Xanterra's move is top C-Falls story

The Columbia Falls economy got a big boost this year when Xanterra Parks & Resorts acquired two vacant stores on the U.S. 2 strip and converted them to offices, a warehouse and a laundry facility.

Xanterra won the bid to take over Glacier National Park’s main 16-year long concessions contract in 2013 and quickly went to work establishing a base here in the Flathead.

The former Pamida buildings had been vacant for several years. The warehouse and laundry were in operation in time for the 2014 summer tourist season, and staff moved into the new offices by November.

Operating under the name Glacier Park Lodges, the company also bought the Canyon RV campground in Coram and a 10-acre site on Highway 206 for a 40,000-square-foot garage for the Park’s historic Red Buses and other vehicles.

The blighted area on U.S. 2 near Nucleus Avenue is undergoing other changes. O’Brien Byrd took over the former Western Building Center store across from Xanterra’s warehouse, cleaned up the site and remodeled the building for his liquor store. And the city has plans to create an entrance park at the Nucleus Avenue intersection in hopes of drawing passing tourist up Highway 486 to the North Fork and Glacier Park.

Other top stories include:

• The city of Columbia Falls and concerned citizens continued to put pressure on the state and federal government to pursue a cleanup of the Columbia Falls Aluminum Co. smelter, which parent company Glencore shut down in 2009.

The Montana Department of Environmental Quality and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency held public meetings in April and December to keep stakeholders apprised of sampling results from nearby residential wells and the lengthy legal process. Cyanide contamination at hazardous levels has not been found in the wells.

Glencore announced plans for a large Canadian planning company to look at the site in May and then told DEQ in August that further negotiations must be done with CFAC, not Glencore. Then on Dec. 9, CFAC broke off talks with DEQ, leaving the EPA in charge of the cleanup.

• On June 10, residents across the city were startled by a loud explosion. A bearing failure on a raw material feed line had caused a fire at Plum Creek’s medium-density fiberboard plant. Firefighters and emergency responders from across the valley joined to fight the fire. There were no injuries, and the MDF plant was back online about a month later.

• As Republicans across the U.S. and Montana swept races this November, local Democrats cheered when Zac Perry defeated incumbent Jerry O’Neil in the House District 3 race. This was Perry’s third try against O’Neil, a libertarian who served two terms in the Senate and two in the House.

In the Flathead County Commissioner race for the north valley seat, Whitefish businessman Phil Mitchell handily defeated Stacey Schnebel, D-Coram, by nearly a two-to-one margin. The board of commissioners remains in Republican hands.

Whitefish Republican Ryan Zinke, a former Navy SEAL commander who represented Columbia Falls and Whitefish in the Montana Senate, won the race for Montana’s lone U.S. House seat. Rep. Steve Daines, R-Bozeman, won the race for the U.S. Senate seat long held by Max Baucus, now the U.S. ambassador in China.