Month: May 2021

by Travis Mateer

A few weeks ago I was downtown talking to a former homeless client when our conversation was interrupted by private security.

The female private security officer was nice enough in telling the group I was speaking to that their peer lying prone on the grass had to be NOT doing that, but it certainly wasn’t the kind of action that fostered conversation.

Enter Emily Brock to the rescue!

I hadn’t realized it at the time, but there was a problem I was experiencing, and it was a problem of culture. That’s where Brock comes in, apparently.

Emily Brock, director of the Missoula County Fairgrounds, participated in a team charged with transforming the courthouse lawn into a more welcoming place, one that goes beyond court proceedings and homeless gatherings.

Brock said many ideas are still taking shape.

Yes, now that a tropical home for bugs has broken ground, this advocate of rational development has visions of food trucks and long tables where civil dialogue will occur. Why? Because County Commissioner Josh Slotnick wants to look out his window and see more than ONE cultural “flavor”.

“We have this large chunk of public space in the middle of a very vibrant downtown that’s unused because it only has one cultural flavor to it,” he said. “What we’re hoping to do is add uses without displacing any uses to this space to make it more broadly appealing to the public.”

Yep, that nicely exposed public space that once featured large trees and nice shade is up for some directed cultural change from our enlightened braintrust. This should be entertaining.

So what’s the plan, Brock?

“Food trucks are not allowed on the street because they compete with brick and mortar businesses that have invested in downtown,” Brock said. “This whole program will be on the lawn on county property.”

Programming will also be part of the equation, including “The Longest Table” event on Thursdays. That event looks to bring “civil discourse” to the courthouse lawn.

Brock said the county has lined up some interested partners, but the details are still taking shape. It could see the public interact with the homeless individuals that often spend their days napping on the lawn.

I mean WOW. There are bodies showing up in rivers and on the lawns of businesses, and a homeless man was beaten to death in broad daylight last winter a few blocks from the Courthouse, but all that serious stuff is just a bummer when you have time to dream and other people’s money to spend.

Here’s more of Brock’s vision (and the unfunded nature of this absurdity):

“It’s a place for civil discourse to help people recognize the humanity in their adversaries,” Brock said of The Longest Table. “We want to host a lunch on Thursday with people who hold opposing views on different issues. There’s no speeches or program in that way, but what we do have are volunteers acting as hosts. It’s not a political prompt. It’s about their lives and families.”

Other programs or additions could happen in the future. The county admitted the first year would be a work in progress. It has yet to allocate the funding needed to host the events but hopes to kick the program off this year.

“We want to change the culture,” Brock said. “If we decide to do it moving forward, we can absorb it into our operations indefinitely. We’re going to learn a lot and the program is going to evolve.”

Is it possible to recall an ENTIRE local political establishment? Because this shit just seems to get more absurd by the day.

by Travis Mateer

I’ve been researching the current capacity of Missoula’s Coordinated Entry System for people who are experiencing homelessness because a well-functioning system SHOULD be a talking point for local officials who are now scrambling to explain why they’ve been so sneaky in planning ANOTHER official outdoor homeless camp like the TSOS.

The link above goes to more reporting from Madison Doner at NBC Montana about why emails obtained by citizen Mackenzie Smith indicate local officials CONSCIOUSLY used United Way and private partners to conceal planning from the public.

Here’s Missoula County’s Chief Administrative Officer deploying the phrase LIVED EXPERIENCE to try and explain away the need for subterfuge. From the first link:

In Lounsbury’s email, he stated the need to involve United Way to create a planning group outside the public and media’s eyes, so we asked him why that was said.

“What we were asking United Way, Hope Rescue Mission and the Poverello Center is to go out and work with these groups and give us lived experience knowledge that we don’t have as government employees and the commissioners don’t have as government workers, and I think that lived experience is kind of the crucial key piece, and I think if folks look at that and understand that there is a privacy interest for the folks that are sharing that information with us,” said Lounsbury.

If I’m interpreting this phrase correctly, “lived experience” is a euphemism for people experiencing homelessness, so what Lounsbury is saying is that they had to be sneaky to protect the information of homeless individuals.

This doesn’t make sense to me, especially considering the existence of Missoula’s Coordinated Entry System, which is supposed to be assessing homeless individuals and putting their data into the Homeless Management Information System.

After Lounsbury’s quote I VERY MUCH enjoyed the following juxtaposition from Doner’s article:

That reasoning isn’t in the email. Instead, he writes planning stopped two times before because of the media and public.

Once again it appears our local officials are using homeless people as shields to protect themselves from public scrutiny. They are ALSO using financial barriers, considering additional emails won’t be disclosed unless a processing fee to the tune of around $800 dollars is paid.

I know this little fact after listening to Mackenzie Smith speak in a Zoom meeting earlier this week about her research. Why so much money, you might be wondering? Well, because a Chief Administrative Officer like Chris Lounsbury is going to have to do some REDACTING in order to protect that LIVED EXPERIENCE.

In our interview, Lounsbury told us the county will share information with the public only after redacting personal information.

“I think it’s really appropriate and really important for us to bring all of that to the public so that the public can weigh in on those things, but that piece of lived experience, I think we do have a need to provide those people some degree of space,” said Lounsbury.

I am now VERY curious about why so much “lived experience” was being discussed in these email conversations planning more outdoor homeless camps.

I am also curious why Missoula’s Coordinated Entry System, which launched FOUR years ago, continues facing capacity challenges.

After making a few calls yesterday I learned that the Salvation Army, once touted as a “front door” for MCES, is currently NOT a front door because the ONE person they had trained to do the assessments, Julie, is no longer there. Someone else has been hired, but they are waiting to be trained.

Another organization once advertised as a front door no longer publicly advertises itself as such for reasons of legitimate client safety.

That leaves just the Poverello Center and 211 as front door agencies.

Of course there are A BUNCH of “partner” agencies, which you can find here (thanks Emily!). The one organization I had never heard before is apparently some Silicon valley tech thing that’s very empathetic and totally going to solve homelessness with their Outreach Grid.

Here’s a little more from their about page:

As engineers from Silicon Valley who saw the potential of technology for applications of convenience, surveillance, and everything in between, we wanted to figure out how to harness technology towards social good. We envisioned stronger cities and better access to care.

Our first problem to tackle: Make homelessness understandable, quantifiable, and combatable.

Well, shit, I guess I was all worried about nothing. If engineers from Silicon Valley are on the job, rest assured things will get better.

Because that’s what happened after the 2018 launch of the SNAPCRAP APP in San Francisco. Right?

Please note this is not The Onion:

It sounds like an episode of “Silicon Valley,” the HBO show that skewers computer programmers and their sometimes silly ideas.

A 24-year-old moves to San Francisco for a tech job, rents a room in a “hacker house” on Sixth Street, finds way too much poop on the sidewalk outside for his liking, and creates an app to report it. And, in the cherry on top of this smelly sundae, he names his creation Snapcrap.

Yes, the whole point of Sean Miller’s aptly named app is to snap a photo of crap and report it to the city for cleanup. In some cities, people whip out smartphones for selfies in front of gorgeous museums or stunning vistas. Here, we whip out our smartphones for poop pics.

I don’t have a picture of poop to conclude this post, but when I volunteered to pick up trash in April at the Reserve Street encampment I came across a plastic sack filled with rocks placed in a side channel of spring runoff.

After I took the picture (then removed the bag) I showed it to the organizer and told him no one will believe that I didn’t set this shot up because it too perfectly encapsulates my frustrations.

So here it is:

by Travis Mateer

I am so fucking tired of our elected officials. From our County Commissioners to our City Council members to our Mayor, they scheme, deceive, and when called out by desperate members of our community regarding housing, they shrug their shoulders and lament how fucking powerless they are.

Councilor Gwen Jones expressed discontent with the state Legislature, as did Engen.

“I would say the entire time I’ve been on council, we’ve been talking about affordable housing,” Jones said. “And I think there are many councilors who are beyond concerned about this and highly aware of the fact that we simply don’t have a lot of tools to address this.”

Yes, Gwen, you sure have been TALKING a lot, but what has any of that talking done to actually help people? My favorite part of Jones’ statement is when this lawyer who moved to Missoula from California tells her desperate constituents how TONE DEAF state legislators were this session:

“It’s beyond frustrating and frankly pretty tone deaf, if you ask me, of the Legislature to not give us more to work with when we’ve had this affordable housing issue continuing to be more and more serious and then have it simply blow up in front of our eyes with the pandemic,” she added.

And that’s how the article ends, with California Gwen scapegoating the pandemic and state legislators because accountability is for the plebes.

At the County level, our three Commissioners are probably hoping this amazing op-ed from Missoula citizen Mackenzie Smith doesn’t get too much traction because, if it does, there is going to be BIG TROUBLE for our scheming public officials.

Here is how the op-ed begins:

Emails released in a Freedom of Information Act request appear to show Missoula County commissioners using private partnerships to advance their projects in an effort to intentionally keep plans out of public view.

“We asked United Way to start convening to try to tackle this issue outride the public/media eye,” wrote Commissioners’ Office Chief Administrative Officer Chris Lounsbury to the three Missoula County commissioners in a March 27 email.

“We definitely want to structure this in a way to avoid media parachuting in and derailing product staff conversations,” replied District 2 Commissioner David Strohmaier.

This is just the tip of the iceberg. Smith got hundreds of emails from her FOIA public records request and it exposes a level of deceit I’m actually impressed with. This is one of the TRUE functions of the public/private partnerships we keep hearing our elected officials touting. Here’s more from the op-ed:

The commissioners’ emails regarding the TSOS are riddled with this type of language and blatant desire to conceal their actions from the public and media. And with the aid of United Way of Missoula County, it appears they are able to do it.

I strongly encourage you to read the whole piece, it’s VERY illuminating, especially the last part:

Commissioner Strohmaier points out in a November 2020 email to his colleagues, that the constituents’ time to affect change is at the ballot box. The District 2 commissioner continues, “Folks can vote me out of office in two years!”

While Missoula County voters will have to wait until next year for the chance to put Dave Strohmaier in the unemployment line, our Mayor can be sent packing in just a few months, along with several of his Team Gentrify enablers.

My goal in the next few months is to make sure voters are AS INFORMED AS POSSIBLE regarding the Gentrification Dream Team and their plans to continue transforming Missoula into a playground for wealth.

So stay tuned…

by Travis Mateer

I’d like to give a special thanks to my co-host, Tim Adams, for the fantastic perspective he brings to our conversations.

And thanks for listening!

by Travis Mateer

After last week’s clearing of the homeless encampment on the West Broadway Island, outgoing Poverello director, Amy Allison Thompson, issued a statement critical of the police action via a press release.

Why did Thompson choose a public press release to convey her criticism? This action is even MORE curious when you consider the Poverello Center has a police officer on its governing board:

When I first read Thompson’s statement last week I was confused because I figured having a cop on your board meant having a direct communication channel to law enforcement. Was Thompson’s statement just theatrics to create the IMPRESSION of criticism in order to gain some street-cred from its clientele, I wondered?

Another interpretation I’m developing is that Thompson has realized that a cozy relationship with law enforcement has more cost than benefit. This interpretation comes from a direct conversation I had with Amy about the death of Sean Stevenson. I told her some of my concerns about what happened and her response to me was that the police had told the Poverello NOTHING about the investigation and that they ONLY knew what was being reported in the media.

One potential cost of this seemingly (but not really) cozy relationship with police is that the Poverello Center may have damaged its reputation with its clients by being seen as too closely aligned with law enforcement. This could impact the difficult work of building trusting relationships with shelter-resistant individuals who are already reluctant to stay inside an emergency shelter.

If this cop criticism was just theatrics from an outgoing director to build some street-cred then I doubt Mayor Engen would have dressed down Amy Allison Thompson by making the following statement to the Missoula Current about her criticism:

Engen said he understands Thompson’s frustrations but said they should be “expressed in a collaborative way, not through a short press release.”

He said the city and its partners, including the Poverello, would continue to seek solutions to a challenge faced by cities across the country – one exacerbated by the pandemic.

“The City of Missoula, Missoula County and our partners take very seriously the plight of our residents without stable housing, but have to balance those interests with public safety, including the safety of the unhoused,” Engen said.

Clearly our Mayor for life is sensitive to this criticism, ESPECIALLY during an election year. Maybe Thompson didn’t realize she was dealing with a political narcissist, or maybe she realized a golden parachute job offering wasn’t going to materialize the way it did for Eran Pehan.

Regardless of the motivation, I’m glad Thompson is taking a more critical position against the city during her final days at the shelter. It’s amazing the freedom of expression one can experience when maintaining your job and keeping the PR lid on for your city funders is no longer a main consideration.

I’ll be talking about this and the implosion of Jacob Elder’s campaign for Mayor in this week’s episode of Zoom Town so stay tuned.

And thanks for reading.