Citizens Urged to Help in Missoula’s Transportation Planning

By Emily Darrell, 11-02-07

If the population of Missoula County continues to grow at around 1.5 percent annually, which the state of Montana predicts it will, the county will double in size—to 200,000 residents—somewhere between 2050 and 2065.

“At some point in time,” said Roger Millar, director of the Missoula Office of Planning and Grants (OPG), “there are going to be 100,000 more people in the Missoula area.”

“At that point, when they are here, what do we want to see? Where do we want to see them living? Where to we want to see them working? To see them playing?”

OPG is preparing a long-range transportation plan to address how these questions of land-use are tied to Missoula’s transportation future, and invite Missoulians to share their ideas at interactive mapping workshops to be held in the middle of the month on the University of Montana campus.

“It’s going to be very hands-on,” Mirtha Becerra, an associate planner at OPG, said of the workshop. The forum, called Envision Missoula, has been organized with the input of many groups including Mountain Line, the Missoula bike/ped community, various consulting firms and government groups and the City-County Health Department, Becerra said.

Part of the consulting team, a group called Envision Utah, developed much of the interactive material to be used at the workshops. Workshop attendees will be split into roundtable groups. Armed with maps, tape (representing roads and trails), and chips (representing houses, businesses, open space, etc.), participants will get to create their own would-be Missoula.

Millar said that different models will show how Missoula might look if it switches to higher density developments and how it might look if it sticks to “business as usual”—i.e., about two dwelling units per acre in city limits.

Bob Giordano, the executive director of Missoula Institute for Sustainable Transportation (MIST) and the program director at Free Cycles Missoula, has been in active participant in the city’s long-term transportation plans and will attend the forum.

“The better land use and transportation can be connected, the better off we’ll all be,” Giordano said.

Some of Giordano’s ideas for future transportation infrastructure include more roundabouts and less stoplights, more connected bike paths and walkways, and “road expansion where appropriate” such as the stretch of Broadway from the airport west to Frenchtown, a roadway that Giordano says is unsafe.

Mike Kress, senior transportation planner at OPG, said that whatever long-term transportation plan the city adopts it had better be “fiscally constrained.”

Construction costs are rising, Kress said, and the nation’s Highway Trust Fund, where Montana gets much of its funding for major roadway construction, is expected to be in the red by 2009. Kress said there are certainly options for obtaining new revenue sources, such as instituting a gas tax, which the county will have to consider.

Kress said that the ideas generated in the forum will be reviewed by consulting firms, which will “try to boil them down into two or three different ideas.” The firms will analyze the impacts of each of the plans in terms of finances, air quality, gridlock, etc. and will then present their findings to the city.

The city is slated to have a draft proposal of the plan ready in February 2008, at which point citizens will get the chance to give their input.

Kress said the forum will be a unique opportunity for citizens to share their vision of what they would like Missoula to become.

“We just hope for a good turnout,” Kress said.

The Envision Missoula workshops will be held on Tues. Nov. 13 from 6 p.m. to 9 p.m., Wed. Nov. 14 from 6 p.m. to 9 p.m, and Thurs. Nov. 15 from 3 p.m. to 6 p.m. (You need to attend only one, not all three.) All workshops will be held in the University Center Ballroom North at the University of Montana. For more information and to RSVP contact OPG Transportation Division at 258-4989. More information can also be found at www.co.missoula.mt.us/transportation/lrtpu1.htm.