The Unpaid Tax Bill Sitting at the Edge of Frenchtown

Drive east out of Frenchtown on Mullan Road and you pass a stretch of land that looks like it stopped in the middle of a sentence. Faded outbuildings, cleared ground with almost no vegetation, a chain-link perimeter around 3,200 acres that once ran one of Montana's largest pulp mills. Twenty miles away, on the other side of Missoula, a nearly identical property tells the opposite story. The old Stimson lumber mill in Bonner now hosts a business park with dozens of companies, a craft brewery, and a concert venue that draws thousands of people on summer nights.

Both mills anchored their towns for decades. Both closed within two years of each other. Both properties changed hands to private buyers in 2011. Only one of them is current on its property taxes.

That gap is the part of the Frenchtown story that rarely makes it into a listing description, and it matters more to anyone comparing Frenchtown to its neighbors than another data point about square footage or lot size.

Two Mills, Two Years Apart, One Bill Still Unpaid

The Smurfit-Stone Container Corporation pulp mill ran along the Clark Fork River south of Frenchtown from 1957 to 2010, using logging scraps to make kraft paper products. When it closed, the shutdown eliminated 417 jobs in a company town built around a single employer.

In 2011, most of the 3,200-acre property was acquired by M2Green Redevelopment LLC, an affiliate of a firm focused on repurposing brownfield industrial sites across North America. The Environmental Protection Agency later named three companies as potentially responsible for cleanup costs: M2Green, WestRock, and International Paper, all of which signed a consent decree in 2015 that put the site on the formal Superfund track rather than the National Priorities List.

That process has been underway for more than a decade, and it has not resolved the site's tax bill. In 2017, Missoula County sued to recover unpaid property taxes tied directly to the Frenchtown School District, Missoula County itself, and the Frenchtown Rural Fire District. By the time a Mineral Independent report covered the case in June 2024, the back taxes owed had grown to roughly $1.2 million.

For a district that relies on its largest parcels to carry a meaningful share of the levy, a 3,200-acre property sitting in legal limbo is not a footnote. It is one of the biggest single line items in the local tax math, and it has been missing for years.

What Bonner Did With the Same Kind of Wreckage

Bonner's version of this story ran on a faster clock. The Stimson mill closed in 2008, and rather than sitting under distant corporate ownership, the 170-acre property was purchased in 2011 by two local partners, Mike Boehme and Steve Nelson. They marketed the empty warehouses and heavy power infrastructure to businesses that wanted exactly what a former mill site offers: large open floor plans, existing utility capacity, and proximity to Interstate 90 and rail lines.

By the time High Country News profiled the site in 2024, Boehme counted more than 17 companies operating there, with about 450 people working across them. The property has since added a brewery taproom and a concert venue with a capacity of roughly 4,250, according to a 2026 area guide covering the site. Every one of those tenants generates local tax revenue instead of owing back taxes to the county that hosts them.

High Country News summed up the comparison directly: "Bonner, in some ways, is both very similar to Frenchtown and the opposite." Nelson, one of the Bonner site's owners, has said the Frenchtown property could follow the same path eventually, but as he put it, "You have to get a little bit lucky."

Luck, in this case, is doing a lot of work. Bonner's site carried a lighter contamination profile and came under local ownership almost immediately. Frenchtown's mill produced pulp and paper for more than five decades using bleaching chemicals that left dioxins, PCBs, and heavy metals in the soil and groundwater, a legacy that put the site through federal environmental review rather than a straightforward sale.

The Timeline You're Actually Working With

If you're weighing Frenchtown against a town like Bonner and wondering when the old mill site might follow the same script, the honest answer is not soon.

The EPA's own site profile lays out the current phase: the remedial investigation report is expected to be published this year, which allows the agency to move into the feasibility study, the phase where actual cleanup options get evaluated. That is one step, not the finish line. In a September 2025 community meeting, David Tooke, a consultant with GSI Environmental representing the responsible parties, told the Frenchtown Citizen Advisory Council that a formal remediation plan proposal could come as soon as 2028.

That timeline matters because not all 3,200 acres carry the same restrictions. The EPA divided the property into three operable units based on historical use. Operable Unit 1, about 1,200 acres currently used for cattle grazing and irrigated cropland, was found to pose no unacceptable risk and won't move forward in the Superfund process at all. Operable Unit 2, roughly 255 acres, is the former industrial core. Operable Unit 3, more than 1,700 acres, covers the old wastewater treatment ponds and settling basins along the river, the section most likely to carry the longest cleanup timeline.

The site, aside from the river itself, remains privately owned, and the EPA has not yet issued a decision requiring formal institutional controls. Past owners already restricted certain industrial parcels to industrial use only, a private covenant that will likely shape whatever comes next regardless of what the EPA eventually decides.

There is also a river-wide consequence worth knowing if fishing access is part of what draws you to Western Montana. Montana Fish, Wildlife and Parks maintains a fish consumption advisory covering a long stretch of the Clark Fork, roughly from Missoula down to the Flathead River, tied to dioxin and PCB levels connected to the mill's operating history. That advisory affects river use, not residential zoning, but it is part of the same legacy that keeps the industrial core in federal review.

What This Means If You're Comparing Frenchtown to Its Neighbors

None of this means Frenchtown is a risky place to buy. Homes in town sit well outside the mill site's boundary, and the majority of the property, the 1,200 acres already cleared for agricultural use, has already passed its environmental review. But it does mean two things worth carrying into any comparison shopping between Frenchtown and towns like Bonner.

First, don't price in a Bonner-style redevelopment bump on any near-term timeline. The feasibility study alone is a multi-year process, and the consultant's own estimate puts a formal cleanup proposal at 2028 at the earliest. Whatever eventually gets built there, whether industrial tenants, open space, or something else entirely, is a decade-plus story, not a next-year story.

Second, understand that the Frenchtown School District, Missoula County, and the Frenchtown Rural Fire District have been pursuing a substantial, currently unpaid tax obligation from the site's largest owner since 2017. That doesn't set your individual tax bill, but it tells you something the median price on a listing never will: one of the district's largest potential revenue sources has been absent from the ledger for years, and the jurisdictions that rely on it have had to plan around that gap rather than count on it closing soon.

If you're looking at property near the mill boundary specifically, ask which operable unit it falls into and whether any private use restrictions from prior ownership still apply. That single question tells you more about a parcel's near-term development potential than anything on a public listing sheet.

Frequently Asked Questions

Is it safe to buy a home in Frenchtown given the Smurfit-Stone site? Residential areas in Frenchtown sit outside the mill site's boundary, and the largest single section of the property, about 1,200 acres, has already been cleared with no unacceptable risk identified. The active investigation is focused on the roughly 255-acre industrial core and the wastewater treatment complex along the river.

Could the Smurfit-Stone site eventually become something like Bonner's business park? It's possible, and Bonner's own developer has said as much, but the timeline is measured in years, not seasons. The feasibility study phase of the Superfund process is set to begin in 2026, and a formal cleanup proposal isn't expected before 2028 at the earliest.

Does the unpaid tax lawsuit affect my property tax bill directly? There's no public data tying the lawsuit to a specific per-property tax impact, but the mechanism is straightforward. The Frenchtown School District, Missoula County, and the Frenchtown Rural Fire District have been trying to recover roughly $1.2 million in back taxes tied to the site since 2017. Until that's resolved, those jurisdictions are working without revenue from one of the largest parcels in their tax base.

Comparing Frenchtown to Bonner, Missoula, or any other Western Montana community means looking past the headline price and understanding what's actually happening with the land, the infrastructure, and the tax base around it. That's the kind of groundwork Bethany Taylor walks through with every buyer weighing one town against another. If you're trying to figure out where your money goes furthest and what you're really buying into, start with a complimentary valuation and a conversation about what's actually happening on the ground.