Now that the official date of January 25th has come and gone–the date given to illegal campers under and around the Reserve Street bridge to be out from the encampment–what is actually happening?
The only thing I can determine that happened on the 25th is that gates have been installed, closing the gaps left by the Idaho company MDOT hired to put in the fencing. Nothing has been done to begin cleaning up the area “A” has called home for 3 years.
To prove that claim, here are some pics I took Friday.
Now, I haven’t spoken with “A” since January 25th, so I’m not sure if he’s been relocated yet. When I spoke with him a week ago, he was adamant that he had every right to be there. And that’s a big part of my concern.
Leaving this visible evidence of “A’s” camp sends a strong message that there’s no real plan to keep people from inhabiting this area. It makes me wonder why the dead of winter was selected to begin enforcing no camping in this area in the first place.
When I spoke with Bob Vosen of MDOT about this, he indicated that a cleanup would happen in March. In the meantime, the private security firm Rogers International will be doing “sweeps” to keep people from camping.
I’ll be going out to the camps today to see how things are going. When I was out there last week I ran into members of the Mobile Crisis Team looking for a client.
So stay tuned this week for more updates, and thanks for reading!
This post will be a quickie and is being put up late because I had to watch the Chiefs break my kids heart.
Anyway, I wanted to highlight two organizations that recently panhandled the Missoula community, then contrast those incidents of panhandling with examples of doing other money-related things.
Lets begin with my former employer, the Poverello Center. Last November the Pov needed money for the winter shelter, then MORE money to incentivize employees to actually work there.
Calling it an investment in Missoula, members of the City Council this week agreed to provide another $125,000 in financial incentives to help the emergency winter shelter recruit and retain workers.
With the added contribution, the city has now paid $436,000 to the Poverello Center to open and operate the winter shelter on Johnson Street. It represents roughly half of the shelter’s $866,000 seasonal cost.
Two months later, the Pov is buying a motel for $1.5 million.
The state’s largest homeless shelter just got larger. Missoula’s Poverello Center bought the Clark Fork Inn last December. It is about a half block east of the shelter on Broadway.
We’re told the 17 units will be used for transitional housing for veterans. The program is called Housing Montana Heroes.
The $1.5 million purchase price is paid for by taxpayer dollars. Here’s the breakdown: the national Veterans Administration provided a $1 million grant, and both the city and county committed over $800,000 of COVID-19 relief funds.
Cool! And also nice that this expansion probably won’t require additional staff and therefore additional financial incentives.
The other organization I’d like to highlight is one of my favorites, and that’s the United Way.
When United Way get grants–like the money from the housing trust fund and federal dollars from the Project Safe Neighborhood program, you’d think that would mean the Executive Director wouldn’t have to go to the media to panhandle for blankets, but that is exactly what Susan Patrick apparently had to do at the end of last year.
“Currently, the 20 individuals staying at the TSOS are really struggling to keep warm in their tents,” said United Way CEO Susan Hay Patrick. “We’re hoping that generous Missoulians may have blankets they’re not using that they would donate, or that folks would consider buying blankets for their unhoused neighbors.”
All this money and then institutions asking for more money and resources makes me wonder if generosity in this town is an inexhaustible resource.
Yesterday’s post about the progeny of two well-known (and well-financed) rich kids all grown up and aiming to build the MOST IMPORTANT crypto farm in the world omitted a fascinating article from August 15th, 1999, about ‘wild kid’ Rick Tabish and the antics in Las Vegas that left one dude dead.
Here is the article’s framing of Tabish’s ‘wild kid’ persona:
The straight-on mug shot appears ordinary enough. Rick Tabish, then 21, stares dully at the camera lens, a small sign dangling around his neck that notes the date of his arrest on a misdemeanor assault charge.
It’s in the second photo from Dec. 7, 1986, the one of Tabish in profile, that something is different. The smirk.
In those days Tabish was a regular at the Missoula County Jail, hauled into custody on numerous occasions for drinking too much, driving too fast and brawling too often. Most of the time, Tabish, the son of a wealthy Missoula businessman, got off lightly for his offenses — a chronic lack of consequences he knew how to exploit all too well, according to authorities.
“Basically, it was a case of a wild kid with more money than sense,” said Detective Rick Newlon of the Missoula County Sheriff’s Department. “With his last name, he knew he could push it.”
Now, 23 years after this article was written, a more mature Tabish is pictured on the front page of our local paper talking to the Governor of North Dakota about his crypto scheme.
Tabish is a great example of the fact that having money is its own form of public rehabilitation because money-hungry assets like a failing newspaper company will happily plaster your face in a beneficial manner to further that aroma of money.
Now, to contrast this media rehabilitation job, Gomer Kidston made a cute little reference to someone who isn’t wealthy like Rick Tabish; someone who used to show up to City Council chambers to read about the strategies of Communists.
Here’s the reference from a piece saying adios to outgoing Council critters, like Bryan Von Rocket Scientist and Julie WGM Merritt:
Through readings of the Soviet Art of Brainwashing, a pandemic and a shift in how the city addresses key issues, members of the Missoula City Council this week said their fond farewells and praised their outgoing colleagues for their service, even amid their differences.
The bold part is the mockery, directed by Gomer Kidston, toward a woman who once used her 3 minutes as she saw fit. Maybe the elites in Missoula think this is something worthy of making fun of, but I don’t.
It’s deeply ironic–considering Gomer is mentioned in the documentary Engen’s Missoula–that this woman who he ridicules called me a few weeks ago to congratulate me on such a well made film. Not only did she thank me, she also asked where she could send a donation, and this week I received her check and thank you note.
I was thinking about haves and have-nots as I walked briskly to get pizza in the wee hours of Friday night/Saturday morning. It’s 2:30am as I write this–after I conducted a $20 dollar business deal with a homeless man–but I’m getting ahead of myself.
I stopped on my way (in 14 degree weather made colder by the wind) to speak with Harley, who I interviewed two days before Christmas. I asked Harley why he was sleeping outside and he said, in cruder terms than I’ll write here, that the shelters are full of sex offenders. Then he boasted about the money he makes panhandling and even consented to me taking a pic.
Harley mentioned that he’ll be turning 72 at the end of next month. And he’s sleeping outside, in Montana, in a bone-chilling cold I can barely stand walking 4 blocks in.
But Harley is not the man I made the $20 dollar deal with.
No, that was the Native man getting ready to pass out for the night next to Harley. He perked up when Harley turned down my deal to hand out magic tickets (while supplies last) to anyone kind enough to give him money.
Here’s what the magic ticket looks like:
Yep, these are the cards I had printed for the Roxy showing that was NOT to be. My deal with the homeless man is $20 bucks to pass out these cards, one at a time, to the kind marks of his panhandling.
I think it’s a pretty good deal, and possibly a sign of creative marketing schemes to come.
The progeny of two Missoula-based names that sing the song KA-CHING have announced their intention to turn 77 acres in North Dakota into a $1.9 billion dollar crypto-mining facility.
Here is Rick Tabish, Kevin Washington and the Governor of North Dakota discussing the plan to build out this vast infrastructure near the eastern border of Montana:
Tabish is president of FX Options Inc., an organization registered in Missoula. Washington, the son of Missoula-based billionaire Dennis Washington, is the founding father of Atlas Energy.
Tabish, Washington and North Dakota Gov. Doug Burgum held a press convention on Wednesday in Williston to speak in regards to the challenge.
Washington mentioned he needs to “create the most important cryptocurrency firm on the planet with a carbon-neutral footprint.” To take action, they’ll make the most of carbon seize expertise, and Burgum has mentioned that the state has permitted a minimum of two carbon seize tasks.
Cold, northern states with low energy costs are quite attractive for building the physical engines of intangible digital coins. And the use of energy is what Missoula County focused on around this time last year when instituting permanent zoning. From the link:
Saying it consumed a “grotesque” amount of energy, Missoula County this week unanimously adopted permanent zoning that regulates where the mining of cryptocurrency can take place, and the type of energy it can use to power the process.
Citing a moral imperative to address the climate crisis, the new regulations require any cryptocurrency mining operation within the county to either purchase or develop enough new renewable energy to offset 100% of its electrical consumption.
Personally, though marginally invested in Bitcoin, I have no idea what to make of this rise of digital currencies. I can see both positive applications and also a very real possibility of technocratic enslavement.
One thing I’m fairly certain of, nothing good comes from ignoring potential problems. Digital currencies are here. What we choose to do with them is up to us.
I am double-triggered today because sidewalks AND the Reserve Street encampment are both making headlines and both issues have involved direct involvement from me in ways that give me a unique perspective that is sadly closer to reality than what you will read in local media.
Let’s start with this report about the homeless camp under and around the Reserve Street bridge. The article begins with this inaccurate depiction of why enforcement stopped:
The Missoula Police Department eased up enforcement of illegal camping in the city as Missoula’s homeless shelter was at full capacity during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Now, with the introduction of a new legal camping site near Reserve Street, Missoula Police said enforcement is back to how it was pre-pandemic, and officers are issuing citations for camping in the city.
No, the Missoula Police Department DID NOT “ease up enforcement” because of pandemic-imposed capacity limits at the Poverello Center. Enforcement strategies changed after I left my job as Homeless Outreach Coordinator and decisions were made to stop doing the cleanups I had been organizing in collaboration with the Health Department and Clark Fork Coalition.
One of the factors that has dissuaded enforcement is the lack of options for illegal campers to go. That has now changed with the opening of the official encampment by the sewage treatment plant and compost facility, so because of that trespassing will allegedly be enforced now, at least that is what police detective Ed McLean is claiming:
McLean said that when Missoula Police respond to these types of calls, officers will now encourage people to move to the camping site on Clark Fork Lane. The city and county have spent more than $1 million to open the site for service.
“Education pretty much just lies with informing them of the services that are offered for them,” McLean explained. “But we are taking a very proactive enforcement role initially on our responses to that area so that people utilize the facility as it’s planned.”
I am very interested to see what this “proactive enforcement role” is going to look like, so stay tuned.
On the sidewalk front, I was tickled to see this issue already exposing some emerging fault lines with new City Council members. Here’s an example of what I’m talking about:
Other potential flaws in the city’s current sidewalk plan also surfaced on Monday. Councilmember Mike Nugent suggested that a buyer of a new home in Missoula absorbs 100% of the cost of the sidewalk abutting their property.
But those with existing homes enjoy some public subsidies, he added.
“When we talk about the cost of housing, in new construction, the homeowner is getting passed 100% of those sidewalk fees right now,” he said. “There’s not an appetite to raise taxes to do more sidewalks.”
The emphasis is on the part where Nugent shows he’s actually aware of public sentiment and knows that there is definitely NOT an “appetite to raise taxes” amongst the battered public of Zoom Town.
Nugent wasn’t the only one concerned about the costs being imposed on homeowners. Kirsten Jordan is also interested in looking at this issue, but the attempt to send it back to committee failed. Here’s what Jordan had to say about that:
“To say right now is not the time to address policy is really short-sighted and frustrating,” said newly elected council member Kristen Jordan. “We need to find a different way to fund these things. I’m very concerned about the cost on homeowners.”
I was concerned about this program back in 2018, which is why I wrote this poem about sidewalks. Alas, City Councilperson, Gwen Jones, didn’t like my poem and my first amendment protections, so she tested my ability to express myself in verse and found out that, yes, I STILL HAVE my first amendment rights to free speech.
If you appreciate how I use my free speech, please consider donating to my GoFundMe page.
