by Travis Mateer
The idiots running our local government are going to have a BIG money problem soon. Why? Because, after 4 years of getting Federal ARPA handouts, the money is drying up. Here’s some more context from the Missoulian (emphasis mine):
Missoula’s local governments benefited from more than $37 million in direct federal funding from the American Rescue Plan Act, but its sundown this fall could cause budget declines at the city and county level.
The city of Missoula could face its worst budget dropoff in several years after the council allocated all ARPA funding by its fiscal year 2024 budget, including almost $1.7 million to offset its general fund last year. In total, the city received $14 million.
While homelessness has worsened over the last 4 years, the money from our Federal government was never intended to be permanent funding for this kind of need, so the decision by our local fiscal-fuckwits to fund first responder programs and homeless services has set up our city for MAJOR money problems. Here’s more from the article:
The city of Missoula spent at least $3.6 million of its remaining ARPA funds last year, funding six budget items that will need to find a new source of revenue starting this summer.
Those items include the Justice, Equity, Diversity and Inclusion (JEDI) program, the Johnson Street warming shelter, a victim witness coordinator position at its attorney’s office, the Crisis Intervention Team (CIT) and the Mobile Support Team (MST).
With such dire financial problems on the horizon, how is the Missoula Redevelopment Agency reacting? Are they acknowledging this reality by slowing down their funding of development? HA! Of course not! As our fire department turns to panhandling voters for 7 million dollars, MRA is funding studies and positioning itself to buy 10 acres so some developer can build something that might look like this:
From the link (emphasis mine):
MRA will consider spending $75,000 to complete due diligence on the property before a purchase decision is made. If so, it would represent the latest step in the city’s land-banking strategy to facilitate a range of housing types, prices and other neighborhood amenities.
This is the same part of town where MRA shoveled over $700,000 in 2023 to a fucking bank for their redevelopment plans (emphasis mine):
$23.5 million new bank and mini-plaza is coming to the Midtown area of Missoula using an innovative form of construction, and the project will get a boost from public funding.
On Wednesday the Missoula Redevelopment Agency approved spending $711,083 in Tax Increment Financing to pay for deconstruction of two existing older buildings and improvements to public streets and sidewalks around the new building. The money will also pay for adding street trees and burying an overhead utility line.
When you do the same thing over and over again, but you expect different results, that’s known as INSANITY, and this town is run by fucking crazy people who think they are the sanest, smartest people in the room. Well, I think the evidence shows THEY ARE NOT.
Everything I’ve been warning about for years is now coming true, despite my valiant efforts at raising the alarm, like putting together a 3 hour documentary on the local uprising against Tax Increment Financing that occurred at the end of 2019.
We just need to give our leaders TIME, they’ll say, for their new strategies to come to fruition, like “land banking” and subsidizing the creation of “workforce housing”. Bullshit. Do homeowners get extra time to come up with money to pay their stratospheric property taxes? Will I get extra time if I can’t afford rent next month? No, us lowly citizens don’t get extra time to solve the financial squeeze we are all experiencing, so it’s more than a little galling to be told by our leaders that their great ideas might work SOMEDAY–but, in the the meantime, we need to give them MORE MONEY. How about NO!
Instead of moving toward SANITY, our local government thinks we need to move toward building stupid shit, like a sculpture park. Why? Do “urban campers” need more surface areas to tag their fucking graffiti on?
Don’t worry, idiots like Dave Selvage will say, this sculpture park with be PRIVATELY funded. Oh yeah, Dave? Will it also be privately MAINTAINED?
The city’s Parks and Recreation Department is seeking community input on a proposal to install a privately funded sculpture walk in Silver Park.
“We believe this is a fantastic opportunity to provide accessible art for our community in a fiscally responsible way,” said the department’s systems and services manager David Selvage. “We’re eager to hear residents’ thoughts on enriching Silver Park through sculpture. Community feedback is crucial in determining if there is enough support to advance the proposal for further public discussion and city council consideration.”
I mentioned this stupid fucking project earlier this month when I explored developer entitlement in Missoula, and I made the point that once something is BUILT it must be MAINTAINED. Do our elected leaders lack the cognitive abilities to wrap their feeble minds around this concept?
A great example of building something and NOT planning for its maintenance is the library, which cost Missoula taxpayers a shit-ton of money, money we voted to spend via a 30 million dollar bond, with a cool half million thrown in when the project went over budget.
Well, I attended a library board meeting recently, hoping to pitch my dreams of creating a Lego installation, but instead I walked into what I’m calling the GREAT WATER-COLOR CLASS UPRISING of 2024.
The story of the water-color class is too long for this post, but what I learned while listening to their concerns is that a man responsible for MAINTAINING the building is being asked to focus on his job instead of moonlighting with the water-color ladies because the library is struggling mightily to maintain their $30 million dollar facility, like having to pay a private cleaning company $80,000 dollars to do cleaning in addition to the two janitors the maintenance guy oversees.
To alleviate my own frustrations over this insanity, I write poems, and I have some hilarious ones ready to go, like the poem I wrote for the Chaplain of the Missoula County Sheriff’s Office, Lowell Hochhalter, which I read yesterday at Imagination Brewery. If you want to see me read hilarious poems, I’m planning a fundraising event for Monday, April 8th, near my former employer, so stay tuned for more details.
And, as always, thanks for reading!
If I am not mistaken, Missoulians will still need to pay the emergency levy that Mayor Jordan Hess signed as an emergency proclamation last June. That might go on our property tax bills this November. Even though it will “only” be an additional 2 mills, that is still money that must be paid. And we do not know what else will be added given the city’s budget crunch.