City outlines cleanup and reuse plans for "Big Red" grain elevator

City staff presented a detailed update on the "Big Red" grain elevator, a structure the city acquired earlier this year, and outlined next steps for assessment, remediation and community engagement. Catherine, a staff member leading the project review, said the city will layer Brownfields grant dollars with TIF funding to pay for structural analysis and environmental sampling before any broad public access or reuse is pursued. "These TIF dollars are not an additional tax," she said, explaining the increment-capture nature of the fund.

Staff described the building as an eight-story structure of roughly 11,000 square feet sitting on about 3.5 acres in a constrained location between a spur rail line and adjacent streets. Catherine said a DEQ-supported structural analysis firm will first assess safety, then a Phase 2 environmental sampling effort will identify regulated materials and their locations so the city can pursue cleanup with the Brownfields multipurpose grant. "It came with 3.5 acres of land," she noted when describing the acquisition; staff also documented dust, pigeon guano and legacy grain-elevator equipment inside the building that will be addressed during remediation.

The presentation included design-charrette imagery from a Montana Festival exercise and a comparison to a repurposed grain elevator in Carlton, Oregon, used to illustrate possible adaptive reuses such as tasting rooms, murals or lighting installations. Staff emphasized these images were illustrative, not prescriptive, and said they plan a public process and design charettes once structural and contamination assessments allow safe, meaningful community engagement. The earliest community-facing steps could come in the spring, pending analysis results.