I hear you
@mickey2942, but here is some nuance. The City of Sturgis is the organizer, and not to make excuses, but I think the City was caught between a rock and a hard place. The rally-goers gather all over the Black Hills, in towns like Keystone and Custer, not just Sturgis. We happened to be visiting friends in Keystone at the beginning of a long trip in our RV in 2004 and it was packed. Motorcycles parked on the main drag just as you see in photos. En route from Oregon, we saw people headed to Sturgis for a couple of weeks before the rally began.
According to the link posted below, there was no support for canceling from Governor Noem...
"We've been back to normal for over three months here in South Dakota, so we know we can have these events, give people information, let people protect their health, but let them still enjoy their way of life, and events like the Sturgis Motorcycle Rally," she said. "We hope people come. Our economy benefits when people visit us."
Even if the City of Sturgis found a way to cancel the rally and block access, they would have come anyway. Having been there, I can say that the “outlaw biker” mentality is alive and well, even though many who attend are just bike enthusiasts who come for fun and camaraderie. They would not have stayed home, so the City had to prepare.
"There was really very little we could do to stop them from coming. It's not a gated event where we can just lock the doors and not allow people to come in," City Manager Daniel Ainslie told Insider. "Given all that, there was a realization that no matter what the city decided, there were going to be an awful lot of people that came to the rally."
Earlier this year, the city canceled all advertising for the event and urged concerned callers from states with high infection rates, or those who are part of a high-risk group, to consider skipping the rally this year, Ainslie said.
Personally, I’m not sure what more the City of Sturgis could have done besides the various precautions they took on site as mentioned in this article. They were not even allowed by Gov. Noem to mandate masks. Given the prevailing attitude both in government and among citizens that “no one is going to tell me what to do,” plus the Mt Rushmore rally July 3rd, the rally at Sturgis was inevitable. Sturgis and the other Black Hills communities were hung out to dry for the sake of the almighty dollar IMO. I hope the price they and the rest of the country pay is not death.
JMO
'It's literally impossible to stop': Sturgis, South Dakota, braces as hundreds of thousands of bikers arrived in the middle of a pandemic
ETA: I noticed someone mentioned that Burning Man was canceled as a comparison. But AKAIK Burning Man has one entrance and is out in the desert, not in a large area like the Black Hills that cannot be closed off.
Burning Man 2020 is online: How to visit the virtual playa and what to expect