Is blight in the eye of beholder?

This Kalispell neighborhood can't be easily labeled

Putting a label on a neighborhood is difficult.

One potential label for a targeted Kalispell business-and-residential neighborhood is "blighted."

In this case, "blight" is chiefly a bureaucratic term - one whose exact definition eludes many - that is needed to jump-start a proposed tax-increment district in central Kalispell.

The proposed district covers roughly 25 blocks around the north, west and southwest sides of the Kalispell Center Mall, extending two blocks in each direction.

The first step in setting up a tax increment district is for a city council to declare the proposed area "blighted," which starts the legal process to set up such a district.

But the Kalispell City Council stalled in early September on declaring that area "blighted" because council members could not agree on the definition - a quandary they will tackle again Monday.

"I need more information. I need more convincing," council member M. Duane Larson said.

Norb Donahue, a former city attorney and current critic of Kalispell's tax-increment districts, said: "It's kind of like that definition of pornography when that Supreme Court justice [the late Potter Stewart] said, 'I can't define it, but I know it when I see it.'"

Montana law has a wide range of definitions of "blight" as applied to potential tax-increment districts.

Several state legal definitions focus on crime and disease -and don't appear relevant to the area surrounding the mall. But a few state legal definitions cite obstacles to economic growth, including "inappropriate or mixed uses of the land or buildings" and out-of-date city planning for the area.

A city staff report to the council said that the proposed zone's infrastructure and streets are old but in good shape. But the same report concluded that any new major development projects will require replacing and upgrading that area's aged streets and other infrastructure.

A tour of the proposed tax-increment zone shows an area that defies any blanket description, except that many blocks have either no sidewalks or broken-up ones.

In fact, no single block in that area can be easily described. Coziness co-exists with decrepit. Spiffy-looking houses and businesses routinely occupy the same blocks as empty, beat-up hulks.

The area has scattered small pockets that are poster children for anyone's definition of blight.

A few messy empty fields, with the biggest and most obvious north of the mall and Burlington Northern Santa Fe Railroad tracks. A few boarded-up houses scattered about. Two big, empty industrial buildings southwest of the mall.

On the other hand, much of the proposed zone consists of numerous small houses for lower-income residents. Some look quaint. Some are ragged and crumbly. Most are a bit weather-beaten, but are only a paint job or fixed porch away from looking neat. Some old trailer homes are also clustered here and there.

At least 90 percent are lived in.

The proposed zone's west end holds Quonset huts and corrugated metal buildings, almost all filled with businesses -mostly of the types that involve dirt under the fingernails and messy coveralls.

That area melds seamlessly into more Quonset huts and corrugated metal buildings in an adjoining semi-industrial area along Montana and Center streets west of Seventh Avenue West and Seventh Avenue West North - a zone already in the city's 9-year- old West Side tax-increment district.