Fort Peck center’s funds restored

A scaled-back Fort Peck Dam Interpretive Center and Museum could open this summer after the Army Corps of Engineers agreed Thursday to restore $325,000 it earlier yanked from the project.

Sen. Max Baucus, D-Mont., said he received an "ironclad promise" that the Corps will restore the money, which accounts for 20 percent of funding for museum displays.

"It’s a done deal," Baucus said.

By JARED MILLER
Tribune Regional Reporter

http://www.greatfallstribune.com/news/stories/20040220/localnews/447322.html

The funding loss, reported in Tuesday’s Tribune, had threatened to delay the center’s opening by several months.

That would have delivered a severe blow to area merchants who were counting on the center’s tourist draw.

Proprietors of hotels, restaurants and shops are counting on the museum, featuring a lifesize cast of a Tyrannosaurus rex, to attract Lewis and Clark Bicentennial tourists to that area of the state.

Betty Stone, owner of Cottonwood Inn in Glasgow, said her decision to add a 25-unit RV park and 14 hotel suites was made in large part to coincide with the planned opening of the center this summer.

"All of a sudden we were going ‘Oh my goodness, how are we going to pay for that?’" Stone said.

Larry Mires, executive director of Glasgow-based Two Rivers Economic Growth, said at least two businesses would not have survived a long-term project delay.

"They had banked on this being done," Mires said.

The 18,000-square foot, $6.7 million museum building was finished last spring. But work on the project did not advance fast enough to spend the $325,000 in fiscal year 2002.

The Corps spent the money on the Fort Peck Fish Hatchery and other projects where it could be used immediately.

Of $588,000 earmarked for the center in the ’02 appropriation, only about $100,000 was spent.

John Rabenberg, board president of Fort Peck Paleontology Inc., has said the Corps is responsible for the spending delays that led to the money being shifted.

Also, the Corps never warned Fort Peck Paleontology Inc. that it would transfer the money if it wasn’t spent within the first year, he said.

Montana congressional delegates responded by firing off letters to the Corps.

Baucus himself sent a "pretty strongly worded" letter to Army Corps of Engineers commander Gen. Robert Flowers in Washington, D.C.

The Corps’ Northwestern Division commander, Brig. Gen. William Grisoli, told Baucus Thursday the money will be restored.

The full $325,000 will be available in 30 to 60 days, said Bill Mulligan, chief of the Corps’ civil works project management branch in Omaha, Neb.

The move will not effect any other Corps projects in Montana. The Fort Peck Fish Hatchery will still get its money, Mulligan said.

The funding snafu will undoubtedly cause some delay at the interpretive center, however.

The $325,000 is a part of $1.4 million the Corps hopes to eventually spend on museum displays.

Officials had hoped to hire Split Rock Studios of St. Paul, Minn., to fabricate and install the first displays by May to coincide with the 199th anniversary of when the Lewis and Clark Expedition passed through the area.

May is no longer reasonable, said Craig Sommerville, president of Split Rock Studios.

"About all I can say is we’d do our best, but I think it would be unrealistic to get something done by summer," Sommerville said.

He said September might more reasonable.

Project manager Darin McMurry said it might be realistic yet to complete the entryway, lobby and two fish aquariums for a May opening.

Funding problems are not delaying completion of the 13-foot-tall, 38-foot-long cast of "Peck’s Rex," an unusually complete T. rex fossil excavated from the badlands near Fort Peck in 1997, said Rabenberg.

The center will employ two full-time workers from the Army Corps of Engineers and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and a number of seasonal workers.