committee. Much of the debate around the money centered continued existence of such committee as opposed to the funding being managed by city council members.
Despite the proposed changes, the Vision Fund will still finance similar community projects through content, programming, and advocacy. With the next five-year cycle in mind, these changes will be implemented in coming days.
Rapid City attorney Joel Landeen said additional change is still coming.
“The mayor made an overall presentation for categories for funding and how much money to allocate to that," Landeen said. "This resolution implements that piece of it. The process for soliciting and identifying projects for each of the areas will be through a separate resolution.”
Critics of the change say the citizen committee offers more flexibility for how the funds can be used in the future.
Mayor Salamun said he does intend to continue the citizen-based committee, however that wording is not specifically in the new ordinance.
“What we did tonight was simply set the budget, we will have subsequent resolutions that will allocate the process and the way that will go, and we’ll be able to have more conversations specifically about each of those,” Salamun said.
The final motion was approved on an 8-2 vote with no’s coming councilmembers Bill Evans and Lance Lehmann.