3-Plus for Russell Street

A recent article in the Missoula Independent, points out that “culvertizing” irrigation ditches is obviously bad for the adjacent trees also. The article is about growth in the target range area but touches on the subject of a grand old cottonwood gallery that has been dying-off for years and now the last one is slated for removal. As pointed out in a previous post, the traffic engineers pursuing a super-size expansion of Russell Street somehow managed to figure a way to extend the project footprint to the west side of the mobile home park at River Road, the location of the irrigation ditch in question. The design of this proposed north/south bypass road over this north/south irrigation ditch appears to impact the yards of 4 mobile homes and likely cause the removal of 2 of them.

New Russell Street news- a recent survey of the residential structures slated for destruction in the City and States’ version of the Russell Street plan, shows it will actually destroy and displace at least 17 households. Not the 11 that they say would get knocked down. Because a number of the 11 residential structures are actually multi-family. Some are duplexes or two small homes on one lot; one of them is actually a quadra-plex.

Also a recent check along the River Road mobile home park irrigation ditch, slated for culvert-ization, revealed that the resident (50-strong!) flock of ducks has moved on for the season; but I was assured by a resident that they will be back when the water returns in spring. Quack !
Unfortunately, the buck that reportedly frequented the adjacent meadow was probably the same one that was illegally poached last fall.