STURGIS, S.D. – The City of Sturgis is continuing their work on updating the Rally Sponsorship Program.

In December, Sturgis City Administrator Aaron Jordan provided the city council a status report on the program, which summarized the historical development of Rally management and monetization.

Building on their December report, the Sturgis Council this week was faced with two options regarding the future of the program.

The council had hoped to make rally sponsorship contracts more transparent to the public, however, a large number of clients told council members they were not for making their contracts public.

Sturgis City Administrator Aaron Jordan says “the sponsorship program has been around for a couple decades and for the most part, those contracts have been confidential.”

He says state law does allow for that type of confidentiality, or what they call trade secrets.

Jordan says “we kind of evaluate those trade secrets like a secret recipe. If you have a secret recipe, you are not going to give us those secrets. But, the cost of those sponsorships and the cost of those deliverables from the City of Sturgis to that sponsor, we don’t see those as trade secrets.”

Jordan says from the city’s perspective state law requires them to be a very transparent, forward-facing type of document with the public. However, he says there’s a challenge to that.

“The challenge is, when we’re working with our sponsors, we are unique to them. They do these events across the nation, motorcycle rally’s, all types of events, and they normally don’t work with municipalities. They normally work with some kind of profit or non-profit, and those agreements between that entity and that sponsor is confidential.”

Jordan says they (the sponsors) feel the trade secret dilemma, because “it kind of puts them in a tough situation when it comes down to competing where they can get into a price-war and that type of stuff.”

For example, Jordan says they lost a $100,000 sponsor last year who was unwilling to make their contract transparent.

The council on Monday night, not wanting to lose money from potential sponsorships, decided to look into a third-party option that Jordan says would allow the city to get into a transparent document contract with that third-party, who would then do all the negotiations and maintain that confidentiality between the third-party entity and the sponsors.

Following the council’s decision, City Attorney Erik Davis told the council he will return with additional materials addressing the next step, including implementation sequencing and contract guardrails.