While I’ve worked at some shitty restaurants in my life, the worst and shortest stint I ever worked was three weeks at the Iron Horse Pub & Grill on North Higgins in Missoula, Montana. Since the owner of the Iron Horse recently passed away, I was curious to see what the reporting would be like. The Missoulian didn’t disappoint:
Tami Ursich, the Missoula woman who founded the Iron Horse Bar and Grill 35 years ago, passed away recently.
“It is with heavy hearts that we share the passing of our beloved Tami,” the Ursich family posted on social media on Wednesday. “Tami was truly one of a kind, a bright light in our community whose warmth, laughter, and generous spirit made everyone feel like family. Whether you knew her for years or just met her once, she had a way of making you feel welcome, heard, and at home. The Iron Horse wasn’t just a bar to her — it was a gathering place filled with stories, friendships, and unforgettable moments, all shaped by her heart and her love for people.”
…
“Tami would have wanted the show to go on. Please come in, enjoy some great food and drinks, support the Iron Horse, and celebrate Tami the way she would have wanted — with laughter, good company, and a full house. Thank you for the love, prayers, and support you’ve shown our family during this difficult time,” the statement concluded.
While it’s pretty common to say nice things in an obituary when someone dies, words like “warmth” and “generosity” are NOT words I associate with Tami Ursich, and I’m not the only one. For an idea of how many NEGATIVE stories exist about this bar owner, here are some comments I curated from a Reddit thread:
Verbally abusing staff, blaming victims for getting roofied, and regularly driving while intoxicated, and that’s just from 5 minutes scrolling a Reddit thread. Wow.
Instead of dealing with the reality of an alcoholic bar owner who EVERYONE KNOWS acted like this ALL THE TIME, our local paper of record decided to quote Kyle Riggs, the loser who got local narrative controllers to cast him as the victim in the implosion of the Pangea restaurant empire.
Kyle Riggs, a Missoula sommelier, bartender and entrepreneur, said he worked for Ursich for many years.
“I spent 18 years at the Iron Horse,” he said. “I always respected her as a businessperson. It’s a hard business and she was always there and doing it and was rock solid and took pretty darn good care of her people.”
He noted that Ursich, along with Tim France at Worden’s Market, Jurgen Knoller at Bayern Brewery, and Kevin Head at the Rhino, started Montana’s first brewfest, called BRIW Fest, in Missoula in 1992.
Respecting Tami Ursich as a businessperson? That’s rich. What Kyle Riggs is actually saying here is that he respected Tami’s protected status as one of Missoula’s untouchables, something his former business partner, Scott Billadeau, didn’t have the benefit of after he became one of the few business owners who STOOD UP to the pandemic cultists six years ago.
I also suspect Riggs appreciated how Ursich, like many business owners in Missoula, accessed Tax Increment Financing for her business, which I found listed in this MRA master list:
If you can’t read the small print, in 1998 the Iron Horse got $74,482 dollars in public money for the… “Expansion of vacant former café to large restaurant building. TIF Program used for clearing the site, sidewalks, and street trees. CRLP interest write down program used to renovate retained portions of the existing façade.“
Giving money to an abusive alcoholic, then protecting her from the consequences of her abusive actions, is what this town is all about, so I’m happy to see the Missoulian’s editor, Cory Walsh, keeping the tradition alive. Good job, Cory! We couldn’t have our own version of Laurel Canyon without the help of our pathetic local media, right?
Right.
On Sunday I’m going to write about someone who died at the end of last year, my fellow blogger, “JC”, because JC was everything Tami Ursich was NOT. Like me, JC stopped drinking, he stopped believing Democrat lies, and he chose to live a modest life doing the things he believed in, like opposing a gravel pit near his home in Arlee, and helping others stay AWAY from the poison Tami made her money selling.
I have one final story, told to me by a friend earlier this week, about Tami that exemplifies how perfectly representative she was of the NEW Missoula ethos that emerged in the 80’s, when Tax Increment Financing was first deployed to save downtown from the popularity of the Southgate Mall.
The most historically and culturally relevant bar in all Missoula, Charlie B’s, also has a tradition of employing some of the most badass bartenders. That’s why Tami showed up one morning when my buddy was sitting at the bar, with his dad and the other old-timers drinking coffee.
After squeezing into the empty chair between father and son and brashly demanding cigarettes be put out, Tami’s intent became clear: she was trying to poach Charlie’s bartenders for her new bar and grill, which sat kitty-corner to Missoula’s true watering-hole heart.
If Tami Ursich was a man treating her staff the way many have claimed they experienced and/or witnessed, would she have been treated with such obvious media deference and law enforcement protection? It’s impossible to say, but I’m sure Drake Doepke would like to know, since his allegedly criminal touching of staff, charges that were later dropped, got plenty of media attention, just like the Missoulian’s HEAVY coverage of Pangea’s financial troubles before that set of restaurants filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy.
If local media was capable of doing their jobs without the pro-business protection racket inherent in newspaper narrative control, I wouldn’t have to balance their bullshit with the ugly truth, but here we are.
In 2023 John Shaffner was recognized by the Bigfork Eagle as a Montanan who had made it big in Hollywood, thus earning an honorary doctorate from the University of Montana:
John Shaffner, who began his career with the Bigfork Summer Playhouse before becoming a legendary Hollywood production designer who created sets for many of television’s most beloved shows is one of two Montanans who will receive an honorary doctorate this spring from the University of Montana.
On March 16 the state Board of Regents approved UM’s request to present the doctorates during Commencement ceremonies on Saturday, May 13 to Shaffner and Mandy Smoker Broaddus, a former Montana poet laureate who helped implement the Indian Education Act for All Act across the state.
The two will serve as UM Commencement speakers, with Smoker Broadus speaking at the morning ceremony and Shaffner speaking in the afternoon.
How did John Shaffner get the kind of Hollywood success that allowed him to buy a VERY NICE house up Pattee Canyon? And why am I specifying this location as if it’s relevant? It’s not like we’re talking about the kind of wealthy people who are close to Epstein Network, right?
Shaffner and his life partner Joe Stewart also work together, including at the outset of their television careers when they designed the set for Star Search. He designed the talk show stages for Ellen DeGeneres, Conan O’Brien, Rachel Ray, and Dr. Phil. He has also built the backdrops for the last three Republican National Conventions.
…
Shaffner has been nominated for 31 Emmy awards and won four, including three for his work on the CBS series The Magic of David Copperfield.
Shaffner was nominated 33 times by the Art Directors Guild, and won Art Directors Guild Awards for the designs of the 2006 Emmy Awards and The Big Bang Theory.
In 2019, Shaffner and Stewart were awarded Honorary Doctor of Fine Art Degrees from Carnegie Mellon University.
In 2002, Shaffner won the award he sponsors from the University of Montana and now and serves on the college’s advisory council.
There are two BIG red flags in the biographical data from Wikipedia about Shaffner’s success, and that’s his work with David Copperfield and Ellen Degeneres. The first one, the magician, is all over the Epstein files, while the second one, the degenerate, had a set design said to look like it was aesthetically modeled after Epstein island.
Was that John Shaffner’s idea?!?
When Aaron Rodgers brought up this visual connection on Joe Rogan, the biggest podcaster in the world wasn’t impressed. That’s because Rodgers and Rogan don’t know what I discovered yesterday by using Montana Cadastral.
Aaron Rodgers has never been one to shy away from tossing around conspiracy theories in a public forum … and that continued during his sit-down with Joe Rogan this week — when he hinted the set of Ellen DeGeneres’ old talk show looked a bit too much like Epstein Island for his liking.
Rodgers made the remark amid his lengthy appearance on Wednesday’s episode of the “Joe Rogan Experience” … which naturally turned to the subject of Jeffrey Epstein and a building on Little Saint James.
Once producer Jamie pulled up an image on screen, Rodgers quickly said it reminded him of the “set of a famous talk show that’s now not on anymore.”
Joe quickly clocked that he was talking about “Ellen” — which went off the air in May 2022. They then pulled up an image of her set on the screen, but Rogan wasn’t in agreement with the quarterback, quickly raining on his parade.
“That might be a building in L.A.,” he said. “It’s whatever. I’m not impressed with that, that could just be coincidental.”
Yes, Joe Rogan, it could just be coincidental, but when you add David Copperfield to the mix, things get a little darker.
Reading this document from the Epstein files, you get the distinct impression that David Copperfield’s sexual predation was intimately interwoven with the production of his show. Hmmm.
If it was just these connections, that would be bad enough, but what my idle curiosity produced yesterday, clicking around Montana Cadastral for property information, showed me some neighbors of John Shaffner who raised my eyebrow, like his NEXT DOOR NEIGHBOR, Ewa Bindek.
Who is Ewa Bindek, what is DST Global, and why is DST Global connected to Ashton Kutcher, who was VERY EARLY in being VERY CONCERNED about human trafficking and the sexual exploitation of children?
Oh, and Russians, can’t forget about the sketchy Russians:
DST Global is a venture capital and private equity firm that primarily invests in late-stage internet companies. DST Global’s founder is Yuri Milner and its co-founders are Saurabh Gupta, John Lindfors, Rahul Mehta and Tom Stafford. The company was founded in 2009 as a spinoff from Russian company Digital Sky Technologies, which became Mail.ru Group (later the VK company). In the early 2010s, DST Global international investments were focused on emerging markets such as China.
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A Kremlin-owned firm, VTB Bank, put $191 million into DST Global, which used it to buy a large share of Twitter in 2011. A subsidiary of the Kremlin-controlled Gazprom funded an investment company that partnered with DST Global to buy shares in Facebook, reaping millions when the social media giant went public in 2012. Twitter similarly went public in 2013. The US government sanctioned VTB in 2014 because of the Russian military intervention in Crimea, but DST Global had sold its stake in Twitter by then. Four days after the Facebook IPO, a DST Global subsidiary sold more than 27 million shares of Facebook for roughly $1 billion. In November 2017, DST Global issued the statement in response to this accusation: “Since 2009, DST Global has invested $7 billion in the consumer internet sector, with a majority being invested in non-U.S. companies — and with less than 5% coming from VTB Bank. VTB Bank was the only Russian government institution that invested in any DST Global funds… Moreover, there were dozens of DST Global investors making up the funds that invested in Facebook and Twitter — ….50 passive investors that invested in Facebook…, and VTB Bank was one of 40 passive investors… that invested in Twitter” Yuri Milner published his own open letter in ReCode magazine stated that “DST Global’s investments in Silicon Valley were motivated by pure business logic, based on a decade of experience in Internet technology… when we negotiated the Facebook and Twitter deals we asked for no board seats, and assigned all our votes to their founders, figuring they knew best how to run their companies. At the time, this structure was unusual, but it is core to DST Global’s philosophy.” DST Global funds have invested in over 80 companies, none of which are based in Russia.
In 2022, due to additional sanctions being placed on Russia resulting from the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine, DST Global became a subject of scrutiny due to its ties to Russia. A DST Global representative stated that the firm had not raised capital from Russian limited partners since 2011. Less than 3% of capital it had raised from inception was from VTB Bank and all such capital was returned by 2014. On DST Global’s website, the firm announced it condemned Russia’s war against Ukraine. In addition the firm donated $3 million to Stand With Ukraine, a GoFundMe initiative launched by Mila Kunis and Ashton Kutcher to help the refugee and humanitarian relief efforts.
For those who don’t remember Kutcher’s dabbling in the anti-trafficking LARP, he adopted his inspiration from his partner, Demi Moore, who was just HORRIFIED that what was happening to Cambodian sex slaves could ALSO be happening to sex slaves in America.
At least, that’s what the Wikipedia entry for the “DNA Foundation” says:
DNA Foundation was founded in 2009, by film and television actors Demi Moore and Ashton Kutcher. At that time, Moore was viewing an MSNBC documentary on human trafficking and sexual slavery of children in Cambodia. While later researching some of the issues that were presented in the film, she was inspired to act when she learned that child pornography and the sexual slavery of children were taking place not only in Cambodia, but in the United States as well.
The other notable Shaffner neighbor who got my attention as I clicked through publicly available information is Monica Tranel, sister-in-law to Ben Davis, the innocuous sounding “non-profit” guy who helps vulnerable children, and who just happened to have a previous job with Kharon, where one of his co-workers, Janice, once worked for the CIA, and another co-worker, Matthew, has a very conspicuous last name.
I know, this is getting fucking ridiculous.
The more famous Epstein, Jeffrey, was allegedly making in-roads into the world of private security near the end of his mortal usefulness to the predator class (if you believe he’s dead). This article, for example, documents Epstein’s introduction to Peter Thiel and the Founders Fund while he also courted Carbyne and talked to a wealthy Russian. Hmmm.
After his first arrest for sex crimes, Jeffrey Epstein tried to get into a new line of work: surveillance. In 2015, he partnered with former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak to invest in a security tech startup called Reporty Homeland Security, now known as Carbyne. Leaked emails show that Epstein was using Barak to seek out opportunities in the surveillance industry and build connections with powerful figures around the globe, including American businessman Peter Thiel, the former director of Israeli signals intelligence, and two people in Russian President Vladimir Putin’s circle.
…
While Epstein was trying to deal with the American tech sector, he was portraying himself to Russian elites as an apolitical wheeler-dealer. In April 2015, Epstein introduced Barak to former Russian Deputy Minister of Economic Development Sergey Belyakov, who then invited Barak to attend the St. Petersburg International Economic Forum. That wasn’t the only business Epstein had in mind.
Returning to Ewa Bindek and her employer, I wonder…does DSL Global’s billionaire Russian, Yuri Milner, have any Jeffrey Epstein connections? Of course he does. This excerpt comes from Forbes:
Epstein had relationships with a number of other venture capitalists and tech investors as well, the files reveal, including Russia-born billionaire investor Yuri Milner, former tech exec and Andreessen Horowitz board partner Steven Sinofsky, and Day One Ventures founder Masha Bucher, who regularly introduced him to startup founders. (Bucher did not respond to a previous comment request on her Epstein ties.)
Milner met with Epstein twice, once apparently at Epstein’s New York City apartment and once at his Paris apartment, both in 2011. According to Milner’s representative, the meetings were arranged by Ian Osborne, an investor and consultant who had a close relationship with Epstein, and the billionaire had no further contact with him. “I wholeheartedly regret that I ever met, or had any association whatsoever with, Epstein,” Osborne said.
The tension between privacy and surveillance is only going to get more tense as Americans realize what the predator class has planned, but as that tension escalates, I want Missoula citizens to understand how safely ensconced some of these Epstein-connected people appear to be in our own backyard.
Has anyone else made the connections I’ve made in this post? Nope, and really, these connections I’m highlighting today make me the most concerned I’ve ever been about the culture of this mountain town I’ve called home for 26 years.
If you would like to support the whistleblower-level work I’m doing to help mitigate the subsequent risk that comes with it, you can donate any modest amount at my new GoFundMe page.
Later today, starting at 5:30pm, a fundraiser for Seth Bodnar is being held somewhere up in the Rattlesnake.
Do I know where? Yes I do. Am I going to say where? No I’m not. That means any would-be party-crasher who might be inclined to show up to tell this terrible, awful, no good, very bad candidate what they/them think about he/him, then they/them will have to do their/their own research.
I hope that makes sense.
The source I got this information from would like me to note that op-sec (operational security) doesn’t appear to be part of Chelsea Bodnar’s skillset, since the open-air meeting she held earlier today with a group of Boomers could have been overheard by anyone in the vicinity.
For example, if one of those Boomers loudly told his partner the specific address where this fundraiser was being held, then a discerning person writing down notes could easily figure out who is throwing the shindig.
And who is throwing the fundraiser?
That information I will share, for reasons that will soon be obvious.
I debated how much context to put into this post about a private citizen throwing a private fundraiser for a political candidate, but as I poked around online to see the nice things Rob does, like connecting with exotic blacks in their tribal element–something the Sentinel Outdoor Institute apparently does, which Lindner is a part of…
…I also discovered that Rob Lindner is fluent in Missoula’s local dialect of resource-acquisition, known as Tax Increment Financing.
Another place Lindner’s name pops up is a place that’s economic smart to be a part of: CLIMATE SMART MISSOULA!
While Rob gets thanked by city/county-connected people near the climate change money-spigot, Zoom Chron readers can thank ME at my new GoFundMe page. Your $5, $10, or $20 dollar contribution helps me disrupt the four and five figure donors duking it out during one of Montana’s most corrupt political cycles since the Copper King era.
Earlier this week I took a little day trip with a friend north of Missoula, where the billionaires play. We drove past Paws Up Ranch, the popular billionaire glamping spot on the Blackfoot river that hosted members of the PayPal Mafia last June, then we drove through Lincoln, where Uncle Ted once lived.
Uncle Ted, for those who don’t know, is Theodore John Kaczynski, the author of Technological Slavery and explosive critic of self-serving scientists selling out humanity to enslave it for their pay-masters, but don’t take that from me (or Ted), take it from Robert Oppenheimer:
To be fair to scientists, the existence of hidden motives lurking behind a person’s stated intentions is simply a part of the human condition, and too often those hidden motives even hide from the conscious mind of the person themselves. That said, even if Tom Siebel really BELIEVED his money could help Montana deal with “the devil’s drug”, the motive shouldn’t matter when the result has been a TOTAL FAILURE.
Instead of honestly reporting on the “philanthropic” motives of a billionaire like Tom Siebel, what local media did two decades ago was help establish this tech-titan’s unearned credentials by opening this 2006 article with Siebel’s unfunny comedy riff about meth labs, as reported by the Independent Record:
In the middle of moving a herd of black Angus cattle from one pasture to another, Tom Siebel dismounts his horse and starts picking up stray pieces of old trash – bailing wire, odd pieces of rusted metal, glass discolored by the years of exposure to the elements.
“Hey, this could be a meth lab from 1929,” Siebel jokes in his gravelly voice.
Coming from anyone else, the statement might earn a chuckle. But for Siebel, the man behind the Montana Meth Project, it carries a weighty message. He has invested more than $10 million into ridding the state of what he calls “the devil’s drug.”
If you continue reading this Independent Record puff piece, like I did, you get more aspirational intent about Siebel’s Deaborn Ranch, which overlooks the Dearborn river, which flows like a rich vein of pure liquid gold from the winter snowpack of the Bob Marshall Wilderness:
“I want this to be the best-run ranch in the state,” Siebel says. Along with his 50,000-acre N Bar Ranch near Grass Range, the Siebel cattle operation ships about 1.5 million pounds of beef a year and puts up about 3,500 tons of hay. “This is a working ranch, but with Tom, wildlife always wins out to cattle,” Harber says.
Siebel and his staff work with Montana Fish, Wildlife and Parks, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and other management agencies to make sure he’s using the best management practices. The 2,000 pairs of cows and calves are kept out of delicate riparian areas and are rotated frequently enough to maintain healthy grasslands.
Parts of the ranch are under FWP’s block-management program, which allows public hunting to those who ask. Harber said FWP has released several rehabilitated wildlife species onto the ranch. There are plots dedicated to upland gamebird habitat and areas where organic means have been used for weed abatement.
One way to understand this parcel of land where “the public” is “allowed” to hunt if they ask is to look up the Montana Cadastral data, which helps show where the protected money to own this parcel comes from:
After perusing this publicly available data, I added “First Virtual Group” to my search strategy in order to get some more fun newspaper context of alleged Siebel intent, like this from The Mercury News:
There’s a lot of distance between a tony office on Palo Alto’s University Avenue and a working cattle ranch in Wolf Creek, Mont. But since he sold his namesake software company to Oracle four years ago, Tom Siebel has been hanging his hat in both Silicon Valley and Big Sky Country.
These days, the billionaire and former CEO of Siebel Systems invests his wealth quietly through a Palo Alto holding company called First Virtual Group. He’s making a bigger splash with his philanthropy, including an in-your-face ad campaign that Siebel initially bankrolled in Montana — and which has since been adopted in other rural states — aimed at warning people away from methamphetamine use.
This article was written in 2009, back when the anti-meth campaign seemed legit. Since then I’ve written about anecdotal evidence that the Montana Meth Project failed people like Craig as it successfully helped Tom Siebel network with politicians and other influential people, like a Sheriff Deputy by the name of John Stevens:
Like Tom, for some reason this friendship with a Cascade County Sheriff deputy really got MY attention, especially when I stopped to check out the public access to the Dearborn river right near Siebel’s ranch:
What do vertical metal poles sticking into the river communicate to the public? Is it a message of “welcome” to the natural water resource they are supposedly guaranteed access to? Or is it something else, something NOT in alignment with the stated intent of this “philanthropist” cracking jokes on his horsey about meth labs?
There were other hints that public access to the Dearborn river at this particular spot is discouraged by design, like the poorly maintained, heavily rutted dirt pull-off for vehicles to park, along with a very narrow, angular access point through a wooden gate to get to the actual river:
Before Tom Siebel built his ranch house on this land, all the way back in 2001, a somewhat critical article (written by Martin Kidston at IR…oh the irony!) did acknowledge the local curiosity over this billionaire’s development. I guess adding an airstrip in rural Montana was difficult to hide:
Silicon Valley mogul Tom Siebel building part-time residence on historic Dearborn Ranch.
The structure slowly taking shape off Highway 287 near the Dearborn River between Wolf Creek and Bowman’s Corner has captured the attention of passersby.
The project is that of Dearborn Ranch owner and California billionaire Tom Siebel, and its details have been kept a secret since the beginning.
“It’s a private residence and they want to keep it that way,” said Bill Muth, site supervisor with Martel Construction of Bozeman.
…
Steve Kilbreath at the county health department said the public septic records show the project is permitted for 12,000 square-feet. The septic permit was issued to Siebel on Nov. 10, 1998, for the address of 6115 US Highway 287.
“The septic is big, but the permit has expired,” said Kilbreath, saying it was unknown what the current size of the project is.
What’s more, pilots have reported seeing a runway near the home, allegedly for Siebel’s private jet, which Business Week Online said Siebel uses to commute between his California residence and the part-time Montana retreat.
Siebel, a Silicon Valley billionaire, was quoted in news stories as saying that he would keep the Dearborn Ranch as it was when he purchased it from Michael Curran in 1997.
Does it sound like Tom Siebel is a liar? Because, at the end of this lengthy excerpt, it certainly sounds like Siebel said one thing, then did another.
Hmmm.
To wrap this post up, let’s connect Tom Siebel to Jack Horner, the dinosaur guy who appears to be the ONLY Montana figure tied to Jeffrey Epstein that our local media wants to talk about. The following excerpt comes from this philanthropy-focused article under the subtitle “The Making of a Dino Prodigy”:
If discerning patterns invisible to others are why Horner isn’t still driving a truck for a living, the discernment of others has also played a role in his success. His mentors looked past his outward failures and saw Horner as Horner could see certain fossils: something remarkable that to everyone else looked common.
It was Horner’s parents who encouraged his love of learning as a boy, and drove him around to fossil-hunting expeditions. It was a Montana geology professor who, blissfully ignorant of Horner’s grades, recognized a budding intellect behind his science-fair project and encouraged him to apply for college. It was a college adviser who wrote letters of support that allowed him to keep re-enrolling each time he flunked out. It was his supervisor at Princeton who saw the scientist in the technician. It was institutions like the Museum of the Rockies, the University of Montana, Montana State University, the National Science Foundation, and the MacArthur Foundation that took the researcher who lacked any degree at all and, on the strength of his work, finally admitted him into the circle of academic legitimacy.
And all along the way, it has been philanthropists who underwrote his research even when conventional funding sources closed their doors to him. The NSF provided critical funding in Horner’s early years as head of MSU’s paleontology program, and continues to offer some support. But NSF grants are often capricious and limited to narrow projects. For unproven ideas, for iconoclastic approaches, for general support, Horner (and thousands of other scientists) relies more on philanthropists than on the science funding bureaucracies.
Philanthropy has been especially important in bringing science to the public. While Horner was building a renowned dinosaur research program in the 1980s and 1990s, the museum had no space to display even its most impressive new specimens. Enter Tom Siebel. Siebel was the founder of software firm Siebel Systems, which was acquired by Oracle in 2006. He is active in philanthropy, giving to numerous scientific, educational, and community programs, and founding the Meth Project, a public education and advertising initiative that helped cut Montana’s meth abuse by two thirds, and has expanded to seven other states (see “Lassoing Montana Meth,” May/June 2007)
When I rhetorically asked in back-to-back posts this week why Montana is a safe space for demons and Christian Zionists, the intent was to show readers how useless labels like “Democrat” and “Republican” are when looking at the Epstein Network and the geopolitics of WWIII. If there are hidden motives behind what I am saying, at least I can say one thing we can remove from the list of possible hidden motivations is making money, because there’s nothing more unprofitable than what I’m currently doing and how I’m currently doing it.
If you’d like to mitigate this extreme unprofitability, my GoFundMe page, as evidenced by a recent donation, does appear to be working, so thank you Mary!
If you were clueless about the Missoula Redevelopment Agency and its favorite tool to subsidize “affordable” housing–Tax Increment Financing–then you might get suckered into watching a documentary like “From The Ground Up“, described by the Missoulian like this:
When communities stand together, seemingly insurmountable challenges can be overcome. That’s the core message of the soon-to-debut documentary featuring Missoula’s Northside neighborhood and its tireless efforts to clean up the former White Pine Sash mill site.
The subject of countless community gatherings, City Council meetings, and local news headlines, the White Pine Sash mill site went from an active sawmill and window-and-door manufacturer to a contaminated Superfund site during its nearly 100-year stint on the Northside.
The film, “From the Ground Up: Restoring a Neighborhood, Reclaiming Its Future,” which premieres July 23 at Headwaters Confluence Center, details how community members fought to have the site restored to be fit for residential use.
Did the Northside community really FIGHT to have this site restored? Or, more likely, did the same recipients of public money, like the WGM group, simply team up with an investor, like Spark Plug Mary, to get the job done?
As I was poking around for additional context on this documentary I noticed the first comment of support on Facebook coming from a familiar name.
Who is Neva Hassanein? She’s involved with Corner Farms, an 8 acre parcel of farmable land that became a land trust…
…with a little help from some famaliar friends:
For more on the close relationships involved with gentrifying Missoula, the last name “Erbacher” got my attention because I think Jamie Erbacher is related (married?) to Patrick Erbacher, the cop who’s signature is on the collective bargaining agreement with Missoula, and the cop who I spoke with years ago about the behavior of Johnny Lee Perry before he was shot and killed by the Missoula County Sheriff’s Office.
While public money continues flowing to the WGM Group, the documentary From The Ground Up frames this “working class” Missoula neighborhood with platitudes I’m a bit skeptical of for reasons I’ll explain after the quote:
In the film, the Northside’s residents talk about coming to the neighborhood seeking a more affordable community. Many noted how important community connection is for them, being relatively isolated from the city center and sandwiched between the railroad tracks, the highway and White Pine Sash.
“Folks talking about being able to make a living on a small income and having a really great life,” Palmer said. “Knowing their neighbors, and really sort of relying on each other in the absence of a bunch of wealth that can insulate you from your problems. They were, and I think continue to be, a really connected community, and I think those kinds of things are in the fabric of Missoula’s identity.”
Collaborating with Stories for Action, a Missoula-based media nonprofit, Front Step CLT has a personal stake in the story.
For an idea of the entities funded by Fractured Atlas, of which there are 489 listed in the 990 form, here’s a sampling from the B’s:
One project that got ZERO dollars from any outside funding sources is the documentary Engen’s Missoula. For anyone involved in stepping up to the mic to say STOP subsidizing development with Tax Increment Financing, the effort by the Missoulian to suggest people WANTING to use public money are BENEFICIAL AGITATORS is more than a little galling:
Reflecting on the film, and the people who fought to have the Northside viewed as a place worth living in and building housing in, Palmer noted that it likely would not have ended in affordable housing without community efforts.
“There’s an alternate reality in which the neighbors never did anything about this, and didn’t have a collective vision for this pretty large piece of land in their neighborhood,” Palmer said.
Neighbors stayed vocal at city council meetings and in meetings with the Department of Environmental Quality, pushing for several years for answers.
Palmer noted that in the film, neighbors recalled being considered “annoying” or “agitators” for their persistence.
“I think this is a good example of the role of the agitator in a community and how it can lead to something better for everyone,” Palmer said.
Congratulations, annoyingly persistent agitators. For your persistence you made developers, like WGM Group, more money, you added more tax revenue to the Missoula Redevelopment Agency instead of the general fund, and you ensured these units will go to the aging and/or mentally ill underclass of dependents who will provide a disproportionate strain on social services and first responders, which will then lead to more bonds, fees, and emergency levees to squeeze taxpayers to cover the difference.
“It’s thrilling to welcome new homeowners in for the first time, but I think what is exciting about this project is to think about who might move in 20, 30, 50 years from now,” they said. “To know that these homes will be made available and affordable … to working neighbors of Missoula is really exciting on that front to know that this isn’t just a one-time investment for the first families who move into these homes, but that this will really maintain in perpetuity.”
Anything in this article about Tax Increment Financing? Nope. Anything about Spark Plug Mary donating money to the Montana Free Press, which is then reporting on a Spark Plug Mary project? Nope.
What an amazing local example of how narrative control works. It almost makes you want to donate YOUR money to ME, doesn’t it?
