Council candidate wants to grow the economy

Growing the Columbia Falls economy is a main focus for incumbent city council candidate Shawn Bates. He’d also like to see a new dogpark in town.

A Missoula native, Bates served in the Air Force from 1989 through 1992, working as an aircraft mechanic in England and during the Persian Gulf War. He moved to Columbia Falls in 2001 after graduating from the University of Montana with a degree in business.

Bates works for PepsiCo in Kalispell, and his wife Becky teaches business education at Columbia Falls High School. They have two children, 5 years and 20 months old.

In addition to serving one four-year term in the city council, Bates has been a volunteer firefighter and EMT for Columbia Falls for the past eight years. He started his firefighting career here and took EMT classes at Flathead Valley Community College.

“I’d like to see Columbia Falls stay on the path it’s on but grow more as a community, with good-paying jobs,” he said about why he wants to run again for the council.

Tourism is “huge” in the Flathead, Bates said, and he’d like to see more lodging, restaurants and outdoor recreation businesses here. One way to encourage tourist businesses to come to Columbia Falls is to stimulate the Nucleus Avenue business district by bringing back the arch over Nucleus Avenue at U.S. 2 and paving the North Fork Road all the way to the Camas Bridge entrance to Glacier National Park.

“That would create another tourist path to Glacier Park,” Bates said.

His focus on economic growth led Bates to cast the lone vote in favor of rezoning part of U.S. 2 East from residential to limited commercial development.

“I think the council dropped the ball on that one,” he said.

A hot topic today is the city’s backflow prevention program, which requires residential property owners with underground sprinkler systems to have their backflow systems inspected annually to protect the city’s water supply.

Bates is not opposed to the city taking charge of the inspection process by contracting out the work, thereby helping guarantee compliance, but “I don’t want to pass on the cost for doing this work to all residential customers — it’s a question of fairness,” he said. People who own irrigation systems should pay a fee for the inspection service, he said.

Bates also commented on the city’s park system.

“We need to maintain what we have, but we need a dogpark,” he said. “We’ve been talking about this for a year.”