I wasn’t planning on commenting last night at Monday’s City Council meeting approving the budget, but after Kristen Jordan’s “survival camping” bullshit, someone had bring REALITY into the conversation.
What was Kristen Jordan actually trying to accomplish last night?
From what I could tell, Jordan wanted money to study a healthier way of managing weeds in Missoula parks, and to get the estimated $150,000 dollars to accomplish this study, she proposed raiding the Urban Camping cleanup fund.
Here’s the language of her amendment, followed by a clip where the language of toxic empathy is deployed.
Jordan’s colleagues, sensing a DSA tantrum brewing, put on their kid gloves and did their gosh-darn best to see if reason could be used, like asking if Jordan had looked for any grants before trying to take money away homeless cleanup efforts. No, Jordan said, she had not.
What REALLY inspired me to comment, though, was Jordan’s final tantrum where she references “values” in a failed attempt to shame everyone else into feeling bad about ACTUALLY LISTENING to constituents when they compelled our elected leaders to get more assertive with “survival camping”.
Instead of acknowledging her colleagues were responding to the will of their constituents, who have become overwhelmed by the many dangerous aspects of enabling drug addicts at homeless encampments, Jordan frames cleaning up riverbanks and other areas used by “survival campers” as “making sure we don’t see homeless people”.
While these clips are frustrating, Jordan’s day-job with the Montana Conservation Commission makes her perspective on “survival camping” downright confounding, since this commission is worried about water quality, and urban campers aren’t known for being good stewards of the land.
What am I missing here?
The Western Montana Conservation Commission (WMCC) is a uniquely structured non-regulatory organization that works to accomplish its important mandate in a consensus-building manner, stressing education, cooperation, broad-based community involvement, partnerships with agencies and nonprofit groups, and the voluntary participation of western Montana residents. The commission represents a wide cross-section of citizens and local, state, tribal, and federal agency representatives who strive to identify Western Montana’s water quality and aquatic invasive species problems and work collectively to implement the most effective solutions.
The Western Montana Conservation Commission is administratively attached to the State of Montana Department of Natural Resources and Conservation (DNRC) and serves as a convening body to facilitate close cooperation and coordination between federal, state, provincial, tribal, and local resource managers to protect the condition of aquatic and natural resources across Western Montana.
Fun Fact: while not officially recognized in the DSM-5, Trump Derangement Syndrome can be detrimental to cognitive health, but even with those barriers in mind, California was able to determine that pooping by the water ain’t good for it.
From the link:
President Donald Trump, a self-described germophobe, has made no secret of his disgust with California’s growing homeless problem, which he has called a “disgrace” and “inappropriate” and equated to “living in hell.”
“We should all work together to clean up these hazardous waste and homeless sites before the whole city rots away,” Trump tweeted about San Francisco on Oct. 26. “Very bad and dangerous conditions, also severely impacting the Pacific Ocean and water supply.”
San Francisco officials were quick to dispute Trump’s claims. But some of California’s most prized rivers, beaches and streams are indeed contaminated with levels of fecal bacteria that exceed state limits, threatening kayakers, swimmers — and the state’s reputation as a bastion of environmental protection.
…
Fecal contamination of waterways is a widespread problem and becoming more urgent in states with large homeless populations. In Seattle, homeless people living in RVs are accused of dumping raw sewage straight into storm drains, which flows directly to local waterways. In Oregon, workers cleaning up homeless camps along the Willamette River in Eugene routinely find feces and needles.
If the state of California can admit pooping by rivers and streams is bad, why can’t Kristen Jordan? Is being a leftist THAT cognitively destructive?
Maybe we should just be done with municipal laws and the people who enforce them if enforcement means “criminalizing” the small percentage of people in this valley of 80,000 souls who leave bullet casings next to their used needles.
While we’re at it, let’s stop enforcing Federal statutes related to immigration, then, if we REALLY want to annihilate the social contract and open pandora’s box for true anarchy, let’s reconsider laws against murder, especially for postpartum women who kill their own children, because that’s apparently where we’re at as a society (the kid-killer mom has raised over $700,000 dollars, by the way).
On the immigration front, doing something performative with her municipal power appealed to Kristen Jordan a few months ago when the anti-ICE “movement” was hot, as reported by the Montana “Free” Press:
The resolution Jordan drafted affirms the council’s support of the Missoula Police Department’s policy to “the extent permitted by law, avoid committing city resources to federal immigration actions for which it has no authority,” and states the city and police department will not enter into a partnership with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, known as a 287(g) agreement.
Jordan said the biggest concern among other council members was that approving the resolution would endanger Missoula’s immigrant and refugee communities, though she said she found academic research showing benefits from such action.
“Most peer-reviewed research shows it makes communities safer when municipalities assert their stance on things,” Jordan said. “The average citizen knows what to expect from police, how they can participate or not and understand how police will handle crowds.”
This quote is particularly funny to me, since “peer-reviewed research” is mentioned in relation to municipalities making hollow declarations that “assert their stance on things”. What the fuck does that even mean?
Before I get to the type of data analysis Kristen Jordan is referring to in regards to refugees and immigrants, I’d like to remind readers that I’ve been interested in obtaining LOCAL OVERDOSE DEATH DATA for many years now, which I referenced recently on X:
Instead of doing what the conservative Discovery Institute is doing for their partisan agenda of using reality against reality-averse liberals, Kristen Jordan probably read something like this and got all tingly:
Do sanctuary policies hamper deportations of noncitizens who threaten public safety? Do sanctuary policies increase crime? These empirical questions are at the heart of a public debate. US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (“ICE”) claims that “in jurisdictions where we are not allowed to assume custody of aliens from jails, …sanctuary cities release these criminals back to the street, [increasing] the occurrence of preventable crimes” (1). The government has often formally relied on this empirical assertion, arguing that sanctuary policies “make all of us less safe because they intentionally undermine our laws and protect illegal aliens who have committed crimes” (2). Immigrants’ rights advocates, by contrast, maintain that sanctuary policies build trust between immigrant communities and the police (3, 4).
…
This report’s second finding—that sanctuary policies do not increase crime—builds on previous estimates of the effects of immigrant-friendly policies on crime rates. Martinez et al. (ref. 16, p. 9) conclude in a review that “relatively little empirical research examines the impact that local limited cooperation policies have on crime.” Wong (17) shows, in cross-section, that crime rates are lower in sanctuary jurisdictions. Amuedo-Dorantes and Arenas-Arroyo (18) find that sanctuary policies make petitions for legal status under the Violence Against Women Act more likely. O’Brien et al. (10) use a matching strategy to compare crime rates in cities with and without sanctuary policies and find little difference between them. Gingeleskie (19) defines sanctuary policies broadly and finds that such policies instituted between 1995 and 2014 in 32 cities caused about a 7% decline in property crime and had no effect on violent crime. Martinez-Schuldt and Martinez (20) find that the adoption of immigrant-friendly policies across cities between 1990 and 2010 reduced robberies (but not murders).
What’s the problem here? I’ll tell you, because I consider this my local turf, and this is the problem: if investigators and prosecutors are unreliable because politics trumps public safety, then the data being referenced can’t be trusted.
Since I was admittedly triggered when I finally got through to make my public comment, I didn’t reference the “hot shot” overdose deaths of urban campers I suspect are murders in Missoula, or the many “accidental drownings” of mostly women that I suspect are ALSO murders, or the corpse of the possible urban camper found on the Kim Williams trail last November and never officially identified by the Sheriff’s Office, but comment I did because very few members of the public were present last night as the budget bullshit got batted around before the majority pulled out their rubber stamps to pass the budget.
Emotions really can cloud rational thought, like my inaccurate assessment on the phone a few months ago with someone at the Health Department about the Buckhouse bridge encampment cleanup, privately funded by “Shoptown LLC“.
What I was wrong about was the natural reduction of water in the area, which was keeping the last trash landfill water-logged, so that this…
…could be transformed into this:
Of course, like the rest of Missoula, it only looks good if you make sure to NOT look too closely.
What’s the harm of a few batteries, some plastic, and what looks like Fentanyl-scorched tinfoil when the offenders who left behind this material are vulnerable victims of circumstance helplessly stealing bikes while abusing dangerous drugs and getting arrested, then released, to do it all again somewhere else in our “beautiful” community?
With this particular urban camp cleanup being forced onto the bottomline of a private developer, the public doesn’t get to see the price tag of what Jason Rice, representing IMEG, paid Missoula Works (who represent the Christian homeless grift), but we do get to see things like the 2024 990 form of the Missoula Economic Partnership, which lists Jason Rice as one of the players–a connection I thought I had hallucinated after going through so much of Missoula’s incestuous developer community over the weekend for yesterday’s post on the forces shaping Missoula’s future.
If you appreciate the work I’ve done over the years bringing the nitty-gritty reality of “survival” camping to your screen, then please consider donating to my new GoFundMe page because I operate on a shoestring and a prayer.
Thanks for reading!