Micky Zurcher, program specialist for community and economic vitality programs for the Montana Department of Commerce, was in Ronan April 1 to meet with members of the Ronan Revitalization Committee and others engaged in efforts to revitalize Main Street.

Local business owners, Ronan City Council members, Lake County commissioner Gale Decker and other stakeholders were on hand for a meeting hosted by Mission West Community Development Partners.  

Discussion was centered around the current state of downtown Ronan, funding for revitalization, the Montana Main Street Montana program, and the Pilot Community Tourism Grant, which Ronan was awarded in 2024 by the Department of Commerce.

Comments and discussion ranged from where to find grants to the progress of the Ronan Facade committee.

One attendee asked whether Ronan has a cowboy theme (it does not).

“Themes are tricky,” said Whitney Legakos, a chamber member who has long been involved in revitalization efforts. “There is a dual history here. A cowboy town would be ignoring the people who were here before the cowboys.”

After lunch catered by The Pheasant, the group began a walking tour with a look at grant-funded sites around downtown Ronan.

The group began their ”field trip” at Rooted & Wild Studio, 426 Main Street. The business is a maker collective that features curated and small batch items created in the Mission Valley. The shelves and walls are stocked with pottery, leather pieces, knitted items, jewelry, beautiful quilts, paintings and photography.

The next stop was the Spring Creek Kitchen. It will be built in the eastern wing of the Mission West building, with a goal of creating a food hub connecting area folks with “locally sourced food” through gourmet local pizzas, kitchen rentals for pop-up events, and retail food sales through online ordering for community sourced agriculture (CSA) boxes.

The group then walked across Main Street to the Pearl Theatre. Coy Theobalt gave a history of the former Entertainer, built in 1917, which the Western Montana Musicians Cooperative now calls home. The group moved into the Pearl a year ago, and built a new stage in the former movie theatre to take advantage of the amazing acoustics in the intimate space.

They also added a state-of-the-art sound system and spruced up the entryway and offer live music Friday and Saturday nights. The co-op will throw a grand opening event on May 6.

The group also visited Intrepid Financial Services, Tom Legakos’s business, housed next door to the theatre. Chamber president Katie Jo Elliott will also have an office in the building.

Around the corner on Fourth Avenue, two murals stretch across an enormous brick wall. One was painted by Cheyenne Renee, a muralist from Virginia, and highlights native birds, wetlands and the Mission Mountains. The other portion was created by local artists Cameron and Aspen Decker, who injected Salish and Kootenai culture onto their share of the wall, with Indian women, horses and also the Flathead River, the mountains, and bitterroot and balsam root, important plants to the Tribes.

Then attendees stretched their legs with a quick walk to the Lake County Fairgrounds, Ronan, for a tour go the newly updated community center with fair manager Sjaan Vincent. The building, constructed with largely volunteer efforts and materials in 1961, has benefitted from a recent $2 million update. 

In addition to new water and sewer infrastructure, a major fundraising effort helped to renovate and add additional bathrooms, upgrade and remodel the kitchen, rewire the center, and add a generator for a tab of $875,000.

The community tourism grant provided $375,000 for new lighting, doors, windows and insulation to make the building more energy efficient, ADA compliant, and a more inviting and usable space. The center and the surrounding fairgrounds are an essential piece of the community’s master plan and a tourism destination.

Sunny skies and a warm afternoon made the final trek to the Ronan Cooperative Brewery fun. Jim Meyers and Larry Hall presented info on the brewery, a community gathering place with 600 members that is a vibrant part of downtown Ronan.

After the brewery visit, the meeting broke up, with MWCDP community development coordinator Brittany Simonich promising to provide participants with an executive summary of the meeting and helpful websites.

Exploring the downtown ecosystem

“The overall goal of the meeting … was to revitalize the Main Street project as much as we can,” said Taylor Lennox, community economics development manager for Mission West. “We wanted to bring in as many stakeholders as possible.” 

He noted there was a bigger turnout than expected, and that Montana Main Street coordinator Micky Zurcher “seemed really excited and pleased.”

Mission West has recently assumed coordination of the Montana Main Street program from the all-volunteer Ronan Revitalization Committee, an arm of the chamber.

Lennox said the walking tour helped to highlight the businesses on the “Fourth Block” that Mission West has helped launch, including the Pearl Theatre, the Ronan Co-op Brewery and Spring Creek Kitchen. He also emphasized changes in “the whole downtown ecosystem,” including the Lake County Fairgrounds with its events that brings many people to downtown Ronan, various walking paths, the Boys and Girls Club, the skatepark, the Push Play Park, and the new Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes Division of Engineering and Water Resources building.

For more information on ongoing revitalization efforts, visit ronantourismgrant.com.

    Mission West Community Development Partners hosted a meeting April 1 to provide an update on community revitalization efforts. (Berl Tiskus/Leader)
  

    Coy Theobalt of the Western Montana Musicians Co-op discusses the history of the Pearl, the former Entertainer movie theatre that the co-op moved into last year. (Berl Tiskus/Leader)