REGULAR MEETING OF THE BOARD OF COUNTY COMMISSIONERS

Tuesday July 14, 2026

 

                PRESENT:  Commissioner Morse, Chair; Commissioner Waters and White; Board Clerk Teri Reitz; Clerk and Recorder Jeff Martin.

          PLEDGE:  MOMENT OF SILENCE, Held.

          Commissioner Waters made a MOTION to refer Items 7A and 7B from the Consent Agenda to staff, Commissioner White seconded.  Passed Unanimous.

          9:00 a.m. PUBLIC HEARING – Resolution No. 26-86 to Adopt West End Neighborhood Plan – Public Hearing and Decision Regarding Adoption of the West End Neighborhood Plan.  Wyeth Friday with Planning and Community Services, presenting to you the West Billings Neighborhood Plan, and you have a public hearing as part of this action this morning.  I'm back. I was here back on June 18th at your discussion session to give you an overview of
this plan.  And I'll walk through a sort of similar presentation, mainly for the benefit of the public hearing.  But some of this will be obviously familiar based on the discussion we had in June.  A couple updates. While you're working through this plan adoption as the county, the city is also doing that at the same time.  We are having discussions with city council this week, and then they have a work session next Monday that they'll be reviewing it, and then they have it scheduled for action on their July 27th meeting.  So that's moving along somewhat in parallel with your review process.  You're just a little bit ahead of them for that.  So going into the plan, this is an update and sort of rework of the 2001 West Billings Neighborhood Plan, which is back when the plan was first developed.  And we also then in 2016 did a West End multimodal transportation plan, mainly looking at the roadway corridors out in the West End area based on a lot of activity regarding development and traffic and transportation connectivity and such.  And so that was done 10 years ago after the 2001 plan was completed.  What we've done is update both of those pieces, the neighborhood plan, and then also updated that transportation study.  More activities you'll see has been going on in a lot of development and people moving into that area.  This plan covers about a 15,000-acre area, so it's quite large all the way from up by Rimrock Road down toward the interstate and from Shiloh Road out to the west towards 67th and 68th, as you'll see on the map.  It looks at both the jurisdictional areas for obviously the overall county and then the area that the city has within the county, and then the rest of that non-incorporated area.  We have both entities involved in this and have been involved in their review process.  This is the map.  What you'll see here is that we have the overall study area and then the transportation analysis area is a little bit smaller and that's because based on our metropolitan planning organization urban area, we have to stay within that to do the transportation portions of the study.  So that's a little bit smaller, but the West Billings, the overall boundary is a little bit bigger.  One of the things to note is that we have the two different jurisdictions as I noted.  When this plan is adopted, the way it will be approached by the city and by the county and staff, city/county planning is that within the areas of the county that are within the plan will continue to, apply the elements of this plan that are specific to the county and then inform the current county zoning regulations and the current county subdivision regulations.  Within the city area, they'll be falling under the Montana Land Use Planning Act and they'll have to follow those requirements.  We'll have those two kind of things going on.  As far as transportation, it'll really be pretty much be coordinated the same.  We'll be looking at transportation impacts, whether we're looking at a county subdivision or a city subdivision, and we'll be reviewing those in a pretty similar manner.
And I'll talk about that a little bit more in a minute.  The big story with this whole analysis is that a lot of growth has happened in this part of the city and county.  A lot of population increases out there.  I won't go through all of these, but there's been major people moving out in that area, some commercial development in the area.  And so we've seen a lot going on in the last 20 plus years that certainly has had an impact on how we're dealing with transportation infrastructure, how we're dealing with other services, both in the city and the county, and the expectations that people are having in that area for services as well.  This map shows you, sort of illustrates visually that development activity. This is looking back from 2003 and looking at the agricultural land versus developed land. And in the last 11 years specifically, you see a huge increase there
where the amount of land developed has gone up markedly in the planning area from what was there back in 2003 to 2024.  So, a lot has changed, again, like I said, with both residential and commercial development activity, both within both jurisdictions with the planning study boundary.  So, as I mentioned, we build on both the original plan and the 2016 study.  We look at the goals and policies that have come from community input and both and also our regulatory documents, our zoning regulations, our subdivision regulations, and then future infrastructure
investments and how we're going to address those through as development continues in the area. One of the things that was kind of key objectives that came from this effort was trying to make sure, you know, where we understand where growth is happening and where our infrastructure exists and where improvements might need to be made, continuing to try to make those connections.  We have multiple schools in this area that and some open space and parkland.  So trying to also be aware of how people are moving around in that respect and how we're trying to have a good level of safety out there for people who are the traveling public as well as people who are using those public facilities.  And then also a lot of what we heard from the community during this process is, you know, continuing to preserve the character of the neighborhoods out there.  And also at those open space facilities that we have, parks, trail corridors, things that are either already built or where there's future development where park impacts could be significant. So we heard a lot of that from the neighbors who are in that area already and the interest in continuing to maintain that and make sure that as development continues that we try to keep that balanced and some of that character that they already have stays there.  So, in terms of outreach, a lot of outreach activity during this planning process.  We did two surveys of the area and asking the public to weigh in.  We had three open house meetings during the process, two community workshops where we really drilled into having people kind of roll up their sleeves, look at some of the maps talk about land use, talk about transportation concerns, highlight some of their issues.  We also had an online website where people could also do comments and put comments on a map.  So, we made that possible.  Obviously, people can't always make it to a meeting.  So, we're trying to make sure they have other ways to engage and participate.  We did several presentations to different organizations during the time, during the process, and also talked to the media and got the information out that way.  I do want to mention that the West End Neighborhood Task Force has been a huge kind of partner in this process.  They've been
engaged.  They've been interested.  They've both pushed things out, but they've also attended and asked a lot of questions and really weighed in on some of these issues throughout the process.  And that's been really great.  They are a very engaged group; they've been at the table throughout the whole process.  We've literally consulted them in a couple of situations with meetings and stuff to say, hey, what do you think is the best way for us to bring this information out, or you know, how do you guys think we can reach the most people?  So, just wanted to mention that that's been a big...part of the process and it certainly helped with success in terms of the input and the engagement that we saw.  Just briefly talking about the population growth, like I mentioned earlier, seeing a lot of growth since 2000.  And part of this is these dates is because of our date, where we can get our data for this, getting up to 2021, which was after the last census, but then projecting potentially up to another 14,000 people moving into this area by 2045 and then housing commiserate with that of over 6,000 potentially new housing units.  So there's a lot that has happened and there's a lot that we expect to see in the next 20 years that this plan helps to anticipate and also sort of get the information out there to say, hey, we need to be aware of that as things are changing.  So, the plan focus in terms of sort of the two or several kind of specific issues with land use and transportation, again, looking at how those function together out in this area, dealing with some disconnected network issues.  As I mentioned earlier, pedestrian connectivity, we heard a lot because of the schools, because of some of the park facilities and some of these neighborhoods out there, people are concerned about how they can get there safely and how they can cross some of the streets and things like that.  So, we heard a lot about that.  And then transit service, which at this point is basically just slightly, goes slightly west of Shiloh. But long term, it certainly anticipates being able to go out and serve a larger area out there.  When you see like those nodes, like where Albertsons is at 54th, and now we have two banks out there, we have restaurants.  Those are the kind of areas where you expect over time to see transit be able to serve that.  And you see a lot of, you know, people are going to work there, people are going to eat and shop.  And so that's the kind of stuff we're trying to look at long term to make sure it's feasible to have those kinds of services too. Public outreach, again, like I said, we heard a lot about traffic concerns.  We heard about safety, the connectivity I just mentioned, and then those, like, being able to provide those services for people to get the places they want to go, both driving, walking, biking, et cetera.  So those were all things we heard throughout the process and people wanted to see that continue and to be improved over time. I'll just say Lora Mattox is here from our transportation division.  I'll just talk through these, but if you have any specific questions, she can help fill in the gaps for us.  We did a significant amount of transportation analysis, like I said, as part of this to help the city and the county understand better what's going on out there now and what could be issues in the future. This map just shows you our level of service analysis, which is very common looking at traffic impacts and traffic circulation.  And you can see on the map, there's some areas going into lower levels of service into Avenue D and below on Grand, on King Avenue where there's challenges. Now, the good news is that with Grand, the city and county are in the process of doing a reconstruction of that roadway all the way from just west of Shiloh out to 62nd, which will help with that immensely on a variety of levels.  So that's a good thing.  We already kind of knew that is out there.  But those are the kind of things that we're trying to anticipate in the long run to make sure we're addressing those.  And then this map is really a great tool for, again, city and county where it looks at future project areas of where impacts are going to occur based on the traffic analysis, based on the population increase out here.  And you've got both intersections identified as well as some corridors where future improvements are going to be needed.  And if you go into the plan, it specifically talks about those, talks about what kind of improvements would be needed in those areas.  Another example here that's on this map is the county is completing the traffic signal at 48th and Central.  That's the exactly the kind of thing this map and plan is looking out toward to say, hey, yeah, those are things that are going to be happening. Your county's already doing that but there's other areas again where city and county would be looking at and coordinating to say, hey, yeah, we see some impact that we need to address as we see more and more traffic, as we see more and more people trying to move around in the area.  If you go into the plan, this has a great amount of detail. That's a good tool for the city and county to be able to look at and use going forward as they as we see more impacts in that in that area. Lastly, I'll just hit on the high level, the guiding principles.  And again, these were what we heard coming out of the community input and the people's comments and what they put on the map and everything during the process.  And so, we got it, we sort of broke them into four categories, land use, community vitality, natural and recreation areas, and then transportation.  What I have on this slide is the high-level sort of principles.  And then if you look in the plan, it has more specific kind of goals to be able to say, okay, if we want to address how we're dealing with residential, commercial and employment uses in the area and how we're transitioning from rural to suburban, development out there, you can get into sort of more of the meat and potatoes if you like.   And it also talks about, in terms of who's involved in that.  So, it's not just, oh, the county needs to do everything, or the city needs to do everything or, you know, this is all an MDT thing.  It's no, here's the different organizations that might be involved in those efforts.  So, it's trying to help us going forward when we see an issue or you, let's say the county commissioners identify something that needs to be addressed, we can go, okay, who should be involved in this and how do we go forward?  So, it helps kind of as a roadmap for that as well. With that, I will wrap up and happy to answer questions. Like I said, Lora’s here for the transportation piece.  We've had a lot of conversation, obviously, with your county public works folks as well on this and how this information can be helpful for them in the future. More kind of a comment, you know, along with the West End Task Force, you know, if we look at some of the other ones that prior to...West End, like the Rimrock area in particular, is just with the flow, increased traffic and the speeds, because they're arterial and they're feeding people worked into Billings proper, is those abilities to cross and to slow people for schools and or just to be able to cross to the growing businesses and restaurants and things like that.  Just those I know were taken into account.  Commissioner Morse state that he read through it and stated just be mindful. I know that those are the biggest concerns that I heard from not only the West End folks, but others as well.  Commissioner Morse stated thanks, Wyeth.  Commissioner Morse opened the Public Hearing.  One citizen spoke in general about the neighborhood plan.  Hearing no other comments Commissioner Morse closed the Public Hearing. Commissioner Waters made a MOTION to approve Resolution 26-86 to adopt the West End neighborhood Plan, Commissioner White seconded.  Passed Unanimous. 

          PUBLIC COMMENTS ON REGULAR, CONSENT AND FILED AGENDA ITEMS – Hearing no comments Commissioner Morse continued the Board Meeting.

METRAPARK – MontanaFair Update.  Mr. Stoney Field, General Manager stated that Michaela's here, so she's going to give you an update.   Just wanted to let you know that we had a Matt Rife show. He's a comedian. There were about 7,200 tickets sold for that.  It was received really well. We don't have quite all our profit and loss in, but it looks like we did well on that show.  If you went by MetraPark at all this last weekend, you noticed that we had a couple of horse trailers down there.  There was a barrel racing event held last weekend.  They were a ton, a ton of folks there.  We don't have quite all those numbers together yet, but it looks like they're super excited about bringing that back again next year because it was quite successful.  Hopefully we can bring the temperature down a few degrees this next time.  Ms. Michaela Woempner, MontanaFair Coordinator, stated we do have a very short 23 days until the 2026 Montana Fair. So that'll be August 7th through the 15th.  We did do just a couple flash sales over the 4th of July weekend, which proved to be very successful.  People are getting excited.  Marketing box office team really killed it with that.  So, we're getting pumped up.  To start off, so we will have our first three nights be our Pepsi concert series with Yungblood, Hairball, and Toby Mac.  We do have the show in the middle of the week, so we're working on some programming, making sure that everything is still prepared and safe for that day as well on Wednesday with Shinedown.  Finishing off the week, we do have Rodeo Billings August 13th through the 15th.  Nile's been a great partner to work with, and we're really excited for how that's improving this year from last year.  We do have some fun entertainment that's returning this year as well.  June Bugs are on the patio stage.  They're always a great hit.  We do have the Fritters that are kind of some cartoon characters, to get the people excited as they come in the gates. Paz the sports guy is also returning this year, but he is changing his theme since we have a new hockey rink here in town.  He's going to do the hockey theme this year.  So just kind of a way to tie that into Billings here and make it a little bit special.  We do also have a new entertainment lineup this year with Chachi the Rocketman Valencia.  He is a human cannonball, and he will be shooting across the pond this year.  So very exciting.  So be watching out for that.  Then we do also have a couple contests coming in this year.  So, Darcy and I have been working on trying to get some sponsors, get the community involved.  It's free entertainment, ways for families of all ages to be able to participate.  We'll have a mullet contest, a wagon and stroller decorating contest and parade to celebrate the America 250 theme as well, kind of tie that in.  Then working with Rodeo Billings again, for a rodeo relay.  They'll be bringing in Miss Rodeo Montana to have some exciting things, and they have their high school rodeo teams that they're working with that and will be helping with that as well.  Currently, I have 61 vendors confirmed for about $70,000, and we're waiting on about 16 vendors that have either been proposed an application or applying currently.
The 4-H exhibits just finished their deadlines.  So, we are at 4,000 entries with over 400 exhibitors. The biggest thing there is that our hog numbers have gone up.  So be excited to see a lot of swine in the building and we're making sure that the expo is set up well enough to handle that. Something exciting that Roni Baker, Extension Director shared with me is we're hoping to have an emu on display this year in the small bay of the expo.  So that'll be kind of unique and exciting. Commissioner Morse asked if it is it a friendly one or is it going to spit?  Ms. Woempner replied, I'm not sure.  I'm excited to see it though.  Something new for our open exhibits. We did move the open horse show earlier.  So that will be on August 1st and 2nd this year. So that's a week earlier than normal. The nice thing about this is that we're able to focus on that show separate from the draft horse show as well as the 4-H horse show.  So, we were able to add in some 4-H classes and bring in some more exhibitors, being able to give them a chance to show before they go into their fair shows as well.  Commissioner Morse commented that the draft show horse is coming back for the fair.  Ms. Woempner replied, yep, the draft show will be still that first weekend, so August 8th and 9th. Darcy updated me that we are at almost $250,000 in sponsorships.  She has really been doing a fantastic job.  She's been looking for different ways to include community members, see what our sponsors are looking for, and then working together to see how we can promote them on grounds, promote them through our social media, things like that, small things from our exhibits to big things like a presenting sponsor.  To have Heenan and Cook as our presenting sponsor this year is very exciting.  Other than that, we will have some exciting news from our carnival this year.  They are bringing in a roller coaster that looks like it'll be 50 feet by 120 feet.  That has been a challenge for our team to be able to find enough space in the carnival lot that is flat enough to be able to host a roller coaster, but I think that'll be new and exciting.  They are also moving to an electronic ticketing version this year.  So, a little bit different, and we're going to see how things go, but we're very excited to work with them again.  And then I do have the amusement games permit that will be in the items that you signed today to send off to the carnival for them to get prepared.  Commissioner Morse asked if John was going to be up with Thomas Carnivals this year?  Ms. Woempner stated she didn't believe so, but it would be great to have him make a surprise appearance.  We will still work with Catherine, Brandon, Timmy.  They've been a great team to work with.  

          CLAIMS – Batches 26-183, 26-184 and 27-001.  Commissioner White made a MOTION to approve the Claims, Commissioner Waters seconded.  Passed Unanimous.

          CONSENT AGENDA – 1.  CLERK AND RECORDER – Amended Plat of Lots 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8 and 9, Eastslope Meadows Subdivision and the S.I.A.  2.  COMMISSIONERS – Board Appointment – Kevin McGovern to Lockwood TEDD Advisory Board.  3.  COUNTY ATTORNEY – SOAR Court MOU with YCAO.  4.  FINANCE – A.)  Request to Expend – Rodeo Steel, Chairs and Ground Fencing.  B.)  MetraPark Contract - Access Limited – Rock Stabilization Services.  C.)  Contract for Banking services with US Bank.  D.)  Sheriff’s Office Contract – MARS of Billings – Protective Window Film Install.  5.  METRAPARK – MontanaFair Carnival Games Amusement License and Permit.  6.  PUBLIC WORKS – A.)  Change Order #3 – Askin Construction, Lockwood Sidewalks.  B.)  County Construction and Maintenance Agreement HSIP STW-0(072) SF 249 BILLINGS DIRECT SIGNS.  C.)  Change Order #1 – Askin Construction, RSID 808 Shiloh Estates.  D.)  Vehicle Titles for Trade In.  7.  SHERIFF – A.)  Summit Foods Pricing Agreement FY27. REFERRED TO STAFF. B.)  MFPE Sheriff Deputies 2026 Montana Fair Stipend Agreement. REFERRED TO STAFF.  8.)  HUMAN RESOURCES – A.)  Blue Cross Blue Shield Stop Loss Agreement.  B.)  BCBS Performance Guarantee.  C.)  BCBS Benefit Program Application.  D.)  MACo Work Comp Agreement – Enrollment Form.  E.)  PERSONNEL ACTION REPORTS – Facilities – 2 Salary and Other. 

          FILE ITEMS - 1.  AUDITOR – Payroll Audit June 16 – June 30, 2026.  2.  CLERK AND RECORDER – Board Minutes – MetraPark Advisory Board Meeting Minutes.  3.  COMMISSIONERS – A.)  Public Comment – Data Center 7.9.26.  B.)  Public Comment – State of Montana Land Use Contrary to Zoning 7.9.26.  4.  FINANCE – Application for $500,000 through the Byrne Discretionary Community Project Grants Program in Order to Pay for the Security Control Panels, Secure Access, and all Associated Peripherals.  5.  HUMAN RESOURCES – June 16 – June 30 Payroll Audit.  Commissioner Waters made a MOTION to approve the Amended Consent Agenda and place the File Items to file, Commissioner White seconded.  Passed Unanimous. 

          PUBLIC COMMENTS ON COUNTY BUSINESS – A representative from the Small Business Administration gave information on how to apply for a loan because of the severe winter storm and straight-line winds that occurred during December 17 through December 19, 2025.  One citizen gave comments on Data Centers.  Hearing no other comments Commissioner Morse adjourned the meeting at 9:34 a.m.

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