Paul Mutascio has been serving Bigfork for the last two decades, fighting for public works projects and making sure his community’s voices get heard — most recently about the town’s historic one-lane bridge downtown.  

Mutascio, 74, recently retired as president of the Community Foundation for a Better Bigfork after 15 years. The CFBB is a group of volunteers that has been around since the 1960s. Since Bigfork is not an incorporated city, it has no ability to levy taxes, so in many ways, the CFBB fills the gap left by the absence of a traditional municipality. 

This week, Mutascio will serve as the grand marshal of Bigfork’s annual Fourth of July parade.  

Mutascio was already a perfect fit for the organization when he arrived in Bigfork in the early 1990s. Raised in southern California, he would move to San Diego for college, earning a bachelor's in economics, urban economics and political science, and later earning his master's degree in public administration with an emphasis in finance and urban planning. 

He met his wife Jill Gottschalk at college, whom he has been married to for 52 years.  

Mutascio started his career working with the city of San Diego to work with the city manager as an administrative analyst. Working in the financial management department, he was involved with long-range and financial planning. After six years, he was appointed to be the assistant director of the City Clerk's office.  

“That's where I really cut my teeth. And then Jill, who's the talent in the family, was an independent graphic artist. So, while I was going through the city and whatnot, she got involved with San Diego Zoo and Quiksilver, Gordon and Smith surfboards, SeaWorld, Anheuser Busch ... lots of big names,” Mutascio said.  

It was a fortuitous time for the couple, but soon Mutascio’s high-stress job began to get to him. When this carried over to his home life, Jill asked him if he wanted to work for her.  

“I thought ‘That's a good option.’ So, I went basically from the boardroom to the dark room, because I was her assistant. I developed all the film and whatnot. Then we started branching out and doing products like t-shirts and mugs,” he said.  

Gottschalk Design continued to grow, but soon Jill became interested in moving out of San Diego.  

"We had some friends that had moved up here and they invited us up. We were here for about seven days and put an offer on a house,” Mutascio said.  

They fell in love with their house on the Swan River, adding an office on top of their garage for Jill. They tried to live part-time in both Bigfork and San Diego, but that didn’t last long. The couple officially became Bigforkians.  

“First of all, we're from California, so we had to be very quiet,” Mutascio joked.  

“But then I was asked to join the board of the CFBB, which was then the Bigfork Development Company. That was 18 years ago and then I served as president for 15 years,” he said.  

The CFBB had a good reputation, he said, as it was created by some of the towns’ founders, but it wasn’t as active when Mutascio joined. 

He said one of the first things they tackled was issues surrounding the Bigfork Land Use Advisory Committee. At the time, he said the community felt like the advisory committee was too slanted toward developers. BLUAC acts as an advisory board for official Flathead County land use decision-making boards and Flathead County commissioners, concerning applications and proposals within the Bigfork zoning district. 

“They were having meetings that they shouldn't be having; they were talking directly to the commissioners rather than going through the community. So, the community came together and we had a whole series of meetings, then brought it to the commissioners and developed the Bigfork Land Use Advisory Plan,” Mutascio said.  

That plan became a guide for land use decisions in Bigfork, and Mutascio said it felt like a win for the community.  

Another project Mutascio worked heavily on was to keep Bigfork’s green box site open when Flathead County was considering consolidating it with the Lakeside green box site.  

“Now you can imagine what kind of traffic jam that would be. So, I went to the board and I just said, ‘Look, do we want this?’ ... If we had to rely on commercial services, the cost would go up dramatically, and if you couldn't afford that or they couldn't get to you, then you'd have to drive all the way to Somers,” Mutascio said.  

Mutascio assembled a team, and they put together a study going over the costs of consolidating the sites and how it would impact residents in and around Bigfork.  

"It took about two years for us to convince them, and then the commissioners had to vote on it too. But the Solid Waste Board kind of got the feeling that the community comes together easily in Bigfork,” he said.  

It was the first of many times that county Public Works Director David Prunty and Mutascio would work together on projects in Bigfork. The two would collaborate again several years later to figure out the stormwater drainage problem plaguing downtown.  

"There were pollutants feeding into the stormwater drains and going right into the river ... so we were able to convince the county to get some contractors and grants, and we put in a state-of-the-art stormwater system with filtration units ... so the water is cleaned before it goes into the lake,” Mutascio said.  

In addition to this, Mutascio helped broker use and maintenance agreements between the county, the CFBB and PacificCorp, the energy company that owns and operates the Bigfork hydroelectric dam. The company partially owns the land that the Swan River Nature Trail is on, as well as Sliter’s Park.  

There is a myriad of landmarks around Bigfork that Mutascio is proud to say are maintained or were at some point impacted by the CFBB. Improvements and maintenance of Sliter’s Park, the Swan River Nature Trail and the Bigfork Art and Cultural Center are just a few of the ongoing projects the organization is involved with.  

Mutascio also made sure the community had a say in decisions surrounding the replacement of the historic one-lane bridge downtown. Recently reopened after months of construction, he said Prunty approached him about the state of the bridge in 2015. 

“He said, ‘Paul, the state's looking at that bridge right now and we’re probably going to have to replace it.’ I asked ‘What will they do?’ and he said it will probably be a cement bridge,” Mutascio said. “And I said, ‘No, that bridge is kind of important to Bigfork.’ So we went to the board and started talking about what we could do to influence the design decisions.” 

First built in 1907 for $2,500, it was replaced with the current steel structure in 1912 after the first road along Swan River from Bigfork to Ferndale was built. It remains a symbol for Bigfork residents and a reminder of the village’s history.  

The CFBB soon moved to register the bridge as a historic landmark with Montana, and later added it to the federal registry, too.  

The Montana Department of Transportation hired a consultant and put together a committee to tackle redesign and replacement options. Mutascio said he, Walter Kuhn and Sue Hansen started attending these meetings with the county commissioners and the state. Eventually, the group proposed seven options for the bridge replacement.  

“We had one final community meeting, and as it turned out, the cheapest option was what we just got,” he said.  

But lacking funding, it took the state several years to replace the bridge. Eventually, vehicle traffic was limited across the bridge as its weight limit was reduced. Then, in January of 2024, it was deemed unsafe for vehicle and pedestrian travel and closed. 

“That really put Bigfork in a vulnerable and dangerous spot, because there was only one way in and one way out. So that's when it became higher on our priority list,” Mutascio said.  

Battle Ridge Builders worked through icy winter conditions to open it ahead of schedule. The community celebrated its opening just ahead of the village’s annual Fourth of July parade, which draws thousands of people every year.  

To Mutascio, the new bridge is a win — it looks like the old bridge while being safe enough to stay with the community for the next 100 years.  

These days, Mutascio is recharging. He’s enjoyed taking a step back and letting a new, younger generation of Bigfork residents take on running the CFBB. But, he said, working with the organization gave him the opportunity to use his background in urban planning and public administration.  

He said he does it all because of a sense of community.  

“I've always had that from my educational background. Through my childhood, I was a Boy Scout, then working for the city (of San Diego), there was just a sense of community. When I was asked to join the board, it just seemed like a good opportunity to continue to support the community,” he said.  

Reporter Taylor Inman may be reached at 758-4440 or [email protected].