A woman with the same name as Missoula’s Mayor brought a spike in her electric bill to local media and local media is investigating. What will local media find out?
A woman in East Helena named Andrea Davis posted a bill showing that she owed $426 for her monthly billing statement ending on Aug. 20. That was significantly higher than her July statement, which was about $138. Her August statement included $334 for electric service, $39 for natural gas service and $52 for state and local taxes.
“We called and all they said was that we must have been using our AC more than usual because it was so hot in July,” the woman wrote. “Nothing we have done has changed. And we did the exact same thing last year.”
Did local media discover anything that actually explains this spike? No, after reporting that the month of July is hot, and that this July was not hotter than last July, reporter David Erickson (and his editors) gave Northwestern Energy plenty of virtual ink to explain how electric bills work and to assure local peasants that Northwestern’s monopoly power is closely overseen by the Public Service Commission.
Do you feel better, peasants?
Black noted that electric bills are based on the amount of electricity a customer uses. Bills are issued monthly and reflect the electricity used during the billing period, which is typically about 30 days. Because billing periods often span two calendar months, a bill received in August may include electricity used for a period that includes July and August.
“NorthWestern Energy works closely with the Montana Public Service Commission to ensure our customers have access to clear information, helpful resources and support when they have questions about their bills,” she said. “Both organizations hear directly from customers when bills are higher than expected, underscoring the importance of resources for customers to understand the factors affecting their energy use and costs.”
One of the most important factors affecting energy costs in Montana is the fact Montana-generated energy is NOT just sold to Montanans, it’s sold to regional customers outside the state. Another factor is where an energy company’s actual responsibility lies, not the PR crap regurgitated by local media, like this bullshit:
“Our responsibility is to provide reliable, safe energy at affordable rates for our Montana customers and the tools, information and support they need to understand and manage their energy use,” Black said. “NorthWestern Energy employees work every day to power Montana homes, businesses and communities while helping customers make informed decisions about their energy costs.”
Um, no, the main fiduciary goal of any company is to maximize profits for shareholders, so I would argue it’s only through this consideration that things like “reliability” and “safety” are considered, since unreliable/unsafe things aren’t as profitable as reliable/safe ones.
Or maybe I’m wrong and these people really do wake up every morning with Montana customers in mind.
A year ago this Executive Team, led by Brian Bird, told Montanans that their energy costs were quite reasonable, using coffee and Big Mac meals for economic points of comparison, which brings me to a very important question:
How many Big Mac meals do YOU consume in a week, Brian?
On the witness stand earlier in the week, NorthWestern Energy CEO Brian Bird agreed with Commissioner Annie Bukacek’s perspective that the utility’s rates are reasonable in comparison to other expenses people pay.
Bird said coffee can be $5 and a Big Mac meal can be $9.99. By comparison, he said, NorthWestern Energy powers all appliances in a person’s home and supplies all of its natural gas for $6 a day.
“I think people don’t really appreciate that when we can do that as affordably as we have,” Bird said.
This cozy “witness stand” chat between Brian B. and Annie B. makes sense when you understand that Annie Bukacek was the PSC hatchet-wielder who played her WOMAN VICTIM CARD to help the Gianforte administration oust Brad Molnar.
Here’s another candidate for the PSC commenting on this “clash of personalities“.
This excerpt was published in March. Now, six months later, Montana’s Governor just appointed the Republican who couldn’t win an election for three political cycles.
I hope Kirk Bushman got Annie Bukacek some flowers.
PSC spokesperson Michael Turner said Bushman, a Republican, will be sworn into office Friday or Monday and start work on Monday.
In a news release, PSC Vice President Jennifer Fielder said she’s pleased the governor selected a commissioner with previous experience on the PSC.
“I expect he will be able to hit the ground running and tackle the heavy caseload with both grace and proficiency,” Fielder said in a statement.
In July, Gianforte suspended Molnar after an investigation into allegations of professional misconduct including sexual harassment.
Molnar is fighting the suspension in Lewis and Clark District Court. His lawyer, Matthew Monforton, said Bushman lost the last three Republican primaries for the seat — in 2016 as an incumbent, again in 2020, and in 2024 against Molnar.
“Judge (Mike) Menahan is still deciding whether the governor had any authority to suspend an elected commissioner in the first place — and still deciding whether to block any appointment to this seat,” Monforton said. “The governor didn’t wait for the judge. He decided the judge was optional.”
Republicans have the same problem as Democrats in Montana, and that problem is BOTH parties are run by public-hating elites who only go through public processes if they can benefit from them, otherwise the public can go fuck themselves.
Whether that underlying message of fucking off comes from a DEMOCRAT Mayor in Missoula, gentrifying everything possible with Tax Increment Financing, or a REPUBLICAN Governor in Helena, juicing a commission involved in the most important decision facing it about energy in a generation, the result is the same: those who will be the MOST impacted by these decisions will continue to be the least heard.
It’s not just the use of energy that the public should be tracking when it comes to the escalating fervor around “data centers”, it’s also the subsidies BIG BUSINESS claims to need in order to build-out this infrastructure. Here’s an excerpt from an article discussing the subsidy strategies being assessed for public-private data center development in Ohio:
At the local level, governments can offer tax incentives through Community Reinvestment Area agreements (CRA), Tax Increment Financing Districts (TIF) and Enterprise Zone Agreements (EZA). With communities across Ohio vying for these data center projects, the total local incentive offered throughout the state is worth potentially hundreds of millions of dollars.
In the region, projects in Jefferson Twp. (Fayette County), Piqua, Sidney, Springfield, Trenton and Wilmington have received some of these local incentives, with the beneficiaries being Amazon, Meta and smaller operators Constant Company and Crusoe Energy Systems.
It’s impossible to precisely calculate how much tax revenue these local governments are foregoing, given that the inputs (like the future assessed value of the land) will change over the course of these agreements.
However, based on current taxable real estate values reported for comparable data center campuses, the value of a local tax incentive could total hundreds of millions of dollars, and potentially even exceed $1 billion, over the course of a decades-long agreement.
Right now Missoula is doing the opposite of what other communities are doing by actually OVER-regulating anything carrying the whiff of a “data center”, something I will be equally critical of as the bureaucrat class gets their 3.8% payroll increase while scrambling to stop a local AI business from expanding to a space near the airport.
As a writer and inevitable hypocrite using AI to mock the fight against AI’s data center backbone, like the image above, I know enough about narrative control to know we’re collectively falling into a massively fallacious straw-man mentality that denies any comparison between a Democrat female Mayor, a Republican male Governor, and their shared disdain for letting the public get in the way of their plans, which I’m sure they genuinely think is for our own good.
I don’t criticize local and state processes over political parties for MY own good, quite the opposite, so if our local taxing jurisdictions haven’t sent YOU to the Food Bank yet, dear reader, then please consider donating to my new GoFundMe page. Any little bit helps.
Thanks for reading!
