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8/25/2025
BNSF, Calumet rail expansion creates costs for city
The city of Great Falls expects to pay for a controlled gate to access the wastewater treatment plant as BNSF expands a rail spur serving the Calumet refinery. The gate will cut off public access to parking on the east end of West Bank Park, which has been widely used for decades.
“It does mean essentially that there will be no public access to that part of the park,” Great Falls City Manager Greg Doyon said at a city commission meeting Aug. 19.
It’s not yet clear what the total cost will be to the city, but on Aug. 5, city commissioners approved a $127,870 contract for design and engineering for a controlled gate at Fourth Street Northeast. That rail crossing is the only road access point into the city’s wastewater treatment plant. The facility is surrounded by Calumet to the north and the Missouri River to the south.
A decades-old agreement between the city and BNSF allowed access over the rail crossing, which is on the railroad company’s land. But as West Bank Park developed, the crossing became a regular public access point to the park from the east. Informational signs and parking cutouts for the park are all along the dirt road that separates the railroad and the park. Those features are intended to serve park users who use the crossing.
“It’s a difficult situation,” Doyon told commissioners. “We understand that operational need to limit traffic across it. And the public is used to accessing it from that point.”
The dirt road is BNSF property. The parking cutouts, which are on city property along with the park, would be rendered useless without public access to the road. One of those parking cutouts was developed for trail users and is paved with an informational map of the park. It will be inaccessible to the public after the change.
Now, as Calumet subsidiary Montana Renewables expands its biofuels plant, the rail spur serving the refinery is due for an upgrade. BNSF plans to expand the single rail line coming out of the refinery to three. The rail line will reduce back to one as it reaches the wider portion of West Bank Park, where the playground sits.
The added rail capacity will help ease congestion and allow for more efficient car switching, a Calumet spokesperson previously told Montana Free Press.
Great Falls Public Works Director Christoff Gaub presented the challenge in January and estimated controlled gate costs to be around $2 million. The engineering contract is the first step in what city officials view as their best option to retain access to the wastewater treatment plant.
The timing of BNSF’s rail expansion to support Calumet has forced the city to take on this gate project, and it doesn’t appear that either company will contribute to the city’s costs. There has been no cost-share proposal from any involved party, Doyon told MTFP in an email.
In an email to MTFP, a BNSF spokesperson said the city was contractually obligated to pay for the gate and said the use of the roadway was trespassing, though it had been regularly used for decades.
“The gate crossing project at this location is to fulfill the contractual obligation of the city to keep the public from trespassing,” the spokesperson said.
In the short term, residents will see signs at the crossing that say “no trespassing” or “authorized vehicles only” until the gate is constructed. The full park will remain open to the public, but users will have to arrive on the west side of the park at the main entrance, roughly a mile away from the Fourth Street Northeast crossing.
Photo op
The 132-year-old General Mills site in Great Falls is being refreshed. In recent weeks, workers could be seen patching the exterior of the large facility and adding new white paint. The grain elevator itself is 100 years old. A General Mills spokesperson told MTFP in an email that the exterior improvements should be finished this year and that interior work will continue over the next few years.
In 1892, The Royal Milling Company started construction of a mill on the Great Falls site, according to information provided by General Mills. The original wooden mill was torn down in 1916 to make way for a newer facility. Corporate mergers in 1928 formed General Mills, and the Great Falls site today produces more than 1.25 million pounds of flour each day.
Calling all photographers: Submit a photo for Great Falls This Week to [email protected].
Housing initiatives move forward
City officials provided updates last week on two initiatives aimed at boosting housing development in Great Falls.
The Planning and Community Development department studied the possibility of using tax increment financing (TIF) to benefit workforce housing projects, which aim to benefit lower-middle-income homeowners. The law that allows this kind of financing defines workforce homeowners as those who make between 60% and 140% of the area’s median income. For Great Falls, that’s between $36,120 and $84,280 for one person or $46,440 to $108,360 for a family of three, according to a city presentation.
Housing built with this financing model would have to abide by those income restrictions through subsequent sales, which is one hurdle toward implementation, according to Planning and Community Development Director Brock Cherry.
“That’s the difficulty,” Cherry told city commissioners Aug. 19. “Because if we give one cent to a downtown business owner for the purpose of workforce housing, we have to monitor that one cent in perpetuity.”
The city doesn’t currently have a mechanism to monitor income for private properties in this way. Cherry’s department looked at Missoula’s TIF-funded workforce housing program, which relies on third-party nonprofit organizations and the city’s redevelopment agency to administer. Missoula has the only TIF-funded workforce housing project in progress in Montana.
Cherry said that this kind of structure appears suited for a larger, multi-stakeholder project like the one in Missoula, which aims to build as many as 314 units and involves a community land trust. The vision for Great Falls’ downtown area was to redevelop older and unused apartments and condos. Those are often on the second and third floors above active businesses and can be expensive for building owners to renovate.
Due to the income restrictions and the available resources, TIF-funded workforce housing might not be as effective for smaller developments of two or three units, Cherry said.
“This is more likely to benefit new construction than existing, and it doesn’t address the biggest issue that we have in just revitalizing what we have,” he said.
City commissioners asked Cherry to prepare a program to make TIF funds available for workforce housing if a suitable project comes along.
On Aug. 20, Cherry presented another initiative that intends to ease development roadblocks related to the often unstable soil across Great Falls. Following lawsuits against the city, officials have required geotechnical engineering studies on all developments that assess the soil stability, but those studies can be costly and time-consuming. The requirement was meant to safeguard the city, but it has caused headaches for developers and engineers.
“We need to embrace our soils,” Cherry told a group of industry stakeholders Aug. 20. “They’re not going to change. So we need to understand that this is just a scientific math problem.”
A proposed ordinance introduces a less intensive step, an initial site evaluation, that could help streamline development and lower costs for the relatively few properties that could be quickly deemed stable for building.
In addition, the proposed ordinance would exempt certain sites from geotechnical studies if they meet a list of criteria in an attempt to identify low-risk lots and reduce the burdens of time and cost. The sites would need to be infill lots, already within the city, that meet international and city building codes, are on relatively flat ground, served by city utilities and are less than one acre, among other factors.
This is aimed to support the redevelopment of aging or dilapidated homes within Great Falls, which improves and increases the overall housing stock.
The proposed ordinance may soon come before the city commission for consideration.
City budget is set
City commissioners finalized the 2026 budget Aug. 20 by approving special district assessments and setting the property tax mill levy.
After receiving property valuations from the Montana Department of Revenue earlier in August, the city was able to calculate its mill levy. The mill levy will generate $28,580,698, which is an increase of $783,055 over the previous year. That growth comes from an inflationary increase of 2.11% that will bring in $448,822, as well as newly taxable property proceeds of $334,233.
This year’s mill levy will increase annual property taxes by $8.91 on a $300,000 home and $20.47 on a $600,000 home, according to the city. Tax revenue makes up two-thirds of the general fund budget.
Assessments on special districts are in addition to the mill levy and will vary based on the type of property and what districts apply. Those were summarized in this newsletter edition.
The mill levy also includes the library mills, which were increased by voter approval in 2023. Because those mills are fixed in the city charter (the others are not), they had to be recalculated due to property tax reform passed by the 2025 Legislature (more on that here).
Voters in 2023 approved a measure to increase the library’s levy from two mills to 17. But the Legislature’s tax reform would have reduced the value of those mills, so it allowed fixed charter mills to be recalculated to avoid a loss of revenue. Now, the library’s levy is set at a maximum of 19.55 mills to raise the same amount of money that the 17 mills previously raised.
This does not affect the seven mills that were the subject of last year’s debate about reallocating them to public safety.
By contrast, the rest of the city’s mills are “floating,” meaning the number of mills can increase or decrease to reach a revenue target allowed by statute.
Read about broader impacts to the 2026 city budget here.
5 things to know in Great Falls
The Great Falls City Commission approved preliminary plans for the first phase of the Peace Harbor subdivision, which ultimately aims to have 67 single-family homes on the south side of town. The 15-acre property is at 20th Avenue South and Fourth Street South, near the Great Falls Fire Rescue training center and Peak Health and Wellness. The developer, KIB Homes, requested a planned unit development that allows a minimum 5,000-square-foot lot size in an attempt to bring down home costs.
The city is interviewing candidates for the deputy city manager position and will readvertise for the Park and Recreation director position after interviewing candidates, according to City Manager Greg Doyon. Former Montana Division of Criminal Investigation administrator Brian Lockerby is the interim deputy city manager. Former deputy Park and Recreation Director Jessica Compton is the current interim director for that department. Doyon told city commissioners Aug. 19 that the future parks director will need a specific set of skills, including business savvy, in order to steer that department.
The city will hold a hazardous household waste collection event Sept. 13. The event allows residents to drop off materials that can’t be thrown into trash cans, including antifreeze, paint thinner, gasoline, fertilizer, shellac, insect spray, cleaners and other materials. The event will be from 9 a.m. to 1 p.m. at 112 1st St. S., near the Great Falls Police Department. More information on the types of waste can be found here.
Toby’s House, a nonprofit crisis nursery, has requested the donation of 11 acres of Carter Park for the organization to build a larger nursery. The organization chose the location due to its proximity to shelters and neighborhoods with a greater need for the free childcare services. Toby’s House serves children at risk of abuse or neglect and currently rents space on Fifth Street North and has the capacity for 12 children. The organization has secured private funds for construction, according to Executive Director Leesha Ford.
The final event in the Downtown Summer Jam series is Aug. 27 on the 400 block of Central Avenue. This concert features musician Logan Michael. Food and drinks will be available for sale, and the event starts at 6:30 p.m. More information is here.
