Drive south on Interstate 90 past the 27th Street exit and you'll see it: a stretch of cottonwoods and open grass along the Yellowstone River, a boat ramp, and if the light catches the water right, Sacrifice Cliff rising on the far bank. That's Coulson Park. It has looked roughly the same way for most of the last decade, and it will likely look that way for a while longer.

That's the part that surprises people when they read the news that broke earlier this month: the head of Billings' Scheels store gave $100,000 toward the park's redevelopment. It's a genuinely large gift, the kind that makes its own headline. But if you've lived along this stretch of river for any length of time, you might remember hearing that Coulson Park was already getting redeveloped. Renderings came out. The city council signed off. That was six years ago. The gap between those two facts, an approved plan from 2020 and a fresh six-figure donation in 2026, is the real story here, and it says something about how anything gets built along this river.

The Plan Everyone Has Already Seen

Billings Parks and Recreation, working with the Bozeman design firm DHM Design, unveiled a full master plan for Coulson Park back in 2020. The Billings City Council approved it that same year. It called for turning the park's roughly 50 undeveloped acres into something with a lot more going on: a bike track, a dog park, sculpture installations, a covered arbor built for small concerts, historical markers explaining the site's past, and eventually a redesigned river bridge built with cyclists and pedestrians in mind.

None of that is invented. It's what the plan says, broken into eight separate phases:

• A boat ramp upgrade, new vault toilets, picnic tables and a games area
• Site infrastructure, a pond, and a creek feature
• Later phases layering in the bike track, dog park, and performance arbor
• A final phase reworking the Yellowstone River bridge itself for foot and bike traffic

The whole build-out was priced between $13.8 million and $16.3 million. That's not a number the city has ever had sitting in a checking account waiting to be spent. It's a number the city plans to reach in pieces, phase by phase, as grants and gifts arrive.

The project's lead designer put the full build-out at roughly ten years. This year marks year six.

The Simplest Phase Is Still Waiting On A Federal Permit

Phase one, the least ambitious piece of the whole plan, was supposed to be the easy part: two new vault toilets and a redeveloped boat ramp, budgeted at $110,000. Some of that money came from a specific source, funds Montana received as part of the state's settlement with Exxon following the 2011 Silvertip pipeline rupture that spilled oil into the Yellowstone River near Laurel. That settlement money was earmarked for river-access improvements, which is exactly what a boat ramp and restrooms are.

As of this spring, according to Billings Parks and Recreation's own project page, that phase still hadn't broken ground. The plans and specifications were finished. What the department was waiting on was a final permit from the Army Corps of Engineers before the work could even go out to bid. Six years after council approval, the smallest, cheapest, already-funded piece of an eight-phase plan was still stuck in federal paperwork.

That's not a knock on anyone involved. It's a fairly ordinary fact about how projects on a river, subject to Corps oversight because the work touches the waterway itself, actually move. But it's useful context for reading any headline that says a park "is getting redeveloped." Getting a plan approved and getting a permit cleared are two very different milestones, and the distance between them can run years.

A Six-Figure Gift Just Moved The Needle

Which brings us back to the Scheels donation. Big Sky Economic Development has been running a private fundraising campaign to help match the kind of public dollars that come with strings attached, grant programs (including funds tied to that same 2011 pipeline settlement) that require a private-sector match before the money can be spent. Reported by the Billings Gazette in a story published earlier this month, the Scheels gift is described as a "six-figure donation," a single check large enough to be treated as its own piece of local news rather than a line item buried in a quarterly report.

That's worth sitting with for a second. In a $13.8 to $16.3 million project, a $100,000 gift is not going to fund the amphitheater and the bike track and the dog park all at once. What it does is help clear the private-match threshold on one specific grant, which in turn frees up the next round of work. That's the mechanism. Progress at Coulson Park doesn't arrive as a single ribbon-cutting. It arrives as a series of matches, cleared one grant at a time, each one dependent on someone, a business, a foundation, a resident, deciding to write a check.

This Is Just How Billings Builds Along The River

If that funding model sounds unusual, it isn't, at least not in Billings. It's close to identical to how the city built the Skyline Trail, the paved path that now runs along the Rims connecting Zimmerman Park to Swords Park.

That trail started as a concept in a 2017 meeting between Billings TrailNet, the Montana Department of Transportation, and city planning staff. An engineering firm was hired in 2018. The first section, a short connector from the Zimmerman Place neighborhood into Zimmerman Park, got built in 2020 on the strength of a single major gift from donor Dick Charbonneau. The city was notified that fall it had landed a federal BUILD grant for the rest of the trail, but TrailNet still had to hand the city $85,000 in matching funds the following summer before that award could actually be put to work. The trail didn't officially open to the public until December 2023, per KULR8's coverage of the ribbon cutting, roughly six years after that first planning meeting, at a total cost near $3 million.

The next piece of that same trail network, the Stagecoach Trail connecting Rimrock Road up to Zimmerman Park, is currently being engineered with a target build date as early as 2027. Same pattern: concept, engineering, a long stretch of fundraising, then construction.

None of this is a complaint about pace. It's a description of how the city actually pays for the parts of Billings that don't come out of the general operating budget: a patchwork of state grants tied to specific legal settlements, federal transportation dollars that require local matches, and private donors willing to write checks toward a public project. If you want to know when a park or trail plan will actually be finished, the plan itself won't tell you. The fundraising thermometer will.

What You Can Already Do At Coulson Park Today

None of this means Coulson Park is unusable in the meantime. The Jim Dutcher Trail, a paved multi-use path, already runs along its edge, and the existing boat ramp already puts you on the Yellowstone. Regulars use it exactly as it is. One recent visitor, Mindi Driscoll, was photographed walking her three-legged dog Lolly and her mother's dog Pearl along the Dutcher Trail there, and told a Gazette reporter she comes back often because she likes having the space to herself.

That's the honest current state of the park: rustic, a little rough around the edges, genuinely quiet, with river access and a paved trail that already work fine for a walk, a bike ride, or an afternoon with a fishing rod. The amphitheater and the dog park and the sculpture installations are real plans, backed by real money that's slowly accumulating. They are not, as of this month, anything you can stand in.

The Town That Lost Once Before

There's a bit of irony sitting under all of this. Coulson Park sits on the site of Coulson, the actual first town in this stretch of the Yellowstone Valley, a frontier settlement that predates Billings itself. When the railroad arrived, it chose to build its new hub two miles west instead, and most of Coulson's residents eventually followed the jobs and moved. Coulson faded out by the 1930s. A plaque in the park today marks where it stood.

The town that lost out once before to a decision made somewhere else is now the park still waiting on outside capital to arrive on its own schedule. It's a strange kind of continuity for a piece of ground that's had more patience asked of it than most.

If you're the kind of resident who's watched this park from the interstate for years and want to know what actually changes next, or you're weighing a move to this part of Billings and want a read on the river corridor from someone who follows it closely, Huskey Real Estate Group keeps an eye on exactly this kind of local development. Schedule a consultation whenever you're ready to talk about what's happening along the river, whether you're already living here or thinking about it.