Kalispell Downtown

Montana’s economic outlook is grim, but it could be, and has been much worse. This was the message delivered Thursday in Kalispell during a mid-year economic update presented by the Montana Chamber Foundation along with the University of Montana Bureau of Business and Economic Research. “No one liked our growth forecast [in February] because it was so anemic, but now it’s even more anemic,” Patrick Barkey, bureau director and a professor at the UM School of Business, said. He spoke to a room crowded with local business owners at the Hilton Garden Inn.

Get your century-old motors running, and get ready to head out on the highway – the national Ford Model T tour is coming to the Flathead. Dubbed the Montana Majestic Mountain T Tour, the international event brings 175 Model T enthusiasts and their classic cars to the valley from Aug. 1 to Aug. 7. The drivers will be stationed at Whitefish Mountain Resort and venture out to new locations everyday, from the Tobacco Valley to Glacier National Park to around Flathead Lake, totaling about 900 miles, according to tour director Mike Cuffe of Eureka.

Skydivers will continue to fly over Lost Prairie following a parachuting accident Wednesday that killed a Colorado man. According to the Flathead County Sheriff’s Office, Garl “Mike” Newby, 57, of Colorado Springs was part of a group of jumpers that had just finished a formation dive when his main parachute got tangled with another jumper’s main chute. The surviving jumper was able to remove his main chute and deploy his reserve parachute, the sheriff’s report states. Newby was able to remove his main chute but was unable to deploy his reserve parachute in time.

A loosely organized but unified campaign is underway to garner support for a little known federal funding mechanism with the potential to bolster money for recreation, public land acquisition and wildlife habitat restoration in Montana by millions of dollars. And in the wake of the BP oil spill, the program, known as the Land and Water Conservation Fund, stands its best chance in decades of seeing full funding after Sen. Max Baucus inserted such a provision last week into an energy bill increasing federal oversight of offshore drilling. “All along the way it has been kind of in the background and no one’s really known about it,” said Walt Timmerman, who administers the Land and Water Conservation Fund as the recreation bureau chief for the Montana Department of Fish, Wildlife and Parks. “People are just now becoming aware of the fact that they need to get behind the program.”