A special meeting of the Rapid City Common Council was held on Monday, July 20, 2026, to receive the proposed 2027 city budget from Mayor Solomon. The mayor presented a $312,332,582 overall budget (general fund and enterprise funds), a 7.4% decrease from the 2026 budget. He highlighted ten key areas, including no property tax increase, a record investment in roads, enhanced public safety, quality-of-life projects, and generational initiatives. The meeting concluded with adjournment; no votes were taken on the budget itself, which will be subject to further department presentations and council deliberation.
Note: The mayor’s presentation included a slideshow and emphasized that the budget is a proposal for council consideration. The 2027 budget year begins January 1, 2027.
All right, good evening. Welcome to special city council meeting Monday, July 20th, 2026. We will begin with a roll call and determination of quorum. Lehman. Maher. Roberts. Here. Stroman. Here. Armstrong. Here. See, Chris. Here. Beaverdorf. Timang. Here. Evans. Meyer. Here. We have a quorum. Thank you. We'll now proceed with the Pledge of Allegiance. If you are willing and able, please stand. I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America. And to the Republic. One nation. Indivisible with liberty and next we will move to adoption of the agenda. I have a first and a second. All in favor? Second, we will move on to general public comment. I have no general public comment, so we will open and close that and then move on to non-public hearing items one through two. Number one is the 2027 Mayor's budget presentation by the Honorable Mayor Solomon. Good evening, Council. And looking at why we do these budget addresses, they're actually uh set by state statute. And that's what this is to you, a proposed city budget for your consideration. Um we have here is a slideshow. This slideshow is also found in the budget book. If you hopefully each of you have a budget book, uh you'll also receive the raw data in a spreadsheet as well. So we've tried to make sure that we have the most open, transparent numbers you could possibly have in any budget by giving you every piece of data that we have available, but also trying to put it together in a format that helps tell the story of where we are at in Rapid City. This will also be available on our city website uh for residents to download and view this budget book and see what you are looking at as you evaluate the budget for 2027. Now, as a reminder, this is just the beginning of the budget process. I kick it off with the address, and as we started last year with the tradition of having the each department come and share their department overviews and their budget with you, and that way you can do a deep dive uh not only into the numbers but also into the priorities that set those numbers and ask questions regarding the departments. I think last year we found it, although it's very time uh intensive, it we've all found it very worthwhile, and I have a great deal of appreciation and respect uh for the leaders that you have right here in the city government. Uh they are tremendous dedicated public servants, and uh so I won't go terribly deep into each of their departments tonight because they will have those opportunities to do that later, but all the information of course is available in your book. So with that, we will move on. I think there we go. So a couple of things I want to I want to highlight before we get into the meet is Rapid City has some great things going for us. Uh you know, we have these best love lists uh that come out each year, and there's all sorts. I want to be number one on all of them. It's hard to do that, but when you're talking about an entire country and the variety of lists that we are placed upon, these are really impressive.