Month: November 2019

by William Skink

Paddlehead by the drift
family fun, the branding shouts
then beg the state to grant your wish
for a sales tax to shake them down

Paddlehead new logo Moose
stupidest thing I’ve seen in years
your family fun’s no apple pie
this mountain town survives on beers

Hotel Zula, come on in
service sector jobs for all
or tech for transplants from the west
who cast a spell to enthrall

paddle my head is what I need
loving blows to set me straight
Missoula is a fantastic place
everything’s awesome, everything’s great

by William Skink

If you had told me nine years ago when I started blogging that I would be writing a post congratulating a bench of conservative city council candidates for flipping two of the six open council seats in 2019 I’d have responded that you were nuts.

Yet, here we are.

These candidates were not just running against the firm grip of Engen’s Team Gentrify, they were also running against the local media in Missoula. You can see this in the Missoula Current’s framing of Missoula’s political opposition movement as “well-funded”:

One of the more charged municipal races in recent memory came to a suspenseful close on Tuesday night, with two conservative candidates scoring a win in a well-funded and coordinated push to change the balance of the Missoula City Council.

Despite everything aligned against these candidates, Sandra Vasecka took Ward 6 and John Cantos took Ward 5.

I’m happy with these results because it’s a message to Engen and Team Gentrify that they do not have an iron clad mandate to continue enriching developers with public TIF money. And it’s a message to the alleged solution-oriented status quo that their only solution of a sales tax–whoops, I mean “tourist tax”–is actually NOT the only solution.

I have an idea, how about we dissolve the Missoula Redevelopment Agency and put millions and millions of public dollars back into the general fund? Maybe ideas like these can get some traction now that Jesse Ramos is not the lone dissenting voice, treated by local media as a high school melodrama instead of the absence of political diversity it was.

At the end of the Missoula Current article the bias is pretty clear with who the piece quotes and what she says:

Several candidates also noted a change in tone this year. A political action committee was formed to support this year’s crop of conservative candidates, which included mailers that many suggested were misleading.

Ramos also formed “Team Liberty” and took the lead in promoting his candidates, playing the role of kingmaker. The returns suggest his efforts worked.

“This was different than four years ago,” said West, noting the change in this year’s races. “The rhetoric was really charged. The money spent on this election has been unprecedented. It does the voting public a disservice.”

Jesus Christ, people, this is fucking politics. Maybe the rhetoric is getting charged because people are feeling more and more financially insecure, and therefore more pissed off when they hear about an out-of-state developer getting 16.5 million to consolidate his hold on Missoula’s music scene. And they are getting more pissed off when they are told things like homelessness in Missoula is improving.

I will once again point out–since local media will be loathed to acknowledge this–that the frustration in Missoula IS NOT JUST FROM CONSERVATIVES. There is also increasing frustration from people who identify to the left of neoliberal capitalists. And guess what, Team Gentrify, some of these people from the left and right are starting to talk to each other and discover more common ground exists than ideological opposition.

So, congratulations to Team Liberty for getting out there and bringing some much needed diversity to Missoula’s City Council. Your victory sends an important message to the Engen regime.

by William Skink

I don’t know what was wrong with the Ospreys, but for some reason the effort to rebrand Missoula’s minor league baseball team got rolling last spring and after 600 submissions Matt Ellis went with…Paddleheads?

I feel a poem may be required to properly respond to this latest offense to the cultural integrity of our rapidly changing mountain town, stay tuned…

by William Skink

I went downtown on Saturday to observe the Festival of Remembrance, the rebranded/repurposed festival that for over two decades had been known as the Festival of the Dead. Here’s some reporting from the Kaiman:

This event was formerly known as The Festival of the Dead until 2017, when the festival committee changed the event’s name and intentions. In the past there were objections raised to whether this festival was culturally appropriate. Some people believed a majority-white population taking part in an event inspired by the Mexican holiday Dia de los Muertos was insulting.

In response to this backlash, the festival’s coordinators have changed the name to The Festival of Remembrance. They have also reached out to multiple ethnic groups around the community to “embrace a higher level of inclusiveness and respect,” according to the festival’s Facebook page.

I’m not sure what attendance was like last year, but this year it was greatly diminished from previous festivals I’ve attended. I’d say attendance was less than half the usual turnout, and that’s being conservative.

Before the cultural outrage blew up in 2017, the Festival of the Dead had been going strong for 25 years. It’s sad how quickly and easily a quarter century tradition was diminished due to a few people who want to impose their sense of cultural purity on the rest of us.

I wonder if the cultural critics were in attendance during Saturday’s festival to see the impact of their cancel-culture temper tantrum. They bitched and moaned in 2017, media gave their righteous indignation a big platform, and well meaning people who invested their time and energy into putting this event on year after year were bullied and intimidated into changing the name. Is it any surprise attendance has now plummeted?

A unique event that was part of the spirit of Missoula for a quarter century is on its way out, and the “soul” in MisSOULa is a little dimmer. I hope the critics are pleased with themselves.

by William Skink

Mayor John Engen had some pretty blunt comments regarding his assessment of the permanent homeless encampment that has been established to the west and east of the Reserve Street bridge. Here is Engen explaining why nothing is going to happen out there any time soon:

“There’s not a lot to be done. The fact of the matter is we live in a place and a world where folks are down on their luck and suffering from a variety of issues, and camping is the way they live,” said Missoula Mayor John Engen.

The mayor says the solution must be deliberate and intentional, and he has hope, but for now says transients will just keep living on taxpayers’ land.

“We hope to have enough resources that folks who want to be housed can be housed. In cases where somebody’s not causing trouble — we don’t have violence, we don’t have crime — until there becomes a really pressing community public necessity for that person to move on, it’s probably going to be where they are going to be,” said Engen.

It’s hard for me to determine if Engen is being clueless, duplicitous, or some combination of both.

First, there is plenty that can be done to clean up this area–I know because I used to do it with dozens of volunteers and other organizations. When this homeless camp controversy last popped up on social media I made some comments based on my direct experiences, and was later chastised by the director of the Pov for what I said in a series of texts.

I was told the same groups I was working with are still actively helping out, so I checked that claim out and it’s unfortunately not true. I used to collaborate with the Clark Fork Coalition and the City/County Health Department, but both confirmed to me they are no longer actively collaborating to address the public health concerns of trash and human waste at the camps.

The Mayor says he wants solutions to be “deliberate and intentional”. What the hell does he mean by this? I was deliberately and intentionally removing TONS of trash with dozens of people and would have continued doing so had I not burned out in the job after 7 years because Mayor Engen and his cohorts were too busy siphoning tax dollars for art parks and event centers to care about gaps in services for drug addicts and chronic alcoholics who can’t afford expensive treatment like our Mayor can when his alcoholism warranted a direct intervention.

When Engen makes the audacious claim that there is no violence or crime happening at the camps, all I can do is shake my head and wonder if Engen is back on the bottle. Every grocery cart removed from the property of the store that owns it is technically a theft. And what about leaving trash behind on public land, is that now legal?

As for violence, I am assuming Engen is only thinking in terms of RECENT violence. During the seven years I worked at the Poverello Center (2008-20016) there were beatings, stabbings, a rape and a man who was tortured and shot in the head before being dumped in the river. But that was eons ago, right Engen? So let’s just slip those heinous acts of violence down the memory hole. I’m sure everyone is sitting around the campfire and singing kumbaya these days.

Engen prefers we wait for homeless individuals living at these camps to exhibit a “really pressing community public necessity” before any intervention happens. So, as long as people don’t stab, rape or kill each other out there, I guess the petty crimes of theft and trashing the environment is an acceptable situation, and all you naysayers just need to shut up about it already.

Well, I have never been good at shutting up, especially when I see a Mayor who envisions grand things like ZERO WASTE shrugging his hefty shoulders while claiming nothing can be done about homeless people living in squalor and taking morning shits next to the river–a river that, upstream, will soon have a 100 million dollar event center dominating the landscape.