Ed Kemmick/Last Best News
The antiquated railroad underpass at 21st Street would be resized and upgraded under a proposal developed by the Planning Department.
A month after plans for a pedestrian bridge over the downtown railroad tracks were killed, the city-county Planning Department is pitching an idea for two such bridges, plus improvements to two existing underpasses.
Candi Millar, director of the Planning Department, made the pitch last week to the Policy Coordinating Committee, which decides how transportation funds are spent in the Billings area.
Millar told the committee that her staff is recommending going after a federal TIGER grant to build two pedestrian bridges over the tracks, one east and one west of North 27th Street, and to resize and improve underpasses at north 13th and 21st streets.
Even as she presented the plan to the committee, however, the proposal was evolving. Millar learned only at the meeting that Steve Arveschoug, director of Big Sky Economic Development, was there to talk about his own rail-related proposal.
BSED has a consultant working on a feasibility analysis for several new industrial parks in the Billings area, which could involve extending railroad lines to serve them.
Depending on what that analysis shows, Millar said in an interview this week, it may be possible to apply for an expanded TIGER grant that would fund pedestrian bridges, underpass improvements and rail-line extensions to industrial parks.
The price tag could range from $10 million to $30 million. Millar admits the proposal is ambitious, to put it mildly.
“The stars really do have to align here,” she said.
The city of Billings had been working for nearly 13 years to span the tracks at 25th Street with a century-old bridge that once crossed Rock Creek, but when bids for the project came in unexpectedly high last month, the City Council voted to scrap it and use the money that was available for other transportation projects.
Enter the TIGER, short for the Transportation Investment Generating Economic Recovery program. Yellowstone County and the state Department of Transportation had applied, unsuccessfully, for TIGER grant funding three times to pay for an overpass at Sixth Avenue North and Main Street in front of MetraPark.
Millar said her staff thought the railroad bridge and underpass projects were a perfect fit for a TIGER grant.
“It’s evolved over the years,” she said. “It’s looking to solve community problems and address issues of livability.”
Arveschoug said the analysis should be done soon and then will be reviewed by the Big Sky ED steering committee in July. He said KLG, the engineering firm doing the analysis, recently helped the town of Shelby land a $13 million TIGER grant for an industrial park railroad alignment project.
He said his organization could still seek TIGER funding on its own or combine with the city on the railroad-access projects.
“It may be that there’s a broader TIGER grant project out there,” he said.
If the city’s project receives the blessing of the Policy Coordinating Committee, Millar said, her department would ask to use transportation planning funds to put together a detailed proposal, with estimated costs and plans.
It’s not even certain that the TIGER program will continue next year, Millar said, but if it does, the deadline for grant applications will be late winter or early spring.
The Policy Coordinating Committee is made up of the mayor of Billings, the chairman of the County Commission, a Planning Department representative and the local administrator for the transportation department.
Mayor Tom Hanel said the PCC is certainly open to considering the proposal, but he sees lots of trouble ahead.
“Any source of federal funding is extremely difficult at the present time,” he said. And if funding were available, he said, it would remain to be seen whether the project would meet all the grant criteria.
“Could it be done?” Hanel asked. “Yes. But there is a lot of work to be done.”
County Commissioner Jim Reno said he isn’t sure there’s much need for pedestrian bridges, but he likes the idea of making the 21st Street underpass more usable.
“The underpass gives us a chance to do both vehicle and pedestrian, and of course, bicycles,” he said. “It would truly open up the South Side.”
Asked what she would say to critics who would rather build one large overpass or underpass for vehicles and pedestrians in the heart of downtown, say at 27th or 28th street, Millar said “none of those solutions have been considered feasible.”
Five studies since 1958 have concluded that it would be difficult, if not impossible, to build a large enough underpass or overpass on those busy streets, she said. Such structures would cut off access to major private businesses — the Northern Hotel on 28th and the Crowne Plaza Hotel on 27th — and would require the relocation of a large, complex network of underground utilities under the railroad tracks.
For some of the same reasons, the city has always proposed building the pedestrian bridges away from central downtown — at 25th Street on the east and somewhere between 29th and 34th streets to the west.
