$28 million to start and about double that to expand.

It’s a hefty price tag for a potential facility in Lincoln County to treat biomass, wood left over from logging jobs, and maybe garbage at some point.

Where that money comes from is anyone’s guess as the county’s financial struggles continue, but local officials said they would target state and federal grant funding to pay for it.

District 1 Commissioner Brent Teske said getting buy-in from state and federal legislators is key.

“That’s gonna be one of the issues moving forward is how to get the state and federal government involved,” he said. “They are with wind, they are with solar, they are with hydroelectric, so how do we get them to recognize this energy resource as a viable resource?”

It and much more were major topics of discussion at the Aug. 19 county commission meeting in Eureka. 

District 3 Commissioner Noel Duram explained that the project proposals include a biomass to energy or MSW (municipal solid waste, also known as garbage) to energy to provide electricity at a rate that would be feasible for local electric co-ops to have accessible to county residents. 

“It would be similar to the one that Stoltze (Land & Lumber) has in Kalispell,” Duram said. “One of the really cool things about it is we can work better about our waste in our forest or our municipal waste.”

Duram acknowledged that energy produced in such a facility isn’t inexpensive.

“It’s not cheap energy,” he said. “So the first thing, if anybody thinks this is cheap energy, it’s not necessarily cheap energy. You have to have a market to sell this energy to and that’s one of the things we’ve learned in this study is that the energy gets much more expensive than the hydro does down at the dam.

“The difference is the energy goes into the power lines, leaves Montana and never comes back. This one would be generated right here. And if we could find a way to utilize it here, maybe with a contract with different facilities, Stoltze has one with Flathead Electric and then they sell that power to a buyer as well,” Duram said.

The public conversation began more than a year ago. Duram first spoke about a biomass facility at the Aug. 6, 2025, commission meeting.  Commissioners Ok’d a $79,860 contract in November 2025 with HDR Engineering for a feasibility study.

The money to pay for the study has come from Payment in Lieu of Taxes (PILT). They are federal funds given to local governments to help replace property taxes lost from tax-exempt federal lands within their borders.

The payments were made beginning in February and just concluded Aug. 9.

A biomass facility in the county is not a new idea. County officials kicked the idea around in 2009, but said the lack of known logging operations on the Kootenai National Forest made the project unfeasible. When Champion International ran the lumber mill decades ago, it utilized steam from waste wood to power operations.

Officials and elected representatives believe certain conditions have changed enough to warrant another look at the idea.

At the Aug. 19 meeting, HDR Engineering’s Zach Maassen presented a draft copy of the feasibility study and an analysis of potential fatal flaws.

The firm, based in Omaha, Nebraska, has an office in Kalispell, which is where Maassen works. The study is 296 pages long and is available for the public to view on the county website at https://lincolncountymt.us. To see it, scroll down and click on “2026 Lincoln County Biomass Study.”

The study said the county possesses several advantages that improve competitiveness for future project funding, including the recently established Master Stewardship Agreement with the U.S. Forest Service, participation in Good Neighbor Authority programs, identified wildfire mitigation objectives, Federal Forest restoration priorities, and the Libby Bioeconomy Development Opportunity Zone designation. 

The study indicated those programs strengthened the county’s ability to find outside grant funding and attract development partners by demonstrating long-term feedstock reliability and policy alignment.

At the meeting, Sen. Mike Cuffe expressed support for continuing to explore the project, citing his experience with forest products jobs and biomass energy. 

Cuffe said when he worked with Champion International, the plant generated power for a long time and sold power into the grid.

“We also provided power for all the operations there,” Cuffe said.

An article in the Jan. 9, 1985, edition of The Western News explained how an electric cable drive which replaced an old steam shotgun on the log carriage resulted in a significant energy savings and allowed surplus steam to be sold to Pacific Power and Light.

Champion bought the mill site in 1985 following its merger with St. Regis Paper Co. while Stimson Lumber Co. took over in 1993.

Cuffe also discussed potential state and federal funding, job creation, wildfire mitigation benefits, and the possibility of attracting forest-products industries back to Lincoln County. 

“I believe the time is right for some federal and state support,” Cuffe said. “I encourage keep going on this thing. It’s a jobs thing and if you balance in some of these firefighting costs, if you’re control burning in your generators, you could equalize some of those costs.”

But one man had significant concerns about the idea.

John Stears, who is from Michigan, but also owns property in Lincoln County, expressed concerns about the limited time available to review the draft report before the meeting and requested extensive future public involvement. 

According to meeting minutes, he questioned the potential inclusion of municipal solid waste, oversight of materials entering the facility, environmental safeguards and the potential location of the facility. He requested several public meetings involving community members, state legislators and EPA before the project proceeds.

“We have to take this slow,” Stears said. “I’m having a larger problem with the fact that we did not have this report in our hands before the meeting began. There is no reason we cannot read that report whether it be finished or not and make decisions and ask questions of this man right now while he’s in the room when we know our commissioners so far anyway have not assured us that there will be town halls that will be hours long that we make ask pointed, intelligent questions on not only what type of facility they are proposing.”

Stears referred to problems that existed in Micigan

Duram spoke about pollution concerns.

“This is all generated not to just smoke up in the air,” he said. “These facilities do not put smoke in the air. They do not put waste matter into the air. The DEQ, the EPA all regulate all those things and we have to meet standards.”

Jobs were also touted as a reason for the plant. According to information on the F.H. Stoltze Land & Lumber site, its plant went online in 2013. It is capable of utilizing 67,200 tons or about 2,240 truckloads per year of bark, sawdust, planer shavings and woods direct hogfuel.

Its power plant employs 11 full-time employees as well as electricians, maintenance and equipment personnel who are shared part-time with mill operations.

Maassen said he hoped to be back on the commission agenda in the next month or so to address questions from the public before publishing a final report.

“Based on the commissioners and public who support this, going forward, then we will either extend our contract and go forward with the RFP (Request for Proposal) process to kind of get to that next step and see how costs come in and then basically determine the next steps to securing funding or even permitting and stuff like that, or we will cease.”