City presents final vision plan for Bozeman Creek

The Bozeman Creek Vision Plan is now in its final stages, envisioning a transformative change to the way the body of water navigates through the city’s downtown core.

On Monday, residents were invited to City Hall to pore over maps, data and historical information, as well as a miniature model created to showcase the creek’s impending transformation.

See Bozeman Creek, a local citizen’s group dedicated to improving the waterway, worked with the city to put the plan together. Steve Nobel, See Bozeman Creek’s co-leader, told the Chronicle that the new creek will bring two major benefits to Bozeman.

“We avoid the cost of a serious flood, and we get the added contribution to downtown commerce,” he said.

At the Dec. 15 Bozeman City Commission meeting, the final plan will be presented to the city for approval. If approved, See Bozeman Creek will reconvene with the city and start determining next steps.

Assistant City Manager Jon Henderson said the 30-year plan would be “transformational” for the city, but will take patience and political will.

“From an engineering standpoint, this is 100% possible,” he explained to a group of people viewing the model.

The Vision Plan The Bozeman Creek model started at City Hall, where the area will undergo a major facelift.

The plan is to eliminate the parking lot in front of the building in favor of a new creekside park. The creek will be realigned, and the resulting riparian corridor will expand to create a green space that includes an amphitheater with plenty of seating.

Just north of City Hall, Henderson noted that the vision plan would fix the “nasty 90-degree bend that floods all the time” in Bozeman’s Creekside Park.

Soroptimist Park, located on the corner of Main Street and South Rouse Avenue, would also undergo a dramatic change. The vision plan expands the green space in the park and erases the parking lot currently located south of the park.

The entire area in that section of South Rouse will subsequently transform into a “public gathering and civic area” in lieu of the current street, per Henderson. The segment of South Rouse between Babcock and Olive Streets will similarly become a green recreation space.

This area between Babcock and Olive is an important part of the vision plan: The creek will bifurcate — or split into two parts — and won’t come back together until the waterways reach City Hall.

Part of the creek will follow its current path under Saffron Indian Cuisine and beneath Main Street and Bar Nine, but the plan is to “daylight” the other section, bringing it out of a tunnel and flowing normally through the expanded Soroptimist Park until it reaches Main Street.

The tunnels that currently carry the creek water beneath the city streets were built over 100 years ago and aren’t equipped to handle serious flooding, according to Henderson.

Flood mitigation has become “a math problem we’re trying to solve,” he said. The typical amount of water that flows through the creek on a normal day is 17 cubic feet per second. A 100-year flood would see roughly 1,052 cubic feet per second of water flow through the creek, but because of climate change’s potential impact on flooding, the city is prepping to handle 1,250 cubic feet per second.

The last portion of the vision plan is focused on Bogert Park, which will see a reorganization of park amenities, a potential relocation of the bandshell and reconfiguration of the parking lot and recreational areas. There, a side channel will be introduced to the creek and the riparian corridor will be expanded — similar to other sections of the plan — to provide more ecological space and reduce flood risk.

Community involvement drastically helped shape the creek’s plan, per Henderson, and See Bozeman Creek and the city listened to what residents wanted and crafted the plan after community engagement sessions took place.

“This is a bold idea that came from the public,” Henderson said, adding that the city doesn’t want to burden Bozeman residents with increased taxes, so philanthropy, federal flood mitigation grants and donations from private business will fund the vision plan if it passes.

City presents final vision plan for Bozeman Creek

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