Rapid City’s Vision Fund budget looks to inject funds into vital community organizations for future projects

RAPID CITY, S.D. (KEVN) - Looking toward the future has been the message of Rapid City’s vision fund for the past 50 years.

With the potential of $1.3 million going into a non-profit endowment, crucial organizations in the community could be added to that vision.

Currently, the vision fund budget for 2025–2029 still has a little over a month to go, and the focus of the current budget is funding for critical essential services. To help some of those organizations, $1.3 million could be matched by the city over the course of 4 years in a non-profit endowment that non-profits can use for projects they would need help funding.

The funds that the community and private donors would donate to the city would be matched, bringing the total that could be utilized up to about $2.6 million by the end of the four years.

The hope is that this will give people an incentive to look toward the future, knowing that non-profit organizations will be covered by the city as long as matching funds are made available.

“As that would continue to grow over the next several years in decades to come, it would be a sizable fund that would be available, or the proceeds from that fund would be available to support non-profits for their capitol project needs,” explained Rapid City’s finance director Daniel Ainslie. “We want to set a kind of goal and a vision to say that in the future, we want to make sure there is a secure source of funding for those non-profits.”

The 2025–2029 vision fund budget currently has $5 million going toward citizen-driven priority projects. This money would be open for the public to use for “brick and mortar” projects around the city, along with $26.8 million going toward comprehensive plan implementation. The funds would be used for quality-of-life projects or projects the city would deem to be for quality of life.

On Wednesday, Rapid City’s legal and finance committee will decide on passing an ordinance revision update for approving expenditures; if passed, it will go to the city council, and if approved there, two weeks later, a second reading will be discussed. Once the ordinances have been revised, the council will then decide the fate of the Vision Fund budget proposal.

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