The mission statement of Friends of Rapid City Parks is “To ensure that Rapid City area parks are managed in a way that preserves, protects and promotes this legacy for future generations.”
Future generations won’t thank us for a legacy of striped asphalt. And Friends has been opposing turning sacred ground into parking spaces since its founding in 2005.
We oppose using the old tennis courts and 8th Street turn-around lot for downtown parking for the following reasons:
1) The Rapid City Area School District promised to turn the tennis court and parking lot land back to the park system in exchange for Central High School’s encroachment into parkland in its 2009 expansion. See news coverage below.
2) If any lesson is to be learned from the embarrassing — if temporary — predicament that expansion created, it might be to check South Dakota law to find out if the city is even permitted to construct a parking lot in designated park land, since the stated purpose of the lot is to serve downtown businesses, and not the allowed purposes of designated park land in South Dakota. We expect you will try to finesse that challenge (as you have in the past) by claiming that the parking lots that serve school gyms and dentist offices and arenas are really “community recreation facilities,” but be ready to pass the red face test when you claim that this parking is in service of “community recreation.”
3) Improvements in the area known as West Memorial Park have been on the drawing board for more than a decade, and were part of the Omaha Street Corridor beautification plan. Friends of Rapid City Parks has supported these plans at numerous meetings and every Vision Process since our inception. Not only do those improvements not require parking, the extensive paving will exacerbate stormwater runoff, not mitigate it.
4) The city has not conducted a parking study. The claim that more parking is needed is based on leased space waiting lists and anecdotal information. This is a habit of Rapid City government. We assert things, go off and spend tax payer money on “fixing” them, and then wonder why the problem remains after the “fix.” Until we know that downtown workers will park in an offsite lot and take the proposed trolley to work rather than move their cars periodically, the rationale for this encroachment into the park is just a notion.
5) If the trolley to downtown from offsite parking is a viable idea, then why not do it from other distant parking lots? New York Street, Founders Park, Roosevelt Park, and the Fairgrounds all have lots of empty spaces during weekday working hours. A vehicle counter study at these lots would be another piece of useful, factual information upon which sound decisions, rather than impulsive ones, could be made.
Finally, we must stop grabbing the park land that was designated after the 1972 flood as a memorial, as open space, as flood protection, and for recreation. Since this land was set aside, more than 60 buildings and a dozen parking lots have covered sacred ground. How many more times will we look to this legacy as “free” or “unused” property? Until we won’t know what we’ve got ’til it’s gone?
Friends of Rapid City Parks opposes this proposal and we thank you for listening to our comments.
You can find more on what we’ve said about parking lots here:
Comments on Founders parking lot
Coverage of Central High School expansion
Tennis court for open space trade
On documenting solutions in search of a problem