RAPID CITY - Former Mayor Keith Carlyle has
raised questions about businessman Bill Gikling's role in the
pending Cabela's land deal with the city of Rapid
City.
Gikling is a partner in GLM Land Corp. The firm
sold 67 acres of land north of Interstate 90 between Exits 60 and
61 to Cabela's development partner Foursquare Properties. The sale
closed June 25, according to the Pennington County Register of
Deeds.
Gikling is also chairman of the Rapid City
Economic Development Partnership. The partnerships' real-estate
arm, the Rapid City Economic Development Foundation, is serving as
the go-between in the city of Rapid City's incentive package for
Cabela's.
The package includes $2 million in cash, 30
acres of land and the Black Hills Visitor Information Center at
Exit 61. The city land is east of GLM's 67 acres.
"I am curious as to how Foursquare
(Properties), Cabela's lead developer, centered on your property,"
Carlyle, who is now a Realtor, wrote in a letter to Gikling. "Our
marketplace has dozens of highly desirable locations they could
have chosen.… Was Four Square steered to just your
property?"
However, in an interview last week, Carlyle
said he does not believe that Gikling used his position as
president of the Rapid City Economic Development Foundation to
compel Cabela's to buy his land. "I don't believe he did that, but
I wanted to ask the question," Carlyle said.
Carlyle said he personally pitched several
locations to Cabela's before the company announced its intentions.
"My intent was to entice them to Rapid City with an incredible
selection of land listings," he said. Carlyle said he never got a
phone call back.
In a two-page reply, Gikling insisted that he
had no direct involvement with Cabela's decision to come to Rapid
City or with the incentive package that the city offered. In his
letter to Carlyle, he wrote, "… when you said you had 'incredible
selections of land,' they must not be as incredible as you
think."
Gikling was already under fire for a letter he
sent to Rapid City Area Chamber of Commerce members shortly before
the June 26 mayoral runoff election. In it, he urged support for
Alan Hanks and criticized Sam Kooiker, in part for voting against
the Cabela's incentive deal.
In his letter to chamber members, Gikling
identified himself as head of the Economic Development Partnership.
He did not, however, disclose that he stood to gain personally from
the Cabela's land deal.
Gikling said he identified himself as head of
the Economic Development mainly because he wanted chamber members
to know that his criticism of Kooiker was based on his experience
in economic development. And as an economic development official,
he said, he makes no secret that he is a cheerleader for Cabela's
in Rapid City - no matter where it is built.
In an interview this week, Gikling repeated
that he had no direct role in the Cabela's incentives or even in
selecting the GLM land. Gikling said he and his partners, Ken Lipp
and James Meier, listed the 67 acres for sale with a local Realtor
in August 2006.
They had owned it for 20 years; Gikling said he
bought it with the idea of moving his Black Hills Harley-Davidson
motorcycle dealership there someday. Instead, he sold the
dealership in 2000, and the new owners moved the business to
Deadwood Avenue.
In October 2006, GLM received an offer and
signed a purchase agreement with a company named Boulder Ventures.
The deal was arranged through a Realtor in Utah, Gikling said. A
month later, Boulder Ventures put down earnest money on the
land.
Gikling said he didn't know at the time that
Boulder Ventures was working on behalf of Cabela's. Like everyone
else, he had heard rumors that Cabela's might be coming. "But I had
no idea who this Boulder Ventures was," he said.
He also said he didn't know anything about
Cabela's talks with the city until March. "In fact, to my
knowledge, neither I nor anyone in Economic Development knew
anything about the Cabela's deal nor did we have anything to do
with any negotiations or discussions with Cabela's," he
said.
City attorney Jason Green backs up Gikling's
account about the Economic Development Partnership's role - or lack
of a role - in the incentive talks.
He said the Economic Development Foundation was
used as a conduit in the Cabela's land deal to ensure that Cabela's
- not some other private entity - ended up with the
property.
State law specifically allows cities to give
land to economic development corporations, not private companies.
Otherwise, the city would have had to declare the land as surplus
and sell it to the highest bidder.
"From a purely legal standpoint, it seems to me
that Mr. Gikling did not benefit directly as a director of the
Economic Development Foundation," Green said. "And it's important
to keep in mind that (the foundation) didn't come to us. We went to
them and asked them to help us with the transaction."
However, Carlyle remains skeptical that Gikling
and the Economic Development Foundation were out of the loop as the
deal came together.
Based on his experience as mayor of Rapid City
- he served from 1987 to 1991 - Carlyle said he doubts that Gikling
and other members of the Economic Development Foundation would have
been unaware early on what incentives the city was offering
Cabela's until the deal was already struck.
"How can they not be involved, especially the
president of the foundation?" Carlyle asked. "They know what's
going on."
Contact Dan Daly at 394-8421 or
dan.daly@rapidcityjournal.com
