"After hearing from the public and understanding what the concerns are, I have decided to withdraw my signature." — Mike Heisey, quoted by Inside Climate News
The general manager of the Bonner Mill Industrial Park announced in July that the property owner was pulling support for a proposed AI data center at the old Stimson mill site. The withdrawal ended months of debate in a small community east of Missoula where the same 170 acres that host a nationally touring music venue and one of Montana's best-known breweries had just spent the spring at the center of a fight over industrial-scale computing.
For anyone weighing a home near Bonner, the episode is worth understanding on its own terms, not as a settled controversy but as a preview of how this particular parcel behaves. The zoning that makes Bonner's lifestyle possible can also draw industrial proposals to the site.
One Parcel, Two Identities
The Stimson Lumber mill ran continuously at the Blackfoot and Clark Fork confluence from 1886 until it closed for good in 2008, taking hundreds of jobs with it. Unlike the Smurfit-Stone pulp mill 20 miles west in Frenchtown, which sat vacant under absentee ownership after its own 2010 closure, the Bonner site found local buyers fast. Mike Boehme and Steve Nelson purchased the 170-acre property in 2011 and began subdividing it into industrial condominiums, leasing space to whoever would take it. By 2016, ten businesses at the site employed roughly 250 people. A count reported in 2023 put employment across the park closer to 600.
That redevelopment also produced the amenities that now define Bonner for a lot of people who have never worked a shift there: KettleHouse Brewing Company's taproom, and next door, the KettleHouse Amphitheater, a 4,250-capacity venue that regularly sells out through Logjam Presents. Canyon River Golf Club sits nearby along the Clark Fork. Milltown State Park, built on the footprint of the old dam removed in 2008, anchors the trail network. This is the version of Bonner that shows up in lifestyle write-ups.
But the zoning classification underneath all of it is heavy industrial, the same designation that once housed the sawmill and now houses a wood chipping operation, a metal fabrication shop, and whatever else can legally locate there. That classification is not incidental to the brewery and the amphitheater. It's the reason they exist in a place with sewer, water, and rail access left over from the mill era. It's also the reason the site keeps attracting proposals a residential subdivision would never see.
The First Time the Zoning Got Tested
Between 2017 and 2020, a cryptocurrency mining operation ran at the Bonner Industrial Park. It generated enough noise and energy-use complaints that Missoula County rewrote its rules in 2021 specifically to address facilities of that kind, limiting them to industrial zones and adding requirements around electronic waste and buffer distances from residential areas.
Those 2021 rules were written for crypto mining, not for the scale of computing infrastructure that showed up five years later. When Krambu proposed converting the former UFP Edge building at the industrial park into a data center this spring, the company's application described an initial power draw of about 7 megawatts with the potential to scale toward 100. Karen Hughes, the county's planning director, told commissioners that the existing rules, written for cryptocurrency operations back in 2021, didn't fully address the energy, water, and noise impacts a modern data center brings.
The Second Time, and Why It Went Further
The Krambu proposal drew sustained opposition. A petition to reject the special exception permit the project needed collected more than 48,000 signatures in under three months, according to reporting from the Daily Inter Lake. Residents raised concerns about aquifer contamination, waste heat, and continuous low-frequency noise at public hearings that drew dozens of speakers, all but universally opposed. Heisey withdrew his signature from the application earlier that week, and, as Montana Free Press reported, on July 9 the Missoula County Commission passed a one-year moratorium on new or expanded data centers, covering unincorporated parts of the county including Bonner.
County staff have said the moratorium wasn't a direct response to the petition. Commissioner Josh Slotnick described the interim zoning as narrowly tailored to meet a compelling public interest, language that matters because Montana's Right to Compute Act limits how far local government can go in restricting computing infrastructure without clearing that exact legal bar. Inside Climate News reported that even Jenny Dixon, the county planner who reviewed the Krambu application, had hoped the company might stay the course and said it would be fantastic if Missoula could be the poster child for how to do a data center.
What the Moratorium Actually Buys, and What It Doesn't
According to Missoula County Voice, the moratorium took effect July 9, 2026, and runs through July 8, 2027, unless the county commission votes to extend it another year. According to Missoula Current, county staff opened a mandated impact study within 30 days; they expect to present findings to the public in early November, with a scheduled session at the Missoula County Consolidated Land Use Board. Permanent zoning changes, if any emerge, would follow that regulatory phase, according to the county's own project page tracking the process.
None of this guarantees a particular outcome for the Bonner site. The Right to Compute Act, as a Daily Inter Lake report on the law explained this month, ties data center development to constitutional property and expression protections, meaning any county rule has to survive a legal test the courts haven't yet clarified. Yellowstone County's parallel fight over a proposed Broadview data center shows how unsettled that question remains: a district court there invalidated a citizen petition on procedural grounds in August without ever ruling on what authority counties actually have.
For Bonner, that leaves an open window rather than a closed case. The moratorium buys the county time to write better rules. It doesn't remove the underlying zoning that makes the parcel attractive to industrial developers in the first place, and it doesn't resolve whether the county can enforce whatever it writes once the Right to Compute Act gets tested in court.
Why the Amenities and the Risk Share a Line on the Map
Here's the mechanism worth sitting with if you're comparing Bonner to Milltown, Frenchtown, or another river-corridor community: the heavy industrial zoning at the old mill site isn't a leftover quirk that happens to coexist with a good brewery. It's the reason the brewery, the amphitheater, and the jobs are all there at once, on infrastructure a residential zone could never support at that price point. Bonner's own redevelopment story, often told as a success story compared to Frenchtown's still-stalled Smurfit-Stone site, is a direct result of that industrial designation staying in place after the mill closed.
A cryptocurrency mine landed there in 2017, and an AI data center was proposed for the site in 2026. Both times, the pattern was identical: a heavy industrial parcel with existing power and water infrastructure, adjacent to homes whose owners had no vote on what got sited next door until the special exception process forced one. As Citizen Portal reported, county rules require projects within 500 feet of residences to go through additional land-use review addressing noise, lighting, and site design, which is the practical distance buyers should have in mind when evaluating a specific property's relationship to the park boundary.
What This Means If You're Weighing Bonner
The lifestyle case for Bonner hasn't changed. The amphitheater season still draws crowds, the trail network off the former Marshall Mountain ski area keeps expanding, and the industrial park still employs hundreds of people in a community of a couple thousand. What's changed is the amount of public information available about how that same parcel behaves when a new kind of tenant shows up.
A buyer looking at a property near the industrial park boundary today has more to go on than someone buying five years ago. The moratorium's July 2027 expiration date, the county's November study presentation, and the unresolved Right to Compute Act question are all trackable dates and open questions rather than settled facts, and any offer on a nearby property should account for the fact that this parcel has now produced two energy-intensive proposals in under a decade. That's not a reason to avoid Bonner. It's a reason to ask specifically what's permitted on the industrial side of whatever line separates it from a given listing, and to understand that Bonner's appeal and its recurring zoning fights come from the exact same source.
If you're comparing Bonner to other Missoula-area communities and want to talk through what a property's distance from the industrial park actually means for day-to-day living and long-term value, Bethany Taylor can walk through the specifics with you.
This article is general information, not legal, tax or financial advice. Consult a qualified professional about your situation.
