CFAC, Ruis announce sale agreement for 2,400 acres of land

The Columbia Falls Aluminum Co. has agreed to sell 2,400 acres of land it owns to Columbia Falls developer Mick Ruis.

The property includes the warehouses and former plant site. CFAC will continue to own the landfills and a buffer around them, company officials said Monday, which amounts to about 200 acres.

The transaction is expected to close once the Environmental Protection Agency releases the Record of Decision on the Superfund cleanup, which focuses on landfills at the site.

The remainder of the property is an idyllic mix of trees and meadows that haven’t been touched in decades.

Ruis has plans for attainable housing, a 100-acre park with baseball and softball fields, pickleball, a dog park and other amenities, he said in an interview Monday.

He also wants to attract industry to the site to provide jobs that have been lost at area mills over the years.

“If I can build a 1,800 square-foot house with a garage for $550,000 … that’s my target,” he said.

He wants to provide owner financing of the homes, so people can get into them with a low down payment and lower interest rate compared to a typical bank loan.

He said the land is ideal for a housing development. A Columbia Falls city water line already runs through the property and the sewer service is just to the south of the BNSF Railway line, so it could be easily extended to the north. He said the plan is to annex the development into the city.

Ruis said he expects to have a master plan for the property in the next few months, but said he wants it to primarily be single-family homes.

“This area has the potential the city needs for affordable housing and growth,” Ruis said. “Real estate prices in the Flathead Valley have skyrocketed in the past few years, putting the American dream of home ownership out of reach for many Montanans. We want to build houses at a better rate so more people can afford to live here.”

He said he wants to do owner financing because that’s how he got his start. More than 30 years ago Blanche Garrett had put the Nord Apartment Building on Nucleus Avenue up for sale for $110,000. Ruis at the time was a single father with three kids, but he had just received a $6,000 bonus from his employer at the time, so he contacted her about buying the building.

She agreed to sell with his low down payment and owner financing at 10% (interest rates were much higher back then). Ruis moved his family into one apartment, painted the walls and put in carpet by himself and later sold the building for about $320,000.

“That was my first taste of real estate,” Ruis recalled.

From there he used the small profit to buy some scaffolding and started American Scaffold, building the business up into a multi-million venture, primarily building concrete reservoirs across the U.S.

After living in California for several years (he still had family in Columbia Falls) he returned and began investing in the city. His first project was the Cedar Creek Lodge, which was finished in 2016. He later sold it to Xanterra Parks and Resorts. Since then he’s completed many projects in downtown Columbia Falls, including transforming the former town square into a condominium/retail project on Nucleus Avenue. 

By the end of the year he’ll have also completed new apartments in Kalispell called the silos, where, eventually, a restaurant will sit on top of former grain silos in that city. He’s also starting construction on a housing project in Whitefish and has previously built retail buildings and housing in that city’s downtown as well.

Ruis said the CFAC development could take 40 years. He said there will not be a golf course. It is intended to be a place where working people can live and raise a family.

He said he wants industry at the industrial site “that will create jobs,” not one that simply uses a lot of power but has few employees.

The Bonneville Power Administration owns a substation that used to serve the aluminum plant, so industrial power is readily available.

“We are pleased to announce the sale of the CFAC property,” Cheryl Driscoll, for Glencore, Ltd. CFAC’s parent company, said Wednesday. “After an extensive investigation and consultation process spanning almost 10 years, we are excited to see what this area will become and for the Columbia Falls community to live, work and play here.”

The Proposed Action to clean up the Superfund site calls for a slurry wall that would contain cyanide and fluoride that is in the groundwater in high concentrations near the West Landfill and the former wet scrubber sludge pond.

The wall would contain the waste, the EPA said, and keep it from flowing away from the landfills. While concentrations of cyanide and fluoride are high in groundwater close to the landfills, the groundwater has low to no cyanide by the time it flows to the Flathead River.

The Proposed Action also calls for scraping away contaminated soils on the site that were close to the plant and burying them on the wet scrubber sludge pond and then recapping it.

The cost of that cleanup is estimated at $57 million.

Still, many people in Columbia Falls aren’t happy with the cleanup plan and are calling for the EPA to require that CFAC dig the waste up and haul it away. The EPA said last month that such a plan would take four to five years and cost between $623 million and $1.4 billion.

    Mick and Wendy Ruis pose on the CFAC property last week. Most of the site is woods and meadows. (Chris Peterson photo)