Community Minded: Billie Lee retires after 30 years serving community

By MICHELLE LOVATO

Lake County Leader

Billie Lee started the first day of the rest of her life Jan. 12.

It was a big day, considering she handed over the key to her office door and her 22-year career as Lake County Community Development Executive Director the Friday before.

The prospect of Lee’s future sat before the woman with a wide happy smile and a brain full of ideas that continue to be further energized by interaction with others.

Lee will travel to Thailand in March, but for the next six weeks, other than working with her already well-established consulting company, Lee has very little to do.

So she is wide-eyed and open to whatever the universe has to offer her in the meantime. 

“I have this wonderful optimism for a better world and the conviction that our younger generation, as they adopt and travel throughout the world, will see a world outlook that recognizes that we really are all connected and that the barriers we have put up against race, color and ethnicity are artificial barriers created by man and not created by God and somehow our younger generations can erase those barriers,” Lee said.  

Leaving her position at Lake County Community Development was a decision she made more than a year earlier.

“It was time,” she said. “I am really good with it.”

Lee said her career in Lake County came full circle. 

In 1992 Lee was hired to start the Ronan Housing Authority, a job that put her in regular company of Gus Byrom, Montana Department of Commerce Community Development Block Grant program manager.

For the last 10 minutes of her last day, Lee was on the phone with Byrom, the perfect way to complete her career in that role, she said. 

During her time on the job, Lee served on many levels and in positions that earned she and her organizations titles with big words that make no sense to a lot of people. 

But the outcome of her job makes perfect sense to everyone.

Lee got free money from the government and planted it into Lake County in the form of affordable housing, new business and jobs.

To reach that outcome, Lee allowed what she called her “crazy brain” to lead her into a winding series of business-development ventures, starting with the Ronan Housing Authority, which by 1995 expanded into Lake County Community Development Center.

The community development organization is a non-profit group that combined Polson Community Development, Olde Town Development in St. Ignatius and Central Valley Community Development Corporation.

All those organizations had volunteers that worked to develop economic opportunities throughout the Mission Valley.

Though each organization had its own goal, they all worked together to create what Lee calls a three-legged community stool. 

The Ronan Housing Authority worked to create affordable housing and community infrastructure like sewer and roads. Lake County Community Development started with its focus on business.

Lake County Development’s first financial gain arrived in 1995 when the development organization won a grant for $450,000. The organization used that money to issue a loan to Montana Naturals, an Arlee manufacturing company employing 30 people. Montana Naturals made upgrades to its facility that resulted in 35 new jobs.

When Montana Naturals began repaying the community development organization’s loan with an average bank interest rate, the development corporation earned extra money that it then used to issue more business loans.

The upside of the community development organization’s work is that it is able to offer business help to entrepreneurs that traditional banks might consider too risky. But organization leaders cannot loan money unless that potentially risky entrepreneur takes the necessary steps to ensure they are prepared for the business world. 

What began as a $450,000 grant is now a $4 million-plus financial portfolio, Lee said. That portfolio will continue to grow.

Montana Naturals is now on its third owner. It had struggled in the past 20 years and is now back to a 70-plus work force, Lee said.

Simultaneous to her community development work, Lee labored with her staff to create roads, sewer, water and other things critical to community growth. 

Her mission at the Ronan Housing Authority was to help Lake County citizens get housing they could afford. The housing authority is responsible for several home rehabilitation projects in the area.

The Ronan Housing Authority developed 129 affordable-living units in St. Ignatius, Ronan and Polson and helped more than 100 people get through the first-time homebuyer’s program.

“We did substantial housing rehabilitation in Ronan and Polson and laid the groundwork” for a low-income housing program called Section 8, Lee said.

“In the meantime, I was privileged to influence, while working with the city of Ronan, the Wetlands Project, in an effort to help sewer issues with the city,” Lee said. “Through later years we went on to develop a sewer system in Arlee; sewer and water in Charlo, Hot Springs, Ronan and Polson.”

Lee said all that infrastructure work culminated in 2009 with a grant awarded from the United States Department of Transportation that rebuilt Skyline Drive, which connects Polson and the Pablo/Ronan area with bike trails any other upgrades.

“I see community development as a three-legged stool,” she said. “It is economic development, affordable housing and infrastructure to support those things. For many years my support staff and board members just tolerated my craziness and were willing to support my mission. We’ve worked over the years on all three of those legs of the community stool.”

Along with her many other stool-leg projects, Lee saw the need to stimulate local agriculture producers’ earning potential. In 2000, the Mission Mountain Food Enterprise Center in Ronan was developed and built.

“Its purpose was specifically to try and help our agriculture community add value to local crops,” Lee said. 

The processing center enabled local growers to process some of their product for alternative markets.

Those markets include processing and supplying local schools with fresh fruit and vegetables to use in school lunch programs.

Lee developed the Mission Mountain Food Enterprise Center with her “partner in crime,” Jan Tusick, who is still leading the center forward. The food center was the first such center in the northwest and became a state and national model for helping develop rural economies through small farm communities.

“We want to have an impact on local growers, and to do that we opened a cooperative development center. Our biggest success story is the Western Montana Growers Co-op that has grown from three members who started the co-op to 32 members providing fresh product statewide, plus developing the farm-to-school program out of the center.

During her career in Lake County, Lee said she helped get between $50 million and $60 million worth of grants that were planted into the ground in some way, she say. 

 “I’ve affected lives of a few thousand people and I’m proud of that,” she said, “but like with anything else, you don’t do that without the help of other people.”

For her part, Lee will use her lifetime of experiences to offer inspiration, information and guidance to those ready to listen.

“Being a mentor is my favorite thing to do in life,” Lee said.