There I was, trying to mind my own business and NOT really thinking about how gay I might be when I spotted a drunk man in his underwear losing a fight with a wooden support pole.
For a better shot of the damage to the wooden support pole, here’s a pic I took from another angle:
Considering the clip I’m about to share it’s important to know that recording the drunk man where he passed out in the tunnel was NOT my first choice, but a defense against his indignant reaction after I returned his phone.
The conversation picks up as the question of how gay I might begins, which started pretty quickly after he determined I wasn’t a cop.
I know it’s not politically correct to use “gay” in any kind of pejorative way, but when I started getting on my high-horse about working at the homeless shelter, yeah, I’m a Gen X-er who remembers how often we’d say THAT’S GAY, like calling out a dude (me) for filming a drunk man in grey underwear on a Friday afternoon as a family biked by.
On a different, but somewhat related note, the drunk man accused of raping a drunk woman in broad daylight by a popular river spot definitely doesn’t come off as gay, either in the conventional or pejorative sense, but whether or not his sexual intercourse was rape will be a matter for the court.
In the court of public opinion, though, we have a curious claim of two drunk people fucking before one of them passed out.
For a more official report, this is what the Missoulian picked out from the charging documents:
Elwood Gene Hall, 60, appeared before Judge Jason Marks Monday morning in Missoula County District Court on one count of sexual intercourse without consent and one count of tampering with evidence, both felonies.
According to charging documents, on Aug. 6, witnesses called in reports of two people having sex on the north side of the bridge. When Missoula Police Department officers responded, they found Hall with his genitals exposed performing oral sex on an unconscious woman.
Officers detained Hall and closed the bridge for an investigation. Hall at first denied having sexual intercourse with the woman, but then said it was consensual and that she initiated it.
It was with this report in mind that I decided to call 911 after this drunk man made his impairment a community safety issue.
Because, frankly, I’m REALLY getting tired of this shit.
Anyway, if YOU, dear reader, are curious about why I had AI put me in a kinda gay looking outfit inspired by the aesthetic of Twin Peaks, it’s because I finished the rewatch of all three seasons and now know what it’s all about. More on that later.
One positive thing that came from interacting briefly with law enforcement is the opportunity I had to show one of the officers the sign I was carrying. Hopefully with the added tape it’s legal for me to show, since I might have to expand my search for my lost Lego sign, considering who I suspect might be implicated.
If you’d like to donate to my multi-faceted GoFundMe ask, any amount helps. Even though I don’t have exact figures on cost, my impression is hiring PI Guys ain’t cheap.
A woman with the same name as Missoula’s Mayor brought a spike in her electric bill to local media and local media is investigating. What will local media find out?
A woman in East Helena named Andrea Davis posted a bill showing that she owed $426 for her monthly billing statement ending on Aug. 20. That was significantly higher than her July statement, which was about $138. Her August statement included $334 for electric service, $39 for natural gas service and $52 for state and local taxes.
“We called and all they said was that we must have been using our AC more than usual because it was so hot in July,” the woman wrote. “Nothing we have done has changed. And we did the exact same thing last year.”
Did local media discover anything that actually explains this spike? No, after reporting that the month of July is hot, and that this July was not hotter than last July, reporter David Erickson (and his editors) gave Northwestern Energy plenty of virtual ink to explain how electric bills work and to assure local peasants that Northwestern’s monopoly power is closely overseen by the Public Service Commission.
Do you feel better, peasants?
Black noted that electric bills are based on the amount of electricity a customer uses. Bills are issued monthly and reflect the electricity used during the billing period, which is typically about 30 days. Because billing periods often span two calendar months, a bill received in August may include electricity used for a period that includes July and August.
“NorthWestern Energy works closely with the Montana Public Service Commission to ensure our customers have access to clear information, helpful resources and support when they have questions about their bills,” she said. “Both organizations hear directly from customers when bills are higher than expected, underscoring the importance of resources for customers to understand the factors affecting their energy use and costs.”
One of the most important factors affecting energy costs in Montana is the fact Montana-generated energy is NOT just sold to Montanans, it’s sold to regional customers outside the state. Another factor is where an energy company’s actual responsibility lies, not the PR crap regurgitated by local media, like this bullshit:
“Our responsibility is to provide reliable, safe energy at affordable rates for our Montana customers and the tools, information and support they need to understand and manage their energy use,” Black said. “NorthWestern Energy employees work every day to power Montana homes, businesses and communities while helping customers make informed decisions about their energy costs.”
Um, no, the main fiduciary goal of any company is to maximize profits for shareholders, so I would argue it’s only through this consideration that things like “reliability” and “safety” are considered, since unreliable/unsafe things aren’t as profitable as reliable/safe ones.
Or maybe I’m wrong and these people really do wake up every morning with Montana customers in mind.
A year ago this Executive Team, led by Brian Bird, told Montanans that their energy costs were quite reasonable, using coffee and Big Mac meals for economic points of comparison, which brings me to a very important question:
How many Big Mac meals do YOU consume in a week, Brian?
On the witness stand earlier in the week, NorthWestern Energy CEO Brian Bird agreed with Commissioner Annie Bukacek’s perspective that the utility’s rates are reasonable in comparison to other expenses people pay.
Bird said coffee can be $5 and a Big Mac meal can be $9.99. By comparison, he said, NorthWestern Energy powers all appliances in a person’s home and supplies all of its natural gas for $6 a day.
“I think people don’t really appreciate that when we can do that as affordably as we have,” Bird said.
This cozy “witness stand” chat between Brian B. and Annie B. makes sense when you understand that Annie Bukacek was the PSC hatchet-wielder who played her WOMAN VICTIM CARD to help the Gianforte administration oust Brad Molnar.
This excerpt was published in March. Now, six months later, Montana’s Governor just appointed the Republican who couldn’t win an election for three political cycles.
I hope Kirk Bushman got Annie Bukacek some flowers.
PSC spokesperson Michael Turner said Bushman, a Republican, will be sworn into office Friday or Monday and start work on Monday.
In a news release, PSC Vice President Jennifer Fielder said she’s pleased the governor selected a commissioner with previous experience on the PSC.
“I expect he will be able to hit the ground running and tackle the heavy caseload with both grace and proficiency,” Fielder said in a statement.
In July, Gianforte suspended Molnar after an investigation into allegations of professional misconduct including sexual harassment.
Molnar is fighting the suspension in Lewis and Clark District Court. His lawyer, Matthew Monforton, said Bushman lost the last three Republican primaries for the seat — in 2016 as an incumbent, again in 2020, and in 2024 against Molnar.
“Judge (Mike) Menahan is still deciding whether the governor had any authority to suspend an elected commissioner in the first place — and still deciding whether to block any appointment to this seat,” Monforton said. “The governor didn’t wait for the judge. He decided the judge was optional.”
Republicans have the same problem as Democrats in Montana, and that problem is BOTH parties are run by public-hating elites who only go through public processes if they can benefit from them, otherwise the public can go fuck themselves.
Whether that underlying message of fucking off comes from a DEMOCRAT Mayor in Missoula, gentrifying everything possible with Tax Increment Financing, or a REPUBLICAN Governor in Helena, juicing a commission involved in the most important decision facing it about energy in a generation, the result is the same: those who will be the MOST impacted by these decisions will continue to be the least heard.
It’s not just the use of energy that the public should be tracking when it comes to the escalating fervor around “data centers”, it’s also the subsidies BIG BUSINESS claims to need in order to build-out this infrastructure. Here’s an excerpt from an article discussing the subsidy strategies being assessed for public-private data center development in Ohio:
At the local level, governments can offer tax incentives through Community Reinvestment Area agreements (CRA), Tax Increment Financing Districts (TIF) and Enterprise Zone Agreements (EZA). With communities across Ohio vying for these data center projects, the total local incentive offered throughout the state is worth potentially hundreds of millions of dollars.
In the region, projects in Jefferson Twp. (Fayette County), Piqua, Sidney, Springfield, Trenton and Wilmington have received some of these local incentives, with the beneficiaries being Amazon, Meta and smaller operators Constant Company and Crusoe Energy Systems.
It’s impossible to precisely calculate how much tax revenue these local governments are foregoing, given that the inputs (like the future assessed value of the land) will change over the course of these agreements.
However, based on current taxable real estate values reported for comparable data center campuses, the value of a local tax incentive could total hundreds of millions of dollars, and potentially even exceed $1 billion, over the course of a decades-long agreement.
Right now Missoula is doing the opposite of what other communities are doing by actually OVER-regulating anything carrying the whiff of a “data center”, something I will be equally critical of as the bureaucrat class gets their 3.8% payroll increase while scrambling to stop a local AI business from expanding to a space near the airport.
As a writer and inevitable hypocrite using AI to mock the fight against AI’s data center backbone, like the image above, I know enough about narrative control to know we’re collectively falling into a massively fallacious straw-man mentality that denies any comparison between a Democrat female Mayor, a Republican male Governor, and their shared disdain for letting the public get in the way of their plans, which I’m sure they genuinely think is for our own good.
I don’t criticize local and state processes over political parties for MY own good, quite the opposite, so if our local taxing jurisdictions haven’t sent YOU to the Food Bank yet, dear reader, then please consider donating to my new GoFundMe page. Any little bit helps.
For 20 years Missoula has been welcoming back college students at the end of summer with a downtown party called the River City Roots Festival. Here’s a fluff piece about this festival quoting some freshman college students about their new Missoula experiences:
For two University of Montana freshmen, the festival served as their first introduction to Missoula.
“It’s such a welcoming town and I love the art and everything and the community events that go on like all the time.”
The celebration also marked a first for Neveah Sims, who is originally from Wyoming.
“I haven’t been really out to these type of places, so just coming around here, seeing just like the different experiences of Missoula and stuff, and just coming downtown is really exciting for me,” she said.
I’m glad Neveah Sims didn’t get run over and killed by a drunk driver like my friend did our freshman year in college because a very drunk young man at the River City Roots Festival consumed so much alcohol that he decided to drive recklessly after punching a woman in the stomach.
This could have ended MUCH worse than it did.
On August 22, 2026, at approximately 11:05 PM, Missoula Police Department Officers were made aware of a 911 caller reporting that her parked vehicle had been struck by another vehicle on the top floor of the parking garage at 128 W. Main St. Dispatch relayed to officers that the vehicle involved was a Toyota SUV.
Officers were aware of a large amount of foot traffic due to the River City Roots Festival in the downtown area. An officer who responded to the parking garage observed the vehicle and a group of people chasing after the vehicle and yelling at it to stop. The officer activated his emergency lights to stop the vehicle.
…
The driver of the vehicle was later identified as 29-year-old David Hunter. During this time, another officer was also in the parking garage and called for witnesses to come and speak with him. A female spoke with the officer, stating she had been assaulted by Hunter. The female stated she knows Hunter personally and she positively identified him as the driver of the SUV that struck the parked vehicle. The female told the officer that Hunter had been “a lot tonight” and said that he was intoxicated.
The female said that she chased after his car and was yelling at him to stop. The female stated that Hunter exited his vehicle and she went up to him to continue to plead with him not to drive. The female said Hunter told her something similar to, “stay out of my business,” and then punched her in the stomach. Hunter then ran back to his vehicle and got inside.
While the on-scene interviews were being conducted, another officer walked to the bottom floor of the parking garage, where he heard tires squealing coming down the ramp from the second floor of the garage. The officer observed Hunter traveling in the SUV at a high rate of speed towards the exit on Ryman St. However, the vehicle did not exit, and instead turned the corner wildly to head towards the Main St. exit.
Where did David Hunter get his alcohol and who served him? Those would be the types of questions one would ask if business establishments faced consistent accountability for the damages done by their customers alcohol consumption, but a town like Missoula prioritizes BUSINESS over the health of its community, so unless David Hunter killed a cop in his drunken attempt to escape the parking garage, I doubt any other person or alcohol-serving business will be held accountable.
The cop-killing drunk I’m referencing DID trigger a criminal charge and conviction for the man who served him, which doesn’t happen too often in a drunken state like Montana, but this case highlights that it IS possible. From the link:
A bartender pleaded no contest during a hearing Wednesday to over-serving the drunken driver responsible for a crash that killed him and a Montana Highway Patrol trooper.
Nathan Hale, 31, of Woods Bay has been convicted of misdemeanor negligent endangerment, sale of alcoholic beverages during closed hours and providing alcoholic beverages to an intoxicated person for serving alcohol to Travis Vandersloot and other employees at a Bigfork bowling alley on March 23, 2009, shortly before Vandersloot crashed his vehicle into Trooper Michael Haynes’ patrol car on U.S. 93, killing them both.
Hale was tending bar that night as Vandersloot, manager Diane Pickavance, 40, and other employees gathered for drinks in the bar portion of Pick’s Bowling Center after closing.
Making money selling a substance that hurts people by contributing to lethal accidents, violence, and sexual assaults does require insurance, but that’s a cost some liquid drug dealers don’t like paying, so a few years ago a bill was introduced to the legislature to soften that financial difficulty for our liquid drug dealers:
Sen. Willis Curdy, D-Missoula, said the Senate Majority Leader’s bill on alcohol overserving liability was an “insurance bailout bill” during a heated exchange on the Senate floor on second reading Wednesday.
Senate Bill 107, proposed by Sen. Steve Fitzpatrick, R-Great Falls, would limit a bar’s civil liability in overserving alcohol to patrons. The bill passed 33-17 Wednesday and will go to a third and final reading in the Senate.
The bill would also limit permissible evidence in civil cases to exclude the overserved patron’s blood alcohol content. Fitzpatrick said this is because there is no way to know in real time what that data point is, and it’s a “judgment call.”
The bill would also limit damages, both punitive and non-economic, like emotional distress, to $250,000 per incident.
Opponents said the bill benefits insurance companies and removes established protections for patrons. Proponents said bars are strapped with high insurance costs and deserve a break.
If Americans were continuing to maintain their cultural drinking habit from generation to generation, maybe business establishments that sell booze wouldn’t feel “strapped” with high insurance costs, but Gen Z is scaring the shit out of the booze industry by NOT damaging their bodies with alcohol to the degree that previous generations did, and that’s a problem for liquid drug dealers. To adapt, here’s an article explaining how alcohol retailers are changing strategies to fit the evolving drinking habits of Gen Z:
Brands may nudge you to imbibe your next cocktail at 3 p.m. as they try to figure out Gen Z’s quirky drinking habits.
Gen Z and younger millennials are generally drinking less than older generations and, when they do drink, are doing so more intentionally, prioritizing quality, flavor, and social context over quantity. That change is pushing bars and alcohol brands to design products for daytime moments, and reshaping how the industry defines a “drinking occasion.”
Across the beverage industry, brands are reorienting their new products toward earlier social occasions — brunches, festivals, dinner reservations before sunset — rather than late-night bar crawls.
Less drinking means less money for alcohol brands, like Seagrams, and the families that profit off substance abuse, like the Bronfmans, so maybe that’s why magazines, like Time, are interested in figuring out what’s up with Gen Z.
“It is becoming clear that, for whatever reasons, today’s younger generations are just less interested in alcohol and are more likely than older generations to see it as risky for their health and to participate in periods of abstinence like Dry January,” said National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism George F. Koob in a statement.
There isn’t one clear reason for alcohol’s decline among Gen Z, but experts point to a variety of factors.
One may be changing laws, including the 1984 National Minimum Drinking Age Act, which set the age to purchase or publicly possess alcoholic beverages to 21. Prior to that, the minimum age to drink was 18.
Further down we get this:
Another contributing factor has to do with the changing socialization patterns of younger generations. “Alcohol tends to be a social drug, even for young people, so part of the decline in underage drinking could be related to less in-person socializing,” said Koob. On average, the amount of time people spent with friends in-person decreased from 30 hours a month in 2003 to 10 hours a month in 2020, according to the U.S. Surgeon General’s advisory on the epidemic of loneliness. That decline was especially marked for people aged 15 to 24.
If young people aren’t socializing as much, and they aren’t drinking as much, and some studies are suggesting they aren’t even fucking as much, then maybe it’s because our young people are VERY DEPRESSED at their relative poverty and diminished purchasing power as the out-of-control Boomers slowly lose their minds while up-sizing their empty homes.
To finish up, if alcohol is something our elected leaders appreciate and need in their own life to manage stress, then my suggestion is don’t stop now because I have a feeling things are going to be getting EVEN MORE stressful as more locals come to the realization that the political rhetoric is bullshit and the decisions on how this valley will be developed have already been made.
If you appreciate the writing of a citizen journalist who hasn’t touched a drop of booze since July 4th, 2020, then please consider donating to my new GoFundMe page. The recent donations I’ve been receiving have been VERY helpful.
William Kittredge, the writer credited with coining the phrase “Last Best Place”, describes what the poet C. K. Williams said about stories when he came to Missoula in an essay titled “The Politics of Storytelling”. Here’s the excerpt:
The poet C. K. Williams once came to Missoula and spoke of “narrative dysfunction” as a prime part of mental illness in our time. Many of us, he said, lose track of the story of ourselves, which tells us who we are supposed to be and how we are supposed to act. It doesn’t just happen to people, it happens to entire societies (for instance, in the United States during the Vietnam War). Stories are places to inhabit, inside the imagination (and places are understood in terms of stories). We all know a lot of stories and we’re in trouble when we don’t know which one is ours. Or when the one we inhabit doesn’t work anymore, and we stick with it anyway.
The story for young women in America appears pretty straightforward: there’s an ATM between your legs, ladies, so why not use it? But use it artfully, like Elle Fanning’s character in the popular Apple tv show, Margo’s Got Money Problems.
For any young woman taking society’s cues about monetizing their bodies on porn sites, like Only Fans, this Apple show literally teaches young women how to maximize the value of selling their first crotch shot, with the show’s culmination being Margo’s leg-spreading for the lens.
Is this what female empowerment is supposed to look like in 2026?
While Hollywood has been selling sex since moving pictures were a thing, it took a “conservative” influencer by the name of Savanna Cannon to give us the absurdity of reading other people’s content (commonly referred to as plagiarism, or stealing) while sitting, legs up, showing camel-toe (a slang term for tight-fabric-packaged twat).
Cannon typically records her videos leaning back in a chair while wearing yoga pants, with her legs pulled up on either side of her. It’s a pose that highlights everything a more prurient viewer might hope to see: her bare feet and—forgive me, I am only reporting the facts here—the faint outline of her genitals.
Cannon’s recumbent poses put her groin right in the center of the vertical-video frame.
“This person sits like this every time,” one Instagram commenter wrote this week. “It’s really weird.”
Cannon isn’t subtle about it. Scroll through her Instagram page and a good 80 percent of the posts are her sitting in that pose, wearing yoga pants, often pulling them up to make them fit tighter. “My videos are for straight men,” she explained.
And lest you have any lingering doubt about the audience Cannon is cultivating, it is probably settled by knowledge of Cannon’s other career: She also posts sexual photos of herself on the subscriber site OnlyFans.
If you are a victim of cootermaxxing content pushed on your X feed without consent, new efforts announced last month by “head of product”, Nikita Bier, might help change that.
X’s head of product, Nikita Bier, admitted in a post on Monday that X’s algorithm was “missing” data about surfacing posts from people who you’ve followed back. Now, he says a tweak will “boost visibility of your posts to your mutuals,” hopefully enhancing the sense of community instead of highlighting and spreading random arguments, but didn’t explain how the data went missing in the first place.
Last week, Bier also said users who post original content will “climb faster,” after admitting that top accounts on the platform have been posting “stolen” recycled content from other users, and now this tweak might address the platform’s tilt toward controversy over other kinds of discussions.
When X product managers refer to enhancing a “sense of community”, what I hear them saying is that they are tweaking the information silo people willingly sequester themselves in so that those human money-cows don’t leave for a different information silo, one where their data-udders will be milked by a different AI tech-demon. But maybe that’s just me.
Going back in time is one way I’ve been countering the insanity of our present moment, and it’s left me with a very different impression of the political chaos magician, Donald Trump, and the genetic confidence he exemplified when he so brazenly suggested in the Access Hollywood tape that, if one is powerful enough, you can vigorously pursue women by grabbing them by the pussy.
A brothel, a real estate land deal, and even a beauty pageant all play roles in a “fictional” show I’ve been re-watching recently, David Lynch’s Twin Peaks.
Set in the Pacific Northwest, I’ve come to have a new appreciation of what David Lynch and Mark Frost encoded in their seemingly quirky cult classic, emphasis on CULT, and it’s dark.
But don’t tell that to the three ladies I overheard two days ago outside a local bar talking about Missoula’s infamous pussy-slinger, Mary Gleim.
As I listened to this enlightening chat I learned that competing with men by being a whore-wrangler is pretty cool, even if you have to dynamite your competition every now and then.
Here’s a bit from the Wikipedia version of Mary’s early life and good education:
Born Minnie Winifred Gleeson on 9 February 1845 in County Tipperary, Ireland, her father, Thomas Gleeson, was reputed to be a landowning squire. Gleim received a good education in England, including in the Romance languages.
In 1869 she met John Edgar Gleim and the couple were married in Sussex, England the following year. John Gleim came from a wealthy St Louis family and enjoyed drinking and gambling. The family’s financial affairs were entrusted to Mary so John could carry on his lifestyle without worrying about the financial matters. The couple soon emigrated to America.
The couple lived in San Francisco and New York City, where Gleim was reputedly included in the “Rogues Gallery” of New York’s most wanted felons. The couple settled in St Louis where they amassed a sizeable fortune, probably from prostitution.
In 1888 the couple set out for Alaska to take advantage of the gold rush there. They were refused admission at the Canadian border twice, Gleim’s reputation proceeding her.
And here’s where Mary had to get explosive:
Gleim had a long running feud with rival C.P “Bobby” Burns. Burns once appeared as a witness against her in a dispute over property on Front Street. The pair had had numerous run-ins, and on one occasion Burns was horse whipped and dragged half a block behind a team of horses.
Bobby Burns’ house was blown up in the early hours of 12 February 1894. Although the house was levelled, Burns survived the blast. Two men were soon arrested; Patrick Mason and William Reed. Reed was subsequently released and appeared as a witness for the prosecution. Mason was put on trial in August 1894 and the details of the conspiracy to kill Burns came to light. Gleim was accused of masterminding the plot and arrested.
When I mentioned this little piece of Missoula’s history to a friend (with his own important pieces of Missoula’s history in his head), he told me the position of Mary Gleim’s headstone toward the train tracks was an intentional nod to her clientele, the male railroad workers who paid good railroad money to fuck Mary Gleim’s whores.
“Want to see it?” He asked.
“Hell yes!” I replied!
While Mary Gleim was a violent and exploitive person, according to her official history, at least her physical assault of some local priests was because she was MOURNING a dead child, not trying to celebrate a child KILLER.
Here’s more color from Mary Gleim’s very colorful official history, starting with coming to Missoula after getting denied at the Canadian border (unlike Donald Trump’s grandpa):
After failing to move to Alaska, Mary Gleim came to Missoula in 1888 with her husband, and quickly saw the potential for prostitution with the large number of railroad workers in the town. She set up brothels one after another in West Front Street and ruled them with a fist of iron, becoming the “Queen of Missoula’s Bad Lands”. By 1890 she owned eight brothels.
Commonly known as “Mother Gleim”, she was one of Missoula’s characters and eventually owned a considerable number of properties in Missoula and elsewhere. Weighing 300 lbs, Gleim, in addition to brothel-keeping, was reputed to be a smuggler of diamonds, opium, and Chinese railroad workers. Gleim appeared frequently before the county judge on various charges arising from her drunken rages, including verbal and physical assaults. She also appeared frequently in the civil court for refusal to pay contractors and to evict tenants who could not pay their rent.
In January 1892, Gleim was convicted of assaulting two priests. While drunk, she had attended church to pay respects to the “McCormick Child” who had recently died. She asked a group of priests for a candle to light in Latin. When the priests were unable to reply as they did not understand Latin, she ripped the frocks off Father J. Neale and Brother Pascal Megazzini, claiming they were not fit to wear the holy raiments. Gleim was fined $50, but because she failed to turn up for court, she forfeited her bond and was forced to pay a total of $736.30.
Retail vagina and other flesh commodities, like twink dick, are BIG BUSINESS, not empowerment, and a central-bank-destroyed economy inevitably brings me to the inevitable rise of Hitler.
I have this book in my library, and I’m interested in history, so I’ve gone through it and one particular example of what the impoverished Weimar Republic looked like while Hitler’s reign was emerging comes to mind.
Yes, it’s true, I’ve gone from William Kittredge to Adolph Hitler in one weird blog post, so, assuming readers have a basic sense of what we were told about BIG EVENTS throughout our recent history, I think it’s pretty obvious where this goes next.
Note: Gemini, unprompted, put “Two Bear Capital” on the fire truck…what does it know that we don’t?
Providing public opportunities for “meaningful participation” is one of the job requirements for being on City Council because that’s THE LAW that they must follow.
Want to use public money for a food truck court, or build a new home for fire trucks? Then be prepared to take public comment from members of the public, some of whom might not appreciate the methods of disenfranchisement deployed against undesirables, like me, who tried and failed SEVERAL TIMES last night to be virtually heard before I finally got through.
Needless to say, by the time I was finally allowed the privilege of unmuting myself, I was no longer a patient commentator ready to be super-mindful of the sensitivities of our elected officials, who struggle themselves to comply with the most basic parts of doing their fucking job, which is interacting with the public (not digging a latrine with golden shovels, which I had AI depict in the image above for therapeutic reasons).
While there are rules of decorum to adhere to, my hope is that City Council takes those rules and shoves them up their collective ass, because going forward, I think I’ll be caring about decorum about as much as the rule-benders themselves seem to care, which appears to be only when it suits them.
Take the latest act of rule-bending by the Missoula Redevelopment Agency so that a private property owner, who is currently allowing his property to be used by drug-addicted vagrants, can get $50,000 dollars in public TIF money to remove that building for a food truck court.
See how gentrification works? Missoula’s leadership enables homeless drug addicts as they degrade certain parts of town for years, catering to their “needs” while adding to downward pressure on property values in these negatively impacted areas, which then provides the justification for public money intervention and opportunities for private developers to take that public money so they can create a safe space for ethnic food trucks.
And this asshole wanting public money thinks “emulating Bozeman” is a compelling marketing pitch?
If you don’t think private developers taking public money are assholes making our community MORE expensive and LESS safe, it’s probably because you don’t understand how Urban Renewal Districts and Targeted Economic Development Districts work, financially handcuffing first responders by taking increased tax revenue and diverting it to unelected bureaucrats, like Ellen Buchanan, and if you don’t understand why this TIF shell-game is a public threat, it’s probably because local media is particularly reluctant to connect certain stories–like resignations at the Missoula Rural Fire District–to growing opposition to this shell game.
Before I get to the NBC Montana news articles from June, which omit any reasoning for Paul Finlay’s sudden departure from his position at Missoula’s Rural Fire District, let’s take a look at the warning he provided right before his resignation about TEDDs:
After this warning about subsidized development within TEDDs, Finlay was suddenly out at Missoula Rural Fire, which was reported as minimally as possible by NBC Montana:
Missoula Rural Firefighters local 2457 announced they acknowledge Chief Paul Finlay’s recent resignation.
This comes after the fire district announced Friday that Finley would retire effective June 21.
The union stated that they “look forward to working collaboratively with the district’s new leadership to advance our shared mission and continue providing exceptional service to our community.”
Around this same time NBC Montana also reported on other concerning resignations impacting first responders at Missoula’s Rural Fire District amidst weird behavior from a closed-door meeting being kept secret, even from fellow firefighters:
A room full of firefighters and members of the public gathered at a Missoula Rural Fire District Board meeting on Tuesday evening amid concerns about the departure of two assistant chiefs, and transparency concerns.
This comes after Board Chair Ben Murphy adjourned a meeting on May 12 while Secretary Dan Corti tried to open discussion to the public. Corti has since resigned.
The article continues with this:
At the forefront of concern in the latest meeting was a decision made at a closed-door executive session on May 27, where the board passed one agenda item — a separation proposal.
Firefighters repeatedly asked what was passed at that meeting, including during public comment on other agenda items.
But Murphy maintained there wasn’t a need to release that information to the public, or the firefighters.
“We have, are, and continue to follow the law regarding open meetings,” said Murphy following a 10-15 minute discussion of district transparency.
Isn’t this interesting? It’s almost like there’s a direct correlation between Urban Renewal Districts, Targeted Economic Development Districts, and local officials struggling to follow open meeting laws in order to actually ACT in a transparent manner for the public good. In this case, I’m sure it has nothing to do with the new sewer district for the Blackfoot Crossing development in Bonner.
It’s cool, I get it. Four years ago I went on KGVO and helped educate listeners of a talk radio show, hosted by Nick and Peter, about why I thought the Crisis Mill Levy was a bad idea and THIS was the electoral result:
Whether it was inflation, the stock market or a general malaise around taxes, voters in Missoula were clear on Tuesday night, saying they weren’t ready to fund any more projects or services — at least right now.
For the first time in recent memory, Missoula voters upended two funding initiatives, one being a $19 million bond to improve the county fairgrounds and the other being a levy that would have raised $5 million annually to support crisis services.
Both campaigns spent months working to drum up support but in the end, they both fell short of their goal. What happens next in the realm of crisis services will likely take center stage in the months to come.
“I wouldn’t have tackled this project if I didn’t have strong convictions about it in the first place,” said Shannon Flanagan, who spearheaded the crisis services levy. “I still feel that in our long-term solution to these things, we took the wrong step yesterday. But I certainly have to respect the results of the election. It’s a bitter pill, but we’ll move forward and pivot to different solutions.”
Did our local officials learn any lessons from this failure to convince voters to give them more money?
Yes, I think they learned that they needed to be more sneaky with how they’re operating to make deals while simultaneously escalating tactics behind the scenes to ensure members of the public, especially a citizen journalist/whistleblower like me, pay a HEAVY PRICE for mapping out that giant space between bullshit rhetoric and on-the-ground reality.
To help show readers of this humble blog (watched closely by unwell people) that I’m not the only public commenter keen on naming the names influencing the harsh housing reality for the poors while elected rubber-stampers stamp, here’s the public comment the preceded mine:
And here’s mine, which I don’t consider successful, since showing frustration is a gift to the extended prosecution team going after me and others, like Brandon Bryant, who I invoked in my comment before dropping the F-bomb and getting scolded by the Mayor:
I hope this comment is somewhat softened by the EVERYONE IS AWESOME Lego set visible in the background, which I added to my Lego world so that it could more accurately reflect the seriousness of our REAL one, where some people’s right to be heard are VERY important to our local elected officials.
Here’s a better shot:
If you would like to help me expose how local power operates, click on my new GoFundMe page and make a donation today!
Ten years ago I sounded so much more reasonable as I discussed my non-profit work at the blog of former Billings reporter, Ed Kemmick.
But read some of the 27 articles I wrote about “urban camp cleanups” since then and, well, you might understand why I’m more than a little frustrated about Missoula’s current state of affairs.
