Park Issues: County seeks help from Bigfork to pay for Sliter Park maintenance
By LYNNETTE HINTZE
Northwest Montana News Network
Flathead County may drop its long-running lease with PacifiCorp for Sliter Park in Bigfork, but two Bigfork groups say they stand ready to do what’s needed to assure the downtown park remains a community facility.
“Sliter Park is an absolute gem,” said Bob Keenan, a trustee for the Bigfork Community Development Foundation trust. “It’s a wonderful facility and if the county wants to walk away from it, I’m all for it. Bigfork is a can-do community. We’ll figure out a way to get it [maintenance and operation] done.”
The county entered into a lease with PacifiCorp about 30 years ago and continued to renew the lease in smaller time increments after the original 20-year term expired about 10 years ago. County Parks and Recreation Director Jed Fisher said maintenance of the highly used park has been an ongoing challenge for the county.
Costs have continued to go up because of higher use, especially during Fourth of July, Whitewater Days and other popular events, Fisher told the county commissioners last week.
Paul Mutascio, president of the Community Foundation for a Better Bigfork, said the development trust and community-generated funds have pumped somewhere between $100,000 and $200,000 into Sliter Park over the years to improve the facility.
Most recently the trust pitched in around $30,000 to fix up the park’s restrooms.
The park’s lease with PacifiCorp, the company that owns the land where the park is located, ran out in July 2006 and the park’s future was uncertain. However, after several months of negotiations the county in 2007 signed a new lease with Pacificorp, which is owned by Warren Buffett’s corporation, Berkshire Hathway, Inc.
In 2007 PacifiCorp’s management preferred to lease five years at a time rather than 25 to 50 years as the company originally agreed too. In 2007 the yearly lease increase from $100 to $212.78 a year.
Fisher said discussion began last year with the Bigfork Parks Advisory Committee, a “feeder” group for the county Park Board, about how to proceed with Sliter Park.
“The [Park] Board is saying, how can we continue to put money into a park we don’t own?” Fisher said. He estimates the annual operation and maintenance costs range from $4,000 to $12,000.
The county can vacate the Sliter Park lease with a 30-day notice, and it’s written into the lease that if the county bows out, the Community Foundation for a Better Bigfork would assume oversight of the park.
“We’ve given them until May, when my costs start flying out the door again,” Fisher said. “I gave them an average of $7,500. We can work a deal out; we’re open to making this work.”
Although the Bigfork Parks Advisory Committee has known about the lease situation for at least six months, both Keenan and Mutascio said they first learned about the county’s tentative plan to end the lease just a week ago.
“Sliter Park is a very important piece, not only to Bigfork but to the entire county,” Mutascio said. “We don’t want it to go away. We want to work with the county to make sure it stays and improves. ... We have to study it carefully. We want to do everything feasible to keep the park available to the Flathead County community.
“I’m confident we can work out whatever we need to work out,” he added.
If the Community Foundation for a Better Bigfork had control of the park, it could put on fundraisers and even lease out the park for special events to help cover the costs of maintenance, he said.
Commissioner Gary Krueger asked Fisher to look into an administrative fee for Sliter Park.
“What are the administrative costs? That would be a fee,” Krueger said. “There’s a possibility you could do the administration of that; do everything contractor-wise. Those costs could be borne by the Bigfork community but we’d be the administrator of that deal. We could build a hybrid of something there.”
PacifiCorp, which owns the Sliter Park property, operates a power plant in Bigfork as one of its small hydroelectric projects.