CHOTEAU — A fire damaged part of the Choteau Acantha’s building between 2 and 4 a.m. Tuesday. No one was injured. The blaze nearly destroyed one of the building’s three rooms and severely damaged items in adjacent rooms.

Officials have not yet determined the cause of the fire at the newspaper’s office. The Teton County Sheriff’s Office and Teton County Fire & Rescue  declined to comment Tuesday on the ongoing investigation.

The Choteau Acantha is a weekly publication that serves Choteau and the surrounding communities. Owners Melody and Jeff Martinsen purchased the paper in 1990. In their roughly 35-year tenure, they have not missed publishing an edition.

The Martinsens said they will still deliver the weekly newspaper Wednesday morning. The Choteau Acantha staff sent this week’s edition to be printed in Bozeman on Monday night. On Tuesday, a representative of the newspaper picked the print editions up from Conrad. The Martinsens spent Tuesday morning picking ceiling tiling off their label maker, labeling the newspapers with delivery addresses and then dropping off the copies at the post office for distribution.

“We have no intention of letting this stop the 131st year of continuous publication of the Choteau Acantha,” Melody Martinsen said in an interview Tuesday. “We pick up the pieces and we keep going on.”

The blaze was first reported by Caine Gray, a bartender working roughly a block away from the Acantha building at the Choteau American Legion.  Gray noticed thick smoke in the street when he left work around 2:20 a.m.

“The way this was concentrated, I knew something wasn’t right,” Gray said. “So I hit the alleys.”

Gray called the Teton County Sheriff’s Department before driving around Choteau in search of the fire. In 2021, Gray rescued his two children from his blazing home in the middle of the night. Within minutes, he spotted smoke billowing from the window’s of the Acantha building. Teton County Fire & Rescue, Fairfield Volunteer Fire Department and Choteau Volunteer Fire Department sent  25 firemen and five engines to put out the blaze.

We have no intention of letting this stop the 131st year of continuous publication of the Choteau Acantha. We pick up the pieces and we keep going on.

Melody Martinsen, Choteau Acantha Editor

Melody and Jeff Martinsen salvaged six computers in addition to several other pieces of equipment and assorted documents. Though the rescued items sustained some damage from smoke, soot and water, “they’re all in working condition, which is an amazing testament to how fast our firefighters locked it down,” Melody Martinsen said.

“The whole staff, they’re great people,” Gray said. “We would do anything and everything for them.”

Community members have offered the Martinsens and Choteau Acantha staff workspaces, office supplies and food.

“They say it takes a village,” Gray said. “ And I think Choteau’s about the best village you can get.”

The post Fire damages Choteau Acantha newspaper building appeared first on Montana Free Press.

Story text is available for republication under MTFP’s standard republication policy. To republish story graphics, contact High Country News at syndication@hcn.org.

On the banks of the Flathead River, along an oxbow southeast of Kalispell, a pair of million-dollar homes sit adjacent to each other on large lots. At a glance, they appear quite similar, each the sort of rural dream house that has become an inescapable part of Montana’s landscape.

A look at their tax bills, though, reveals a difference, the result of a singular quirk of Montana’s tax code.

One of the two parcels, like most homes in Montana, is classified as residential property. The other, however, is designated agricultural, a category that qualifies it for a tax discount worth thousands of dollars a year.

The residential property includes a 2,893-square-foot house and several outbuildings on a 10-acre lot. In 2023, the land was worth $585,000 and the buildings just over $1 million, according to state records. The property tax bill was about $9,100.

Next door, the agricultural property, also 10 acres, contains a 3,673-square-foot home along with garages, a dock and other structures, together valued at $1.2 million. A Zillow listing, which indicates that the property was last sold in 2018 and was later available for rent, describes it as a “gorgeous Montana river estate” with a boathouse, a putting green and an orchard. This property’s 2023 tax bill, which was mailed to an address in Florida, was about $2,100 lower than that of its neighbor.

If you exclude the taxes levied on all the structures, including the home, the owner of the residential property paid an effective rate of $331 an acre in 2023, an amount similar to nearby residential parcels. Meanwhile, the neighboring agricultural property — putting green and all — paid just $2 an acre.

The discrepancy is the byproduct of a tax system designed to encourage farming and ranching and preserve Montana’s agricultural character by taxing agricultural property at much lower effective rates. Unlike most other properties, agricultural land is valued not for its likely selling price, but rather for its agricultural production potential. In recent decades, however, as Montana’s luxury real estate sector has grown, the line between bona fide agricultural operations and high-end residential properties has become increasingly blurry.

Montana Free Press and High Country News analyzed state property data, combined with public records and aerial imagery, and found that thousands of million-dollar homes benefit from the agricultural tax provision. As of 2023, the most recent year for which detailed data is available from the Montana Department of Revenue, the analysis found that at least 1,882 million-dollar homes received a tax break as fully qualified agricultural property, while at least 1,338 others got a lesser discount through a partial agricultural designation.

While those million-dollar properties appear to comply with Montana’s tax law, they illustrate what critics consider the system’s failure to tax luxury real estate fairly. More than half of the properties were located in Gallatin, Flathead, Park and Ravalli counties, all parts of western Montana that have become epicenters of the state’s real estate boom. Many of the owners who get agricultural tax treatment for high-value properties are prominent professionals engaged in non-agricultural careers, including a former Goldman Sachs executive, the CEO of a billion-dollar food service corporation and Montana Gov. Greg Gianforte, a former technology executive. Because of how Montana’s tax system divides the cost of local government services, most of their savings translate into higher bills for other taxpayers. 

With the 2025 Montana Legislature set to open Jan. 6, both Republican and Democratic lawmakers say they want to tackle rising residential property taxes, which saddled homeowners with a median increase of 21% between 2022 and 2023 following the pandemic-era surge in housing prices. Some lawmakers also say they want to pass bills that would make the agricultural tax system more equitable.

Brian Campbell, who runs a cherry orchard and a growers’ co-op on Flathead Lake, would certainly welcome tax reform. In an interview, he said he’s annoyed by the owners of nearby expensive properties who produce just enough agricultural income to qualify for agricultural tax status, clearing a threshold that’s currently set at only $1,500. 

“There’s people that totally take advantage of this and treat it as just a big loophole in the system,” he said. 

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The agricultural tax issue has simmered in the state Capitol for decades without producing a politically viable solution. A bill that would have tied agricultural tax benefits to federal farm aid eligibility, for example, was voted down during Montana’s 2023 legislative session, spurring its supporters to form a working group to develop more refined proposals for 2025. During a meeting of the group in February, Rep. Mark Thane, D-Missoula, read aloud from a decades-old state memo prepared in 2001.

“‘Some buyers are purchasing large ranches for their American dream and taking land out of agricultural production,’” Thane read.

He looked up from the memo at his colleagues, who were seated around two long tables in a Department of Revenue meeting room. “Twenty-four years ago,” he said, “that prompted individuals to take a look at this very issue, and here we are, still looking at this issue.” 

Many Western states give farms and ranches special tax treatments and have encountered similar headaches. In Wyoming, for example, a proposal in the state Legislature to increase the revenue threshold for an agricultural tax break went nowhere in 2022. And a 2011 Denver Post story about a proposal to overhaul Colorado’s agricultural tax system noted that the issue had “vexed” state politicians for “decades.”

Those debates are sticky in part because of how tax policy can guide the way land is used across the West. Tax rates help determine whether suburban and rural land is used for farming or ranching, preserved for conservation purposes, or developed into housing and businesses. Proponents of agricultural tax benefits argue that they help keep such land undeveloped and protect farmers and ranchers from often-uncertain commodity markets.

“There’s an argument that all Montanans benefit from having a vibrant ag economy in Montana, not just for the economic benefits of it being Montana’s largest industry, but it has cultural value for us as Montanans,” said Chuck Denowh, a lobbyist and executive director of the United Property Owners of Montana, who was part of the working group. “As you drive around the state, our ag properties are one of the things that make the state beautiful.”

Montana’s tax code, though, is unique in that it allows many properties to qualify for agricultural tax benefits without requiring proof that they are used for agricultural purposes. Colorado, Wyoming, Washington, Oregon and the Dakotas all require landowners to submit applications showing some combination of crop, grazing or land-leasing income. 

In contrast to other states, any Montana property larger than 160 acres automatically qualifies for the full agricultural tax status, whether or not it demonstrates farm or ranch income. Many mid-sized rural properties — those between 20 and 160 acres — also automatically qualify for a partial agricultural classification, even if they don’t report enough farm or ranch income to qualify for the full tax break. That policy is unique to Montana, according to state analysts. 

Additionally, the annual production-income threshold that qualifies smaller properties for full agricultural status — currently just $1,500 — represents a low bar for well-off property owners to clear. It hasn’t been updated since 1986.

Campbell, who was also a member of the working group, pointed out that a property owner can make $1,500 a year from just a handful of cherry trees. Around Flathead Lake, for example, where planting cherry trees on high-value land is common, the cost of maintaining a few trees is quickly offset by the tax savings. 

“That’s obviously the motivation behind a lot of little orchards up here,” he said.

Montana has about 326,000 non-vacant residential parcels. In comparison, more than 77,000 Montana taxpayers benefit from either the full or partial agricultural tax status of their property, which encompasses more than 50 million acres of land, according to the state revenue department. MTFP and HCN estimate that residential properties smaller than 20 acres had their underlying land taxed at a median effective rate of $1,609 per acre in 2023, while similar properties with a full agricultural designation paid just $6.61.

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One Montana property that benefits from the full agricultural tax break is Gov. Gianforte’s longtime home on the outskirts of Bozeman. The governor and his family own several parcels there, along the East Gallatin River, including an 11.4-acre property with a house and detached garage that is currently valued by the revenue department at $1.3 million.

The Gianfortes’ tax bill for that parcel — about $7,400 in 2023, according to county tax records — briefly became election season fodder when the campaign of the governor’s unsuccessful Democratic challenger, Ryan Busse, published a video interview with the owner of a neighboring property who expressed tearful frustration that her tax bill was rising faster than the governor’s. Her property, which also sits along the East Gallatin, includes two dwellings valued at $1.5 million on a 10.2-acre parcel classified as residential land. It received a tax bill of about $12,200 in 2023, including approximately $826 per acre in taxes on the land.

MTFP and HCN estimate that residential properties smaller than 20 acres had their underlying land taxed at a median effective rate of $1,608 per acre in 2023, while similar properties with a full agricultural designation paid just $6.61.

Meanwhile, right across the street, the governor paid taxes at $5.75 an acre for his property. Thanks to his agricultural designation, Gianforte’s total land tax in 2023 was about $66 for his 11-acre property. The state’s tax rolls included about 176,000 residential properties with homes on town or city lots that year, most less than a quarter-acre; HCN and MTFP estimate that 97% of their owners paid more land taxes than the governor.

Montana’s public records office denied an open records request for the application materials used to justify the Gianforte property’s agricultural status last year, saying they contained income information that the revenue department was required to keep confidential. A spokesperson for the governor’s office said in early December that land owned by Gianforte and his wife, Susan, rotates between irrigated barley and alfalfa production and is also used to board horses and mules. The spokesperson did not answer questions regarding the amount of agricultural income generated by those activities or whether the governor supports changes to the state’s agricultural tax structure.

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The partial agricultural status available to mid-sized properties without demonstrated agricultural income — formally known as “non-qualified” agricultural land — has been a source of intense debate since its implementation in 1993.

The Legislature has loosened qualification requirements for partial status over time, thereby benefiting more property owners in platted subdivisions. As of 2023, roughly 30,000 Montana taxpayers benefited from the category’s tax treatment, according to the revenue department. 

A 2022 Montana Department of Revenue report demonstrates the difference that even a partial agricultural status can make. In one case, in southwest Montana’s Beaverhead County, department staff identified a situation where a 19.03-acre parcel, just under the threshold to qualify, owed $942 in taxes, while an adjacent 20.09-acre parcel, just over the threshold, owed only $482. Meanwhile, in Gallatin County, a vacant 19.989-acre lot owed $5,821 in taxes, while a nearby vacant lot of 20.011 acres owed just $168.

Because the partial agricultural designation provides substantial tax benefits to tens of thousands of property owners, however, efforts to repeal it have met with powerful political headwinds.

In 2017, for example, a bill to repeal the category, sponsored by Greg Hertz, then a state representative and now the chair of the Montana Senate’s Taxation Committee, drew so much blowback that he withdrew the proposal before its first committee hearing. Hertz and fellow Republican lawmaker Jeff Essmann, who also worked on agricultural taxation bills that year, recalled that both efforts were deluged with opposition. And Essmann said he expects similar political dynamics to erupt again.

“[Tens of thousands of] people that are suddenly going to have to pay market rate on their homes, or do some work to qualify as ag, can generate a lot of phone calls to representatives and kill a bill pretty fast,” said Essmann, who is no longer in the Legislature. 

“It’s hard when somebody’s got a sweet deal to remove it — that’s just the reality of life,” he added. “But it is a very sweet deal.”

Additionally, while eliminating the exemption would raise taxes dramatically for those property owners who currently benefit, it would lower them only slightly for other taxpayers. 

An analysis by the revenue department estimates that eliminating the partial ag exemption would increase the average qualifying property’s annual tax bill from $3.84 to $42.75 an acre — a $1,167 increase for a 30-acre property. In exchange, the department says, the median residential tax bill would decrease by a mere $33 a year.

That’s enough, Hertz said, to convince him the Legislature should just leave the designation alone.

“You’re saving somebody a dollar, but increasing somebody’s taxes by several thousand,” Hertz said. “To me, that just doesn’t make sense.”

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Neil Cornish, a professor of astrophysics at Montana State University, illustrates the tricky ways that current tax policy and possible changes can affect individual taxpayers. In 2020, Cornish bought a former cattle ranch in the Shields Valley, outside the small town of Clyde Park. At the time, it was just under 160 acres, and since Cornish neither farms nor ranches, it qualified for the partial agricultural designation.

Cornish, who said the classification initially struck him as “a bit of a weird thing,” recently did a boundary adjustment with his neighbor, boosting his property to just over 160 acres. He did so in order to qualify for an antelope hunting tag that’s available to larger agricultural landowners.

But that seemingly minor adjustment meant that his property now automatically qualified for the agricultural tax break for properties over 160 acres. As a result, he said, his property taxes went “down by a decent amount.” In an interview, Cornish said that the annual taxes on one portion of his land, the 1-acre homesite where his family has built a house and an outbuilding, dropped from about $2,000 to just $40. 

According to Park County records, Cornish and his wife, Jamie, had a total tax bill of about $8,300 in 2024, down from about $9,400 the prior year. Cornish noted that the recent addition of the two structures offset the agricultural tax savings by boosting his non-land property value.

One bill that legislators are putting forward, House Bill 27, would do away with the automatic agricultural tax break, thereby removing Cornish’s tax break unless he can demonstrate sufficient farm or ranch income.

That bill would bring Montana in moline with other Western states by requiring landowners like Cornish who want to receive or maintain an agriculture tax break to submit an application documenting a minimum level of farm or ranch income. And that income standard would also increase to at least $4,000 a year.

Losing the automatic tax qualification, Cornish said, would push him to consider “getting some agricultural activity going at some point.” He added that generating enough income to surpass the proposed standard “starts to be a more serious endeavor.”

That’s precisely the sort of effect lawmakers who are supporting the agricultural tax reform bills hope to have. 

“What we want to do is generate more ag production,” said Sen. Becky Beard, who led the working group and will serve as the vice chair of the Legislature’s Senate Taxation Committee this year. “If they’re not bona fide ag producers, then we have to look at a more realistic tax classification for those individuals or entities.”

Cornish believes large rural properties should get some sort of tax break to encourage preservation of habitat and open space. Large herds of elk, mule deer and antelope pass through his property, he said, which other than a small, out of use hayfield is largely sagebrush and high-desert juniper. “It’s basically like a nature preserve,” Cornish said. “It seems to me that that shouldn’t be taxed the same as a small subdivision.”

Lawmakers who helped draft the bills appear to agree. The bill that would end automatic agricultural classifications includes a clause replacing the partial agricultural tax category with one for “idle” land, at a higher effective tax rate.

Another draft bill, Senate Bill 4, would increase taxes on homesite land directly underneath high-value homes built on agricultural properties while shielding properties valued at less than the statewide average — potentially raising taxes for property owners like Cornish and the Gianfortes even if they retain their agricultural designation. Colorado passed a similar bill in 2011, reclassifying the land beneath structures that were not “integral” to agriculture as residential. The change was so controversial at the time that at least one county assessor refused to enforce the law.

According to an August revenue department analysis, the homesite proposal would increase taxes on more than 6,000 properties statewide, a majority of them in just four counties where land is selling at particularly high market values. In Bozeman’s Gallatin County, for example, the average property classified as agricultural would see a tax increase of $1,248 a year. The department estimates that this change would collect enough extra revenue to save the median residential property $14.05 annually.

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Montana lawmakers pushing reform efforts face a dilemma: How can the agricultural tax system support farmers and ranchers without creating a system that disproportionately benefits the wealthy? For example, the bill that would require Cornish and other property owners to apply for an agricultural designation would also require them to demonstrate an additional $6 of agricultural income beyond the new $4,000 threshold for each acre they own over 640. It would specify that certain activities don’t qualify as agricultural income, explicitly excluding revenue from, among other things, corn mazes, personal horse boarding, hunting access, dude ranches and some conservation efforts.

If the bill passes in its current form, prominent mega-landowners Dan and Ferris Wilks would be among those who would be required to apply to hold on to their agricultural status. The Wilks brothers, who hail from Cisco, Texas, bought holdings in Montana after making a multibillion-dollar fortune in the fracking business. State property data indicates that Wilks Ranch Montana LTD owned 814 parcels totaling 301,732 acres across six Montana counties as of 2024. All of those parcels — including four containing at least a million dollars’ worth of residences or other structures — were categorized as agricultural. 

With the new qualification standards, the Wilks Ranch would have to demonstrate an annual agricultural income of $1.8 million.

Walter Schweitzer, president of the Montana Farmers Union, doubts that the increased income standard would prove a greater hurdle for the state’s larger private landowners than the existing $1,500 threshold. 

“It’s not that arduous,” he said in an interview. “It wouldn’t be a big deal.”

Schweitzer added that while he has no love for the wealth inequality represented by trophy ranches, he does think they can contribute to agricultural communities caught in what he described as a flawed system. Large landowners often lease their land to young farmers or ranchers who are trying to gain a foothold in a difficult industry, he said. He also expressed some fear that the $4,000 income standard could be a challenge for new or small-scale farmers who own little parcels of land and are part-time farmers. 

Like generations of Montana lawmakers, Schweitzer — whose brother is former Democratic Gov. Brian Schweitzer — said he’s stumped about how best to tackle the issue. 

“I don’t know,” he said in an interview. “Do you have a good answer to how to close that loophole? Because I would sure like to.”

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These hard truths loomed over the working group. Even before the bills were written, its members agonized over how to build the political backing necessary to bring them to the governor’s desk, particularly generating support from the state’s agriculture community.

Still, making the state’s tax code more equitable is worth a fight, said Rep. Sherry Essmann, R-Billings. Essmann, who is sponsoring the application bill, is married to Jeff Essmann, the former lawmaker who pursued agricultural land tax reform in 2017.

“There are people coming in, and they’re taking out perfectly good ag property, or grazing property or ranch property, and using it as their private playgrounds,” she said at the August meeting. 

“They’re not being taxed at the rate that they should be taxed for this property,” she added. “And I think, honestly, it makes people in Montana look kind of silly that we haven’t figured this out.”

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Photo illustrations by Luna Anna Archey/High Country News

Image credits: Property parcel outlines in Bozeman, Montana, including Gov. Greg Gianforte’s property. Montana State Library; Property tax history for an agriculturally designated property in Kalispell. Screenshot from Redfin; The home on an agriculturally designated property in Kalispell. Screenshot from Zillow; An antler chandelier. Henry Burrows/CC via Flickr; The state seal of Montana. Wikipedia; Home icon. Vectorsmarket15/Flaticon

Property parcel outlines in Kalispell, Montana, including neighbors, one agriculturally designated, the other residentially designated. Montana State Library; Data screenshots from said residentially designated property. Montana State Library; A previous listing of said agriculturally designated property. Screenshot from Zillow

Homes in Bozeman, Montana. Dan Nguyen/CC via Flickr; Gov. Greg Gianforte speaks at a bill-signing ceremony at the Montana state Capitol on May 3, 2023. Mara Silvers/Montana Free Press; A grain silo near Miles City, Montana. Tim Evanson/CC via Flickr; The deed of Gianforte’s neighbor that was featured in Ryan Busse campaign ad criticizing the governor’s low tax bill. Screenshot from YouTube; Data screenshots from Gianforte’s property. Montana State Library.

The post Montana’s agricultural tax rules slash bills for thousands of million-dollar homes appeared first on Montana Free Press.

COLUMBIA FALLS — On the Friday afternoon before Christmas, as some in the Flathead Valley left work a little early or rushed to the store to do some last-minute holiday shopping, a small group of students were hard at work inside the woodshop at Columbia Falls High School as if it was any other day of the year. While a long holiday break awaited them when the final school bell rang, there was no desire to cut corners or put their tool belts down a little early.

Since 2019, students at Columbia Falls High School have helped build cabins for employee housing and other important structures for Glacier National Park. This school year, the students are finishing their sixth two-bedroom cabin for the park and their 13th structure overall. They have also constructed entrance kiosks and tool sheds. 

Glacier officials said the student-built homes have helped the park deal with a shortage of employee housing in recent years, especially on the east side of the park. 

“Glacier National Park struggles with hiring and retaining employees because of the limited in-park housing we have and how unaffordable housing is outside the park,” wrote Jim Foster, Glacier’s chief of facilities management, in an email to Montana Free Press. ”Providing housing like these cabins for seasonal employees can help entice those interested to apply for and then accept a position to work in Glacier.”

The School-to-Park Program was the brainchild of former deputy superintendent Eric Smith, who had seen a similar program in Denali National Park in Alaska. The partnership between the park and the school is a win-win for both sides; the park gets much-needed structures at cost and the students get experience in carpentry, plumbing, electrical work and more.

Columbia Falls High School wood instructor Manolo Victor and Glacier Park carpenter Bob Jellison lead the class. Jellison has worked for the Park Service since the 1990s and has been the coordinator between the park and the school since the program’s beginning. He said he’s enjoyed working with the students — 76 in all — and is always impressed with their work ethic. 

“They’re getting to work on a project from start to finish,” Jellison said. “Every day these kids get to see the progress that they’re making on the cabin and what they’re able to do with their own hands. You can really see them take pride in their work.” 

Among the students working on the Friday before winter break was senior Janna Gorelkin. She took the class because her brother had and the experience has been helpful as her family is remodeling their house. 

“I learn something every day in this class,” she said. 

Gorelkin was working with Noah Baker Kelley, a junior, to install siding on the structure. The employee cabins are 468 square feet and have a small living room, kitchen, bathroom and two bedrooms. Jellison said the buildings are “tight but comfortable.” 

“Providing housing like these cabins for seasonal employees can help entice those interested to apply for and then accept a position to work in Glacier.”

Jim Foster, Glacier National Park chief of facilities management

Jellison said Foster has been instrumental in securing funding for the program over the last few years. Presently, it’s funded by the National Park Foundation, which is also supporting a historic preservation carpentry intern in partnership with the Great Basin Institute during the summer of 2025. The Glacier National Park Conservancy has also been an important partner for the project, including providing funding for electrical service at the school’s shop facility when it started. The conservancy has also paid for tool bags and tools that are gifted to the students at the end of each school year. 

When the cabins are completed in the spring, they are loaded onto a truck and taken to their permanent home. So far, two cabins have been installed in Many Glacier, two at Rising Sun and one in Polebridge. This year’s structure will be installed in Many Glacier. 

Columbia Falls High School students are not the only ones building cabins for the park this year. Welding students are also building bear-proof boxes to store food at campgrounds. This fall, the advanced welding class has been building a prototype, and in the spring, an intermediate class will construct seven more, said instructor Ben Schaeffer. Like the cabins, the bear-proof boxes provide students with valuable skills and a way to give back to their community. 

“Knowing that these boxes will be in the public eye — that they’ll be used by thousands of people over the years — encourages the students to do their best work,” he said. 

The post Columbia Falls students building much-needed housing for Glacier National Park appeared first on Montana Free Press.

LIVINGSTON — From the hillside above her home on Suce Creek, Maggie McGuane has a clear view of the property a Miami-based investment firm is eyeing for a luxury resort development. 

The lower boundary of the empty three-lot parcel is easily identifiable. It’s been planted in winter wheat, highlighting the right angles that form the property’s lower edge. The upper lot has more relief, stretching up a pine-dotted hillside.

McGuane has climbed above the cottonwoods that shelter her house from Park County’s infamous wind — blowing moderately on a late October day — to explain why she finds a proposal to put 100 cabins, a restaurant and a spa in this tucked-away slice of Paradise Valley a “uniquely mysterious” prospect. 

The mystery pertains to peculiarities of the 90-acre property, which is still listed for sale, and the inscrutability of the parties involved: an out-of-state landowner named Robert Pappert whom McGuane has been unable to reach outside of communications with his attorney and realtor, and Flex Capital Group, an out-of-state real estate developer that’s an unknown quantity in Montana.  

McGuane has been unofficially appointed by her neighbors to lead the charge against the development, which has generated difficult conversations about zoning in the two months since the proposal came to light via an email exchange unearthed by a local nonprofit. McGuane and others argue that the development is out of alignment with the area’s predominantly rural character, and a poor fit for a community eager to avoid the breakneck development that’s reshaping nearby Bozeman, a rapidly growing college town of 57,000 that was recently crowned one of the country’s “coolest” small cities. 

Though McGuane is well aware of an outpouring of interest in the amenities Paradise Valley has to offer, aesthetic and otherwise, several features of Flex’s plan have challenged her understanding of the voracity of the land lust transforming Paradise Valley, the place she scattered the ashes of her mother, actress Margot Kidder, and the home she said she can’t imagine leaving.

Suce Creek is a relatively tight drainage perpendicular to Paradise Valley, a wider valley that has long been a thoroughfare for ranchers raising cattle, anglers casting for trout in the Yellowstone River, and tourists eager to spot geysers, grizzlies, wolves and bison in nearby Yellowstone National Park. Even without a zoning district precluding the type of commercial resort development Flex has in mind, McGuane finds it hard to imagine more than 100 structures and 400 parking spaces packed into a 90-acre property with so much slope. “It just doesn’t make any sense,” McGuane said, going on to describe the land as “rattlesnake-crusted, barren [and] windblown.”

“Barren” pertains to water availability, which McGuane said is “core to this battle,” especially given an active lawsuit between Pappert and neighboring landowners and the fact that several of her neighbors have had to redrill their wells in recent years in search of a reliable water supply. 

Pappert, a North Carolina-based dentist, acquired a right to some of Suce Creek’s water when he purchased the property in 2014. Since it’s not a particularly senior right, scant water is available to the property owner during the dry months of the year. A three-year legal battle produced a recent water court ruling finding that Pappert is entitled to 40 miner’s inches of water (roughly 450 gallons per minute), but whether he has access to that water via an easement across his neighbor’s property remains legally unresolved.

Another access issue pertains to roads. Though the property is just a few miles from two major north-south routes — Highway 89 and its cousin to the east, East River Road — Suce Creek Road is a gravel road prone to drifting in with snow when Park County’s winter winds kick up in earnest. 

Finally, there are concerns of the horned, hooved, furred and fanged variety. On a recent fall day, dozens of cattle roamed above a cattle guard posted with an “open range” sign. The Absaroka-Beartooth Wilderness, just a couple of miles up-drainage from Pappert’s property, supports the kinds of large mammals that need distance from people to thrive, including moose and rarer animals. In 2006, a trio of teenage hikers spent nearly two hours tucked into the fetal position to protect themselves from a charging grizzly bear. 

Up on the hillside, McGuane takes a break from throwing a stuffed octopus for Penny, her copper-colored mutt, to relate the story of a black bear that frequented the drainage from 2018 to 2022. He was first seen as a small cub near her house. Her husband dubbed the bear Darren. 

McGuane’s not sure what happened to the bear, but she suspects a neighbor shot him. She knows plenty of people in Park County don’t share her views about large carnivores — or any number of natural resource issues, for that matter — which is part of the reason she’s been so struck by what she describes as consensus around the Suce Creek development.

“It’s amazing to see everyone in agreement — and this is Park County-wide. I have grown up around these things being huge battles. This is my first experience with a proposal that, across the board, everyone thinks this is a bad idea,” she said. “This development has challenged all of our notions of how far things could go, how nonsensical the growth could be.” 

‘THE Z WORD’

Like other residents of southwestern Montana, McGuane learned about the development from the Park County Environmental Council, a 34-year-old nonprofit perhaps best known for a successful multiyear campaign to fend off an exploratory gold-mining operation in nearby Emigrant Gulch that state environmental regulators permitted in 2017. Curious if murmurs about a new development in Suce Creek were founded, the group submitted a record request to the county planning department in early October.

“This is my first experience with a proposal that, across the board, everyone thinks this is a bad idea.”

Suce Creek resident Maggie McGuane

The request produced about a dozen emails between Park County Planning Director Mike Inman and Nir Balboa, one of Flex’s managing partners. Balboa described the property’s location and inquired about what sort of environmental reviews would be required for a 100-cabin development sketched out in renderings for Flex projects in Utah and North Carolina that he described as “identical to” the company’s plans for Paradise Valley. The documents show small, flat-roofed cabins with lots of right angles and glass situated near 27,000 square feet of shared amenities: an airy 200-seat restaurant, a pair of indoor pools with a view into surrounding green space, an event space and a storefront for recreational gear.

The renderings generated an immediate stir on social media. (“Tell these derivative traders that don’t give a flying damn about this place that they are not welcome here,” software executive and local lodge owner Jeff Reed wrote on his Facebook page shortly after Park County Environmental Council shared the renderings. “Make this an election issue for our county commissioners.”)

Park County fields inquiries from developers trying to understand the regulatory lay of the land in the county “fairly frequently,” Inman told Montana Free Press in a recent interview. It doesn’t take long to give interested parties the broad outlines: There is a sign ordinance along Highway 89 as well as five smaller citizen-initiated zoning districts scattered throughout the county, but there is no county-wide zoning. Local review requirements for most commercial projects — including those like Flex’s — are therefore extremely limited, he said. Substantive project reviews would instead go through state agencies such as the Montana Department of Natural Resource and Conservation, which would examine the water-availability piece of the equation, and the Montana Department of Environmental Quality, which would review project components pertaining to wastewater management and public waterworks. 

“Nobody wants things in their backyard, which we hear a lot, but there are no guardrails,” he said. Inman and the appointed, volunteer-staffed county planning board he works with spent several years developing a proposal for an agricultural and residential preservation zoning district (previously dubbed a “conflict mitigation zoning district”) that would have allowed local elected officials to weigh in on proposals like Flex’s, as well as other commercial enterprises such as tire dumps, asphalt plants, wind farms, chicken processing facilities and shooting ranges. 

County commissioners voted to put that proposal on ice in 2022, partly due to the logistical challenges of taking public comment during the COVID-19 pandemic. It generated intense interest: 226 pages of comments regarding the zoning proposal landed in county employee inboxes. In an interesting twist, anti-zoning and pro-zoning contingents banded together to halt it. One side argued that it went too far, and the other said it didn’t go far enough.

“Fear runs both sides,” Inman said of the two camps’ unusual cooperation. “When you are operating out of fear, it is really difficult to have consensus and productive conversations.”

The community fears that county planners are grappling with now underscore why it’s better to discuss growth before conflict around a specific proposal sharpens the debate, Inman said. “I’m really amazed at how [the Suce Creek proposal] has blown up, for something that may not even get built.”

Whether Flex is casually interested in Pappert’s property or fully committed to pursuing a Paradise Valley development is a source of widespread speculation in Park County seat Livingston and beyond. Billed as an “innovation-oriented real estate investment firm with fully integrated acquisition, development and property management expertise,” Flex was founded in 2020 by real estate and hospitality executives with experience in the Miami and New York City real estate markets. The company did not respond to emails and calls seeking comment. 

Property owner Pappert declined to be interviewed, but the realtor representing him told MTFP on Dec. 3 that Pappert is still accepting offers for the property, which has been listed intermittently since 2021. It’s currently listed for $3.9 million. In 2014, the year Pappert bought it, it was listed for $800,000.

Park County Environmental Council Co-Director Max Hjortsberg said the Suce Creek proposal strikes him as a “very Big Sky-esque” development slated for an area that has retained its agricultural foundation and “quiet social fabric.” “This is indicative of a new type of development,” he said. “[We’re] being sought after by a different level of developer and investor.”

Since the nonprofit received its record request, Hjortsberg said, it’s learned that Flex has approached at least two other Park County property owners with purchase offers. (They were declined.) “They’re doing their due diligence, so we think they’re very serious and definitely making a play at this development opportunity,” Hjortsberg said.

Erica Lighthiser, Hjortsberg’s co-director, said she doesn’t particularly relish the marathon time commitment involved with zoning questions — “the ‘Z’ word,” she calls it — but she’s grateful that the Suce Creek prospect has reignited conversations about community planning.

“We need something, because otherwise it’s this slow erosion of this ecosystem and this area where there’s a little development here, a little development there. And all of a sudden, we’re like everywhere else.”

NEXT STEPS

To Lighthiser’s relief, conversations about the Suce Creek development aren’t confined to social media — they’ve spilled over into the City-County Complex, the nexus of local government for the 18,000 people who live in Park County. 

Lighthiser said she’s encouraged that county residents voted in June to deny Referendum One, which would have repealed the county’s existing growth plan and effectively kneecapped a county-wide zoning initiative. To the chagrin of planning proponents, a sister initiative, Referendum Two, did pass. As a result, any new county growth policies — or amendments to the existing one passed in 2017 — won’t be implemented unless they garner the approval of voters living outside of Livingston and Clyde Park, Park County’s only incorporated communities. 

On Nov. 20, the commission held a workshop on growth before a standing-room-only crowd in the City-County Complex’s Community Room. Though the workshop wasn’t explicitly about the Suce Creek proposal — the county attorney advised against discussing developments that may eventually come before the commission — the project came up frequently in public remarks during the hour-long meeting. 

“We need something, because otherwise it’s this slow erosion of this ecosystem and this area where there’s a little development here, a little development there. And all of a sudden, we’re like everywhere else.”

Park County Environmental Council co-director Erica Lighthiser

First up to the microphone was Suce Creek resident Richard Walker, who said Flex’s project would jeopardize his water and, by extension, his property value. He said five of the “dozen or so” families living in the drainage have had to drill deeper wells in the decade since he moved into the area, and he’s heard of similar issues in more southerly drainages. “If this property goes in at Suce Creek, the water usage is going to render our properties worthless,” he told commissioners. “We won’t have water.”

A couple of attendees advised commissioners to consider their legacies, and to act proactively and swiftly to initiate county-wide zoning. Kevin Johnson, who described himself as living “within eyeshot of the Suce Creek project,” implored the commission to preserve Livingston and Park County’s “old-school charm.” Still others cautioned that without guardrails, the area is destined for the growth-related issues that have afflicted other communities like Bozeman and Big Sky.

Leslie Fiegel with the Livingston Chamber of Commerce and It’s My Land, a landowner rights organization, offered a different view. Park County residents have had lots of opportunities to participate in planning discussions, she said, and the outcome “has played out the way that it should.”

“This is not a time for political division. This is not a time for blaming others or companies that want to start a new business,” she told commissioners. “Thank you for what you’ve done up to this point. … We have your back.”

Park County’s three commissioners stayed quiet through most of the meeting. Toward the end, though, they opened a window into their views about where one person’s property rights end and another person’s start — the tension at the heart of so many land-use debates, both locally and West-wide.

Mike Story, who is midway through his term, described the Suce Creek development and the discussions it’s engendered as “an ongoing thing” and encouraged Park County residents to keep reaching out for conversations. He said he’d like to see similarly packed meetings in Park County’s less populous areas — places like Clyde Park, Emigrant and Gardiner — “just [to] have ideas out there that we can look at.”

Commission Chair Clint Tinsley, whose term is up at the end of this year, said there are options the commission can pursue now, but they’ll require a lot of hard conversations — a nod to how “beat up” commissioners have gotten in meetings about previous zoning proposals.

“If the majority of this community wants zoning, that’s probably where we need to go,” said Tinsley, who formerly led Livingston’s public works department. His seat will be assumed by Jennifer Vermillion, a Shields Valley hay and pig farmer, in January.

Brian Wells, an Emigrant business owner appointed to fill a commission vacancy in 2023 and recently elected to serve a four-year term, said in his careful drawl that he would like the planning department to evaluate growth-wrangling options that other counties with similar populations and political leanings have pursued.

“We’re a pretty diverse and divided community,” he said, “but one thing we have in common [is] most everybody I talked to would like to see some kind of guardrails, some kind of protection.”

MONTANA MICROCOSM

For nearly two months, McGuane has made it her mission to learn the public and private tools Suce Creek residents can use to protect their drainage. They’ve mulled over county-wide zoning and citizen-initiated zoning, purchasing the property outright or encouraging a land trust to make an offer. 

No solution is perfect, McGuane says, so they’ve also hired an attorney to represent their interests if the sale goes through and Flex forwards their proposal to state regulators. (DEQ spokesperson Rebecca Harbage told MTFP on Dec. 3 that DEQ hasn’t fielded any proposals or outreach from Flex.)

In the meantime, McGuane said she and her neighbors are “in a weird state of limbo.” But that status hasn’t been without benefits, she said. 

“This is the most perfect tiny example of the conflict all over the state. So much of it is just the conflict between people from remarkably varying backgrounds with big financial losses and gains on the line,” she said. “If we can do a good job working through this, I would love for this to be a good example for the rest of the state.”

The post Unpacking a ‘uniquely mysterious’ development proposal in Paradise Valley  appeared first on Montana Free Press.

As a matter of routine last spring, University of Montana graduate student Erin Dozhier would settle into their home office on the north end of Missoula and prepare for a barrage of questions about houseplants and parrots. The queries came from public school kids hundreds of miles away, their worlds temporarily connected to Dozhier’s through a version of Zoom often utilized by therapists for virtual counseling. Usually, Dozhier would start with their most tried-and-true strategy for building rapport with young clients.

“Number one, if you want students to talk to you, ask them about their pets or show them your pet,” said Dozhier, whose parrot Alfie often made appearances in such sessions.

Dozhier is one of a growing number of students from UM’s social work, school counseling and mental health counseling programs who have delivered such services for K-12 children in Montana’s far-flung rural districts. What began as an experimental effort to address the mental health side of school safety has, over the past five years, evolved into a fixture both for the university’s Safe Schools Center and for the small schools it serves. Dubbed VAST — short for Virtually Assisted School Teams — the program now boasts six grad students and 22 participating districts stretching from the Bitterroot Valley to the North Dakota border.

The free counseling services VAST has made available to young Montanans highlight a growing focus among leaders across the state’s education continuum on student mental health. According to Montana’s latest Youth Risk Behavior Survey, 43% of responding high school students reported feeling sad or hopeless for two or more weeks in a row, and more than a quarter had seriously considered suicide — the highest annual rate since 1991. Educators often point to rising rates of youth anxiety and depression as a contributor to the steady decline in statewide academic performance, and for schools large and small, financial and hiring difficulties frequently stand in the way of providing robust mental health resources. Even outside the K-12 system, such support for students in Montana’s more rural communities may be dozens if not hundreds of miles away.

For program leader Tammy Tolleson Knee, who serves as school support liaison for  UM’s Safe Schools Center, the issues VAST was crafted to address have only become more pressing since the pandemic and speak to social and societal forces at work well beyond a school’s hallways. She told MTFP that as of this week, 53 K-12 students in Montana have been referred to the program for one-on-one counseling, with more than a dozen more referrals expected.

“One of the great hardships for families is just what’s happening with the economy,” Tolleson Knee said. “And when families are stressed, kids become stressed.”

Some districts, including in the northeast Montana town of Bainville, have been relying on VAST for years to meet the needs of their most vulnerable students. Other districts such as the Broadus Public Schools have only recently joined the program but are already reporting an impact. Broadus school counselor Dori Phillips told Montana Free Press that in the two months since the district formalized its participation, she’s already referred six students to one-on-one tele-counseling through VAST.

“I don’t know where I would be without the help with those particular kiddos,” Phillips said.

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When Dan Lee first envisioned the VAST program in 2019, he saw tele-counseling as the preventative prong in a larger effort to address student safety. As then-head of UM’s Safe Schools Center, Lee heard time and again from educators that shortages of mental health professionals in rural communities posed a significant hurdle to getting children the help they needed before their personal struggles reached a critical level. The challenge, Lee told MTFP, was in developing an initiative that didn’t reinforce misconceptions — tied to school shootings — about mental health as a public safety concern.

“One of the concerns we had was we can’t criminalize mental health,” said Lee, now the dean of UM’s College of Education, which houses the campus’ various counseling programs as well as the Safe Schools Center. “We can’t say if you are depressed, you are a threat. You can’t do that. When you’re depressed, it doesn’t mean you’re a threat to anybody. So we didn’t like the idea of classifying mental illness as a threat to schools because it’s not.”

VAST, which kicked off during the 2020-21 academic year with two participating schools, fit neatly into a collection of services Lee and his cohorts developed for Montana schools, providing a compassion-centric therapeutic tool to complement the center’s more site-specific threat assessments, staff training and its 24/7 school safety hotline. At the same time, Lee said, the initiative began giving UM students greater access to the clinical hours needed to obtain their degrees and licenses, hours that can be difficult to get.

“We can’t say if you are depressed, you are a threat. You can’t do that. When you’re depressed, it doesn’t mean you’re a threat to anybody.”

Dan Lee, dean of UM’s College of Education

In the years since, VAST has increasingly filled a void in rural communities with participating schools. Tolleson Knee recalled the story of one student who had previously received counseling in a community an hour away from home, until the family’s finances could no longer sustain the costs of travel and treatment. Her colleague, Safe Schools Center Director Emily Sallee, added that even if families are able to sustain private mental health services, outside professionals may not be effective at coordinating with in-school staff. By comparison, VAST relies on teachers and school counselors — the latter a state-mandated position in public schools — to coordinate with UM-side practitioners and keep them informed about any developments in a student’s life that may go unseen or unacknowledged in a tele-counseling session.

“There’s this huge wraparound piece that’s often missing when kids are accessing counseling outside of schools,” Sallee said, “and it’s a huge part of how all these people can be supporting this kiddo, not just the counselor.”

For Deborah Ith, the team-centered aspect of the program has been an important facet of her VAST experience this fall. A doctoral student in UM’s school psychology program, Ith currently has three teenage students in rural schools that she meets with remotely at least once a week via a paid, HIPAA-compliant version of Zoom. Their struggles have primarily been interpersonal ones, Ith said, and on a couple of occasions have risen to the level that Ith has reached out to the school counselor and parents to develop a group plan of support.

“Sometimes that means trying to support parents because that’s really scary,” Ith continued. “When you’re a parent and you have somebody call you up and be like, ‘Hey, this came up, this is going on, you need to know about it, this is what we talked about as a way to support and this is what you can do to support them,’ that’s really hard to hear sometimes.”

Even as VAST participants continue to provide such day-to-day services for a growing collection of rural schools, Tolleson Knee is identifying opportunities to expand the program’s offerings even further. She told MTFP that starting this spring, the Safe Schools Center plans to try out a hybrid version of VAST in one Bitterroot Valley school that will include a monthly in-person counseling session for students on top of three monthly tele-counseling sessions.

The University of Montana isn’t alone in recognizing the challenges rural schools face in providing adequate mental health support for their students. The nonprofit Montana Small Schools Alliance has developed its own 24/7 crisis support app, which mental health resources director Cindy Fouhy said has so far been accessed by more than 20,000 students across the state. In addition, the alliance — in partnership with the Montana Professional Learning Collaborative — has developed a free tele-counseling model of its own. Like VAST, the focus is primarily on Montana’s smallest and most resource-starved schools where dedicated one-on-one intervention simply isn’t available.

“You go to these small schools and they may not even have a certified counselor,” Fouhy said. “If they do, he or she is also teaching classes and doing 500 other things.”

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The factors that make mental health support in rural communities so difficult can also fuel the very stressors that necessitate such support in the first place. Consider Broadus, a town of fewer than 500 people anchored to the vast prairie of southeastern Montana. The local K-12 school boasts a student population of roughly 225, some of whom travel up to 70 miles one way to attend Power River County’s sole high school. According to data from the Office of Public Instruction, more than a third of the student population is classified as economically disadvantaged.

Politics, drought, alcohol use — there are a lot of issues influencing local families, said Broadus school counselor Dori Phillips, and those pressures “trickle to our students.” Professional help is more than 80 miles away in every direction. Stress and geographic isolation are exacerbated by a persistent social stigma around seeking mental health treatment, one that Phillips has struggled, family by individual family, to overcome.

“Getting our families to commit to taking their kids for help is almost impossible in many cases,” Phillips said. “I have very few students on my caseload. I think there’s three total that actually travel out of town to get help.”

Broadus Public Schools used to offer more robust mental health services for students through the state-sponsored Comprehensive School and Community Treatment program, or CSCT. But the district’s access dried up about two years ago following legislative changes to how services were administered, and the availability of a part-time school psychologist has largely served during emergencies or as a backup on days when Phillips isn’t working. So when Phillips heard of VAST in a statewide association email, she instantly saw the prospect of free, in-school tele-counseling as a carrot for local families.

“I can work with kids on friendship issues, I can help kids if they’re having trouble managing homework or learning organizational skills, those types of things,” said Phillips, whose school counseling license is distinct from the licenses granted to clinical therapists. “But when you have a family who deals with the loss of a parent or a caregiver, you have a family who goes through even a nasty divorce or a child who has a lot of trauma from their early years, those are things that they really need a private counselor for. Someone who’s licensed and knows how to work with kids.”

In just two months, the number of Broadus students receiving tele-counseling services through VAST has grown to six, and Phillips said she’s working to connect three more students with the program.

“Getting our families to commit to taking their kids for help is almost impossible in many cases.”

Dori Phillips, Broadus school counselor 

A few hundred miles to the north, Bainville school counselor Amy Iversen said the number of students she’s referred to VAST has grown from two students in 2022 to seven last school year. She described the ag-and-oil community as similarly small, with 172 students across all grades, and similarly isolated, with the closest larger population center lying across the state line in Williston, North Dakota. For Iversen, UM’s program came along at a critical time for several students who showed signs of behavioral issues or depression and whose families lacked the resources for private counseling.

“They can come in and talk to me about it, but then you know what? They’re going to see me again in class in two days and they’re going to be like, ‘Oh, crap, is she going to say something?’” Iversen said. “They probably don’t want me to know all their secrets. I’ve got kids in the school, some of them are friends with my own kids. It’s awkward for them, so when you’re in a small school, it helps with that confidentiality.”

In some cases, parents have commented to Iversen on a noticeable difference in their child’s confidence, self-esteem or coping skills as a result of ongoing therapy. And while school-based counseling has its limits — like the services provided by traditional school counselors, VAST is not offered during the summer break — Iversen hopes the mental health skills students glean during the school year can see them through the off months.

“That’s better than not getting anything,” Iversen said.

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Dozhier, the UM grad student, didn’t have to look much farther than their own childhood in a small Oregon timber town to understand the issues facing the young Montana clients they counseled last spring. Kids are smarter and more observant than people think, Dozhier said, which means when pressures like joblessness, food insecurity or substance abuse weigh on a household, children pick up on it. They may act out or isolate themselves, sometimes without knowing why, and the last thing such a student can focus on is learning.

“Their thinking brains are off,” Dozhier said.

Dozhier’s parrot Alfie may help break the ice, but helping a child navigate issues they may not fully understand requires more than just talking about pets and plants. In sessions with VAST, Dozhier said they primarily utilize a style of counseling called play therapy, allowing a student to play freely with whatever toys they choose. Their actions may give the counselor some subtle insight into what’s going on in their lives, Dozhier said. Fighting between toys could, for example, be indicative of difficult relationships with siblings or other family members and help guide a counselor’s questions.

“Even though it looks like play, we find that pertinent themes come up in play, even without specifically saying, ‘Hey, how’s your relationship with your brother?’” Dozhier said. “It’s almost like watching a theater play that doesn’t have a lot of words and kind of using that to draw conclusions.”

Ith’s work with older students this fall has also underscored the added stress coming to age in a smaller community can place on a 21st-century teen. She acknowledges that the rural nature of the schools she serves through VAST can help reinforce a sense of support, giving some students an awareness that others around them recognize the experiences they’re going through. But it’s a “double-edged sword,” she said, one that can make it difficult to find new peer groups or move past incidents of bullying. 

At the Montana Small Schools Alliance, Fouhy notes that social media and technology can exacerbate such issues in ways older generations may not fully understand.

“The kids can’t get away from stressors,” Fouhy said. “In the 80s, kids could go home and if they had to fight at school, they wouldn’t have to worry about it again ’til Monday. But now it just goes on and on, and the conflict and the stress that’s just in their pocket is significant.”

Remote delivery of the one-on-one services that can help students process such situations does pose challenges, and leaders at VAST are quick to note that the program isn’t a solution for budgetary shortfalls or hiring challenges. Dozhier and Ith both credit the effectiveness of their work to individuals in the communities they’ve served — school counselors, teachers, parents. Tele-counseling initiatives haven’t sought to replace those voices but rather to create oases in Montana’s rural desert of outside mental health services, and Tolleson Knee has heard from past participants that the anonymity of therapy was a key motivator.

“When you do live in those small communities, it’s just so hard to be objective,” Tolleson Knee said. “I heard students and family saying it was so nice to know we weren’t going to like have this intense session where we’re talking about really personal stuff and then run into [the counselor] in the grocery store.”

The experience of meeting such a need fits well with Dozhier’s long-term professional goal of returning to rural Oregon as a counselor, and they are slated to return to the VAST cohort of practitioners-in-training this spring as it branches into in-person service. But while the program is great at doing what it’s doing, Dozhier recognizes even private counseling has its limits. A few sessions with a therapist won’t erase the issues that arise for a child when, say, a parent is overworked, stretched thin and struggling just to put food on the table. When it comes to improving mental health, Dozhier said, the challenge is far more systematic than one school, one university or one counselor can handle alone.

“The answer to all of this kid’s woes is maybe not counseling for a year,” Dozhier said. “The answer maybe to so many of these woes would be to reduce stress on the family, and that’s something that our systems aren’t set up to do.”

The post University of Montana program tackles counseling shortage in rural schools throughout the state appeared first on Montana Free Press.

GREAT FALLS — The Great Falls City Commission has approved a reduction in funding for the Great Falls Public Library. The new agreement, struck Tuesday night during an often contentious meeting, is a compromise after months of negotiations between city and library stakeholders.

The agreement cuts 3.5 mills of funding from the library budget from fiscal year 2026 until fiscal year 2029, which ends on June 30 of that year. Based on projected mill values, that amounts to a cut of about $471,413 from the 2026 budget and $499,088 by 2029. The library has warned that this will result in cuts to services, staff and a day of operation.

The cuts are the direct result of two contrasting levy measures in 2023: the library’s successful levy in the spring and the much larger public safety levy and bond that voters rejected last fall. Throughout 2024, the debate over funding positioned a library with a $3.1 million budget against a much larger public safety budget that has fallen far behind the city’s needs.

“I knew that a compromise was the only way to ensure some level of funding would remain in the management agreement,” said Commissioner Susan Wolff, who was on the city’s negotiating team. “My fear was that we would lose all seven [mills].”

The cuts come from a batch of seven mills that the city approved in 1993 to support the library. Those mills were separate from the funding approved in last year’s levy election, though library supporters have said that their campaign relied on those seven mills as part of the foundation on which to build.

During their meeting on Tuesday, commissioners first voted to cancel the 1993 agreement before moving on to consider the new agreement, which passed on a 4-1 vote with Commissioner Rick Tryon voting against.

“I’m glad this is coming to an end,” Mayor Cory Reeves said. “This has not been a fun project.”

It was a long road to Tuesday’s meeting. The first of eight negotiation sessions was on April 25 and continued even after the city offered a “last, best and final” offer that would eliminate all seven mills by 2027.

The library’s board of trustees countered in September with its own proposal, which was for a smaller reduction of 2.5 mills through 2029.

In this latest agreement, passed by the city commission on Tuesday, the city agreed to maintain reduced funding through 2029, at which point the library and city would discuss renewal. But with the reductions passed, Library Director Susie McIntyre has warned that services would need to be cut, staff positions would be in jeopardy and the library could close for one day each week.

The city’s agreement still requires approval from the library board of trustees. Whitney Olson, the library board chair, told Montana Free Press on Wednesday that this will likely take priority at one of their next meetings. In the months leading up to the next fiscal year, the board will also need to decide how to realign its services with funding levels.

“The board is going to have to make some hard decisions about what we are going to have to cut,” Olson said. “Because it’s not feasible to keep our current level of service with the amount of money the city has granted us.”

Public comment and commission discussion on Tuesday focused a lot on Great Falls’ strained public safety resources. The city has vowed to reallocate the library funding to public safety needs, though the money is less than 1.5% of the $32 million public safety budget for courts, legal, police and fire.

The library negotiations in 2024 have been juxtaposed against the successful library campaign of 2023 and the public safety levy that failed later that same year. The public safety levy would have raised some $13 million annually to fund firefighters, police officers, 911 dispatchers, legal staff and more. It also included a $21 million bond request for building and infrastructure.

Early in Tuesday’s meeting, the audience heard from Great Falls Police Chief Jeff Newton for a regularly scheduled update. Newton opened his remarks by mentioning the failed 2023 levy.

“Despite the failure of the public safety levy and bond, the workload has not subsided and the challenges have not gone away,” Newton said.

Officials have described the lack of resources at police and fire departments in Great Falls as dire. The city has grown in the 50 years since the last expansion of public safety funding, increasing the number of fire, police and medical calls. The lack of additional funding has increased fire response times, left departments unable to cover unstaffed positions and left the police department in a reactive position, as Newton described.

During a Nov. 6 city meeting, Great Falls Fire Rescue Chief Jeremy Jones said the department had reached the limits of the adjustments they’ve made to maintain its level of service.

Following the failed levy, the city created a Public Safety Advisory Committee. Aaron Weissman, vice chair of that committee, urged commissioners during Tuesday’s meeting to keep library funding and address public safety separately.

“The citizens of Great Falls support public safety,” Weissman said. “It was just a really big ask.”

After some debate earlier this year, the committee submitted a set of public safety recommendations that included the drawback of up to seven mills of the library’s funding. Jeni Dodd, another member of the public safety committee, advocated for removing all seven mills from the library coffers.

“The 1993 agreement for the seven mills was never guaranteed in perpetuity,” Dodd said on Tuesday. “Each year it was subject to nonrenewal by either party.”

Positioning library funding against public safety needs was key for those who supported the reallocation of library funds.

“I can’t in good conscience support library expansion over public safety,” said Tryon, who was the lone vote against the agreement. 

Tryon announced he would vote no after reading off a list of insults he received in his email inbox and holding up a printout of a sticker that said, “Don’t rob our readers! Hands off the GFPL!”

Those who lobbied to maintain the same level of library funding couched their arguments against the library’s successful levy campaign. 

“Our voters supported enhanced library services, not replacement funding,” said Brianne Laurin, Great Falls Public Library Foundation executive director.

As part of its levy campaign, the library agreed to return a $350,000 annual general fund subsidy. Added to the reduction approved on Tuesday, the city will recoup around $821,410 from past library funding for the next fiscal year.

The library board of trustees’ next meeting is Nov. 26, and the funding agreement is likely to be on that agenda.

It’s likely that city officials will regroup and coordinate another public safety levy request in the future, though it’s unclear what that will look like at this time. The city will determine how to use the roughly $470,000 that will return to its general fund in the next fiscal year.

“We’ve been asked several times: So how will we use these funds that come back?” Commissioner Wolff said. “And I will be recommending to our city manager and our fellow commissioners that this money be used to support our courts and our legal department.”

The post Great Falls commissioners pass cuts to library to support public safety appeared first on Montana Free Press.

At $273 million and counting, Montana’s just-ended 2024 U.S. Senate race is the state’s most expensive political race ever, and likely its last big-dollar federal election for the foreseeable future.

Federal election data shows that when once competitive “purple states” swing definitively to one political party, election investment by national party committees and political action committees flatlines. Montana has not elected a Democrat to statewide or federal office since Tester was elected to his third term in 2018. 

The U.S. Senate race between Republican Tim Sheehy, who Montanans elected Nov. 5, and three-term Democratic U.S. Sen. Jon Tester cost at least $273.3 million in spending by the candidates and independent PAC expenditures on the race. 

Tester’s spending by late October totaled $81.8 million, by far the most ever by a federal candidate committee in Montana. Sheehy’s spending amounted to $22.2 million. Millions of dollars in candidate spending won’t be added to the ledger until early next year. 

“The parties direct donors to the competitive races, and outside groups target the seats/states that are the most competitive on paper, generally,” explained Kyle Kondik, of the University of Virginia Center for Politics. The center publishes Sabato’s Crystal Ball, a free weekly newsletter analyzing American politics. “Montana’s Senate seats no longer qualify — they are both held by Republicans and Montana has become a reliably Republican state at both the federal and statewide levels.”

Kondik said there may be times in the future when the state’s western U.S. House district could be competitive in a good year for Democrats. But the big-money Senate races are likely over for some time.

Federal election data shows how quickly outside congressional race money dries up for parties out of power. This year’s U.S. Senate race in North Dakota between Republican U.S. Sen. Kevin Cramer and Democrat Katrina Christiansen drew no serious PAC support for Christiansen after PACs and the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee spent $10 million on Democrat Heidi Heitkamp’s unsuccessful reelection bid in 2018. 

Cramer flipped the seat in 2018 by defeating Heitkamp. Thirty-three political committees spent money in the race.

This time out, the DSCC spent nothing on Christiansen. One PAC, Givegreen United Action, spent $6.66.

PAC funding ran to $126 million in Missouri in 2018. Claire McCaskill, part of the freshman class including Tester that flipped the Senate blue in 2006, was defending a Senate seat against Republican challenger Josh Hawley. Hawley defeated McCaskill in 2018, and easily won reelection last week as Democratic PACs and the party’s senatorial committee mostly stayed away. One PAC spent $379,165 opposing Hawley. No committee spent money supporting Democrat Lucas Kunce, who received 41.8% of the vote.

Republican Party committees and PACs also don’t stick around for races considered noncompetitive. In Rhode Island and Virginia, where Democrats flipped Senate seats in 2006 and continue to hold both, outside spending for Republicans has dried up. 

In Montana, “I think the western congressional district, the 1st congressional district, has the best chance going forward … where there might be outside money,” said Jeremy Johnson, head of the political science department at Carroll College in Helena. “But in the statewide races, Montana is not going to get that outside money unless the national Democratic Party sees proof that the Democratic candidate can compete.

“I think it’s going to have to be very grassroots-oriented, going back to the old ways of campaigning and to try to convince voters, that is literally meeting voters, community-based, and having to work on the street, because you’re not going to get the big money any more.”

The lack of funding for federal campaigns is something Montana Democrats have already dealt with, said Robyn Driscoll, who chairs the Montana Democratic Party. In 2022, without a Senate race on the ballot, there weren’t resources to get out the vote like there were this year, when registering new voters and door-to-door canvassing amounted to a multimillion-dollar effort, as revealed in federal campaign finance reports for Tester and supporting PACs.

As previously reported by Montana Free Press, Native American turnout in Montana in 2022 slumped to a 20-year low without Democrats driving turnout for a statewide candidate. Glacier County, where the Blackfeet Reservation is located, turned out just 26% of its vote in the 2022 general election. This year, with more than $1 million spent turning out the Indigenous vote statewide, Glacier County’s turnout was 61.3%, state data shows. 

Democrats are focusing more on local candidates, Driscoll said. The party has a “blue bench” coordinator to work with local government candidates. Local races have received more attention for about the past six years. The party’s executive director, Sheila Hogan, has been traveling to rural towns. It isn’t clear what’s been gained, but that’s the hard work, Driscoll said. 

“I haven’t really looked at the pickups, but it’s still laying the groundwork,” Driscoll said. “And, if the party in the future keeps it up, and keeps visiting these areas, that lays the groundwork. You’ve got to go where it’s hard. You don’t get to just sit in your bubble where you know you will have support in these safe areas.” 

U.S. Senate races have defined the political power struggle in Montana for the last 24 years, starting with the 2000 race between then U.S. Sen. Conrad Burns and Democrat Brian Schweitzer. Burns won, but Schweitzer, a newcomer, picked up 47.2% of the vote, suggesting that maybe Burns, despite having six years earlier become Montana’s first Republican to win a second Senate term, was vulnerable. 

Schweitzer snapped Republicans’ 16-year hold on the governor’s office in 2004, while Burns lost to Tester in a nail-biter, 48% to 49%, with Libertarian Stan Jones making up the difference. Thirty-nine political action committees spent money in that Senate race, more than Montana had previously experienced. The PACs favored Tester. The $19 million spent on the election was a Montana record. 

Democrats were surging, in part because they were appealing to voters in rural areas, where even their losses weren’t blowouts, as they are now. Schweitzer won 49 of Montana’s 56 counties and was reelected in 2008, Barack Obama campaigned in Montana, winning 47.3% of the vote, the largest share for a Democratic presidential candidate since Michael Dukakis in 1988. Republicans failed to produce viable candidates for U.S. Senate and governor.

Up for reelection in 2012, Tester drew a challenge from Denny Rehberg, who had a decade of comfortable wins behind him as Montana’s at-large U.S. representative. Tester won 49% of the vote to Rehberg’s 45%. Spending on that race ratcheted up to $48 million. The Supreme Court had ruled two years earlier in Citizens United that campaign spending constitutes free speech and can’t be legally limited. Super PACs funded by corporate donors spent  millions. The next time out, in 2018, expenditures hit $69.3 million. Tester won 50.3% of the vote, the high-water vote share among his Senate elections and the last time Democrats won a statewide election in Montana. 

The post Montana Democrats face an underfunded future appeared first on Montana Free Press.

As of Sunday Nov. 3, more than 395,00 Montana voters had submitted their ballots for the 2024 general election, according to the secretary of state. Others spent portions of their Monday casting their votes early at county election offices using a one-time absentee option. Even more will flock to the polls Tuesday to stand at a booth and fill in the bubbles next to their candidates of choice.

How exactly do all those paper ballots transform into the official results flashed on television and computer screens come election night? The answer to that question is what keeps local election workers busy well ahead of Election Day, and well past it. It’s also something that has generated  intense interest and, at times, skepticism among voters across the state.

At MTFP, where we’ve been covering election procedures for years, we spoke with local election officials in Missoula, Gallatin and Lewis and Clark counties to help readers better understand how votes are being counted this week.

In the case of absentee ballots submitted via mail and in person, the count is already underway in many parts of the state. Montana election law allows counties with more than 8,000 registered voters or more than 5,000 absentee voters to process absentee ballots three business days ahead of an election and to begin counting those ballots the Monday before Election Day. That work starts with county staff and volunteers sorting ballots based on the mix of district- and precinct-specific races listed on them, then marking ballots as “received” in the state’s election system. 

From there, the signature on each absentee ballot envelope is verified against past examples of a voter’s signature in the state system. Any discrepancies are reviewed by multiple election workers, and, if a signature is missing or rejected, the county attempts to contact the voter directly to resolve the issue. Once a signature is accepted, the secrecy envelope containing the ballot is removed from the signature envelope. The ballot itself is later removed from the deidentified secrecy envelope, flattened out and kept secure alongside the other ballots in its batch until they’re sent to an electronic tabulating machine for vote counting. Each of those steps is recorded on a sheet that accompanies each bundle of ballots through the entire process.

A similar process will be applied tomorrow across Montana to ballots cast at the polls, where voters will deposit their completed ballots in collection boxes. The number of ballots collected in those boxes will be recorded throughout the day, and, once the polls close at 8 p.m., election workers will verify the totals. In many counties, the collection boxes will then be transported from polling locations to a centralized tabulating center under the watch of two election judges. The boxes are accompanied by corresponding pollbooks, which contain the recorded signatures of every voter who cast a ballot at that particular polling place on Election Day.

After polls close at 8 p.m., election workers will begin to put the ballots through the same electronic tabulating machines used to process absentee ballots. The machines themselves — manufactured by Nevada-based ES&S, Montana’s sole certified provider of election equipment — are required by law to be publicly tested for accuracy in the weeks before the election. Batches of voted ballots will be sent through the machines, with the number of processed ballots once more checked and verified. If a machine can’t process a ballot for some reason, perhaps because the voter filled in too many bubbles for a single race or used an ink color the tabulator can’t read, the ballot is flagged and sent to a bipartisan panel of election judges to make sure the voter’s intent is accurately reflected in the night’s final tallies.

Election workers will pull vote totals from each machine throughout the night using a special ES&S-supplied thumb drive and upload them to a secure computer isolated from the internet. Countywide results will be pulled in turn from that computer and uploaded through a separate computer to the secretary of state’s election system. 

Voters will see those results reflected in updates to Montana’s online election dashboard. At the same time, poll-watchers and journalists at election offices across the state will be handed printed copies of local results, data that can sometimes let news outlets like the Associated Press report results faster than they appear on the official state dashboard.

The Associated Press also produces race call predictions based on current returns and historical results. In some cases, those race calls are issued before a majority of ballots involving a race are counted based on the agency’s ability to predict the likely political breakdown of a district’s voters.   

Despite a wave of skepticism among some conservatives in recent years, Montana’s ballot counting process has been routinely described as fair, accurate and secure by state and local officials of all political stripes. State law has numerous long-established safeguards as well, allowing political parties to recruit poll watchers to monitor local Election Day procedures and requiring randomized post-election audits and county canvasses to double check and certify the results.

Organizations such as the nonprofit Carter Center have also launched independent observation initiatives this year to report on the security and efficacy of Montana’s practices. And, as added insurance, once the secretary of state has proclaimed the results of the 2024 general election official, Montana law requires county election officials to seal and lock away every single ballot for a minimum of 22 months so they’re available to reference in any recounts, challenges or appeals.

The post How Montana ballots become election results appeared first on Montana Free Press.

Security footage of a man touching a ballot drop box in Browning sparked a brief viral firestorm last week, with Republican Secretary of State Christi Jacobsen claiming in a statement delivered by her 2024 reelection campaign that the video showed “undeniable” evidence of election tampering by a political operative.

“The actions captured on camera reveal how desperate Democrats have become in Montana,” Jacobsen’s statement read, referring to assertions the man was a Democratic party staffer. “Tampering with ballot boxes is a criminal offense, and those responsible will be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law.”

Jacobsen’s allegation of tampering echoed the language used by Glacier County Election Administrator Crystal Cole in an Oct. 21 email alerting Jacobsen’s office of the incident, and the framing quickly made it into headlines from conservative-leaning media outlets including Fox News. Glacier County officials later dismissed the claims as unsubstantiated, noting that the person in the footage — a former employee of the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee — was questioned by the Glacier County Sheriff’s Office and released without any criminal charges. 

Glacier County Attorney Terryl Matt did not respond to emails from Montana Free Press but told KRTV Great Falls last week, “The behavior captured in the video does not constitute a legitimate attempt to tamper with the ballot box or the electoral process.” The DSCC also did not respond to an MTFP email seeking comment.

The rhetoric inspired by the episode was evocative of a broader trend in Montana elections in recent years, one characterized by heightened skepticism about the security of the infrastructure and systems used to conduct those elections. Concerned citizens have filed reams of public records requests with local election offices, leveled allegations of misconduct on the part of county election officials, and at times taken it upon themselves to watchdog allegedly suspicious activity. For Geraldine Custer, a former Republican state lawmaker and 36-year veteran of the Rosebud County elections office, growing public distrust in the electoral process raised a personal fear that some Montanans may stop participating.

“I just felt like people were going to not vote,” Custer told MTFP. “They weren’t going to trust the system. They were going to think, ‘Why bother?’”

Custer is one of a handful of former state and local officials who have put their concern about flagging faith in Montana elections into action this year, partnering with the Georgia-based nonprofit Carter Center and the University of Montana’s Mansfield Center to impartially observe the state’s Nov. 5 election. Dubbed the Montana Election Observation Initiative, the group has spent the past few months recruiting and training 175 volunteers across 15 counties tasked with monitoring various local election procedures. According to coordinator Daniel Bruce, the initiative will encompass Montana’s five largest municipalities and a sampling of smaller, rural counties.

“Over the last couple of weeks, we’ve seen a lot of positive traction and engagement,” Bruce told MTFP recently. “We’re still looking to add a few people here and there in each of those rural communities to just boost that level of coverage … But overall, we’re in a really good spot and we’re really excited by the level of engagement and excitement we’ve seen from the communities.”

The Carter Center spearheaded a similar initiative in Georgia during the 2022 midterm election, and is conducting observation efforts alongside local leaders in New Mexico this year as well.

Bruce added that volunteers will act as nonpartisan observers of local Election Day operations, working off a checklist that sequentially follows the steps outlined in state law for processing ballots and tabulating votes. The observers’ collective observations will then be used to generate a post-election report of the initiative’s findings, including a narrative of each stage in the process and notes about any significant concerns or observed departures from established procedure. Bruce added that volunteers will be held to a strict code of conduct emphasizing professionalism and non-interference with the operations they’re observing, and have been instructed to prioritize their own safety and step away if any situations at poll locations and election offices become threatening.

Initiative leaders followed the same model during a pilot observation of the June primary in Missoula County, which reported no systematic concerns or incidents of disruption and concluded the election was “well-organized, peaceful, orderly,” and conducted in line with state laws and guidelines.

Separately from the Carter Center-led Montana Election Observation Initiative, two international election observers arrived in Montana early this month as part of a nationwide monitoring effort by the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe [OSCE]. The organization — made up of 57 member countries including the United States — has conducted more than 430 election observation efforts across the globe as part of its mission to promote free and fair elections. This year marks the 11th time in the past two decades that OSCE has conducted such a mission in a U.S. election at the invitation of the federal government.

The two OSCE monitors tasked to Montana and Wyoming are among a team of 64 monitors spread across the Lower 48 states collecting not just technical information about America’s election procedures but insights on voter rights, the sociopolitical environment surrounding federal campaigns, and the challenges faced by reporters covering federal elections. In a May 2024 needs assessment recommending this year’s general election monitoring mission, OSCE’s Office for Democratic Institutions and Human Rights noted the potential importance of international observation “given the highly polarized environment and the discourse sowing distrust in the integrity of elections.”

The assessment also concluded that most issues identified in past OSCE observation missions in the U.S. remain “unaddressed,” and that only some of the organization’s recommendations have been implemented. An interim report on the 2024 general election released last week said early monitoring work indicated “a highly contested electoral environment, with a high expectation for widespread post-election litigation.” The OSCE plans to release its preliminary findings and conclusions at a press conference in Washington, D.C., on Nov. 6.

Whether Election Day insights from firsthand observers are enough to improve faith in the integrity of Montana’s elections, which Secretary of State Jacobsen has repeatedly called a “gold standard,” it appears unlikely that politicization of election administration will vanish overnight. Bruce said the Montana Election Observation Initiative has intentionally kept its focus on administration and legal process in a tacit acknowledgment that it’s “not easy to talk about elections without talking about politics.” Initiative leaders recognize the volunteers they’ve trained have their own political beliefs, Bruce added, but the hope is that the collective commitment of a diverse group to an attitude of impartiality can serve as a message in its own right. 

“I think people are eager to participate in activities and in dialog that allows them to put aside some of the partisan elements that tend to divide us,” Bruce said.

Former Montana Commissioner of Political Practices Jeff Mangan, who is co-chairing the initiative alongside Custer, believes there’s positive momentum in simply shining light on the electoral process. Election officials in some counties have already taken similar steps, he said, and have increasingly engaged in conversations about their work in a bid for transparency and trust.

“I don’t know how we get there, but there needs to be a more connected effort from county to county, official to official, talking about these things and avoiding politics,” Mangan said of questions and concerns about election procedures. “I don’t know if that’s possible, but it only gets talked about, unfortunately, when something political happens.”

The post Training nonpartisan eyes on Montana’s 2024 election appeared first on Montana Free Press.

Like a squadron of benevolent B-52s loaded with money, federal opportunities are circling above Montana’s coal country looking for places to land.

“It absolutely is bewildering,” said Clair Scribner of the Bonneville Environmental Foundation. “Tribes are being inundated with opportunities.”

Scribner toured Montana this summer with K.C. Becker of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency to publicize Solar For All, which plans to spend $44 million in Montana to help tribal and rural communities get rooftop solar panels to lower their electricity bills.

“This is part of the biggest investment ever in renewable energy,” Becker added. “All together, there’s $7 billion focused on low-income and disadvantaged communities.”

That’s an understatement. Solar For All is one of the more human-scaled of the initiatives tumbling out of the Inflation Reduction Act, the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law and related congressional legislation. The $7 billion Becker mentioned is just an EPA slice of the renewable energy pie. The Tribal Energy Loan Guarantee Program through the Department of Energy has $20 billion on hand to fund solar and wind generation, as well as mining and fossil energy production. 

In between lie billions more for mine waste cleanup, job training, loan financing, tax credits, climate resilience and education programs. Put together, more than a trillion tax dollars are flying around the nation’s energy sector.

FADING AWAY

The money comes just as Montana’s coal mining base around Colstrip dreads the loss of a fossil-fuel energy industry that’s underpinned its way of life for half a century. As recently as 2001, coal supplied more than half of the nation’s electricity.

Nationwide, coal-sourced energy reached its peak capacity of 318 gigawatts in 2011. It’s since been on an unbroken downward trend, losing half that in 15 years. In 2023, coal was producing about 80 gigawatts for the Lower 48 states.

About 600 people work at Colstrip’s mines and generating station. The Rosebud mines west of town dug 6 million tons of subbituminous coal in 2023. They once produced more than 12 million tons a year. Colstrip Units 3 and 4 consumed around 222 railroad carloads of coal a day to generate 1.4 gigawatts of electricity.

Colstrip Units 1 and 2 used to contribute another 614 megawatts. They went dark in 2020, two years ahead of schedule, after their owners concluded they couldn’t operate cost-effectively due to aging equipment and pollution control upgrade costs.

What didn’t get burned there got put on railroad trains to Oregon and Washington. Each car carried on average $14,000 worth of fuel, in trains more than 115 cars long.

Twenty miles west, the Absaloka coal mine used to dig 6 million tons of coal a year from deposits owned by the Crow Indian Tribe just outside its 2.2-million-acre reservation. When it stopped production last April, owner Westmoreland Resources was only digging 1 million tons annually as its primary customer switched its generating plant to methane gas.

Sandwiched in the middle lies the Northern Cheyenne Indian Reservation. It has no operating coal mines or generating stations on its 440,000 acres. But one in five of its residents work in the mines and power plant at Colstrip. And all of them live about 14 miles from Colstrip’s 800-acre coal ash waste ponds.

Those ponds have been leaking into the underground water table, losing as much as 368 gallons a minute contaminated with sulfates, boron, selenium and other heavy metals known to cause cancer and other health issues, according to Montana Department of Environmental Quality estimates.

Colstrip residents don’t drink from their underground aquifer — municipal water is piped in from the Yellowstone River. But most residents of the Northern Cheyenne Reservation depend on groundwater wells.

This fall, the U.S. Supreme Court declined to block new Biden administration rules requiring tougher pollution standards on coal smokestacks. The rules are anticipated to push the United States’ 200-odd remaining coal-fired power plants out of economic feasibility.

Much of that slide is driven by economic headwinds: Methane gas, wind and solar generators cost less and provide as much power as coal plants. On top of that, burning coal contributes the largest share of greenhouse gas pollution to the atmosphere, resulting in climactic problems ranging from extended droughts and wildfire seasons to intensified hurricanes.

Both the economics and climate concerns have hit Montana coal country like locusts on a wheat field. Yet despite the boom-and-bust history of coal jobs, residents atop the Powder River Basin coal deposits aren’t sprinting toward a renewable energy future. That could be because no one knows what that would look like.

MINING FOR VOTES

Competition for the Indian vote brought both Democratic incumbent Sen. Jon Tester and Republican challenger Tim Sheehy to the annual Crow Fair gathering near Crow Agency this summer. Tester touted his efforts negotiating the Inflation Reduction Act and Bipartisan Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, which have made so much money available to the region. Sheehy pledged support for Indian Country, but undermined his claims when audio surfaced of him telling a fundraising gathering that roping calves on the Crow Reservation was “a great way to bond with Indians when they’re drunk at 8 a.m.”

That drew a rebuke from Crow Tribal Chairman Frank White Clay, who issued a public letter stating, “Tim Sheehy’s racial remarks about the Crow Tribe and Indian Country are deeply troubling and unacceptable.”

Nevertheless, White Clay and the Crow Tribe have worked closely with Republican Sen. Steve Daines on a deal to expand accessible coal fields to a mine outside the reservation. Daines has spent years developing relations with the Crow with campaign slogans such as “a war on coal is a war on Indian families.”

Known as the “Crow Revenue Act,” Daines’ S.4444 bill in Congress would swap the mineral rights to 4,660 acres inside the Crow Reservation owned by the Hope family (who are not tribal members) for 4,530 acres of federal mineral rights near the Signal Peak coal mine, 80 miles to the northwest.

Signal Peak has struggled to get access to new federal coal leases. The Daines mineral swap would turn accessible federal coal private, allowing Signal Peak to avoid federal oversight of its acquisition. It would pay royalties to the Hope family, which would share some of the revenue with the Crow Tribe if the coal is developed.

Daines spokesperson Rachel Dumke said the revenue-sharing agreement is not public, but does require the Crow Tribe and Hope family to agree on a formula for sharing the royalties.

Opponents of the deal on the Crow Reservation called that arrangement “outrageous.” The Apsåalooké Allottees Alliance wrote, “There is no justification for gratuitously enriching the Hope Family Trust at the expense of the United States, in return for the Tribe receiving mineral rights of little value.”

Signal Peak has been further encumbered by criminal investigations about its environmental management, including a legal complaint filed last October alleging its underground mine is creating subsidence cracks in the pastures of adjacent ranches. The New York Times further reported on the company’s legacy of “embezzlement, a fake kidnapping, bribery, cocaine trafficking, firearms violations, past links to Vladimir Putin, and worker safety and environmental violations by the mine and its owners.”

CHICKENS AND EGGS

The swarm of opportunities may tangle its own progress. For example, the Solar For All program offers to install photovoltaic panels on the roofs of anyone in the target area who requests a set. The goal is to lower each homeowner’s power bill by at least 20%.

Individual solar arrays are great in isolated places where utility-scale power is either hard to get or expensive. But even though their price has fallen greatly in the past decade, the small-scale set-ups cost more per kilowatt than a larger-scale solar farm serving a whole community. A 2023 study in the United Kingdom found large-scale photovoltaic farms produced electricity at about one-third the cost of domestic systems.

That results in confusion when communities face dueling proposals. Why would a private power developer invest in a community-scale solar farm if all the potential customers already had photovoltaic cells on their rooftops? Conversely, why would homeowners take on the hassle and structural upgrades needed to add those cells to their roofs if they could get the same power with just a wire connection to the big farm?

Basin Electric Power Cooperative in Montana has already been selected to receive a grant to develop more than 1,400 megawatts of new electric production in Montana, North Dakota, and South Dakota. That’s part of a $7.3 billion fund called Empowering Rural America. It would replicate the nameplate generating capacity of Colstrip’s coal-fired plant, if it doesn’t get derailed by the small-ball Solar for All.

Wind power faces different challenges. Numerous wind farm proposals in Montana have failed because NorthWestern Energy has resisted allowing them to use its electricity transmission lines. But the Biden administration has targeted electrical grid modernization as a core part of its initiative. And that could push wind to an entirely new position in the nation’s energy portfolio.

“The biggest obstacle we have in this state is transmission capacity,” said Anne Hedges of the Montana Environmental Information Center. “We haven’t upgraded the transmission system for decades.”

The $3.2 billion North Plains Connector project would allow electricity generated in the western states  to reach the energy markets of the Midwest. But it would also connect a link in wind power that’s been missing.

“North Dakota has a different wind profile than Montana wind or the Columbia Gorge winds of Washington,” Hedges said. “If you line up all those areas, you get power all day. That’s why Portland General Electric is investing in this line. It could access a whole new market for clean energy.”

STAY OR GO

Then there’s the debate over holding to the past or reaching for the future.

NorthWestern Energy CEO Brian Bird has proposed letting Montana’s monopoly public utility acquire most of Colstrip’s generating capacity now owned by out-of-state utilities. It would fold that back into the portfolio of electrical energy it sells to its 400,000 Montana customers — and keep Colstrip a viable generating facility for years.

Opponents questioned that plan before the Montana Public Service Commission. In his testimony, Grid Strategies Vice President Michael Goggin reported that NorthWestern has enough new generating resources applying to connect with its power system “to meet any capacity need created by Colstrip’s retirement 22 times over, indicating NorthWestern could replace Colstrip if it agrees to purchase the output of less than 5% of these projects.”

The plant also faces what operator Talen Energy estimates are between $320 million and $600 million in upgrade costs to meet new federal Mercury and Air Toxics Standards — the EPA rules the Supreme Court upheld in September.

Yet while Colstrip’s traditional energy partners move toward greener energy sources, the burgeoning rise of electricity-hungry data centers has roiled the coal industry. Companies including Google and Meta have revived failing or dormant coal generating plants in Georgia, Utah, Wisconsin and Nebraska. Data centers are predicted to consume up to 17% of all electricity production in the United States by 2030, according to Bloomberg Intelligence.

Were coal to fade away, Colstrip’s coal ash ponds and mine fields could become a part of Montana’s restoration economy, with an estimated 10 years of cleanup work waiting to be done. Erasing a coal mine requires most of the same skills and equipment as building one, meaning the workers who’ve built their lives around the Powder River Basin could find their talents still in demand. The mine owners have cleanup bonds in place to fund the work, and the federal incentives include millions more for mine reclamation.

For decades, Montana has developed its infrastructure, schools and other public works with coal money. The Coal Tax Trust Fund still has nearly $1 billion in the bank, and interest on that money gets deployed throughout the state by the Legislature.

However, that resource is itself finite and fallible. As Mark Haggerty of the Center for American Progress put it, the state drove its coal ambitions by looking in the rear-view mirror.

“After the copper barons and Anaconda Company collapsed, the state was left with big holes in the ground and no wealth,” Haggerty said. “We were going to do coal differently, so we imposed a high severance tax. The narrative is we’ve done quite well.

“But that money is sent to deal with the impacts of development, not transition or re-investment. It was set up to deal with the impact of opening a mine. Closure costs are really different. You have to invest in things that don’t have anything to do with coal, and change the economy to something else.”

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This three-month investigation was supported by a Kozik Environmental Justice Reporting grant funded by the National Press Foundation and the National Press Club Journalism Institute. The series was produced by reporter Rob Chaney and Missoulian photographer Ben Allan Smith in collaboration with Montana Free Press. Tom Lutey contributed research. 

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