Missoula Downtown Business Improvement District renewed for 10 more years

(KPAX) The downtown Business Improvement District (BID) has been renewed for another 10 years following last week's 9-to-3 vote by the Missoula City Council.

The BID brings vital services to the community through common-area maintenance and management. Services such as garbage removal, dedicated downtown patrolling, and ice chipping are done regularly.

The City Council approved the renewal last week, with almost 73% support from the 700 downtown property owners that were surveyed. The BID is funded by those property owners, who give a combined $350,000 annually to the BID budget.

Downtown Missoula Partnership executive director Linda McCarthy said that with the budget, downtown Missoula can provide a cleaning team, a downtown ambassador, one dedicated downtown police officer, downtown maintenance, and business development.

Without the renewal of BID, McCarthy said one's experience in downtown Missoula would be entirely different.

“If we didn’t have the BID services, our downtown wouldn’t be as clean or safe as it is today,” said McCarthy, “so we would see a lot more garbage on the sidewalks, weeds in tree wells, no one would be plowing the alleys so it would be harder for our delivery trucks to make their deliveries.

"We wouldn’t be chopping the ice off the street drains so you’d see more flooding and more ice, and it’d be harder to navigate downtown.”

The BID board will assess its current programming in the next few months to determine what the next ten years of services will look like.