HELENA – Everyone keeping a close watch on the Helena economy has their eyes trained to the north. For it’s on the north side of town that the capital city is awash in retail and trade growth.
Looming ever closer on the horizon is a new interchange on Interstate 15 at Custer Avenue, the main east-west thoroughfare on Helena’s north side. Bidding for the project is expected to be let a year from now, with work to begin in 2012.
The project, years in the planning, has resulted in retailers jockeying for position near the new exit.
After a decade with no openings or closings, there are three hotels either open or about to open within a half-mile of the new exit. Last month, a Residence Inn by Marriott opened just east of the pending interchange and just north of Helena Regional Airport. A Comfort Inn and Suites, owned by Town Pump of Butte, is under construction behind the company’s existing convenience store just east of the highway.
People are also reading…
And west of I-15, a Holiday Inn Express is taking shape, in a retail development that already includes a Burger King and a Buffalo Wild Wings, each of which opened within the past 12 months. Helena Community Credit Union owns space in the same development and is waiting for the right time to build.
Jena Sabatini, owner of the Residence Inn (as well as Helena’s existing Hampton Inn), said the market for people coming to town on business for several days on end was underserved.
“This one is a slam-dunk in that it’s the only all-suite hotel catering to extended-stay guests,” Sabatini said the week the hotel opened. “There’s a lot of existing long-term business in the market, and there’s not a reason for those people not to stay with us.”
The three new hotels will boost Helena’s room count, which has stood at just under 1,300 for close to a decade. A spate of building in the early 2000s saw the Best Western Helena Great Northern Hotel, Wingate by Wyndham, Quality Inn and Hampton Inn all come online within about two years of each other.
Mike Mergenthaler, director of the Helena Convention and Visitors Bureau, said it took several years for occupancy rates to recover as the city digested the new inventory, but numbers have trended upward for a couple of years and new building, especially considering the new interchange coming in, is probably warranted.
“It’s going to take a while to build that (percentage) back up again, but being stagnant isn’t good either, so it’s good to see we are growing,” Mergenthaler said.
Other businesses are angling for space on the north side as well. The Skyway Regional Shopping Center, which started with Home Depot as an anchor in late 2003, now has several retailers and restaurants in addition to a branch of American Federal Savings Bank.
And on the other side of the highway, the Custer Landing shopping center, anchored by Wholesale Sports and Office Depot, filled the first of its two strip plazas this year with a frozen yogurt store and a locally owned coffee shop taking the last two spots.
Even businesses that don’t succeed aren’t vacant for long. A year ago, Montana Furniture Gallery went out of business at the corner of Custer and North Montana, a half-mile west of the interstate and one of the busiest intersections in town. Today that corner is being rebuilt into a CVS Pharmacy, to be the third in Helena when it opens early next year.
The first step in the interstate project was actually completed this summer, with the widening of Cedar Street, another major east-west thoroughfare, from three to five lanes. Because Custer will be closed for as long as several months while the interchange is built, officials saw it as crucial to expand Cedar Street first, to better accommodate detouring traffic from the north. That project was completed ahead of schedule in June.
Not all the new development in the capital is taking place on the north side. In the center of the city, an old Smith’s supermarket, vacant for several years, is being turned into a health club/rehabilitation center, a joint project by Dick Anderson (owner of Dick Anderson Construction) and St. Peter’s Hospital. That project was able to move forward by taking advantage of special federal tax credits available through the Montana Community Development Corp. of Missoula.
In downtown Helena, the major change in 2009 was the debut of a new $27.6 million building for employees of Montana State Fund. The workers’ compensation insurer’s 250 employees moved into their new digs adjacent to the Great Northern Town Center around Memorial Day, and this fall the old State Fund building, on the Downtown Walking Mall, became home to the Montana Department of Corrections.
The Helena economy hasn’t been without its hiccups. The state of Montana, the largest employer in town, maintained a pay freeze for state employees, and nobody expects the upcoming session of the Legislature to be awash with cash.
And the Capital Hill Mall, long underutilized, became even more so this spring when Dillard’s department store, one of the mall’s two anchors, closed. Foreclosure proceedings have been initiated again on the mall, after a planned sale this fall was postponed and then canceled.
Reporter John Harrington can be reached at (406) 447-4080 or at john.harrington@helenair.com.
