Renewal plan: High hopes for downtown Miles City

MILES CITY — As a lifelong resident and mayor of this history-rich cowboy town, Butch Grenz knows what makes Miles City unique.

But as a downtown businessman who has watched the decline of what used to be the center of his city, he also knows what makes it similar to other communities in the state.

“It’s just typical Main Street Montana without a highway,” he said.

He was referring to the coming of the interstate highway system in the 1960s, a development that bypassed dozens of towns in Montana — he mentioned Laurel and Big Timber, if you’re looking for parallels — and started the slow strangulation of their downtowns.

Now there is a proposal on the table — a big plan with lots of moving parts — to restore some of Main Street’s former glory. A meeting is scheduled Thursday to gather public comment on a Downtown Urban Renewal Plan that the City Council is scheduled to vote on later in the month.

The plan is part of a larger Revitalize Downtown project that was proposed by Connie Muggli, the city’s historic preservation officer, in the summer of 2012.

In a document outlining the project, Muggli wrote of the town’s early days, when Miles City was a regional trade center and the founding fathers competed with one another to build the most impressive buildings, houses and parks.

“Their legacy,” the report says, “is a beautiful downtown district constructed with enduring materials and inspiring architecture that reflects our proud cultural heritage.”

That’s the good news. The bad news is found in the pages of the draft urban renewal plan, which tells how the local historical society worked to have the Main Street District listed on the National Register of Historic Places in the 1980s.

At the time, the district included 99 buildings, 60 of which were considered as “contributing” to the historic district. A more recent survey showed that only 55 of those 99 buildings remain standing, and of those only 33 are considered “contributing” buildings.

A lot of those buildings were lost in fires, including the fire that wiped out the north side of the 700 block of Main Street in 2009. The damage from that fire was so extensive that the governor declared a state of emergency in the city.

Still, Miles City had so many notable buildings that enough of them remain standing to make an attempt at restoration worth the trouble.

“I’ve seen a lot of downtowns that are in a lot worse shape,” said Steve Zeier, a Billings consultant working on the urban renewal plan.

And thanks mainly to the ripple effect of the Bakken oil boom, there is enough growth and economic activity in Miles City to make downtown revitalization seem more doable than at any time in years.

As Zeier put it, “Miles City is finally growing, which is why we’re having this conversation.”

In recent decades, almost all the commercial development in Miles City has occurred on South Haynes Avenue, with its easy access to the interstate highway. As more and more businesses took root on Haynes, downtown businesses were closing their doors for good or making the migration to Haynes.

The urban renewal plan says the downtown “is not meant to compete with the Haynes development,” but to complement it, to provide the kinds of services and amenities that would lure some of that “high transient traffic” to Main Street.

The plan would encourage development by making funding available for basic infrastructure improvements — better streets and sidewalks, upgraded utilities, new parks and pedestrian trails and, probably most important, more parking.

Similarly, access to funding and streamlined regulations would encourage people to create more high-density housing in the downtown core, new retail stores and arts and entertainment offerings. Related to all the other goals would be the restoration of Main Street’s historical character, which would attract tourism and add to the success of the district.

One of the main funding mechanisms would be creation of a tax-increment finance district. In such a district, which a municipality can create by designating the district deficient or blighted, the existing tax value of all property in the district is first determined.

Then, during the 15-year life of the district, tax revenues derived from any new development — anything over and above that base property valuation — would stay in the district, used mostly for infrastructure improvements but also for things like restoring the facades on historic buildings.

Money from the tax increment district could also be used to leverage other sources of funding, including historic preservation tax credits, new market tax credits, Community Development Block Grant funds, Montana Board of Investment loans and “brownfields” grants from the Environmental Protection Agency. The brownfields program provides funding to clean up and restore properties contaminated by outdated construction materials like asbestos and lead-based paint.

“I really want people to understand that this is a long-term financial tool,” Muggli said of the tax increment district.

Zeier, the consultant from Billings, was hired to help create the urban renewal district and the TIF district. He previously worked for the city of Billings and Big Sky Economic Development. He has managed two TIF districts in Billings and one in Laurel.

Creation of the TIF district in Miles City is the most important part of the urban renewal plan. The public meeting on the plan is scheduled Thursday at 6 p.m. at Miles Community College.

The City Council will vote on adopting the urban renewal plan by ordinance on Oct. 28, and there will be a formal public hearing on the plan that night. If approved, the ordinance will be voted on for the second and final time on Nov. 11.

Zeier said he’s been pleased with the reaction he’s been hearing to news of the urban renewal plan and tax increment district.

“Once you sit down and explain it to people, they get it,” he said. “And they see it works.”

Some of the best evidence of how a tax increment district can work, Zeier said, is on display in downtown Billings, which has made a dramatic recovery from a downturn in the 1990s. But the experience in Billings also shows that it can be a long, gradual process.

“It’s not a silver bullet,” Zeier said. “It’s a way to get things started, to leverage other dollars.”

Some steps have already been taken or are underway. Riverside Park renovations have begun, and acquisition and restoration of the historic Northern Pacific Depot is still moving forward. The so-called West End project — to improve the western entrance to the city with new signs, lighting and landscaping — is in the planning phase.

Muggli said activity on the west end of Miles City, with its interstate access to the downtown, is often neglected.

“My opinion is, they’re overlooking an existing market,” she said.

On the West End is the Fort Keogh Livestock and Range Research Laboratory, the Miles City Livestock Commission, Riverside Park, the Range Riders Museum, the fairgrounds and rodeo grounds and the Denton Connor Sports Complex.

All of those bring a lot of people to town, Muggli said. The livestock commission is the 13th largest in the country, and Fort Keogh last year had 1,400 hunter days in five weekends on the 85 square miles of block hunting it owns. Fort Keogh also has meetings and symposiums and a steady stream of visiting scientists from around the country and overseas.

Downtown, at the historic Montana Bar, new owner Blake Mollman is also bullish on Miles City. He came to Miles City nine years ago after getting out of the military and coming to town to visit a cousin.

“I just ended up staying,” he said. He bartended at the Montana for seven years and has been running it since the first of the year. The actual change of ownership has not happened yet because of delays in transferring the liquor license.

Mollman said the historic district needs a lot of things to get back on its feet, including an upgraded movie theater and a new restaurant or two. He figures it might take another five years before the downtown is starting to take off.

“We just need to put some hotels up, and better parking, and some more events,” he said.

Down the street, at Sullivans Furniture, owners Greg and Debie Moore said they are still doing pretty well, mainly because they draw in shoppers from an 80-mile radius. They’ve owned the business since 1987, and it’s been at 900 Main St. since 1992.

They said parking is the No. 1 issue in downtown Miles City. They also said that the downtown could come back, just as it has in Billings.

“You know what?” Greg Moore asked. “My favorite restaurant in Billings is Jake’s downtown.”

Debie Moore said she’d much rather shop in downtown Billings than at the Rimrock Mall.

“You get much better service,” she said.

Meanwhile, over at the 600 Café, which Butch Grenz’s family has owned since 1946, the mayor echoed Mollman’s opinion that the downtown needs more developments that generate traffic.

New apartments would help, as would office spaces in the downtown core. He said a prime possibility is the old Milligan Hotel, a beautiful, three-story brick building now vacant and boarded up. Grenz said the building could renovated into maybe 60 apartments, or into offices, assuming enough new parking can be created to support the increase in tenants.

The research leader at Fort Keogh, Mark Petersen, is certainly on board with efforts to revitalize the downtown.

Besides heading the research facility, Petersen is the chairman of the Miles City Area Economic Development Council. He started working closing with Muggli after they met at a Leadership Miles City program.

“Although we don’t have a mission to think about economic development,” he said of Fort Keogh, “we do want to be part of the community.”

Petersen said Miles City is ripe for redevelopment.

“It’s just our willingness and our stamina to get it done,” he said. “I think that’s all that is preventing us from doing that.”

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