A Washington state-based company is the latest to try to revive the community of St. Marie, the site of base housing for the old Glasgow Air Force Base in northeastern Montana.

DTM Enterprises LLC of Ephrata, Wash., recently paid just over $212,000 in back taxes to Valley County to take assignment of 483 housing units in St. Marie, the Great Falls Tribune (http://gftrib.com/Yh2APD) reported Friday.

DTM co-owner Merrill Frantz said the company and its partners are working to gain ownership of the properties with plans to rehabilitate the aging structures to meet the housing demand created by the Bakken oil boom.

"We expect to begin construction sometime around the last of April," Frantz said.

The town of St. Marie provided base housing for the Glasgow Air Force Base until it closed in 1968.

In 1987, a retired Air Force officer, Patrick Kelly, bought most of the town's 1,100 housing units with plans to create a retirement community for military personnel, but that did not pan out. In 1996, he sold his remaining interest in the community to Seattle property developer Terry Parks, who later filed for bankruptcy.

St. Marie still had 264 residents in 133 housing units, according to the 2010 Census.

However, the "muddled" ownership of the rest of the housing units has made St. Marie unattractive to most potential investors, said Valley County Treasurer Jeannie Reinhardt.

"They have belonged to different people and there's been a bankruptcy that involved some of them," she said. "It's just turned into more that most investors want to get involved with - to get the titles cleared, to get the taxes paid up, to get the building put back into top condition."

"And then there wasn't any need," she said.

That changed as thousands of people began working in the Bakken oil fields.

"There's no place to rent in Glasgow," Reinhardt said. "I've heard of houses that were listed for sale in the morning and sold by the afternoon."

DTM's settlement of the tax debt on the properties doesn't guarantee they'll eventually obtain clear title to them. The owners of record, Kelly and another investor, can reclaim their properties by paying DTM the taxes plus interest. A final resolution on all the properties could take up to three years, Reinhardt said.

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Information from: Great Falls Tribune, http://www.greatfallstribune.com