“Pave Paradise, Put up a Parking Lot”

In the immortal words of Joni Mitchell’s “Big Yellow Taxi” song, FRCP has some concerns about paving more of Rapid City’s green ribbon to accommodate parking. When the greenway is so popular that we have to cover it with parking spaces in order to enjoy it, we are in danger of loving our town’s most precious feature to death.

Friends of Rapid City Parks has been following the Founders Park improvements project since spring. We applaud the Parks Department for improvements to trails, but we have concerns that the “improvements” include a huge swath of paving from Founders Park all the way to Cross Street in order to add parking spaces.

We have met with Parks Department officials and designers of the project to express our ideas about avoiding the addition of hard surface in the greenway.

If you attend the Open House, ask about permeable surface, how many parking spaces are really needed (considering that neither the Farmers Market nor the proposed Whitewater Park will be at Founders in the future). You can read about the project here and download a copy of our comments.