Come to Butte if you want to see an ethnically diverse and economically thriving hub | Don Peoples Sr. and Karen Sullivan

When the Republican candidate for the U.S. presidency refers to our country as "a garbage can for the world," our ethnically diverse community should take serious offense. When this same individual refers to our country's "weakened economy," we of Irish, Finnish, Italian, Slavic, American Indian, Lebanese descent — we could go on — should invite the man to Butte, America to witness some serious economic stimulation.

The Montana Connections Business Development industrial park west of Butte is example one. Its self-billed description as "the intersection of the West" is apt, as the park is located at the crossroads of two U.S. interstate highways, I-15 and I-90 — providing logistic strategy moving west, south, east and north. The park offers interested businesses land beginning at $2,000 an acre, potable water and wastewater mechanics, natural gas, and telecommunications, including high-speed fiber. Montana Connections also offers tax incentives and is also a foreign trade zone, allowing businesses to avoid U.S. duties.

Already home to many businesses, Montana Connections over the past four years has added the Murdoch's warehouse, the National Guard armory, the Town Pump Diesel Exhaust Fluid Plant, Empire Building Materials, Sia Motor Freight Line, and the 406 Fresh Connections Café.

Montana Connections is also home to this gem, the Port of Montana. The port is an industrial facility featuring transload, distribution and warehousing. The port touts to businesses 120,000 square feet of indoor storage, 55 acres of outdoor storage, storage capacity for 250 rail cars, five docking areas, and two certified truck scales. The port also features that aforementioned highway access and rail logistics.

The Montana Connections complex provides good jobs and employs 800 people — 800! The paychecks of these folks (who are presumably of varied descent) sustain the array of current businesses in Butte and beef up the operations of our major employers, which include Northwestern Energy, St. James Hospital-Intermountain Health, Montana Resources, and Town Pump.

Montana Resources of course operates Butte's open pit copper and molybdenum mine (the current copper market price is an astounding $4.37 per pound). But what is really promising about this operation is the Berkeley Pit — yes, the Berkeley Pit. Montana Resources is studying the feasibility of retooling its water treatment functions to extract rare earth elements and critical minerals — items such as cerium, lanthanum, yttrium, manganese and zinc. The effort could culminate in lessening the nation's reliance on other countries for rare earth elements and critical minerals, which are leveraged to produce components of hard drives and electric vehicles. According to Mark Thompson of Montana Resources, the U.S. Department of Defense has some interest in this prospect, since rare earth elements and critical minerals can be used to help produce items such as missiles, drones and jets.

Leave it to Butte to prospectively be at the heart of our nation's future defense.

Back to Butte's economy. Don't even get us started on retail. Butte is seeing its first real retail renaissance in decades, with groundbreaking occurring at the new Cornerstone Plaza on South Harrison Avenue, New York developer David Leon at the helm, and Oregon's Dickerhoof Properties starting work on the former Butte Plaza Mall further north on Harrison, promising a new grocery store anchor and more.

We are obviously bullish on Butte, this melting pot of a town we love so much. We could fume about the recent references to garbage cans and weakened economies, but we'd rather focus on and highlight the incredible realities of a culturally transcendent and economically diverse city-county that is imbued with vigor and promise.

Heck, Butte might just be the intersection of the world.

Don Peoples Sr. is the retired president and CEO of the Montana Economic Revitalization and Development Institute (MERDI) and MSE, and a former chief executive of Butte-Silver Bow County. Karen Sullivan is the retired public health officer of Butte-Silver Bow. They are both Butte natives.