Day: May 21, 2023

by Travis Mateer

While it might be the SMART thing to simply NOT attend tomorrow’s City Council meeting, and risk ruffling more feathers, it appears I may HAVE TO attend in order to correct the minutes from last week’s meeting. Why? Because the minutes, like Martin Kidston’s reporting, do not reflect reality. Here’s a screenshot with my emphasis added so you can see what I’m talking about:

Did I say this? No, I did not. This inaccurately recorded comment actually came from a different frustrated citizen, Kevin Hunt. Here is a portion of Hunt’s comment on the post I wrote to correct Kidston’s inaccurate record:

Where does MY frustration come from? Lots of places, like stumbling across the active death scene of Glen Harley Stephens on Saturday at 5:30pm in downtown Missoula, right in front of the doors our County Commissioners enter and exit to access their offices.

This was the scene yesterday from my vantage point to the right of these doors, closer to the Missoula County Courthouse:

For more context on where Harley passed away yesterday, here’s the shot across the street from the doors Harley died in front of. This is the building where City Council and the Missoula Redevelopment Agency do their business:

I’ll go deeper into my frustration by citing the barrage of “reporting” the Missoulian has been doing under the series title NO WHERE TO GO! Here’s the most recent narrative control effort from our “local” media. After Mayoral candidate, Andrea Davis, gets some ink to promote the Trinity housing project, we get some more NO MONEY complaining from our placeholder Mayor, Jordan Hess. From the link (emphasis mine):

At a press conference in April to discuss the rise in urban camping and the city’s response, Mayor Jordan Hess said the city currently doesn’t have enough money to fund all the services that are necessary to alleviate homelessness.

“What I can say is that we have a structural funding problem in the city of Missoula,” he said. “This is a structural revenue issue, where our property taxes are capped at the state level at one half the rate of inflation.”

There are simply things that won’t get funded, he said, and that will “have an impact on our community that people will see, and it will have an impact in the community that is outside the values of our community as well.”

When asked if there have been discussions about the prospects of putting an affordable housing bond on the ballot at some point in the future, Hess said it’s a possibility.

“I think that some sort of voter-approved solution is going to be necessary at this point,” he said.

He noted that a proposed Crisis Services Levy, which was voted down last November, was favored by a majority of city residents, even though the measure failed in the county overall.

“And so I think it remains a priority of city of Missoula residents,” Hess said. “What we will do is, we’ll work within the constraints that we have on the short term. And like I said, in the medium- and long-term, we need solutions at all levels of government. We need funding from the state, we need funding and assistance from the federal government and will likely need some funding at the local level.”

What is going on here? A city that fought like hell to preserve its TIF slush fund is bitching about a property tax cap and threatening the remaining Missoulians who haven’t been forced out of this valley with a affordable housing bond. How many ways can we say FUCK NO? But it obviously doesn’t matter what the voters say, because Hess and his cabal are so fucking deluded, he can actually say A MAJORITY OF CITY RESIDENTS FAVORED THE LEVY. Huh? I mean, I don’t even know what to say, and speechlessness is not a thing that happens to me too often.

It’s not just exhausting LIVING in Double-Standard Town, it can even be difficult to THINK clearly in this updside down place I thought I knew after 23 years.

For example, instead of being able to reflect on Harley’s death this morning, and the kindness of someone placing purple flowers in a vase near where he died (look at the picture), I had to deal with a panhandler who HAS housing and HAS disability income, but she pesters people for money anyway to fund unhealthy habits.

Here’s what Lorenna acts like when she is told to stop bugging people trying to get money out of a downtown ATM machine. I started recording because Lorenna was following me, screaming, and the camera is a surprisingly effective deterrent to this kind of behavior (I’ve seen a downtown business owner use this method before). Also, I’d apologize to the biker for getting his face in the shot, but he shouldn’t be biking on the sidewalk in the first place.

One more thing: giving someone like Lorenna money can actually COMPROMISE her housing, which she is currently in, thankfully. The guy she was pestering at the ATM understood this, which is why he thanked me and identified giving her money as “enabling”.

https://vimeo.com/828806843?share=copy

Getting back to the question posed in the title of this post, I don’t know what’s going to happen at the City Council meeting on Monday. I’ll spend the rest of the day trying to find some clarity about how to proceed. Comments are welcome!

Also welcome, funding! So if every penny hasn’t been gobbled by inflation, the main ways to support my work is through Travis’ Impact Fund (TIF), or making a donation at my about page. My TIF fund just got a $25 dollar anonymous donation. Thank you!

And thanks for reading!

by Travis Mateer

This week’s review is a solo effort that took two sessions to finish, and Saturday’s session was recorded AFTER I saw Glen Harley Stephens die on the sidewalk right in front of the doors that lead to the offices of our County Commissioners.

Here’s an image I took before the sheet went on and before the 4-5 Sheriff Deputies showed up to process his corpse:

When you listen to my podcast episode, you will hear the conversation I had with Harley two days before Christmas, 2021. This is MUCH MORE context than what you’ll get at the Missoula Current–an alleged news organization that used Harley’s image in an article earlier this month:

Since the grapevine can be as accurate as Martin Kidston’s reporting, I took it upon myself to share what happened with a few people and entities that would help confirm the identity, like a pawn shop contact I have, and The Ox. It was at The Ox I learned Harley’s beard may have earned him a Santa-related nickname.

Harley is a part of an old generation of homeless characters I knew well, and will miss. I suspect the cost of responding to him, if it could be calculated, is IMMENSE in first responder dollars alone. Harley also caused thousands of dollars in damage to the building that houses the Badlander downtown when he ripped apart nice metal gratings that had been put in place to keep riffraff from sitting on brick window sills. I also once had a conversation with Judge Kathleen Jenks about Harley because his 80+ charges in her court, and inability to address his behavior, greatly confounded her.

My last conversation with Harley actually included talk about housing, which he said he was coming up on the list for. He also acknowledged something else I heard from a private security guard, who had taken an interest in his situation and making it better, and that was the fact Harley was regularly getting robbed. I asked Harley how many times and how much he thought had been taken, since his prolific ability to panhandle money is well known. He said he had been robbed about a dozen times for probably about a thousand dollars.

This makes me sad, and I wasn’t in the greatest of places before coming across Harley’s final moments in this fucking town. I’ll be following up on this story if more develops, especially if I’m able to find any family, who I think are in Idaho.

If you value my work, Travis’ Impact Fund (TIF) is one way to help keep it going, or you can make a donation at my about page.

Thank you for reading/listening.