There are a wide variety of public infrastructure and private redevelopment projects that the Missoula Redevelopment Agency is hoping to push forward in the coming years, including a major rehab of the riverbank near downtown and possibly a new project at the Riverfront Triangle, MRA executive director Ellen Buchanan told the city council last week.
She said that the Agency is continuing to work to entice developers to work with the city on coming up with a plan to develop the Riverfront Triangle, which sits inside an Urban Renewal District on the northwest corner of Front and Orange streets. It has been mostly vacant for decades, and several large projects to redevelop the site and increase the property tax base have fallen through.
“We don’t have a lot of money in that district,” Buchanan said. “We do have some revenue. We are actively working with a group of developers on the city’s 3 acres in Riverfront Triangle and we’re trying to work though how we get the infrastructure in place that would be needed for a project to be built there.”
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The Riverfront Triangle at the corner of Orange and West Front streets in Missoula has sat nearly empty for 30 years.
The city owns a portion, while private property owners own a big chunk as well.
“We’ve got somebody who’s actively working on the city-owned piece, but there’s still a lot of land out there that needs to be redeveloped and it’s the property that was formerly owned by Providence,” Buchanan said.
City council president Amber Sherrill wanted to know how much property tax is generated by the new Stockman Bank building downtown compared to the aging buildings that were at that site on the corner of Broadway and Orange before Stockman was built. Sherrill said the city gets “a lot of pushback” about how much Tax Increment Financing went to finance the public infrastructure around the new bank.
“And as we always talk about, economic development is having a long-term view of these things,” Sherrill said. “And what they were paying then, what they are paying now, what the additional properties around it are now paying in comparison to what investment we made to make that happen, I just think that’s a message that I don’t want to be lost as we move forward.”
The increased taxable value inside the Urban Renewal Districts generated by new development, called the tax increment, can only be reinvested back into the districts. Missoula has six Urban Renewal Districts, areas where the city has deemed are in need of more development.
In 2016, before the Stockman Bank building was built, the property was paying $7,820 a year in property taxes to the city. The MRA spent $1.51 million in Tax Increment Financing on the project, which will be paid back by increased property taxes. In 2023, the bank paid $378,000 in property taxes.
Buchanan gave an overview of all the other districts as well.
The oldest Urban Renewal District, called URD II, was once home to many nonprofits and social services organizations that didn’t generate property taxes to the city, schools, county and other taxing jurisdictions.
“But in more recent years we’ve had a great deal of investment. Because of the investment in TIF and in infrastructure we now are seeing the benefits of the development at, for instance, the Old Sawmill District,” Buchanan explained. “So this district has strong revenue sources that it didn’t have in its early years at all.”
The district sunsets in 2031, and the Agency is looking at about eight large projects to complete before then. Those include building out sidewalks, building out water mains, completing the pedestrian/bicycle bridge over the Clark Fork River at the old railroad crossing, redeveloping the former Sleepy Inn site at the corner of West Broadway and Russell, rebuilding California Street, acquiring land for housing and lighting the Bitterroot trail.
“So we’re kind of marching down a path where we’re trying to tick off these different projects that were identified as priorities,” Buchanan said, noting that some projects like the Bitterroot trail lighting are funded and well underway.
Buchanan said it’s important for the sidewalks in that district to get built using TIF funds rather than special assessments, because the latter method would cause gentrification.
The West Broadway River Corridor project has not been funded yet. It would be a redevelopment project between the California Street bridge and the railroad trestle.
“We’ve got some serious bank erosion on the south side of the river where the baseball stadium is that we’ve got to deal with,” she said. “With the city’s acquisition of the Flynn-Lowney Ditch, we now have tremendous opportunities to do different things there and reshape and restore that riverbed as well as the riverbanks. If we’re successful in what we’re trying to do, this will be the largest major investment in our river corridor since the levies were built.”
Sherrill wanted to know more about that rehab project.
Buchanan said the project involves improvements to Downtown Lions Park and riverbank restoration.
“We’re in danger of starting to lose the (river trail) if we don’t do something there,” Buchanan said. “Another piece of the puzzle is a recreational feature of some sort, either in a side channel where West Broadway Island is or in the river itself. And it’s looking more like the side channel might be the more viable option. Then we have a lot more activity down there which starts to change behavior and increases the public’s use of that island.”
Buchanan acknowledged that the city’s effort to attract a developer to buy the former Sleepy Inn site has “thus far not been successful.”
The city bought the motel during the pandemic and now it is a vacant piece of land on a high-visibility corner that is for sale.
“This is a tough time for redevelopment with interest rates where they are and construction costs where they are, everything seems to be a challenge,” she said.
In Urban Renewal District III, Buchanan said the largest project is a possible purchase by the city of a 10-acre property behind Bob Ward’s called the Southgate Crossing property. The city is doing due diligence on the property right now and is looking to close the purchase in the coming months.
Buchanan said that the city is trying to initiate a publicly-engaged planning process this fall on how to redevelop the city-owned MRL property on the corner of Johnson and North Avenue, which includes the Johnson Street Emergency Shelter.
One of the biggest projects the Agency is working on, which Buchanan described as maybe one of the largest such projects in Montana, is a $10 million reconfiguration of Brooks Street to enhance mass transit and other transportation options.
“We call it the Transform Brooks Connect Midtown, and that’s to create Brooks as a transit-oriented development corridor,” Buchanan said. “This is to incentivize the type of development that creates the densities that will support very, very robust transit.”
Buchanan said people often complain that crossing Brooks is dangerous.
“We have so much potential out there for housing, community, for creating new jobs,” Buchanan said, noting that almost all commercial space in that area is leased up.
The $10 million the Agency has set aside will be used to try to get a federal matching grant.
Buchanan said that in the Front Street Urban Renewal District, large projects such as the Mercantile hotel, the AC Hotel, the ROAM Student Housing and the Park Place parking garage have transformed the area. The city has about $2.7 million in uncommitted funds for that district, which she said was “exciting.”
She said construction is expected to begin in the next few months on a project to add an ADA-accessible path to the river near Caras Park.
“It’s gonna make a huge change in that section of the riverbank and the park,” she said.
Other projects on the horizon include redeveloping the old Missoula Public Library site and transforming the one-way streets downtown into two-way streets.
David Erickson is the business reporter for the Missoulian.