HomeMy WebLinkAbout07-29-26 Public Comment - J. Pape - Follow-up to tonight's public comment --- reconsidering Census Tract 11.02 for Opportunity Zone 2.0From:Mike Maas
To:Bozeman Public Comment
Subject:FW: [EXTERNAL]Follow-up to tonight"s public comment — reconsidering Census Tract 11.02 for Opportunity
Zone 2.0
Date:Wednesday, July 29, 2026 11:32:48 AM
From: Jerry Pape <jpape@espt.com>
Sent: Wednesday, July 29, 2026 10:49 AM
To: Mike Maas <Mike.Maas@bozemanmt.gov>
Subject: [EXTERNAL]Follow-up to tonight's public comment — reconsidering Census Tract 11.02 for
Opportunity Zone 2.0
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Mayor and Commissioners,
Thank you for the opportunity to speak this evening. I want to leave the request with you
concisely; a formatted version is attached.
By way of disclosure: I am a Bozeman broker, for thirteen years the Realtor for Gallatin
County, and I hold a brokerage interest for bare land in Census Tract 11.02 that is well
under one percent of the tract. The vertical development projects named below are not
mine. I make this case on its public merits.
On June 23 the Commission forwarded a single tract, Census Tract 6. What may not
have been before you that evening is that the City's own economic-development staff
had prepared a complete, letter-supported application for Census Tract 11.02 as well —
a strong application that, because only one tract went forward, never reached the state.
Two points bear on the choice.
Your own priorities. In March the Commission adopted priorities centered on housing —
the affordability gap, starter homes — and the Community Plan points the same way, to
compact residential and mixed-use growth. By its own terms, the Tract 6 application is
an industrial and employment-redevelopment case. The 11.02 application is housing:
roughly fifteen residential projects already in review, anchored by the nearly 300-home
Alpenglow development at Kagy and South 19th, breaking ground this September.
Measured against your own priorities, the tract forwarded is the industrial one, and the
tract left off is where the housing is.
How the incentive actually behaves. Across the program's decade, Opportunity Zone
capital has gone overwhelmingly to housing, not industry. Novogradac — the national
firm that tracks this investment for the industry — reports that less than two percent of
Opportunity Fund equity went into operating businesses. The Joint Committee on
Taxation and the U.S. Treasury's Office of Tax Analysis both found that roughly two-thirds
of the businesses receiving Opportunity Zone capital were in real estate, construction,
or lodging — not the industrial or traded-sector enterprises the incentive was meant to
seed. The Urban Institute concludes plainly that the program became a housing-and-
real-estate program, not a jobs-and-economic-development one. And the ground-level
data agree: the best project-level reporting available, from Ohio, shows residential
development drawing 64 percent of Opportunity Zone capital against just 6 percent for
industrial, and an independent analysis of Colorado found roughly three-fourths of its
Opportunity Zone projects were multifamily housing. The industrial redevelopment
and adaptive reuse at the center of the Tract 6 application is not simply a different
use from 11.02's housing — it is the one use Opportunity Zone investors have most
consistently passed over, in every dataset that has examined the question, across
the entire ten-year life of the program.
It is not too late. The Governor retains discretion to add tracts, and the nomination
window remains open into the fall. I respectfully ask that the Commission reconsider
and forward Census Tract 11.02 — the tract your own staff made the case for, and the
one your own priorities point to and align with — so the incentive lands where you have
said you want it: on Bozeman's housing.
I am glad to provide the City's 11.02 application, the eligibility confirmation, or any
further detail, and to make myself available to the Commission or staff.
Respectfully,
Jerry Pape
Triple Creek Realty, for the Bozeman Development Consortium
(406) 522-8314-- Jerry Pape, PresidentExcalibur, Inc.www.espt.com(406) 579-3636