Feds award CSKT $30 million for Post Creek project

The Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes recently received a hefty grant from the Federal Highway Administration to rebuild the section of Highway 93 from Dublin Gulch Road to Gunlock Road at the top of Post Creek Hill.

The grant, for $30,567,037, was awarded from the National Significant Federal Lands and Tribal Projects (NSFLTP) program.

“We put in for that a couple of years ago,” said Tribal Chair Tom McDonald. “It’ll be a nice project – hopefully it’s enough to do it justice.”

The three-mile stretch of road traverses Post Creek and a sensitive riparian area. Plans call for a multi-span bridge over the creek, traffic safety improvements, infrastructure to help reduce collisions between vehicles and wildlife, roadway reconstruction, and development of a shared-use path.

Montana Department of Transportation District administrator Bob Vosen said his department is coordinating grant details with the Federal Highway Administration.

“We are happy to have additional funding for a much-needed project on a major highway in Montana,” he said in an email statement.

According to McDonald, the bridge over Post Creek is an important component of the project, since grizzlies migrate along that riparian corridor from the Mission Mountains to the Flathead River.

“Unlike other animals, it’s more difficult for grizzlies to go through an underpass,” he said. “So that’s the goal on that bridge, to allow them to move up and down the stream corridor.”

The span should also be high enough to allow Post Creek to “express itself in the natural flood plain.”

The reconstruction of that segment will bring the Highway 93 corridor through the Flathead Reservation closer to completion. At a meeting in January, MDT representatives discussed revised plans for the 4.5-mile stretch of Highway 93 between Gunlock Rd. and Brooke Lane.

Vosen said then that the Tribes had applied for a $65 million grant for that project, which spans a national wildlife refuge and two ponds.

He also noted during that public meeting that the discretionary funds in the federal infrastructure bill offer the only realistic paths forward for big-ticket items like the Ninepipe corridor or the Post Creek Hill project, and praised the collaborative process involved in the grant applications.

"That’s what it’s going to take on a lot of these,” he said.