Reinventing downtown Kalispell

It’s exciting to imagine downtown Kalispell as a place where people want to spend time, a place where shoppers can walk comfortably from store to store, or sit outside a local eatery without hearing the constant rumble of traffic blasting by on the four-lane highway that cuts through the city’s core.

That pleasant scenario of restoring downtown as an attractive destination for people is the crux of Kalispell’s new Downtown Plan, a 61-page guide that envisions what that area will look like by 2035.

City planners have spent a couple of years gleaning advice and input from residents and businesses about what they’d like to see happen in the downtown core. From that research it was decided that Kalispell should go back to its roots and return Main Street to three lanes as it was in the 1940s. The plan calls for widening sidewalks by 6 feet and creating bulb-outs at intersections to make more room for pedestrians.

This kind of old-fashioned Main Street, with a landscaped median on a few blocks, may meet some resistance, and will take some negotiating to achieve and some salesmanship to reach consensus.

For one thing, state highway officials still have a four-lane highway around the courthouse couplet and through downtown as the preferred alternative for the eventual rebuild of U.S. 93 through Kalispell. If the highway design deviates from alternatives posed in the 1994 environmental impact study, the document will need to be re-evaluated. The county commissioners also have indicated support for the four-lane option, so city officials will have to convince all of the key players that putting Main Street on a “road diet” is the best option for the traveling public.

It’s also interesting to note that Kalispell has taken a couple of proposed projects from Whitefish’s playbook. The downtown plan suggests a performing arts center and a parking structure in Kalispell’s future, amenities Whitefish already has. Whitefish went through its downtown master planning process in the early 2000s and came up with a detailed plan in 2005 that was updated two years ago to build on downtown development that has stimulated more than $9 million of private investment since the Whitefish plan was adopted.

Kalispell residents have an opportunity to weigh in on the new downtown plan during a Planning Board public hearing on Aug. 8. The plan is posted on the city’s website, so take a look and see what you think. It’s not too late to make your voice known.