Month: April 2020

by William Skink

When I wrote this post about the city purchasing the Sleepy Inn motel I forgot to highlight another maddening aspect of development in Missoula, the inevitable study.

You see, the Missoula Redevelopment Agency loves directing tens of thousands of TIF bucks to study what to do with the acreage the city has been accumulating. Much of this money has been going to the Florida-based consulting firm, Dover Kohl. Engen claims that will happen again with this parcel:

The Missoula Redevelopment Agency in February funded a study to complete a preferred development scenario for the parcel. The study will receive public input this year, with proposals including housing, office space, retail and parking. The end result should enable the city to partner with a private developer to move the recommendations to construction and occupancy.

Engen said Monday he envisions a similar process playing out at the Sleepy Inn if the City Council approves the purchase using tax increment financing from the district. Public input would help craft the end result.

“The best analogy would be what we’re doing with the Payne (library) Block,” Engen said. “We’d do a public scoping process to understand city and neighborhood desire, and follow that up with a request for proposals.”

While we prepare for our NEW NORMAL, it sure looks like there’s a lot of the idiotic old normal still happening.

If you’re relatively new to this blog, I’ve written a few posts on public-funded studies, Dover Kohl, and their ties to almost Development Director, Josh Martin.

Since it looks like this consulting firm in Florida is going to continue getting paid lots of public money to reshape our community in Missoula, Montana, people in Missoula really should pay a little more attention to how this firm has rolled through past communities.

I did a little more online searching today and found a very interesting article. Apparently the community of Naples View, Florida, had such a bad experience with Dover Kohl’s urban planning in 2003 that a decade later, in 2013, when talk of another study was broached, people were immediately skeptical. Here’s a lengthy excerpt from the article:

Naples Park, consider yourself notified.

A study is under way that could lead to improved sidewalks and better ‘walkability’ in the neighborhood.

The innocuous-sounding study is raising fears, however, of a repeat of the disastrous 2003 Naples Park Community Plan, an episode that led to no improvements and bitter feelings that linger to this day.

Also known as the Dover-Kohl Plan after the consulting firm that worked on it, the 2003 plan discussed ways to enhance Naples Park. Ideas included more sidewalks, better landscaping, on-street parking and even a new street to be built between Eighth Street and U.S. 41.

The Dover-Kohl Plan was accompanied by a media blitz to get the word out, a weeklong open meeting allowing residents to express their ideas and a door-to-door campaign to pass out fliers explaining the process.

But the ambitious plan that came out of the meetings also drew criticism. Many who hadn’t participated in the early stages later claimed to have been left in the dark. They balked at the fundamental change the plan would have meant for the neighborhood and the price that Naples Park residents would have had to pay through their property taxes.

It eventually disintegrated amid squabbling, accusations and counter accusations.

Now, 10 years later, comes the Naples Park Walkable Community Study. The Collier County MPO, made up of county commissioners and City Council members from Naples, Marco Island and Everglades City, heard an update on the plan last week.

Here’s more about how the first plan devolved:

Naples Park resident Chris Carpenter is spearheading the effort to make sure there’s no repeat of 2003.

‘It was a very divisive issue. It was horrible,’ Carpenter said, recalling an instance when a proponent of the 2003 plan made an obscene gesture to opponents at a public meeting.

‘What upset people the most was the lack of communication. People felt like it was done behind their backs. I’m seeing some signs of a lack of communication this time around,’ she said.

Carpenter asked the MPO to send out a survey to all Naples Park property owners asking their opinions on sidewalks. A 2003 survey on the issue showed about 68 percent opposed them, she said. If there isn’t enough money to do a survey this time, the entire walkability study should be dropped, she said.

I was really hoping a global pandemic would maybe scale back the ambitions of our new urban planners and their old addiction to public money, but, alas, it appears they see themselves as exempt from our NEW NORMAL.

by William Skink

One of the saddest parts of our broken mental health care system is the helplessness family members often feel as they watch their loved one spin out of control.

It is not unusual for family to hear from social services that involving law enforcement is necessary because once they are in the system more can be done, sometimes on an involuntary basis.

If a person is already in the system for, let’s say, threatening to beat a prosecutor to death with a baseball bat, and they are on probation for that crime, there is supposed to be a higher level of supervision that can step in when needed.

That didn’t happen with Jared Kuntz.

Kuntz is the 38 year old man accused of going on a rampage on Mt. Sentinel, beginning with fracturing a woman’s skull, terrorizing her 13 year old son, getting naked, then attacking two hikers, both UM students. Kudos to the student who had his Buck knife, because that’s what ultimately ended the attack.

Jared’s brother, Jacob, took to Facebook to provide an extensive, detailed account of the many steps he and his mother took to alert authorities to Jared’s “deteriorating” mental health. The letter in full will be pasted below the fold.

From my experience working at the shelter, the family members I talked to who were having the most difficult time were the ones who’s mentally ill loved one was just sane enough to NOT do anything too illegal to trigger legal intervention.

That is not the case with Jared Kuntz, he was on probation, and these were some of the steps Jacob took to sound the alarm:

In the Facebook post, Jacob Kuntz listed at least three instances across roughly a month before the Mount Sentinel attacks that he tried reaching out to the Missoula Probation and Parole office to raise an alarm about his brother’s troubling behavior.

Jacob Kuntz said he contacted the Missoula Police Department and an emergency mental health provider, but was ultimately told that patients cannot be involuntarily committed, but either court-ordered or volunteer themselves for commitment.

“I communicated with my brother and offered him that I will drive to Missoula and we would go together to the ER to get him help,” Jacob Kuntz wrote. “He refused.”

According to Jacob Kuntz, Jared threatened the lives of Jacob and his parents on April 10, the same day as the alleged assaults on Mount Sentinel. At approximately 5:30 that afternoon, Jacob Kuntz began to see reports of the Mount Sentinel incident that had begun hours earlier.

“The victims on the ‘M’ trail experienced tremendous trauma and suffering from horrible acts of violence that could have been avoided had these agencies responded appropriately,” Jacob Kuntz said, citing Missoula law enforcement and emergency psychiatric care providers along with the local probation office.

Jacob claims he was told his brother could not be involuntary committed unless it was court ordered, or his brother went voluntarily.

That is absolutely not true. If it’s an emergency situation where there is imminent risk, this is what Montana Code Annotated has to say:

53-21-129. Emergency situation — petition — detention. (1) When an emergency situation exists, a peace officer may take any person who appears to have a mental disorder and to present an imminent danger of death or bodily harm to the person or to others into custody only for sufficient time to contact a professional person for emergency evaluation. If possible, a professional person should be called prior to taking the person into custody.

(2) If the professional person agrees that the person detained is a danger to the person or to others because of a mental disorder and that an emergency situation exists, then the person may be detained and treated until the next regular business day. At that time, the professional person shall release the detained person or file findings with the county attorney who, if the county attorney determines probable cause to exist, shall file the petition provided for in 53-21-121 through 53-21-126 in the county of the respondent’s residence. In either case, the professional person shall file a report with the court explaining the professional person’s actions.

If you read Jacob’s letter, which I really hope you do, you may want to do some additional risk assessment as we navigate this NEW NORMAL world where Covid can be the simple excuse for everything wrong.

I can anticipate the excuses to sound something like, oh, well, gosh, sorry, our probation officers are working remotely, because Covid. And because they work remotely our voicemail system was being upgraded and no one got the message, because Covid. And everything about the already fucked up criminal justice system is going to be even more fucked up and non-responsive now because, you guessed it, COVID!

If you think I’m exaggerating, check out how Covid-related court adjustments supposedly led to the mistaken release of the dude arrested at Target for allegedly recording a boy peeing in the restroom:

A 38-year-old man arrested on suspicion of attempted sexual abuse of a child was released from the county jail Monday due to an apparent misunderstanding between the prosecutors and a judge in Missoula.

The mishap took place as the court system navigates communication changes in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Our criminal justice system and mental health care system were bad enough before the pandemic, but if we’re already at a point where the basic function of probation and parole can’t be met, then it’s time to upgrade the leatherman I’m currently carrying on my hip to something with more stopping power.

Read Jacob’s full letter beneath the fold.
Continue reading “The Family Of Jared Kuntz Tried To Stop The Rampage On Mount Sentinel Before It Happened, But Authorities Ignored Their Warnings”

by William Skink

There is a new propaganda term worming into our brains as I sit here like a good American in lockdown. This Missoula Current article even puts the term prominently in its headline about economic experts at UM helping small businesses navigate cons like the Paycheck Protection Program.

Paul Gladen, his team of “experts”, and corporate/financial talking heads from coast are going to be saying it over and over, so get ready, America, for your NEW NORMAL!!!

I do have some questions, though, for the experts. Here they are:

Does your new normal include accountability for Big Banks?
Does your new normal include auditing the Fed?
Does your new normal make housing a human right?
Does your new normal fix drinking water with lead?
Does your new normal stop tropical corporate tax shelters?
Does your new normal stop wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Sudan…?

OR…

Is your new normal about controlling people’s movements–
Is your new normal about controlling people’s thoughts–
Is your new normal about ramping up surveillance–
Is your new normal about 5G at whatever cost–
Is your new normal about maintaining oligarch status for Bezos–
Is your new normal about getting data-mined by Zuck–

because if this is your new normal, your new normal can go get fucked.

by William Skink

The city of Missoula unveiled a new plan to shelter people without homes amidst this pandemic when it was announced the city would purchase the Sleepy Inn on West Broadway for just over a million dollars.

Critics of the state’s official indifference toward homeless people, critics like myself, should be applauding this move of a municipality stepping up, right? And using TIF money to help some of the most vulnerable in our community is what this funding tool was made for, right?

One problem I have is that over the years of watching the Engen regime I simply don’t trust that the Mayor doesn’t have something else up his sleeve, which he essentially admits to in this Missoula Current article after the word “pivot”.

Engen said the purchase would be made in full using tax increment from within the district. The property was already on the market, offering the city a chance to achieve several pressing goals, including isolated shelter during the pandemic and affordable housing down the road.

“The other moving part here is that, pre-COVID, we had been looking at opportunities for redevelopment, particularly for housing projects, and we identified this property as one of those properties that was ripe for redevelopment,” Engen said.

If approved by MRA’s board this week and the Missoula City Council next week, the purchase would close this month. The city would also acquire the right of way held by the state under the purchase agreement.

“We knew if we were able to aggregate these two properties, we’d have a good piece of land for redevelopment for truly affordable housing, most likely low-income housing,” Engen said. “Our intention is to purchase the property and operate it as a non-congregant shelter for as long as we need to during the pandemic, and then we could pivot and move into a redevelopment opportunity.”

Yeah, I’ll believe it when I see it.

The other thing about the Sleepy Inn motel, and almost all the other “cheap” motels in Missoula, is that they can be rather nasty, exploitive businesses, charging their housing-insecure customers anywhere from $200-$300 dollars a week to get bitten by bed bugs and harassed by tweakers.

Another interesting thing about these “cheap” motels in America is that half of them are owned by East Indian families, but take that from me, here’s the opening paragraph from the Smithsonian Magazine:

Stop in at a motel anywhere in the U.S., and you are likely to find an Indian-American family at the helm of it. At least half of America’s motels are owned by Indian-Americans, and 70 percent of these are owned by people from the same region of India—Gujarat, a state on the nation’s northwest coast. Since the 1940s, Indian-Americans have built a sprawling network of motels across the U.S., laying down roots and bringing in their extended families, generation after generation. The contributions of these immigrant entrepreneurs are explored in the Smithsonian Asian Pacific American Center’s new exhibition, “Beyond Bollywood: Indian Americans Shape the Nation,” which is now open at the Natural History Museum.

I don’t blame east Indian families for taking money from desperate people who can’t formally rent because of issues like bad credit, criminal history, mental health issues and addiction issues. These families chasing the American dream didn’t create a society that criminalizes poverty while protecting criminal bankers who create economy-killing ponzi schemes knowing their buddies at the Fed will always be there to bail them out, so why blame them for seeing an opportunity and working hard to achieve some degree of material comfort?

But it is ugly and exploitive, at least it was to me as I was begging certain motel managers to not kick out my clients after they spent nearly their entire disability check on “rent”.

I did a lot to form positive relationships with motel managers during my time working at the shelter. When I was doing outreach a lot of the calls that would come in would be from motel managers giving me the chance to help out BEFORE they kicked someone out of a room, and often I was able to mediate and prevent those unofficial evictions.

Motel managers put up with an incredible amount of insane shit because they are daily dealing with our societal failures with mentally ill and addicted people. Warm Springs will literally discharge someone from the state hospital directly to a motel room.

Sometimes Warm Springs would try to discharge people to the Poverello Center, which is a pretty terrible discharge plan if you ask me. I remember the shelter saying no to one person in particular because of her history the last time Warm Springs discharged her. A few days later I got a call from a motel manager about this woman, who immediately stopped taking her meds and started drinking with an old alcoholic in the next room over.

If the city can run a less exploitive “non-congregant shelter” where the Sleepy Inn currently sits, great. That will marginally improve the situation as it stands in Missoula.

But, like I said, I don’t trust Engen for one hot second, so if there’s something else brewing I’m going to do my level best to find out what it is.

If any readers know anything, or would like to drop me a line and tell me how awesome I am, my email is willskink at yahoo dot com.

Thank for reading.

by William Skink

Last August I reported on Missoula’s bridge to nowhere. This publicly-funded bridge providing river access from West Broadway, next to the Imagination Brewery, is a project I was directly involved with during my time as the Homeless Outreach Coordinator at the Poverello Center.

From conversations I have had with Morgan Valiant, the Parks and Rec. lead on this project, the city didn’t know what it was getting itself into when they got this parcel of land, and not because of any of its natural features, but because of the human problem.

I did plenty of outreach in this area after the Poverello Center opened its new center on West Broadway, so I am quite familiar with the terrain and with the hope articulated by Parks and Rec. that building a bridge would somehow encourage a different kind of use of this area.

Did I think spending a half million dollars in public money on a bridge across the street from the homeless shelter was going to somehow bring in an barrage of dog walkers to run out the meth users? Hell no. But I don’t get to direct public money to projects that any bank would laugh at funding.

So, where are we with this little patch of Missoula on Monday, April 13th, 2020? Like I suspected, the cost of the bridge was significantly more than a half million dollars. According to the Missoulian, the Missoula Redevelopment Agency spent $800,000 dollars in public money to make the situation on the island worse, and even better, there’s really nothing the police are going to do about it. From the link:

When the park was unveiled this past October, city officials billed the improved access as a deterrent to people seeking shelter there, saying an increase in activity by walkers and bird watchers would make it a less attractive place for people to camp.

But the opposite appears to be true, and the evidence is building up, with at least five camps cobbled together from litter, tarps and driftwood scattered across the island, in addition to a smattering of campfire rings littered with cans and cigarette butts.

Come on, birdwatchers! Get a little more gumption about your passion, even if you might accidentally stumble onto someone’s makeshift shelter.

Bird watchers and dog walkers are not going to be emboldened to visit this part of Missoula. There were a few situations that even I had to retreat from, one involving a man with a machete (he was old and drunk and I knew him well enough to know he wasn’t a threat).

Getting back to the article, here’s the part where the taxpayer foots the bill because the police don’t know what to do about this problem:

The improvements to the island, which totaled about $800,000, were funded by the Missoula Redevelopment Agency, through tax increment financing in the area’s urban renewal district, which is funded by collecting a portion of the property taxes within the district.

While unveiling the improvements, MRA assistant director Chris Behan said the Missoula Police Department was instrumental in advocating for the work, saying former Chief Mike Brady had said police couldn’t singlehandedly stop the island from being used as a camp for homeless people, and that the improvements would help.

First, before we continue, who got the bid for this $500,000 $800,000 project? And why did it cost $300,000 more than expected? These might be pertinent details to include, considering everyone advocating for this expenditure of public funds was wrong about its proclaimed impact, and the island is now “overrun”.

Now, here’s our local PD using a lot of words that ultimately leads one to assume a continued hands-off approach, because if they push people out by the river, then they might become a bigger problems in neighborhoods:

Police spokesperson Sgt. Travis Welsh said that while law enforcement had an amount of responsibility for maintaining the park through enforcing anti-littering and anti-camping ordinances, police were weighing many different factors in how to deal with the current situation.

With COVID-19 forcing people to avoid crowded spaces, Welsh said he expected people who might typically seek shelter at the Poverello Center are instead choosing to camp.

“We are not without compassion and realize people are struggling and trying to follow directives of the governor and the CDC (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention), and they’re trying to stay healthy,” Welsh said. “People are trying to practice social distancing, and that includes the homeless. So we’re trying to balance those things. We want our parks to be places where anybody can go and enjoy them, but if you tell people they can’t sleep there, they’re going to sleep someplace else. It’s not that we are going to allow anyone to sleep there, but it’s one of the things we weigh when we approach the situation.”

In the pre-pandemic world, before a simultaneous health and economic crisis hit us, hundreds of thousands of dollars in public money could be casually thrown around to unnamed developers for doomed-to-fail projects like Missoula’s bridge to nowhere.

In a post-pandemic world experiencing an economic depression, federal bribes won’t be enough to keep the beleaguered public from experiencing the brunt of the economic pain that’s coming.

I hope those who come up with creative ways to fail with public money remember that as they use Covid-19 as a convenient excuse for why no-go zones now exist in Missoula.