Updated: It's official - Butte-Silver Bow gets $20 million for new 'resilience hub'

Unlike long-pledged or envisioned private projects in Butte such as the Praxis medical training facility and a tram to our Lady of the Rockies atop the East Ridge, the money for a “resilience hub” — $20 million in public funds — is already there.

The money is from the EPA’s Environmental and Climate Justice Community Change Grants Program, which provides funds for locally driven projects that reduce pollution and promote activities in response to climate change.

The Butte Community Wellness and Resilience Hub will be built near the Butte Civic Center, on formerly contaminated ground associated with the Parrot Tailings where the county shops were once located.

As envisioned, the center would serve a host of functions, ranging from providing recreation and wellness programming and facilities to a shelter during times when wildfire smoke diminishes air quality and threatens health.

Gallagher says recreational functions of the facility will likely be less like a fitness center and more like a gym — with basketball and volleyball courts and probably pickleball, too. But it will offer more, he said.

“It’s going to really be a facility that accommodates a lot of different things,” he said. “It’s going to … be flexible where you could put maybe multiple courts down on the floor, or you could have community events. You could have fairs, you can have pickleball, and when we talk about arts and culture, there will be places in the center that allow for that as well.”

It will be, he said, “an everyday facility.”

The Butte-Silver Bow project is part of nearly $1.6 billion in EPA grants available to help communities reduce and prevent air, water and soil pollution; build resilient infrastructure to extreme weather events; and bolster workforce development.

The money is available through a $739 billion package passed by congressional Democrats in August 2022 they called the Inflation Reduction Act, which included numerous allocations toward green energy initiatives among other things.

The EPA says it received 2,700 applications for grants such as the one Butte-Silver Bow is getting and the city-county worked incredibly hard to be selected.

Danielle Arigoni, EPA Region 8 Environmental Justice Division director, said some of the county’s planning and groundwork go back several years.

“All of that hard work and dedication has paid off and this is the only award made from the Community Change Grant Program in Montana,” she said.

County officials have known for at least four weeks that Butte-Silver Bow had been “selected” to receive one of the grants, but said nothing was official until the EPA announced it had actually been awarded.

Numerous county officials and departments had a role in the planning efforts, Gallagher said, and two of them — Community Development Director Karen Byrns and Planning Director Julia Crain — also spoke at Friday’s event.

Gallagher said he’s heard people talk about the need for such a center for years — somewhere to gather, to recreate, a safe place for kids to go after school. People will also be able to go there when wildfires pour smoke into the Summit Valley.

Byrnes said the center will meet “critical needs” in the community.

“These needs have been identified through multiple plans over the years and all of these plans pointed in one direction, and that’s this direction, this vision that you see before you,” she said.

With Friday’s announcement and the grant contract in hand, Gallagher said the county will seek more community input on what the “resilience hub” will entail and then formally seek proposals for designs and engineering.

There is a three-year timeline for getting the project completed, officials said, so it is on a fast track.

“We hope to see you all back for a ribbon-cutting in a few years,” Arigoni told everyone at Friday’s ceremony.