For about two weeks, Kevin LeClair has been walking the blocks of downtown Kalispell, doing a shoe-leather inventory of the area’s characteristics.

Parking availability, building vacancies, sidewalk and infrastructure conditions, and more are getting catalogued as the first part of a comprehensive downtown planning process.

The Downtown Plan will continue into the fall, with city officials interviewing property and business owners for their views on what’s lacking and what’s working for the downtown area.

“Depending on who you talk to, there are a lot of things going well, but other things that aren’t,” LeClair said Tuesday.

LeClair is the senior planner for the city of Kalispell.

“Part of the story to tell here is that we’ve seen a lot of success and momentum built from the Kalispell Core Area Plan,” LeClair said, referring to a similar planning process that applied to the east-west “core area” that encompasses city blocks that parallel the railroad tracks that run through town.

That plan calls for eventually removing the tracks to provide for better parking, green space, sidewalks and generally better conditions for business development.

The Downtown Plan encompasses the historic business district to the south — a tree-shaped area between Center Street and the Flathead County Courthouse and Second Avenues west and east.

To kick off the planning effort, about 200 mailers recently were sent to property owners and more information has been distributed by the Kalispell Chamber of Commerce, the Kalispell Downtown Association and the Kalispell Business Improvement District.

“It’s really about working in partnership with the business community to make it as viable as possible,” LeClair said.

The success of core area redevelopment may largely depend on the success of downtown redevelopment and vice versa, LeClair said.

The timing of the effort couldn’t be better because the Kalispell bypass route is expected to be finished within the next couple years. When that happens, LeClair said, the nature of traffic in the downtown area is bound to change.

And that will be a consideration in how Main Street may be managed. The Montana Department of Transportation, for instance, has tentative plans to possibly widen the couplet portion of Main Street that guides traffic around the courthouse.

That may not be the preferred option down the road if the city and downtown business owners have a desire to discourage a route that might continue to attract large trucks.

As it is currently designed, the couplet “is an ideal traffic-calming device, if you will,” LeClair said.

One idea for a Main Street with calmer traffic conditions is to convert it to having just one lane in both directions, a center turning lane and diagonal parking that is currently not available. Those conditions would be more conducive to people stopping in the downtown area.

“We need the traffic,” LeClair said, “but we want the right kind of traffic.”  

There’s no telling what kind of feedback the city will get, but LeClair said it’s possible that there will be a lot of common interests for improving the downtown area.

He said the planning effort could be a very valuable tool for identifying top priorities for improvements, which is good for avoiding a “planning paralysis” where there are too many goals being pursued at once.

He noted that the planning effort “is not going to be offering solutions at the outset,” and that the input the city receives could lead to solutions that have never been considered before.

The city is urging property and business owners to call City Hall at 758-7940 to schedule an interview about downtown.

Reporter Jim Mann may be reached at 758-4407 or by email at jmann@dailyinterlake.com.