Stevensville Main Street Association Executive Director Lorraine Roach, who started work last June, has Main Street business in her blood. Both her grandparents and parents owned Main Street businesses.
Roach was born in Moscow, Idaho. She attended the University of Puget Sound in Tacoma, Washington. From there she headed to Europe for four years and lived near the border of Germany and Austria. She had skied competitively in college and taught skiing lessons for a couple of years, skiing professionally for a couple of seasons. Then she went to work doing marketing for a group of historic hotels and resorts.
She also did some public relations work for the Department of Defense. At that time, in the 1980s, the Berlin Wall was still in place and over 832,000 troops were stationed in Europe. She left Europe in the fall of 1987, just two years before the wall fell in 1989.
Before leaving Europe, Roach fulfilled a dream and took a three and half month bicycle ride through France and Switzerland. She said it was really fun. She took a tent and a sleeping pad and carried one bottle full of water and the other full of wine.
When she returned to the States, she ended up back in Moscow, Idaho to help run the family business as her father had fallen ill. She planned on getting her college degree but instead met her husband-to-be, Mark, and eventually ended up living with him in Grangeville, Idaho.
In Grangeville, she started a marketing and consulting business. In order to understand the market, you’ve got to understand the local economy, says Roach. The Grangeville area is a smaller market even than the Stevensville area, even though the population of the town is bigger. They had a sawmill at the time, but it closed down within a few years. It was a $23 million loss to the local economy.
That’s when she got involved in a national economic development strategic planning program being run by the Avista Corporation. They were involved in strategic planning aimed at helping communities facing economic difficulties due to sawmill closures, mine closures, military base closures, and some just facing gradual decline due to population loss.
Roach teamed up with over two dozen other firms from Seattle to Boston, including urban planning, engineering and architecture firms, among others, depending on the project. She did a lot of work in Montana. She helped develop an economic development strategic plan for the town of Red Lodge and a couple of years later came back and helped develop a Downtown Master Plan there. She also helped develop two five-year State Tourism Plans for Montana and a statewide Outdoor Recreation Plan for MT FWP.
Roach did this kind of work in over a dozen states for about 20 years. Then she decided to go back to school, but her husband’s father was diagnosed with stage four pancreatic cancer. She stopped taking clients since she could no longer do all the travelling and moved her office into her home.
Once her father’s husband passed she took the opportunity to go back to school, but it wasn’t in marketing. Instead, she went into the Seminary and got a Master’s Degree in Theology and Human Needs Care, mainly focusing in women’s ministry. Afterward she worked for a local church in Grangeville part-time, mainly doing women’s ministry and working as a volunteer in the Chaplain’s Program at the local hospital. She also worked on the County Human Needs Council.
“That was a real change,” said Roach.
But back to economic development.
Roach worked in Libby after the sawmill closed and then after the mine closed and all the asbestos problems came to the surface.
“There was so much anger at the companies, and over the contamination,” said Roach, “but there was no one to take it out on. The companies were gone.” That’s when she realized that what Libby faced and really needed help with was a grieving process.
Roach said that Stevensville was facing something much different. She said Stevensville was facing issues similar to Whitefish, where she worked, and Sandpoint, Idaho.
“These towns were just not prepared for the kind of growth they were facing and the pace of that growth was overwhelming,” said Roach. The city government was so overwhelmed that their meetings were stretching to 2 a.m. She was called in to serve in conflict mediation.
One thing she faced at those meetings, she said, was a deep-seated anti-newcomer attitude. So at one meeting she just said frankly, “Everybody that wasn’t born here needs to leave the room.” She said that was an icebreaker.
Stevensville, she said, and the Bitterroot valley in general, has been going through similar growing pains. Then came the economic recession of 2008. But the valley and Stevensville are slowly crawling out.
“Things are definitely on the upswing here,” said Roach. “In talking with people and businesses about trends, this economy has a lot of positives.” She said the school has seen an increase in enrollment which means families are moving in. And a lot of retired people are moving here.
“The real challenge here,” said Roach, “is that 60% of our workforce commutes to Missoula and Hamilton every day.” She said what Stevensville needs are the kinds of jobs that can keep that workforce here.
The Town of Stevensville, with the help of Stevensville Main Street Association, just received a grant to do precisely that. The grant came last fall from the Montana State Main Street Association. The effort now is to turn that $10,000 grant and an additional $5,000 from the Town into the match for a federal grant to get a market analysis done as well as a Master Plan for the town.
“The market analysis will tell us how money is flowing into, around, and out of the local economy,” said Roach. She said it will divulge the demographics and describe the nature of the work force, as well as the tourist spending. The Master Plan will then go into the details of the town’s infrastructure, inventorying empty buildings and empty lots, etc., looking for opportunities for building or reconstructing commercial business space.
According to Roach, economic development for municipalities depends heavily on commercial development.
“A lot of citizens don’t realize that the average household doesn’t pay enough in taxes to pay for all the services delivered,” said Roach. “Essentially those service are being subsidized by commercial property taxes. The town loses on each residence it adds and you don’t lose money on each thing and then make it by volume. So we’ve got to focus on commercial development.”
The really big issue in terms of development, according to Roach, is “what are the community values? what do we want to become and, more importantly, what do we not want to become.” She said that the answer to those questions “sets the sideboards on the kind of development that the community wants or doesn’t want to look at, and in some cases, it sets the pace.”
As an initial step in this process the Main Street Association sent out a survey to businesses and organizations in the community in order to make some initial findings. Surveys were mailed out to approximately 250 businesses and 61 survey forms were returned. That’s a 24% response rate.
“That’s a good response rate,” said Roach.“The average is about 10%.” Seventy-two percent of the respondents were from in town; another 28% still in the zip code; and 2% from outside the zip code. Roach said the responding businesses showed a good variety of longevity and experience. Most had been in business for 4 to 10 years, many for 11 to 20 years. But some, 14%, were only 3 years old or less while some, 14%, were older than 41 years.
One very important “key finding” that surfaced in the survey was the perception that “Stevensville is generally business-friendly.” It got high ratings for law enforcement/public safety, transportation and shipping, skills/work force ethic, and quality of public infrastructure.
Roach found the response to what is most needed very interesting. Available commercial land/buildings showed up at the top of the list.
In terms of future business potential, Roach said the town had a strong dining and beverage cluster, a strong medical cluster, a strong aviation cluster, and a strong munitions/sportsman cluster.
“We can build on that,” she said.