County officials are dusting off design work done in 2007 for a multi-story parking garage for Uptown Butte with hopes of bidding out the project in 2016.
Unlike 2007, the county will soon have a way to fund the estimated $6 million project: bonds backed by revenue from the new tax-increment financing district and its Uptown anchor, the NorthWestern Energy building going up at Park and Main streets.
“We are going to have to bond to build this garage and we can’t sell those bonds until we have a very established source of revenue, and the new source of those funds will be the Northwestern Energy building,” Community Development Director Karen Byrnes said Wednesday.
Byrnes told the Urban Revitalization Board, which oversees the TIF district and its finances, that she has talked with Collaborative Design Architects of Billings about updated cost estimates and designs so more preliminary work on the project can be done.
She said they would build off initial designs by the firm, which were not close to encompassing everything involved, to get the project moving again.
“We want to re-up everything,” she said. “Get the public involved in the process again as to what the project might look like, how it’s going to function, working with the parking commission, this board, the Uptown merchants about what it is and how it will work,” Byrnes said.