But he stressed that his vision is dictated by the community, not the other way around.

“I think this mill site is the greatest opportunity in Montana to create economic development and to balance the environment and to take advantage of the natural setting,” he said.

The stumbling block is what it has been all along. Portions of the mill site are contaminated, some of them seriously so, and an investigation must be done to figure what exactly is and isn’t.

The county and state want the process to be initiated by the Environmental Protection Agency, which is apparently still in the process of determining when the mill site will be placed on its national priorities list.

Such listings are generally made twice a year, in the spring and in the fall. Peter Nielsen of the Missoula City-County Health Department told the 20 or so people at the council meeting that he can’t speak for the EPA but he’d been told the agency has yet to begin the process by sending out general notice letters to the primary responsible parties – past and present owners.

Those are Rock-Tenn, which bought out Smurfit-Stone; International Paper, the successor to Champion International; and Burlington Northern Santa Fe, along with M2Green.

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