Grant seeks $8.7 million for rail park

The city of Kalispell and Flathead County Economic Development Authority are crossing their fingers after asking for an $8.7 million federal grant to help develop the Flathead County Rail Park.

Their request is through a fifth and unexpected round of the Transportation Investment Generating Economic Recovery program the U.S. Department of Transportation announced in April.

“Cautious optimism,” Kalispell Community Development Manager Katharine Thompson said to describe feelings about the fast-track grant application filed Sunday, one day before the deadline. 

“We didn’t know (the program) would be available again and we certainly weren’t anticipating it would come this early in the year, so it was a scramble to get everything submitted.”

Competition will be fierce with hundreds if not more than a thousand communities asking for a share of the $475 million available nationwide. Awards should be announced in September.

“The pattern has been that they fund 50 or fewer,” Thompson said. “If TIGER comes through, that’s fantastic. If it does not, the rail park just continues on and is funded in a different manner and probably at a slower pace.”

The grant funding could be used to build rail and road infrastructure for the 40-acre rail park, located at the former McElroy and Wilken gravel pit along Whitefish Stage Road. 

Total development costs for infrastructure development are estimated to be around $14.5 million.

As part of the request, Flathead County Economic Development Authority has pledged to contribute up to a $5.8 million match using money from its own savings and private contributions.

“It’d be the icing on the cake to get this grant and get the industrial park done,” said Turner Askew, chairman of the economic development authority’s board of directors. “If it doesn’t go through we have another set of challenges. That is plan A and this [grant] is plan B. But if we can make plan B work it’ll make life a lot simpler.”

The collaborative rail park project plays a key role in Kalispell’s Core Area Revitalization Plan. 

Adopted last winter, that plan envisions Kalispell’s last two rail-served businesses — Northwest Drywall and Building Supply and CHS Kalispell — relocating to the new rail park. That would let them and other rail businesses grow in a more suitable location. And it would let Kalispell remove railroad tracks that “strangle” the downtown and redevelop a 365-acre rail corridor that has gradually lost its industrial base, leaving behind acres of vacant and underutilized land in the center of the city.

The plan also envisions a new pedestrian and bike path through the rail corridor, new north-south street connections to improve traffic, more green space and parks and a concerted push for dense mixed-use redevelopment in the area. 

Those are initiatives that would have to be undertaken outside of the rail park’s development, but depend to a large extent on its success.

ALMOST 80 LETTERS of support were included with the grant application, Thompson said.

That includes letters from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, which helped fund Kalispell’s Core Area Revitalization Plan with a $175,000 grant; the Montana departments of Transportation, Commerce, Agriculture, Environmental Quality and Natural Resources and Conservation; state Sens. Bruce Tutvedt and Jon Sonju; Gov. Steve Bullock; Rails to Trails of Northwest Montana; U.S. Sens. Jon Tester and Max Baucus, who helped secure a $1.1 million federal grant for Flathead County Economic Development Authority to buy the rail park site; the Kalispell and Whitefish chambers of commerce; Flathead County commissioners; BNSF Railway and Mission Mountain Railroad; and Northwest Drywall and Building Supply and CHS Kalispell.

Mark Lalum, general manager of CHS Kalispell, said relocating to the rail park would let his business ship more grain and fertilizer by rail. That would reduce the number of trucks in downtown Kalispell by about 2,000 a year.

Tia Robbins, executive officer of the Northwest Montana Association of Realtors, said that group has long supported the project.

“The proposed rail park will offer existing industrial-type business an opportunity to relocate to an area better suited to their manufacturing and transportation needs, leaving opportunities for the downtown area of Kalispell to flourish and function as the ‘heart of the community’ as all viable downtown areas aspire,” Robbins wrote in a letter of support.

Thompson said it took a “huge team effort” to get the grant application submitted.

“We’re very pleased to have had such strong support in not only getting the application together, but for the project as a whole,” she said. “That’s what it really is all about. We’re going to try to present the Department of Transportation with the most competitive case we are able to, so hopefully they’ll fall in love with the project the way we have.”

Reporter Tom Lotshaw may be reached at 758-4483 or by email at tlotshaw@dailyinterlake.com.