Today’s post is about MORE than just numbers, it’s about a bathing suit called REMITTANCE that’s intended, as a funding “tool”, to provide cover for the body politic. Here’s how they do it.
First, it’s VERY important to conduct government business about the budget when the LEAST likely amount of people are paying attention, which is why I suspect Missoula officials use what I’ll call the “middle” strategy, scheduling the first opportunity to see the Mayor’s budget in the middle of the day, and in the middle of the week, and in the middle of summer.
For those who didn’t know about the mid-week committee hearing, here’s the breakdown in three graphs of where the 3.8% tax increase will be going:
Do you see the sleight-of-hand at work in the last two graphs? If not, let me try to explain what I think is going on here.
The second graph claims to be the parts of the budget that appear on your tax bill, while the third one claims to include ALL expenditures, with the additional $70 million coming from entities “with their own revenue”. Since the Missoula Redevelopment Agency (MRA) is NOT included in the second graph, that leads me to believe MRA is one of the entities, like the Parking Commission, that is said to have its “own revenue”.
Ok, but does it?
While this might be seen as quibbling over a definition, my perspective of MRA is that it legally STEALS money from the General Fund through Urban Renewal Districts and, unlike parking violators paying tickets, Missoula taxpayers in those districts DO NOT GET A CHOICE about it the way a car commuter can choose not to park where they might get ticketed.
The REAL fun, though, comes when you try to understand how the remittance strategy from MRA intends to cover the bloated body politic with a skimpy bathing suit that STILL lets taxpayers see how fat and disgusting our local government has become. Thankfully, for our elected braintrust, local media is more than willing to help out with misleading headlines downplaying the 3.8% tax increase:
Isn’t this an amazing example of local media manipulation? Instead of acknowledging reality, which is that the budget DID CHANGE by increasing, this KPAX reporter seems to be suggesting that a 3.8% tax increase is not a notable change to the city’s budget.
Further down in this manipulative article about the city budget we get this:
To balance the budget this year, a one-time remittance of $2.5 million from the Missoula Redevelopment Agency will be given to the city.
To simplify, a remittance is essentially a transfer of funds between different government entities.
How many times can a “one-time” funding tool be used before local media stops calling it a “one-time” remittance tool? By my count, this 2024 article about using MRA money to balance the budget makes it sound like Missoula has been using this MRA remittance strategy to balance the budget since 2022 (or the same year Engen’s Missoula came out criticizing Tax Increment Financing).
Hmmm.
In each of the past two budgeting cycles, the city has faced what it has described as a revenue shortfall. To fill the gap between existing taxes and the desired level of service, it has asked MRA to fill the gap by providing a tax remittance.
To do so, Buchanan said the agency has tried to distribute the remittance as equally as possible across its urban renewal districts. It also considered a district’s capacity to surrender funding, and any pending or potential project that might emerge in 2025.
To cover the city’s needs, MRA took a $1 million remittance from URD II and a $3.5 million remittance from URD III, or the Midtown area. Buchanan said that providing the remittance from the more active districts doesn’t currently place any projects in jeopardy – yet.
“Running government on the back of urban renewal districts isn’t sustainable,” said Buchanan. “But we’re fortunate as a city to have this tool available so we can provide the level of service we need to provide. Thank goodness we’re here. I don’t think anything will be jeopardized by this.”
“Thank goodness we’re here“, Ellen Buchanan says? Does she not know that Missoula taxpayers WOULDN’T BE HERE if their tax money wasn’t being siphoned off by her shadow government to run the kind of political slush fund that any mafia organization would be jealous of?
Of course she knows, just like Mayor Davis knows–that’s why Mayor Davis sounds so full of shit in one of the three clips I curated from last Wednesday’s committee hearing. Here’s the first one:
The second clip features a point made by Stacie “A Better Big Sky” Anderson about how Missoula fucks over schools with their remittance scheme tool:
While I consider Stacie to be one of the more toxic characters on Council, she makes a very important point here about the three-way bribe flowing from MRA to the city, the county, and Missoula’s school district, because the SCHOOL DISTRICT portion doesn’t even go to the schools, it goes to the STATE of Montana, since it’s STATE law that delineates how school districts around the state are funded, and understanding THAT process is even more confusing than unpacking the WHITE KNIGHT (Ellen Buchanan) riding in to save the day on her TROJAN horse (MRA).
Did anyone from the public register concern at this committee hearing in the middle of the day/middle of the week/middle of the summer? Yes, of the 78,903 people who are estimated to live within the city limits of Missoula, one person did make a comment, which included an invitation to attend a more dynamic meeting open to the public:
While commenting on city politics is fun and all, my Wednesday last week was dominated by court and trying to understand how there could be “rumblings” that I’ve been sighted in places downtown that I’m forbidden to be, considering pre-trial supervision knows EXACTLY WHERE I AM at every moment of every day, per my ankle-monitor.
This is important to consider because the PUBLIC MONEY at the County level includes the cost of operating the jail and other parts of “justice” system, which pays a County Attorney, like Mac Bloom, to pass along provably inaccurate hearsay at an omnibus court hearing.
I didn’t specify anything about the process I’m going through in my public comment to the County Commissioners. Instead I reminded the Commissioners about what the Sheriff’s Office did three years ago when they collectively sued the County to get more money for payroll.
For more context on that shakedown, you can read this post, titled “Mineral County Is At War With Itself, Assisted By A Law Firm Specializing In Money Shakedown Schemes For Badges Across Western Montana“. If you read that post you’ll better appreciate why I said what I said here:
I’m not bringing up the “parity pay” lawsuit simply because it’s budget season and the timing is right. I’m bringing up the lawsuit, enacted by the Reep, Bell and Jasper law office, because my sources tell me that the JASPER part of that law firm, Lance, is out.
If Lance Jasper fell off the wagon, like I’ve been told, and if he was forced out of his law firm over missing money, which is what the rumor mill thinks, then I think the timing of traveling down parity pay memory lane is perfect, since it leads to Mineral County, where David Barsotti supposedly died sometime last month.
Hmmm.
Anyway, if you appreciate the freedom I seem to have to expose local power dynamics, now is a good time to remind readers that FREEDOM ISN’T FREE, so donate (if you can) to my new GoFundMe page. Any little bit helps.
Thanks for reading!