Kalispell Chamber luncheon highlights tourism industry

Tourism is a booming industry in Montana and the Flathead Valley has grabbed a bigger slice of the pie in recent years.

Several speakers addressed the positive trends in the tourism sector at a Kalispell Chamber of Commerce luncheon on Tuesday.

In Montana, tourism supports 53,380 local jobs and visitors spend about $3.4 billion annually, according to data presented by Voices of Montana Tourism Director Dax Schieffer.

Statewide, the bed tax has increased each year since the height of the recession in 2009. In Kalispell, bed-tax revenue growth outpaced the state as a whole due to years of double-digit growth immediately following the recession and steady growth over the last couple years.

That growth has been pushed along by Glacier Park International Airport, which sponsored the luncheon at the Red Lion convention center.

The number of passengers deplaning at the airport has risen steadily since the late 80s, with the last five years seeing particularly steep levels of growth. Schieffer said that passengers deplaning in Kalispell last year made up 14 percent of those from the state, a 1 percent increase over the prior year.

Airport Director Rob Ratkowski said the airport is drafting a master plan to accommodate growth for years to come.

He touted new direct flights to Los Angeles that multiple carriers are offering on a daily basis this summer as a sign of success, and also said that year-to-date service was up 16 percent, which is an indication of a strong underlying economy in the area.

He also pointed out that air travelers tend to spend more than their counterparts who arrive in the state via other means of transportation, and increased air traffic was more likely to trickle down to other sectors.

Ryan Weiss, Montana’s Public Access Specialist for the Department of Natural Resources and Conservation, spoke about the paradigm-shift his office has undergone in the last several years toward embracing recreational opportunities on state land.

While the DNRC owns lands they manage in all sorts of ways to create money for the state, Weiss said the department has heard an increasing tide of interest in opening up more lands for public recreation.

In the past, he said his organization had been more oriented toward managing the lands in a way that brought a financial return, whether that money came from timber or other natural resource extraction leases or from real estate deals.

For example, he noted that Kalispell Cabela’s is located on DNRC lands that bring in about $1 million a year from its real estate lease. Once fully developed, he said that tract would likely bring in closer to $2 million per year. He said the DNRC pulls in more than $64 million in revenue each year.

While some lands are more suitable to development and recreation than others, he said conversations like the one that was happening in the room were driving his organization’s pivot to valuing recreation like they do other uses.

He said the biggest factor that made land appealing to the public was the ease of access. If there was a plethora of public lands close by and it was easy to drive to, they saw the land getting a lot of use. If those factors weren’t present, the land might be better suited for other uses or could be used in a land swap to get more favorable tracts.

A manifestation of this policy can be seen in a large 13,000-acre parcel north of Whitefish Lake that is coming back into DNRC hands after it was sold to Weyerhauser, Weiss said.

The Flathead was uniquely poised to benefit from the policy shift as well, according to Weiss.

“Most of the contiguous blocks of state trust lands are here in the Flathead, without national forests,” Weiss said.