EDITORIAL: Bypass at last: Can you believe it?

There are many Flathead Valley residents who thought they would never live long enough to see a bypass around Kalispell completed. All we can say is: Will wonders never cease?

At long last the state has awarded the contract for the final leg of the U.S. 93 Alternate Route on the west side of Kalispell. Construction begins Oct. 12 on the final 4.5 miles to connect U.S. 2 and Old Reserve Drive. The majority of the $33.8 million project will be completed by the end of the construction season next year.

We are thrilled to deliver an “atta boy” to all of the government officials involved in finally making the bypass a reality.

It’s been a long, long time coming. The Daily Inter Lake has written many editorials through the years about the need for a bypass and has documented every stalled attempt over the decades.

A 1995 editorial written by then-Managing Editor Dan Black pointed out that in the mid-1940s, when the Conrad Mansion was roughly 50 years old, “folks in the know started talking about the need for a truck route that didn’t run smack through the middle of town.

“Back then, a route around Kalispell’s east side — or west side, for that matter — would have displaced a few pheasants, but not much else,” Black wrote.

An earlier editorial by Black in 1991 lamented the bureaucracy was moving “as slowly as the traffic at Kalispell’s Main and Idaho.” He acknowledged not everyone would be pleased once a bypass route was chosen. And he was right. There has been plenty of NIMBY (not in my back yard) bantering through the years.

The Inter Lake dogged the process that at many times was “zipping along at glacial speed.” There were political promises made and broken, feasibility studies that seemed unending and exorbitant amounts of red tape, and still no bypass.

Black found a little humor in the process along the way.

“Granted, Rome wasn’t built in a day, but if Remus and Romulus had worked at this speed, they’d still be driving survey stakes in the Seven Hills today,” he wrote in March 1992, adding he hoped to see the bypass finished “yet this century.”

The 20th century came and went, and we’re now 15 years into the new millennium. Yes, it is high time to finish the bypass.