Month: August 2020

by William Skink

Once again, the time-honored tradition of trying to solve systemic societal problems with more tax-funded studies and programs is being deployed in Missoula.

A lack of social equity, you say? Then how about a $100,000 dollar “seed” investment for the LEARN program. From the link:

The city of Missoula will consider investing $100,000 in seed funding to kick start a program intended to rid the community of what several City Council members described on Wednesday as system racism and discrimination.

The city has already stated its commitment to address racial and social equity in its three-year strategic plan. To get there, it will appoint a team that’s largely comprised of BIPOC community members to identify disparities and solutions to advance social, economic and racial justice.

In my opinion, there is absolutely NO NEED to identify disparities in Missoula. Why? Because they are very well known.

For example, incarceration rates for Native Americans in states like Montana stand in stark contrast to their relative population size.

This factual disparity means more Native Americans will have criminal records, and that fact means they have a greater chance of being DENIED HOUSING because of it.

Again, this is all very well known, as anyone who has worked in social services can tell you.

Which is why it’s so damn frustrating to see a former director of the Poverello Center, and current lead on creating the city’s housing policies, unload this two-phase bullshit PR plan that is apparently just getting started (’cause “seed” money implies more money to come).

Are you ready for this?

Phase 1:

“…we’ll honor our commitment to work with community partners to define disparities in our community and to identify the most promising solutions toward advancing social, economic and racial justice,” she said. “We’ll also conduct an internal policy analysis and equity audit to ensure operations, policy creation and decision making reflect the city of Missoula’s goals to advance racial and social equity.”

Phase 2:

“…the city will develop a pro-equity policy agenda to advance the city’s goals.”

“We will work within the city of Missoula to create an equity and social justice strategic plan that will serve as that blueprint for integrating and implementing pro equity practices in all our major functions of government,” Pehan said.

“This investment is essential and will serve as a necessary building block and catalyst for meeting our community based goals to advance social and racial justice as stated in our strategic plan.”

My recommendation to any BIPOC person considering participating in this is simple: don’t.

The city always wins these little skirmishes by attrition because maintaining pressure is tedious and monotonous and takes more time during conventional business hours than most impacted people can afford to give.

The city moves like water, slowly eroding any barriers before it. They have endless methods of “engagement” that ultimately function to sap people’s energy while creating the illusion that decision makers are actually listening to their constituents who aren’t developers or political funders (is there a difference?).

Take it from someone who has seen how this works up close. These methods are used over and over again because they work.

One of the things I have found that works to counter their schemes is increasing public awareness.

I can even point to this article where I believe my blogging efforts had a direct impact. The story behind this part of the article (my emphasis):

Vanderheiden said the department experienced several failed recruitments this fiscal year and currently has nine vacancies. They include the department’s top director, five planner positions, two inspectors and a transportation engineer.

The city thought it had the director’s position filled when it named and promoted the hiring of Josh Martin in January. However, Martin withdrew from the position before he even started.

Should be understood in the context of posts like this one.

So, before anyone jumps at the opportunity to provide the city of Missoula cover for the social disparities their policies help exacerbate, consider how the methods they offer you lures you into engaging on their terms, and then pay attention to the actual actions they take while they phase you into a neutralized non-threat to their development schemes.

by William Skink

There is a relatively new phenomenon of regular people using the internet to investigate criminal cases, often cold cases.

Known as “websleuths”, the most recent and high-profile example of this phenomenon is the incredible story of how the late Michelle McNamara’s obsessive efforts to investigate a prolific rapist/killer in California led to the capture of the Golden State Killer.

Websleuths are self-deputized audience members of the true crime genre. Other manifestations of media interest in this phenomenon include the Netflix documentary Don’t F**k With Cats: Hunting An Internet Killer and the book I’m currently reading, Gone At Midnight, by Jake Anderson.

The book is an attempt by the author to figure out what happened to Elisa Lam, a young Asian woman from Vancouver who was last seen at the creepy Cecil Hotel in LA, and later found dead and floating in a water cistern on the hotel’s roof.

The death of Elisa Lam went viral after the last images of her alive were released to the public. The video footage of Lam came from an elevator she was using in the Cecil. Her behavior in the video has led to all kinds of speculation, including paranormal possession.

While Anderson looks at all the possibilities in his book, including how Lam’s mental illness may have contributed to her behavior, he is savvy enough to wonder why the footage in the elevator was released, while other footage was not (police later admitted they had footage of Lam returning to the Cecil with two men).

One possible answer: narrative control. Get the public to focus on the titillation of supernatural possession while the more mundane questions regarding homicide go unasked.

Narrative control is incredibly important to authoritative institutions like law enforcement.

Here in Missoula there are narratives being told by those in authority about deaths that are happening in our community.

Two homeless men get into a fight and one dies. The man who dies is from out-of-state. The young man who killed him, the story goes, acted in self defense.

Case closed.

Two young men enter a bathroom to trade some black market merchandise. The kid who claimed to have meth had no meth, and instead of a trade intended theft. A struggle ensues and the wannabe thief gets stabbed four times and later dies.

The young man who killed him, the story goes, acted in self defense.

Case closed.

These simple narratives lacking critical context become tools of herd management for local power structures tasked with managing the criminal inclinations of our population. Anyone looking for justice in the county’s application of the law is making an erroneous assumption about the function of the criminal justice system.

This became apparent to me when war veteran and whistleblower Brandan Bryant was charged with felony intimidation last February. On February 4th I wrote a post posing a question that lays the joke of justice bare: If Brandon Bryant Had Killed A Homeless Person Instead Of Using Threatening Language Would He Still Be Sitting In Jail?

The questions I ask in that post are still very relevant, so I will ask them again. From the link:

Who gets justice in our community? Who gets protection? Those two questions ran through my mind as I read that Brandon Bryant was booked earlier this week on a felony count of “threats in official and political matters”.

Why is Bryant being held on a bond of $100,000? According to Deputy County Attorney, Selene Koepke, “prosecutors sought the high bail because they believed Bryant to be a threat to public safety.”

So, because Brandon Bryant used threatening language that elected officials have interpreted as being directed toward them, he is deemed “a threat to public safety” and thrown in jail.

Johnny Lee Perry, on the other hand, USED HIS HANDS TO KILL ANOTHER HUMAN BEING and he spent exactly ONE DAY IN JAIL before being released back to the streets without ANY CHARGES, felony or otherwise.

The juxtaposition of these two cases is absolutely insane. How is a man who literally killed another person with his bare hands not considered a threat to public safety while a veteran whistleblower who used threatening language is allegedly so threatening he deserves to sit in jail on $100,000 bond?

There has been no recent news regarding the legal fate of Brandon Bryant. The criminal justice system was clogged before the pandemic, so I can’t imagine how backed up it has become.

Regarding the non-public threat Johnny Lee Perry, I was downtown last week when I ran into a former client I knew from my work at the shelter. After some catching up, I asked him if he knew anything about the death at the Poverello Center.

According to this guy, Johnny Lee Perry was allowed to use Poverello services a mere month after killing Sean Stevenson in “self defense”. I have no reason to disbelieve this formerly homeless man, who once told me the accurate location of another killer in our community police failed to catch before he fled to Louisiana.

The narratives told by those in positions of power and influence are usually skewed toward protecting that power and influence.

People really need to remember that on a number of fronts as summer wanes and the anxiety of what’s ahead increases.

Stay tuned…

by William Skink

Dementia Joe picked a running mate with impressive pigment qualifications and a vagina.

It was very, very important for Democrats to pick someone with the right epidermal hue and lady parts, so this must be very exciting for supporters of Democrats who know the world will end if the orange man isn’t jettisoned with extreme prejudice from the White House.

In celebration of this amazing candidate who sticks to her guns (even if it means nearly putting an innocent man to death), here is a poem for your Saturday morning. Enjoy!

VEEP

Copmala no Impala as she
steamrolls the streets
from west coast haunts like Oakland to
Washington DC

Copmala no apola-gize for
innocent men detained
and the media will help her—do you
even know their names?

Copmala make you holla as she
signals with her skin
after Grandpa takes his long sleep
the real work begins

so dolla-up, Copmala, ‘cause
orange man on the loose
and with your tough exterior you’ll
sell a better noose

by William Skink

Yesterday the title of this KPAX article had me doing a double take: Almost zero apartments available in Missoula. From the link:

Heather Schwenk with Missoula Property Management said of the about 1,600 units it manages, only one is ready to rent.
…
Schwenk said she’s never seen anything like this in all her years in Missoula. She said usually there are about 50 or 60 units available, but the last time she checked the vacancy rate was less than 1%, around .005%.

This is insane, especially as students are returning. So what is going on here?

With around 5,000 less students looking for housing, the plummeting vacancy rate is being attributed, in part, to those dreaded out-of-staters:

The companies attribute the issue to people moving in from out of state, lack of options, and people staying in their leases for longer due to the pandemic.

Another looming factor in Missoula’s housing crunch is Cognizant’s coming move to the Old Sawmill District. This MC article from last month has Cognizant still “bullish” on investing in Missoula:

“We see tremendous growth,” Stergios told Missoula County commissioners last week. “We’re confident we’ll be able to achieve that growth. We do have some facilities construction that’s underway – yet to be announced but underway. We’re very bullish on continued growth in Missoula.”

Further in the article, after Stergios’ BULLISH declaration, the developer they are working sounds like they are already getting high on TIF supply:

“You will see homage to the grand arches of the world’s beautiful train stations, and the timeless prominence of university centers of education,” the developers said.

Did these grand plans embarrass Missoula’s TIF dealers? Was it these visions of grand arches and the timeless prominence of university centers that caused MRA to do this:

Last Monday, staff members of the Missoula Redevelopment Agency, members of the Agency’s board and Mayor John Engen told Old Sawmill District developers Ed and Leslie Wetherbee that as it stands, the city will not be spending TIF to build new public infrastructure. The money would have been used to defray the cost of constructing buildings to house tech company ATG-Cognizant.

These developer-addicts sure didn’t like hearing how their government TIF dealer was trying to cut them off, so they decided to engage in some complaining about the unexpected high cost of building out their grandiose vision:

“Just as a matter of context, we just opened bids a couple days ago on these new buildings, and I’ll share with you costs came in dramatically higher than estimated,” Wetherbee said. “That puts more burden on being able to get some assistance. I will also tell you whatever assistance will be passed on directly to our tenants. It’s a combination of a cost-sharing kind of thing.”

If these comments don’t piss you off, the Wetherbees continued their maddening lament with this:

“We are in desperate need of some help,” he said. “I can assure you the two new buildings that are being worked on right now are very much a positive addition to the core of Missoula.”

I think it’s beyond disgusting that these wealthy developers are claiming to be IN DESPERATE NEED of some help. Why? Well, let’s take a look at who Ed Wetherbee is:

Ed has 30 years of experience managing VC funds and portfolio companies; as founder, builder, president and director of entrepreneurial companies; and as a mentor to others. He is co-founder and developer of the Old Sawmill District, a 45-acre, mixed-use urban Superfund remediation and redevelopment of formerly blighted industrial land in central Missoula, Montana. He is also co-founder of the Northern Rockies Regional Center in Missoula and Zhuhai, China, sponsoring projects for low-cost mezzanine funding.

Ed is a former chairman and currently Executive-In-Residence of University of Montana entrepreneurship and LA Cleantech Incubator programs. He was a partner in a national commercial real estate acquisition and development company. For more than 20 years, until 2010, he was a principal in a seed and early-stage venture capital company operating in Colorado, New Mexico and Montana. He was president of start-up companies that developed and operated three innovative utility-scale natural gas-fired electric power projects, a national scale agribusiness company, and served several interim roles including president of a clean-tech fund effort for the World Bank. Ed is Chairman of the Northern Rockies Advisory Board for The Trust for Public Land, a director of the Missoula Symphony, and has been director/advisor and committee chair of several boards of private, public and community service organizations. He is a graduate of the University of Colorado and the University of Denver. Ed and his wife, Leslie, live in Missoula, Montana and Boulder, Colorado.

Yes, this is the same Ed Wetherbee who is DESPERATELY panhandling MRA for more TIF money while your average Missoulian is wondering how they are going to keep a roof over their head.

I was curious about this Northern Rockies Advisory Board for The Trust for Public Land, so I looked it up. The Managing Director, Arnold E. Sherman, has an interesting pedigree. From the link:

Managing Director, Arnold E. Sherman is an internationally recognized expert in new market strategies and has worked and traveled in more than 90 countries. Since 1987, Sherman has served as president of Global Development Services, Inc., an international representational and advisory firm. Sherman is the founder and former chairman of the American Center for International Leadership, the premier organization for introducing emerging leaders of the world to their counterparts, particularly in developing democracies.

The connection Wetherbee and Sherman have with China is an important one. Before Trump’s trade war with China kicked off, soliciting investment from China through the EB-5 Visa Investment program was a strategy being used by Wetherbee for the Old Sawmill District. Here is an article featured at the Sawmill District’s website discussing this investment strategy from nine years ago:

The last of the wood waste has left the Old Sawmill District site.

Now, as the once-contaminated land is prepped for building, developers are turning to China for money to get the first phase of the $200 million project off the ground.

In exchange, the Chinese investors have the opportunity for a substantial return and a fast track to U.S. citizenship.

“Starting three years ago, we recognized with the way the economy was, we were going to have to look for creative and alternative ways to finance building development in the Old Sawmill District. The opportunity came up with Arnie (Sherman) and it just seemed to make a lot of sense,” Ed Wetherbee said.

I’m sure this made lots of sense to Ed nine years ago. But today we live in a different world.

And since we live in a world where tens of millions are unemployed and uncertain how they are going to survive, venture capitalists like Ed Wetherbee should take that desperation he is supposedly experiencing and shove it where the sun don’t shine.

If Missoula taxpayers were actually informed about the kind of “desperate” people who still feel entitled to panhandle MRA for public money, there would be a political reckoning for our current leadership.

If you appreciate the insights this blog provides, don’t hesitate to share my posts on platforms like Facebook. I believe MRA denied the Wetherbees TIF money because they know more people are paying closer attention to what they are doing with our money, and that scrutiny, I believe, is having an impact on the decision making.

So let’s keep it up!

by William Skink

I was listening to an Opperman Report episode the other day featuring a retired NY detective, Michael Codella. While the episode wasn’t really about his book, titled Alphaville: 1988, Crime, Punishment, and the Battle for New York City’s Lower East Side, the topic of fighting the heroin epidemic in NYC did come up, and it got me thinking.

Back then Codella described his beat as the epicenter of heroin trafficking in the states. People would come from all over the county to get the potent smack. Codella said back then junkies were easy to visibly identify.

Opperman and Codella then briefly discussed how the drug epidemic today is nothing like the problems that emerged in the 70’s ad 80’s, especially with opiates. Instead of people getting into the drug game to make money, it’s become a more widely dispersed, less centralized network of mostly small time dealers selling enough to supply their own habit. Instead of visibly identifiable junkies, it’s soccer moms and elementary school teachers.

There are still of course huge cartels that make tons of money, but a more widely dispersed network of dealers moves law enforcement further away from catching the big fish. It then takes much more work to climb the drug dealer food chain; tough, dangerous work that, because of the changing dynamics of US drug culture, could make the risks less worth taking.

So, where am I going with all this?

I’m trying to understand how a federal initiative created by John Ashcroft under Bush, and revived by Jeff Sessions under Trump, called Project Safe Neighborhoods, is playing out on the liberal streets of Missoula.

If you believe last June’s DOJ update, there has been two years of successful statistics to report since this initiative was revived:

For the second straight year, murders, robberies and aggravated assaults in Missoula County have decreased as law enforcement continues investigating and prosecuting methamphetamine trafficking, firearms offenses and armed robberies through Project Safe Neighborhoods, announced federal, state and local prosecutors today.

Crime statistics show that in Missoula County, these violent crimes decreased by 9.2 percent in the 12-month period ending May 2020. Overall, violent crime has decreased 25.7 percent since PSN was launched in May 2018, and 85 fewer people were the victim of a violent crime than in the 12 months before PSN began.

It might be difficult, when looking at numbers, to remember we are talking about human lives here. But that is the reason I am trying to understand this federal initiative, because I’m worried that some lives taken violently from this world aren’t being counted.

My online research has not produced much in terms of non-government analysis of PSN in other parts of the country. According to this local article from Macon, Georgia, PSN has three areas of focus:

1. Community based: Meaning that each local program is altered to fit the specific crime problem in that district

2. Targeted: Where local law enforcement and community intelligence use advanced technology to identify the most violent offenders to keep unkempt areas of the community clean and free of crime

3. Comprehensive: Connects federal and local law enforcement agencies to attack the crime head-on

On the Federal side of things, U.S. Attorney Kurt Alme’s office is the point of contact for Montana’s two participating counties, Missoula and Yellowstone. I spoke briefly with Claire Howard, the Public Information Officer, but since my interest is in local statistical reporting, she wasn’t much help.

As I was poking around online I found this article stating United Way would be involved in coordination efforts:

Law enforcement agencies and more than 30 non-profit and government organizations coordinated by United Way in Missoula County is working to develop a community plan to reduce meth demand through treatment and drug prevention. The community coalition is being called “Missoula Substance Abuse Connect.”

“Meth is overwhelming our courtrooms, our jails and our hospitals, it’s devastating families and kids, and it is nurturing the next generation of criminals and addicts,”Susan Hay Patrick CEO of United Way of Missoula County said. “We can and must break this terrible cycle by providing greater access to effective treatment and prevention.”

I know Susan from my work at the shelter, so I emailed her and she was gracious enough to respond.

Since Susan wasn’t speaking to me officially as the ED of United Way, I will just say that, generally speaking, United Way is focused on prevention efforts, so she wasn’t able to illuminate much regarding the crime reduction aspect of PSN. For that, everyone I talked to directed me to the County Attorney’s office.

I emailed Chief Deputy County Attorney, Matt Jennings, well over a week ago, and have yet to get a response. I doubt I’ll get a response because Matt is a very busy guy, especially now that his boss got this new gig:

The National District Attorneys Association has named Missoula County Attorney Kirsten Pabst to its board of directors as a vice president and member of its executive committee.

“Pabst was chosen because of her leadership and long-standing commitment to criminal justice reforms and prosecutor well-being initiatives,” said NDAA President Nancy Parr. “We welcome her expertise and look forward to working with her.”

Pabst’s recent accolades stem from her acknowledgement that prosecutors (like lesser paid social workers) take on trauma as a result of the work they do, and to counter that they need intentionally facilitated methods of processing this trauma.

This became acutely apparent after the grizzly murders in Missoula where the psychotic assailants dismembered and partially dissolved the bodies of their victims in acid.

With this new national appointment further valorizing Pabst’s recent work, one has to be impressed with how she has successfully leveraged her fellow prosecutors traumatic experiences trying a brutal double homicide case into a professional stepping-stone, breathing new life into a career trajectory that could have ended after Missoula became a national focus of rape culture, thanks in large part to Kirsten Pabst’s LACK of focus on victims of rape and sexual assault.

Understanding Project Safe Neighborhoods and the players involved, like Kirsten Pabst, will continue to be a focus of my local reporting.

Thank you for reading, and stay tuned…