MISSOULA — This edition of Current Events with Missoula Current editor Martin Kidston takes an in-depth look at city and county efforts to purchase land on Marshall Mountain.
"The city and county -- both separate bodies — approved to spend open space bond funding to purchase this property. Each will expand roughly $1 million from their share of the Open Space Bond. The whole purchase price is about $3.8 million, so there's other money on the table, but that's pretty much the big picture. It's not quite a done deal,” Kidston said.
The county still has to approve the actual purchase, they have to close in our property. They have to appraise the property. What they decided [Wednesday] night was to spend money from the bond,” Kidston continued.
Kidston explained more about why purchasing the land is important to city and county officials.
“Last year group of philanthropists stepped up and bought the lower portion of the mountain to keep it. Hopefully, keep it in public hands. So, they gave the city and county time to make this purchase hoping that they wanted to keep this in the public trust — which they seem like they want to do,” Kidston said. “The public's pretty much in favor of this. In most cases, it'll secure 480 acres on [the] mountain — in the public domain recreation, wildlife, all kinds of stuff.
Public spaces are the reason why so many people come to Marshall Mountain. What does it say about maybe the ethos of the community or at least, the current government, that they've decided to make this change?
“Well, as somebody said [Wednesday] night, resilience, like to get dirty, like the play in the dirt. And I think there's some truth to that. Unfortunately, you can't ski here anymore. It was a decent ski hill. Good place to ski back in the 90s and so forth. Not anymore, but there's other opportunities here,” Kidston explained. “It's close to home. The population is growing, so more open space...means more opportunities.”
Kidston also explained the next steps in the process of attempting to purchase the land.
"The next step is the county has to actually make the purchase. So right now, the money is now available — they've approved spending the money. The county has actually closed the deal and the property hasn't been appraised yet,” Kidston said. “Some of these bonds haven't been sold yet so they haven’t appeared [voter’s tax bills]. Voted on this in [2018] — they're not fully paying for it yet. So, I think there might be some sticker shock here in a couple months when it actually shows up on your property taxes, but the decision has been made.
It still isn’t clear what the cost of purchasing Marshall Mountain will be to taxpayers as the process continues to play out.
"We don't know yet because they haven't sold all the bonds. And we don't know at the interest rate on those bonds are going to be. We don't know who's going to buy them,” Kidston noted. “There's a lot of factors that come into play on that, but we know the total price is 3.8 million “They've received a $600,000 grant [to get the] place ready for public use, but we'll see [what] the final price is when it all shakes out and what the property owners will actually paying for this down the road.”
