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Wednesday, June 01, 2005

Mini-Golf

A quick Butte Civics lesion. There are three towns in Silver Bow County: Butte-bustling city of 35,000, Walkerville-I'd call it Butte's Springtown, and Rocker-a truck stop and a ganky full-nude strip-bar. So since Butte is the only real city in the county in 1977 (A great vintage for babies) the city and county governments merged. The upshot of witch is that while a city has a city council and a mayor, Butte-Silver Bow has a Council of Commissioners and a Chief Executive.

Now a quick Butte Econ Lesson: B-SB is like Flint Michigan in that it was a one-industry town (mining) and then the industry left (prices of metals fell). And like Flint, a some of the Butte citizens choose to stay, and many other chose to leave. Two other employers came in, the Montana Power Company and Touch America (telecommunications not a crazy band of perverts). Well they both went under. Needless to say the economy has had some serious suckage. The upshot of which is BSB has a lot of property that was lost to back-taxes.

More Civics: They used to sell the property at a big tax sale. But bad people took advantage by buying historic buildings on-the-cheap and then gutting them for timbers and brick (largely to ship to the west coast or north east). They would then not pay the taxes leaving BSB with the same property but in far worse condition. The new strategy is to issue Developer's Packets. Which is like a tax auction except that your plans are the more the focus than your bid. Plus you must get reasonably along in your project before you get the deed. (though if they take it back they have to reimburse you for your improvements).

Why was all that important? I am making a presentation to the Council of Commissioners regarding a developer's packet tonight. Its for a small piece of vacant land two blocks east of us. We want to through in a bid just incase no one else does. But we cant just “buy” it so we propose to cram an 18 hole historic Butte and Mining themed miniature golf course.

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# posted by Max : 6/01/2005 04:32:00 PM  
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