This piece is part of MTFP’s 2026 poll week, where we’re exploring data on how Montana voters feel about their elected officials, environmental concerns, immigration enforcement and other issues.

One-hundred percent of Montana Democrats expressed disapproval of Republican President Donald Trump’s approach to immigration in a Montana Free Press-Eagleton poll conducted in late December and early January — while 94% of Montana Republicans expressed support. 

Regardless of political party, an overwhelming majority of Montana voters, 85%, expressed strong feelings one way or the other about the issue. About 49% of respondents overall said they strongly approved and another 37% strongly disapproved, leaving only about 15% without a strong stance on the issue. 

The poll was conducted before the fatal shootings of U.S. citizens Renee Good and Alex Pretti intensified protests over immigration enforcement actions in Minneapolis. It was also before the Jan. 25 arrest of business owner Roberto Orozco-Ramirez in the small eastern Montana town of Froid.

While 86% of Republicans “strongly approve” and another 8% “somewhat approve” of Trump’s approach to immigration, 0% of Democrats approved at all or had no opinion. Independents, meanwhile, were split at 51% “strongly disapprove” and 27% “strongly approve.”

Collaboration between U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement and local government has become a contested issue in Helena, which is under investigation by Montana Attorney General Austin Knudsen over whether the city commission’s resolution to restrict police from cooperating with ICE violates a 2021 bill that banned sanctuary cities. 

The MTFP-Eagleton poll surveyed 801 registered voters through telephone interviews and text-to-web questionnaires. Data was collected from Dec. 23, 2025 to Jan. 3, 2026. The poll, which was weighted to reflect the demographics of the state’s voters, has an overall margin of error of plus or minus 4.1 percentage points.

This piece is part of the Montana Insights project, which is commissioning rounds of polling to help MTFP readers understand public sentiment on key Montana policy issues. Further findings from the Dec. 2025-Jan. 2026 poll are available here.

The post Poll: Montanans deeply divided on federal immigration enforcement appeared first on Montana Free Press.

Environmental groups on Tuesday filed a challenge to an expansion of the Bull Mountains coal mine in central Montana, arguing that the federal government has used a “sham” energy emergency to cut the public out of the environmental review process required by federal law. 

The Center for Biological Diversity and Montana Environmental Information Center wrote in their lawsuit that the mine has “devastated” the Bull Mountains’ ranching community near Roundup by dewatering groundwater resources and forcing ranchers off their land. 

In their 42-page filing, the plaintiffs argue that the Interior Department’s Office of Surface Mining rushed its environmental review to facilitate Signal Peak Energy’s access to 24 million tons of Bureau of Land Management-owned coal. Landowners frustrated by the mine’s impacts to the region’s land, water, wildlife and air quality say federal law requires a more rigorous study of the expansion’s ecological, social and economic effects.

The plaintiffs are asking a federal district court in Billings to nix the expansion until the federal government produces an environmental review that complies with the National Environmental Policy Act and the Administrative Procedure Act.

Signal Peak has a longwall mining operation that requires a 10,000-pound machine to remove the Mammoth coal seam in miles-long panels. But the excavation of that subsurface material has created subsidence cracks in the earth, some of them several feet across, dozens of feet deep and hundreds of meters long.

“It was well known by both miners and regulators that a longwall mine would dewater the Bull Mountains, driving generational ranching families off their land to enrich three out-of-state corporations sending coal overseas,” Pat Thiele, a landowner in the Bull Mountains and member of the plaintiff organizations, wrote in a press release about the lawsuit. “Nobody with any authority cares.”

Signal Peak, which has operated the Bull Mountains Mine since 2008, did not respond to Montana Free Press’ request for comment on the litigation.

The expedited expansion is the product of an executive order President Donald Trump issued the first day of his second term that declared a “national energy emergency” and directed federal agencies to “identify and exercise any lawful emergency authorities” to facilitate the development of fossil fuels, uranium, critical minerals and geothermal heat. The order also asserts that selling energy resources to international allies helps the U.S. “compete with hostile foreign powers,” which will in turn “support international peace and security.”

A reconfiguration of the National Environmental Policy Act followed, including an Interior Department directive that agencies such as the Office of Surface Mining and the Bureau of Land Management turn around permitting decisions, which often take years, in just 28 days if requested by an applicant.

Federal regulators authorized the expansion of the Bull Mountains Mine under that new regulatory framework. On May 6, Signal Peak requested the expedited environmental review. Within a month, the Interior Department had released a final environmental impact statement and issued a record of decision authorizing the 247-acre expansion.

The vast majority of the coal extracted from the Bull Mountains Mine is bound for overseas markets including Japan and South Korea, according to the lawsuit. Plaintiffs argue that this fact, considered alongside the rise in domestic fossil fuel extraction and the Trump administration’s aversion to renewable energy resources such as wind and solar, throws the legitimacy of Trump’s energy emergency into question.

The plaintiffs also claim Signal Peak has a disconcerting record of flaunting federal environmental and worker-safety laws and that several of its former executives engaged in crimes ranging from cocaine trafficking and bribery to firearms violations. As such, the company should not be eligible for a fast-tracked review, they say.

“The Trump administration rubber-stamped an expansion for a mine with an alarming history,” Earthjustice attorney Shiloh Hernandez, who is representing the plaintiffs in the litigation, wrote in the release. “The sham energy emergency that this approval was based on does not exist, and even if it did, shipping coal overseas wouldn’t help to address it. The agency has again failed to faithfully follow the science, so we’ll see them in court.”

NEPA, the act passed by Congress in 1970 and signed into law by President Richard Nixon, requires federal agencies to take a “hard look” at environmental impacts associated with large federal land projects and use the “best available science” in its analysis. NEPA reviews often include information on endangered species habitat, anticipated shifts to water quantity and quality, an estimation of a project’s employment footprint, and a catalogue of potentially affected cultural and historical sites.

Signal Peak, which employs about 250 people, has pursued multiple avenues to facilitate its access to additional coal. Multiple lawsuits going back over a decade have thwarted those efforts. In 2023, a federal judge in Missoula blocked a 7,100-acre expansion on the grounds that the government had conducted an inadequate review of climate and water impacts. The mine responded by turning to state-owned coal within its footprint. 

Congress has also come to Signal Peak’s aid: Last May the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee tucked an 800-acre expansion of the mine the company had requested in 2020 into President Trump’s megabill, which also lowered coal royalty rates from 12.5% to 7%, reducing the revenue that federally owned coal generates for the nation’s coffers. 

The post Lawsuit challenges feds’ authorization of Bull Mountains Mine expansion appeared first on Montana Free Press.

A majority of Montana voters said they see cost and insurance as significant barriers to accessing mental health care — a larger share than those who named physical distance as a major hurdle.

According to a new Montana Free Press-Eagleton Poll, conducted in late 2025 and early 2026, 67% of respondents cited “cost of services” as a major problem when it comes to accessing care. A smaller share, 42%, cited the stigma associated with receiving care as a major problem, while 47% said the same about the travel distance necessary to access services.

Additionally, residents who live in rural areas must often travel hours to reach health care services, and some behavioral health services aren’t available within Montana’s borders at all. Given the state’s strong bootstraps mentality, many mental health care advocates also commonly say stigma deters Montanans from speaking up about mental illness.

That perception breaks down differently between genders. According to the poll results, 35% of men said they saw stigma as a major challenge for mental health access, while that percentage was substantially higher, 50%, for women.

Poll respondents overall, though, named cost and insurance as major problems in greater numbers.

In another part of the poll, 43% of respondents said they had health insurance coverage through their employer or their spouse’s employer, while 29% said they were insured through Medicare. Just six percent of respondents said they were covered through Medicaid, the health insurance plan for low-income adults. 

According to a 2021 state-level overview by KFF, a national health policy research firm, Montanans with mental health issues insured through large employer health plans had higher average health spending compared to enrollees without those diagnoses, paying roughly $8,800 annually compared to $3,800. 

Brenda Kneeland, the CEO of the Eastern Montana Community Mental Health Center in Miles City, said she’s not surprised that cost and insurance coverage are perceived as major barriers for Montanans seeking mental health care. She said her organization often helps patients navigate insurance gaps, especially if they’ve been disenrolled from Medicaid coverage because of paperwork or documentation errors. People with employer-based insurance, she added, are also not immune from cost struggles.

“Just because they have health insurance through an employer, that doesn’t always mean that there are strong behavioral health benefits tied to the plan,” Kneeland said.

Matt Kuntz, the director of NAMI Montana, a mental health advocacy coalition, said he thinks stigma has been gradually decreasing around mental health issues over the past decade. Kuntz linked some of that change in sentiment to the fact that many military veterans of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, as well as their friends and family members, have become well-acquainted with the need for accessible mental health care treatment.

“We’ve been having a lot more conversations about mental health in the last decade or two. And I think it’s a more positive conversation,” Kuntz said. 

In recent years, high-profile public officials in Montana have launched projects aimed at destigmatizing mental health and addiction treatment, and advocated for policy fixes to make that type of health care more accessible. 

Since taking office in 2021, Gov. Greg Gianforte, a Republican, has rolled out a series of initiatives aimed at improving access to treatment for mental health issues and substance use disorder. One of those efforts, a roughly $300 million funding scheme dubbed the Behavioral Health System for Future Generations, held a statewide listening tour about filling treatment gaps for mental health and addiction. Another, the Angel Initiative, works with local law enforcement departments to help route people to addiction treatment services. 

At an October meeting between Gianforte and local law enforcement officials, Sweet Grass County Sheriff Alan Ronneberg described mental health as an issue at the root of many people’s struggles, including those with substance use disorder.

“When we’re talking about mental health, not everybody with mental health problems has an addiction problem, but everybody with an addiction problem has a mental health problem,” Ronneberg said. “We need to recognize that.”

The MTFP-Eagleton poll surveyed 801 registered voters through telephone interviews and text-to-web questionnaires. Data was collected from Dec. 23, 2025 to Jan. 3, 2026. The poll, which was weighted to reflect the demographics of the state’s voters, has an overall margin of error of plus or minus 4.1 percentage points.

This piece is part of the Montana Insights project, which commissioned a poll to help MTFP readers understand public sentiment on key Montana policy issues. 

The post Montana voters overwhelmingly view cost as a major mental health care hurdle appeared first on Montana Free Press.

It’s poll week here at Montana Free Press.

We’re publishing results from an MTFP-Eagleton poll we’ve conducted in late December and early January as part of our ongoing Montana Insights project, examining Montana voters’ opinions on everything from a statewide sales tax (not popular) to the geographic of eastern Montana (mixed takes) and the president’s immigration agenda (quite controversial). 

We’ll be rolling out those and other poll results over several days in the form of stories on our website, montanafreepress.org — and rounding up some of the most interesting takeaways with updates to this post between March 2 and March 6, 2026.

Here’s what we’ve got:

Most Montana voters don’t want a statewide sales tax

Montana voters overwhelmingly view cost as a major hurdle in accessing mental health care

The post Poll week: How Montanans feel about sales tax, immigration and state officials appeared first on Montana Free Press.

A Montana judge has mooted the state’s would-be TikTok ban before it could block a single viral video.  

U.S. District Court Judge Donald Molloy on Feb. 20 concluded the case over the legality of the Montana Legislature’s TikTok ban, which had been paused since Molloy temporarily blocked its implementation in 2023. 

Several Montana users of the popular social media platform, along with TikTok’s Chinese owner, ByteDance, filed lawsuits days after the ban law was signed. That civil litigation was later combined into a single case against the state, defended by Attorney General Austin Knudsen. The challenge alleged the law violated the First Amendment and overstepped the authority of state government by wading into national security issues. 

Molloy dismissed the case on the basis of a clause in the law, which Gov. Greg Gianforte signed in May 2023, that voided the ban if ByteDance sold a majority share of TikTok to a non-Chinese company. That change of ownership occurred in January. 

The 2023 Legislature’s TikTok ban grew out of concerns about Chinese access to Americans’ data. It was the first statewide attempt to ban TikTok in the United States. 

In a statement on Feb. 20, Knudsen lauded the transfer of ownership that led to the case’s dismissal.

“President Trump, with his years of business and negotiation experience, worked diligently and succeeded in finding the right American company to purchase TikTok and make sure that Montanans and Americans will no longer be spied on by a foreign adversary,” Knudsen wrote. “Today’s dismissal ends years of litigation, brought on by TikTok, and will stop wasting taxpayers’ money.”

The state Department of Justice did not respond to a Montana Free Press request for an interview for this story.

Knudsen’s office signaled its support for the Montana law banning TikTok when it was first heard in the Legislature in February 2023. Department of Justice Crime Information Bureau Chief Anne Dormandy testified in support of the bill at its initial hearing. 

“There are grave concerns with the popular app related to national security and China’s influence through TikTok,” Dormandy said. 

The bill passed out of the Legislature with mostly Republican support. Gianforte expressed concerns that the bill’s language might subject it to a legal challenge, but ultimately signed it in spring 2023. The law immediately drew multiple court challenges. Before the ban could take effect as scheduled in January 2024, Molloy blocked it in November 2023. 

That year marked an uptick in the federal government’s scrutiny of TikTok over national security concerns. The Biden administration mandated that agency employees delete the app from government-issued mobile devices in February. And in March, members of Congress peppered TikTok CEO Zi Chew with questions about data privacy during a marathon hearing.  

While Montana’s ban languished in court, Biden signed a law in 2024 banning the social media app unless ByteDance sold it within the following 270 days. That law survived a slew of legal challenges, and TikTok ultimately blocked American users for a few hours on Jan. 18, 2025, a day before the federal law required it to. On Jan. 19, Trump assured the company he would issue an executive order that would extend ByteDance’s window to sell. He did.

In 2025, Trump extended the sale window on four separate occasions, allowing TikTok to continue to operate in the U.S. The company finalized a deal on Jan. 23, 2026. 

ByteDance retains 19.9% ownership of TikTok. Other investors with substantial shares include technology conglomerate Oracle, private equity firm Silver Lake, and United Arab Emirates-owned investment company MGX. 

That deal made Montana’s 2023 state law moot based on a clause in the state legislation voiding the ban if majority ownership was transferred away from a federally designated “foreign adversary.”

But some legal experts are casting doubt about whether that transfer actually mitigates concerns of Chinese access to Americans’ data.

Timothy Edgar, a cybersecurity expert at Brown University and Harvard Law School, filed an amicus brief in 2024 that argued against forcing ByteDance to divest from TikTok on constitutional grounds. 

Edgar said data privacy concerns had been better addressed at the end of Trump’s first term and early in the presidency of Joe Biden, when pressure from the executive branch forced TikTok to negotiate terms with the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States. 

“I felt that those restrictions were really quite significant, and no other social media company in the world has ever done anything like that,” Edgar said. Edgar said the forced sale that made Montana’s ban moot could give users a false sense of security. 

“I actually worry that there’s going to be less oversight of TikTok’s data, less pressure to uphold some of the requirements in that data safeguarding agreement that they had,” Edgar said. “And so, in a way, we’re in a worse position now than we were when TikTok was owned by ByteDance.”

Edgar emphasized that potential security risks remain, despite the company diluting its Chinese ownership.

“They focused on the wrong thing,” Edgar said about the supporters of the forced sale. “They focused on who owns the company instead of on what are the real risks? How would a country like China get ahold of data? And what are we going to do to protect our personal data against China? And, you know, TikTok is certainly one potential vulnerability, but there are so many others.”

The post The first-in-the-nation TikTik ban that wasn’t appeared first on Montana Free Press.

ESSEX — Over the winter, those in the tiny mountain hamlet of Essex, on the southern edge of Glacier National Park, said something felt amiss around LOGE Glacier, the beloved old railroad lodge better known as the Izaak Walton Inn. Perhaps it was the lackluster snow covering the cross-country trails or the recent departure of a popular employee at the inn, they thought. Even when the trail-grooming machine the inn had been leasing this winter was suddenly repossessed a few weeks ago, locals hoped that maybe someone had made a mistake and missed a payment. 

Regardless of what they thought, no one expected that the inn was just weeks away from shutting down as a result of “significant” financial challenges for its Washington-based parent company, which had purchased and remodeled the inn just a few years ago. 

Now locals in Essex are wondering what their community will do without its beloved gathering spot, and employees are wondering where they will go once their jobs are eliminated and employee housing is shuttered. 

“We were all blindsided,” said Fantasia Knight, a housekeeper at the inn since LOGE reopened it in 2024. “A lot of us moved our entire lives up here, and some of us have nowhere else to go.”

‘THE INN BETWEEN’

While there are a number of historic lodges in and around Glacier National Park, few are as connected to their communities as the Izaak Walton Inn. While there are more than 30 rooms in the lodge itself, plus a number of rail cars-turned-cabins scattered across the grounds, on a Friday or Saturday night, you were just as likely to run into a local bellied up to the basement bar as you were a tourist. 

While Essex has built a reputation in recent years as a haven for outdoor recreation, it began as a railroad town. Shortly after the Great Northern Railway built its main line over nearby Marias Pass, Essex became a “helper station,” where extra locomotives were added to trains for the climb over the mountain. It was also where plows were stationed to keep the tracks clear in winter. Every winter, the Great Northern would have about 200 railroaders based in Essex. But in 1935, the “beanery” that fed and housed those workers burned down. For a few years, the railroad had its employees stay in old boxcars, but the accommodations were far from attractive, and managers had difficulty finding people willing to work out of Essex during the winter.

In 1939, the railroad made a deal with the Addison Miller Company to construct a hotel and lunch room next to the tracks in Essex. The Izaak Walton Inn opened later that year. While the inn’s primary purpose was to serve railroaders, the evocative name honoring a popular 17th-century outdoorsman and the Tudor Revival style were meant to attract tourists as well. Located about halfway between West Glacier and East Glacier Park, the Izaak Walton earned the nickname “the inn between” and was known as a quiet oasis away from the park’s busier east and west sides.

In 1957, the Addison Miller Company sold it, and the inn passed through several private owners. One of the most consequential was the Veilleux family, which owned it from the early 1980s until 2006. During their tenure, the family helped develop a system of cross-country ski trails and leveraged the inn’s railroad connection by buying old cabooses and converting them into cabins. The family even sought permission from the railroads to paint the cabooses into the appropriate colors, logos and all, representing the companies that operated in Montana. Over the years, the inn became popular with outdoor and railroad enthusiasts alike. In 2006, the inn was sold to Brian Kelly, who helped the business grow by acquiring a nearby motel and a cafe within Glacier Park. In 2022, Kelly put the inn and surrounding property up for sale, and nine months later, it sold to LOGE Camps for $13.5 million. 

THE LOGE ERA

LOGE Camps (pronounced “Lodge” and standing for “Live Outside, Go Explore”) was founded in 2016 with the mission to find “forgotten motels near our favorite towns and trails, and bring them back to life.” Suggesting that the Izaak Walton was “forgotten” irked some locals and long-time visitors, and eyebrows raised even further in 2023, when the hospitality company announced they were shutting the inn down for a major renovation. As part of that, the company held an auction in which it sold hundreds of pieces of memorabilia from the walls, along with furniture and just about anything else that wasn’t nailed down. After the auction, the inn closed, and over the next year, LOGE undertook a major renovation, including upgrades to the water and heating systems, new wiring and a brand-new kitchen. Some of those upgrades, management later admitted, were not part of the initial plan but were required (most notably the outdated electrical system). 

But with the inn, along with its restaurant and bar, closed, many locals found themselves without a centralized gathering spot, said Brian and Lisa McKoen, whose family has owned a cabin near the inn for decades. 

“Without the inn, it’s just a remote neighborhood,” Brian McKoen told Montana Free Press this week. “With the inn, it’s a community.” 

“The energy was completely different when the inn was closed,” Lisa McKoen added. “It was kind of sad and lonely to go up there. There was a desolate energy about the place.” 

That lonely era came to an end when the inn reopened under a new name, LOGE Glacier, in the fall of 2024. Inside, guests and locals found refreshed rooms with new furniture and modern amenities. Some of the railroad memorabilia from the inn’s previous iteration had also been squirreled away before the auction and made an appearance inside the hallways and downstairs bar. 

“Without the inn, it’s just a remote neighborhood. With the inn, it’s a community.”

Brian McKoen, part-time Essex resident 

“We knew we had something special here,” general manager Lucas Hillman told the Flathead Beacon in late 2024. “You don’t buy a place like this and then change everything.”

Locals said that Hillman and the rest of the LOGE staff made a concerted effort to be good neighbors and invite the locals to the inn by hosting trivia nights and other community events. While some changes irritated locals — like painting the old cabooses a generic blue, no longer picking up guests from the Amtrak station in Essex and a limited menu in the restaurant — they generally gave the local management positive marks, said longtime resident Larry Epstein.

“When it reopened, it quickly became our community center again,” he said. 

Meanwhile, LOGE was rapidly expanding across the region, opening locations in Washington, California and Colorado. It also opened a hotel in Missoula, and said it saw additional opportunities in Montana. 

‘WE WERE SHOCKED’

But the company was struggling financially. According to a report from the Flathead Beacon, which broke the news late last week that LOGE Glacier was closing, the company’s board of directors discovered in late 2025 that the company was in “significant distress” and lacked the money to continue operating. According to emails reviewed by the Beacon, LOGE CEO Cale Genenbacher had told the board that the company had refinanced one of its properties. But in reality, LOGE had repurchased it after the lender foreclosed on the property, according to the Beacon. Genenbacher resigned in November, and last month the company retained a chief restructuring officer and insolvency counsel, who typically guide a company through restructuring or bankruptcy. 

In January, LOGE’s board of directors decided to begin winding down operations. 

“The board did not make this decision lightly, but this was required due to a lack of cash flow at the property level and the inability to continue paying required operating costs,” the board wrote in an email, according to the Beacon. “The company is doing everything in its power to look for ways to continue maximizing value in these properties, but cannot risk additional liability that would come from missing payroll obligations or other obligations to critical vendors.”

LOGE did not respond to a request for comment from MTFP.

Last week, word spread that LOGE properties across the region were closing, including the hotel and cafe in Missoula. Knight, the housekeeper, said she and the rest of the staff were informed last Friday that they were losing their jobs. 

“We were shocked,” she said. 

While some LOGE properties have already closed, the Izaak Walton is expected to remain open until March 1. Knight said she suspected the facility in Essex is staying open longer because it has two weddings scheduled for the end of this month. While LOGE has informed the 17 full-time employees that they will be out of work at the end of this month, Knight said it has provided little additional information.

“We have been getting a lot of phone calls, but we don’t have a lot of answers,” she said.

Knight said that she and the rest of the staff are committed to one another and to finishing the job they were hired to do. But they’re also trying to figure out what’s next. Most full-time staff live in employee housing, which will also be closed, so most people will not be able to stay in Essex. Knight said she was unsure where she would go. Some were unsure how they would leave town, as not everyone owns a car. Others were dealing with the logistics of moving with the pets they had brought with them to Essex. Knight has organized a GoFundMe to raise money that will be split among the employees to help with moving expenses. As of Wednesday night, it had raised about $1,300. 

Local residents told MTFP that they were concerned about the staff, many of whom had become friends over the years. But they were also wondering what would happen to the community of Essex now that the inn at its heart is once again about to be closed, this time, with no firm plans about its future. Thane Johnson, an attorney who splits his time between Helena and Essex, said the inn is in great shape and would be an attractive business for a new owner. Although if LOGE declares bankruptcy, Johnson said it could be months before the legal issues are resolved and the inn is reopened. Others expressed concern about the impact of an extended closure on a historic building in a rugged environment. 

“It would be devastating if no one bought it,” Johnson said. “Our community would survive — we’re close-knit — but there would be a hole in that community.”

The post Employees, locals ‘blindsided’ by looming closure of historic Izaak Walton Inn appeared first on Montana Free Press.

Last month, the host of the “Montana Talks” morning radio show spent a 10-minute segment interviewing a BNSF Railway official about the company’s opposition to a proposed merger between two rival railroads. To even the most well-informed listener, the segment may have been the first time they heard about the plan to combine the railroads, Union Pacific and Norfolk Southern, into a coast-to-coast behemoth spanning more than 50,000 miles of track and 43 states. If approved by federal regulators, it would be the largest railroad in America by tens of thousands of miles. 

The proposed merger has drawn attention from businesses and Montana’s congressional delegation in Washington, D.C., who have signed letters urging regulators to proceed with caution and conduct a “rigorous and comprehensive review.” With elected leaders expressing concern here in Montana, one would think Union Pacific and Norfolk Southern are major players in the state. They’re not. In fact, more than 90% of Montana’s railways are controlled by one company: BNSF. 

So what does this (mostly) out-of-state railroad maga merger have to do with Montana? Here’s an explanation:

Who’s merging and why?

While the proposed merger of Union Pacific and Norfolk Southern has gotten little media attention in Montana, it’s a big deal in the railroad world. On July 29, 2025, UP announced its intent to acquire NS for $85 billion in a transaction that would create the largest railroad in the country and the first single-rail line connecting the East and West coasts. 

UP and NS are two of the six large “Class I” freight railroads that operate in North America. Together, these six operators cover about 140,000 miles of track, with two major railroads in the west, two in the east and two in Canada (although the Canadian operators have a major presence in the Midwest). At one point, there were dozens of Class I railroads, but through consolidation, there are now only six.

Union Pacific was founded in 1862 and built the eastern half of the First Transcontinental Railroad, which was completed in 1869. Today, it operates 32,200 miles of track in 23 states, mostly west of Chicago. Last year, the company made more than $7 billion moving freight. Its primary competitor is BNSF. 

Norfolk Southern was founded in 1982 following the merger of the Norfolk & Western Railway and Southern Railway. It operates 19,420 miles in 22 states in the East. Its primary competitor is CSX Transportation. 

UP President Jim Vena, who is expected to remain as the head of the railroad if his company acquires NS, has said the merger would benefit shippers, the environment and the nation by offering cheaper freight transportation and by taking an estimated 2 million trucks off America’s highways annually. Vena has said it is possible because a single-line railroad could offer better shipping rates, especially in the Midwest, where shippers often have to deal with multiple railroads, thereby increasing prices. 

Where does Montana fit on the map?

The Utah & Northern Railway Company, a subsidiary of Union Pacific, became the first railroad to reach Montana when it built its line over Monida Pass on the Idaho-Montana border south of Dillon in May 1880. The railroad eventually reached Butte and Garrison. But today, Union Pacific operates only as far as Butte, meaning it serves only 125 of the state’s 3,700 rail miles, or about 3%. More than 90% of the rail mileage in the state, about 3,400 miles, is controlled by BNSF, according to the Association of American Railroads. Norfolk Southern has no track in Montana. 

Who’s for it, who’s against it?

In December, UP and NS submitted their application to merge with the U.S. Surface Transportation Board, the independent federal regulator that oversees railroads, which will have the final say on whether the two railroads can combine. Since then, the two railroads and their competitors have aggressively rallied support for and against it. Leading the charge against the merger is BNSF. 

BNSF has argued that the merger would be “anti-competitive,” and would give rail shippers — including Montana farmers — fewer options, thus increasing prices. For example, if a farmer near Great Falls ships grain to an East Coast community served by NS, the shipping charge could increase once NS is part of UP. For its part, UP has denied that it would increase rates.

Opponents have also pointed to the chaos that ensued after previous mergers, particularly in the 1990s. Perhaps the most notorious was the 1996 Union Pacific-Southern Pacific merger, which led to a “service meltdown” as rail yards across the country were jammed with late trains, and the railroad lost billions of dollars in profits. The railroad mergers of the 1990s were so disruptive that the U.S. Surface Transportation Board imposed a temporary ban in 2000 and later issued new requirements for combining major railroads. A quarter century later, no major railroad has attempted to merge under the revised rules. 

While UP is a comparatively small player in Montana, both it and BNSF have been lobbying stakeholders and elected officials here in favor of and against the merger. In December, both railroads reached out to state legislators with their take on the combination. Since then, a number of politicians — including all four members of the state’s Washington D.C. delegation and Montana Attorney General Austin Knudsen — have agreed with BNSF’s take and signed on to letters to federal officials, urging a rigorous review. Among their chief concerns is the impact it could have on pricing for agricultural producers, but the letters also note potential major impacts on the shipping of consumer goods, construction materials, fuel, food and more. 

“If approved, a combined UP-NS would handle more than 40% of all U.S. freight rail traffic… a transcontinental system spanning 50,000 route miles across 43 states,” read a joint letter from Sens. John Hoeven (R-N.D.) and Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.), and co-signed by Sens. Steve Daines, Tim Sheehy and 14 others. “Service interruptions of this magnitude could have severe consequences, especially for agricultural producers. Time-sensitive shipments during harvest could be delayed or spoiled, export windows could be missed, and access to global markets could be sharply reduced.”

What’s next?

The first question for federal regulators to consider after UP and NS submitted their application in December was whether the agency had enough information to review it. In January, the board ruled it did not and rejected the initial application. The two railroads have said they will revise their applications to include the requested information and try again. If the STB does accept the application, the review is expected to take more than a year, ensuring that the issue of mega railroad mergers isn’t going away any time soon. 

The post What does an $85M railroad merger have to do with Montana? appeared first on Montana Free Press.

While Montana might not be viewed as an artificial intelligence hotbed, it is considered among the top states in the country with potential to “power the AI revolution.” An analysis CNBC published last July based on grid reliability and average market electricity price named Montana as the  No. 3 state in the country for its potential to power data centers. Despite that, only a handful of relatively small data centers have been built in the Treasure State, and several operations have come and gone.

But the state of play could change — quickly — as proposals for new data centers garner traction in energy, economic development and political circles. Big Tech’s race to deploy AI, which the Brookings Institute has described as “the transformative technology of our time,” is spurring a corresponding rush to build data centers, massive warehouse-like buildings filled with stacks of chip-laden servers that have been likened to the “backbone” supporting AI.

The push for infrastructure to support the technology is also on display in Montana, as data-center developers and energy executives work to capture a piece of a rapidly growing market. Preliminary agreements that NorthWestern Energy, Montana’s largest utility, has signed with three companies in the past 14 months have given Montanans a general idea of how much electricity these large new data centers would require, but information about their water usage is in short supply. Wary of project developers’ tight-lipped approach to discussing their proposals, environmental watchdogs warn that a hands-off strategy could turn Montana communities into “sacrifice zones” to serve the data-processing needs of some of the world’s largest companies.

Data center experts that Montana Free Press interviewed in recent weeks said the lack of transparency could be by design. Project developers have been hustling to secure hundreds of millions, or even billions, of financing dollars before local pushback and potential regulatory changes spook investors in a competitive market that some industry insiders have described as a “global arms race.”

Aaron Wemhoff, a mechanical engineer who studies data centers’ environmental impacts as part of a consortium focused on energy-efficient electronic systems, told MTFP that center developers are running up against a power supply bottleneck and opposition from nearby residents wary of environmental impacts.

“I think that is what is setting the pace of development,” Wemhoff said. “What you’re seeing is that a lot of data centers are now being built in rural locations [where] there’s a little bit less resistance and perhaps they’re getting friendlier governments.”

Whether they’re inclined to support or oppose them, many Montanans are hungry for more information, and data-center developers have been reluctant to provide it.  Montana Environmental Information Center Executive Director Anne Hedges told MTFP that these companies might be looking for “easy pickings” in Montana, but residents of Butte, Billings, Broadview and Great Falls have shown an “overwhelming interest” in the topic at educational events MEIC has co-hosted. Hedges said public engagement with this issue is like nothing else she’s encountered in the 32 years she’s worked for MEIC, an environmental nonprofit that also serves as a corporate watchdog.

“We’ve had to turn people away in a room that holds hundreds,” Hedges said, referring to last month’s talk in Billings, which turned into a standing-room-only event. “It’s fascinating from an academic perspective, but certainly from the perspective of somebody who wants to get regulations in place to protect Montanans from what the richest men in America want to do.”

MEIC is concerned that NorthWestern Energy’s existing customers’ electricity bills will rise to fund power plants, substations and transmission lines to serve new data centers that might shutter in a few years’ time.Running parallel to that issue is uncertainty about what data-center development means for the rivers, lakes and aquifers that support two of the top industries in this arid state — agriculture and outdoor recreation.

Although all data centers that process large volumes of information require a cooling system, there are a variety of ways to run them. Wemhoff said there is a tradeoff involved: evaporative cooling systems require more water but less electricity. “Closed loop” or “open-air” systems typically use less water but are less efficient in that they require more electricity. 

“To me, the true water footprint is the water that’s consumed on site, but you also should include the water that’s consumed in the process of generating the electricity that the data center is consuming,” Wemhoff said. Fossil fuel plants often consume significant quantities of water, contributing to a larger water-use footprint, he added. 

Montanans still don’t have a fulsome accounting of these new proposals’ water impacts, but some information has been in circulation as companies like Quantica and Sabey approach their projected operational dates. This is what we know as of early February.

QUANTICA: 1,000 MEGAWATT FACILITY SOUTH OF BROADVIEW

A recently formed Texas-based company called Quantica Infrastructureis planning a “high-performance computing” campus to support artificial intelligence — an industry that’s expected to garner trillions of dollars of investment by 2030. Quantica has secured a 5,000-acre property south of Broadview for the project, which it is calling Big Sky Digital Infrastructure.

The project would require a continuous supply of up to 1 gigawatt of power, which is more than all of the total average load electricity NorthWestern Energy uses to serve its 400,000-plus electricity customers on an average day. Since facilities that require a lot of power typically generate a lot of heat, the energy footprint can be a helpful proxy for cooling — and therefore water — requirements.

In a Jan. 26 email to MTFP, Quantica wrote that the company aims to minimize its water use to avoid resource conflicts. Details on its cooling system will depend on environmental assessments and its customers’ needs, the company wrote, adding that it does not intend to source water from the town of Broadview, a rural community north of Billings with fewer than 150 residents and a limited water supply. 

“We’re evaluating multiple approaches including zero-water air cooling, deep aquifer wells, treated greywater, and direct-to-chip liquid systems that reduce water consumption 20 to 90% versus older data center cooling technologies,” the company  wrote. Quantica is looking to move quickly on its project, which will have limited local oversight due to the absence of zoning in that area of Yellowstone County.

Quantica doesn’t currently possess any water rights, according to the Montana Department of Natural Resources and Conservation. Like other users of large quantities of surface water or groundwater, the company would therefore be required to go through an administrative process designed to ensure that existing water users in the area aren’t negatively impacted by new withdrawals, a process that can take years. Despite that, the company anticipates moving forward with site construction this year.

Quantica’s energy-procurement plan includes incorporating “traditional” grid power along with renewable and battery energy storage. It has 45,000 acres of land under lease and on-site solar, wind and battery storage infrastructure have been “quietly” under development, Quantica CEO John Chesser told the Voices of Montana radio program last September. But its near-term power source, at least temporarily, is likely to include coal given its proximity to the high-voltage transmission lines leading out of Colstrip, the state’s largest power plant. Hedges, with MEIC, said Quantica could be one of the customers NorthWestern plans to serve with the nearly 600-megawatt share of the Colstrip plant it acquired last month. 

SABEY: 250-MEGAWATT FACILITY WEST OF BUTTE

In December of 2024, Sabey Data Centers, a company based in the Seattle area, reached a power-procurement agreement with NorthWestern for up to 250 megawatts of power. A few months later, the company reached a tentative — and still-pending — agreement with the Butte-Silver Bow Commission to purchase 600 acres of government-owned land in the Montana Connections Business Park, an industrial area west of Butte, for $1.2 million. 

Sabey is also looking to the Butte-Silver Bow commission for water to cool its system. More specifically, it plans to use an existing water right that conveyed snowmelt from multiple drainages in the Pintler Mountains to the smelter in Anaconda for nearly a century. When the smelter was operational, as many as 80 million gallons of Silver Lake water would surge down to Anaconda, but daily use rarely tops 10 million gallons per day these days.

At an interim water policy meeting last month, Rob Corbin, Sabey’s senior vice president of energy development, told lawmakers the company will use “air-first cooling,” to take advantage of Montana’s cool and dry climate. Water-based cooling using industrial water — the Silver Lake water that Butte-Silver Bow owns — will kick in during the hottest days of the year, Corbin said, adding that there won’t be “routine” water discharge. (Even the closed-loop systems with less evaporative water loss require occasional draining and refilling.)

Despite Corbin’s assurance to lawmakers that Sabey is emphasizing “transparency from Day One,” Sabey’s governmental affairs manager did not agree to MTFP’s interview request. The company has been in communication with Montana Tech Lance Energy Chair Bob Morris, who used the facility’s energy requirements and local climate data to provide rough calculations of the facility’s anticipated water usage at a recent presentation before the Butte-Silver Bow Commission. 

According to Morris’ calculations, extra water for cooling will only be required when the outside air temperature exceeds 80 degrees, or between 30 and 60 days of July and August. He said that’s when the evaporative cooling system will kick in, which is estimated to use about 16 million gallons per year. Morris likened the total volume of water required over the course of a year — 44,000 gallons daily — to three garden hoses running continuously at full capacity, describing the usage as a “small” share of an underutilized water right.

Butte-Silver Bow Commissioner Russell O’Leary echoed Morris’ assessment of the underused nature of that industrial water, telling MTFP in a recent interview that the only current use of the Silver Lake water right is an occasional release to Warm Springs Creek to support instream flows during drought years. Otherwise, much of the Silver Lake water flows down to Georgetown Lake, which supplies farmers and ranchers with water for irrigation, O’Leary said. 

During the Jan. 27 meeting, members of the public spoke both in support of and opposition to the project. Butte “needs to look to the future,” architect Dan O’Neill offered, arguing that the city should “take what we can get.” 

Another Butte resident, Linda Trevenna, countered that Sabey appears to be dodging public scrutiny and has at times offered contradictory information.

“Why is Mr. Morris putting together the presentation for Sabey and using the words, ‘I’m assuming’ [and] ‘this is what I’ve read’? Why isn’t Sabey producing their own defined, guaranteed diagram of what they intend?” Trevenna asked.

A Sabey employee attended the 2-hour commission meeting remotely but spoke little.

ATLAS POWER’S 150-MEGAWATT EXPANSION: BUTTE

At the tail end of 2024, two days after it issued a statement about its agreement with Sabey, NorthWestern announced that it had signed a letter of intent with Atlas Power Group to supply an additional 150 megawatts to its flagship facility, a cryptocurrency mining operation in Butte.

Atlas did not respond to MTFP’s multiple requests for comment. O’Leary told MTFP that Atlas uses a different cooling system than what Sabey is proposing. Atlas’ existing facility is more dependent on air circulation than water-based cooling, he said. 

“They have gigantic fans that are out on the roof of the building. They basically pull air in from the outside, run it through the system and push it back out,” he said. “It is a fairly noisy facility. That’s not what is being proposed [in Butte] by Sabey.”

Atlas’ facility is authorized to use a negligible amount of water. According to DNRC, Atlas Power Holdings has a water right that enables the company to use up to 2 acre-feet of groundwater per year, roughly equivalent to the annual water usage of four households.

Atlas purchased the water right from CryptoWatt, a company that launched a bitcoin mining operation in 2018 and later shuttered following legal allegations that the founder created a Ponzi scheme.

It is unclear if Atlas intends to use its expansion for cryptocurrency mining. Hedges said she wouldn’t be surprised if the company transitions to other types of data processing to align with market demands and find a more stable customer base.

“When you get into the bigger data centers that are using these Nvidia chips that really have high power demand and get really hot, air just isn’t as efficient,” Hedges said. “That’s why these companies are moving toward using water cooling.”

WHAT HAPPENS NOW?

Kerri Hickenbottom, a University of Arizona professor of chemical and mechanical engineering, described the current situation as a “black box” where communities are scrambling to learn about data center impacts — and mitigation opportunities — amid exponential growth in AI, cloud computing and government document storage. 

“These data centers are just building as fast as they can and cities have really struggled with how to incorporate [them],” said Hickenbottom, who started researching data centers’ water usage when they started cropping up in the Phoenix area.

Some local governments are developing novel approaches to resource concerns, such as requiring data centers to use wastewater for their cooling needs — and to treat it themselves. Data-center developers can also spur utilities to develop more renewable power sources, she noted.

“We’re all responsible for this, too, because we’re using the data,” Hickenbottom said. “If we weren’t using the data, they wouldn’t be building more data centers.”

The post As AI investors eye Montana for new data centers, communities brace for water impacts appeared first on Montana Free Press.

Five years after Glacier National Park first introduced a ticketed-entry system to handle ever-increasing summer crowds, the park plans on eliminating the at-times controversial system. 

At least that’s what the superintendent said during a chamber of commerce meeting late last year. Since then, despite promises that details would be announced soon, the National Park Service has remained mum about what the busy summer season will look like in Glacier. 

“There’s definitely some confusion,” said Sarah Lundstrum, Glacier program manager for the National Parks Conservation Association, an independent nonprofit that supports national parks. 

The ticketed-entry system was first launched in 2021, when the park faced a perfect storm of rising visitation and summer construction projects both inside and just outside the park that threatened to wreak havoc. Former Superintendent Jeff Mow noted that it was actually the state of Montana that requested a ticketed system that year because of a major construction project on U.S. Highway 2 near West Glacier and the concern that traffic would back up for miles when the park became overloaded with visitors (which happened on multiple occasions the previous year, sometimes forcing park officials to close the entrance). 

That first year, the ticket system was only used on the Going-to-the-Sun Road between West Glacier and St. Mary. In 2022 and 2023, the system was expanded to include other areas, like Polebridge, Many Glacier and Two Medicine. Since then, the system has been tweaked further, and last year, the park used a timed-entry model, where visitors who wanted to enter the west side of the park between 7 a.m. and 3 p.m. had to get a ticket and show up at a specific time. 

“It has been a learning process, and every year has been a little bit different,” Mow, who retired from the Glacier in 2022, told Montana Free Press.

The reservations and ticketed-entry systems haven’t always been popular. In 2023, Montana Rep. Ryan Zinke called for changes to the system after meeting with local business owners who complained it was hurting tourism in the area because visitors were struggling to get tickets. But Mow said that as tweaks were made, the system became more popular as people grew accustomed to it and came to enjoy less congestion in the park. 

But in December, during a Columbia Falls Chamber of Commerce meeting, current park Superintendent Dave Roemer said Glacier National Park intended to eliminate the ticketed-entry system in 2026. According to the Daily Inter Lake, Roemer said one issue with the timed system was that more people were driving to Logan Pass at night, which is not ideal for safety or for Glacier’s wildlife. Roemer added that the park was considering instituting reservation systems for parking at Logan Pass, a common choke point, and for the Sun Road shuttles, which are popular with hikers. 

But since Roemer made those comments in December, the National Park Service has said little about its plans for this summer. MTFP has reached out to a park spokesperson multiple times since December to request details on its plans for a ticketing system, but has received the same canned response each time. 

“The National Park Service continuously reviews Glacier National Park’s pilot operation programs to determine adjustments for the following year,” the spokesperson wrote. “Visitor use data, gate counts, congestion monitoring, traffic operations, and feedback from the public and gateway communities help inform strategies the park uses to manage congestion, shuttles, parking, and visitor access. We will update the public once a decision for the 2026 season has been made.”

In previous years, Glacier Park announced its plans for the following summer as early as November or December. 

Glacier isn’t the only park where there’s uncertainty surrounding the ticketed-entry system, or possible lack thereof. Multiple parks across the West have not announced whether they plan to use a ticket system. In the case of Mount Rainier National Park, it announced online that it wouldn’t use it, then backtracked, stating it hadn’t made a decision, according to SF Gate. Cassidy Jones, senior visitation program manager for the NPCA, put much of the blame for the confusion around the ticketed-entry system on NPS officials in Washington, D.C., and the Trump administration. 

“The administration is really putting parks in an impossible position, and the visitors are the ones who are going to suffer for not having information,” Jones told SF Gate. 

Zak Anderson, executive director of Explore Whitefish and the Whitefish Convention & Visitors Bureau, told MTFP that he and other tourism officials are eager to communicate what the park plans this summer. He also emphasized that he believed Superintendent Roemer and other officials at Glacier were doing the best they could “despite a lack of communication coming from Washington.”

“​​We’re still waiting on the National Park Service, and I think that to a certain degree the park superintendents are waiting on Washington,” Anderson said. 

The post To ticket or not to ticket, that is the question in Glacier National Park appeared first on Montana Free Press.

Even in her 80s, longtime Missoulian Ethel MacDonald traveled worldwide on solo bike tours. She once told her son John that she loved her trips, but “I’ll always come home to Missoula.” 

A philanthropist and supporter of many social justice causes, MacDonald was passionate about making sure others in her community had what they needed, including an affordable home. 

Before MacDonald died last October, she sold her Westside rental property at below market rate to Front Step Community Land Trust, with the proceeds going to her Ethel MacDonald Charitable Foundation. The home will remain permanently affordable as part of the community land trust, which will maintain ownership of the land to bring down the price and require future homeowners to sell at an affordable rate.

In August, she told Front Step in a recorded interview that she made the sale “for the same reason that I would want to feed a hungry family on the street. For the same reason I would want them to be safe, and to have enough clothing, to be safely warm in our cold winters. That’s the way I am. I have everything, and too many people have almost nothing.” 

John MacDonald is also working with Front Step to sell his mom’s University District home to the community land trust, and he and the organization hope others will consider doing the same to increase affordable housing options in Missoula. 

“It’s a novel approach to one family at a time addressing housing needs,” MacDonald told Montana Free Press. “I think it’s how she would do it.”

Ethel MacDonald moved to Missoula around 1958 and spent most of her career teaching high school English and French in Arlee before retiring in the 1990s. She bought her house in the University District in 1980 after she and her husband divorced. 

John MacDonald said his mom was active with the Jeannette Rankin Peace Center and supported several causes in Missoula, including conservation, food security and affordable housing. 

About seven years ago, a friend in the real estate industry connected Ethel MacDonald with a single father at risk of losing his home. MacDonald bought his mortgage and rented the house back to him at a below-market rate. When the tenant moved, he encouraged MacDonald to continue renting the house at an affordable price, John MacDonald said. 

After covering taxes and other costs, Ethel MacDonald directed the rental income to her charitable foundation, which she started in 2018. MacDonald was frugal, a good investor and often donated her annual IRA disbursement to the foundation, her son said. In 2024, the Ethel MacDonald Charitable Foundation donated about $23,000 to dozens of nonprofits. Upon her death, nearly $1 million went to charities through direct donations and her foundation, John MacDonald said. 

“She just lived a very simple life,” he said. “She always said, ‘I have enough, and I have everything I need, and I should give to others not as lucky as me.’” 

Last year, Ethel MacDonald approached her foundation board about the future of the rental house. Karissa Trujillo, a board member and executive director of housing nonprofit Homeword, said that when they discussed whether to keep the house as a rental or to sell it, she suggested the community land trust. MacDonald met with Front Step in April and sold the home to the organization in August. 

“She felt really good about the legacy she was leaving there and being able to bring some funding into the foundation but also still sell it at a rate that worked for Front Step to take the home into their portfolio and sell to someone who could afford to live there,” Trujillo said.

Community land trusts aim to provide affordable housing on land they own and lease to homeowners. Removing the land’s value lowers the home’s price, and the homeowner agrees to sell the home at a restricted price to keep it affordable. 

Hannah Kosel, Front Step’s stewardship program manager, said that since MacDonald was willing to sell her property at below-market value, the organization didn’t need grant funding to help acquire the home, as they have in most other cases. Kosel said MacDonald was quick to get on board with the opportunity to keep the home affordable. 

“For her to say, ‘I have the resources I need. I recognize I have some extra as well and that can go to others,’ I just thought that was a really beautiful gift of generosity and wealth redistribution in that regard,” Kosel said. 

Front Step is making some upgrades to the home before seeking applications from potential buyers, Kosel said. Front Step will select an income-qualified buyer earning up to 120% of Missoula’s area median income, currently $94,560 for a two-person household or $118,200 for a four-person household. The home will have a 75-year ground lease that includes an agreement to sell to the next buyer at an affordable price. The homeowner still receives equity, but the arrangement allows households currently priced out of today’s market to buy a house, Kosel said. Unlike other affordable housing models, no additional funding is needed to subsidize each new homeowner, they said. 

“Ethel’s one-time generous donation will be able to stay with this home on a long-term scale, which is a really beautiful way to keep her legacy alive,” Kosel said. 

Front Step, which has grown to include more than 90 permanently affordable homes in Missoula, will likely see more individual home acquisitions in the future, Kosel said. 

John MacDonald said he decided to sell his mother’s University District home to Front Step after seeing many neighboring houses replaced with those unaffordable to anyone he knows. MacDonald said he owns a home in Helena and “a cabin in the woods” and doesn’t need to sell his mother’s home at full market price. 

“If I can do something to contribute, it would be great to help out,” he said. 

MacDonald said he hopes other people in his position will consider selling their parents’ homes to the community land trust to help those in need. 

“It’s a unique approach, but I think it would work,” he said, “I think people could see the benefit to the community and themselves.” 

Kosel said it would be exciting to also bring MacDonald’s home into the community land trust because it would be the first Front Step home in the University District. 

“We believe affordable housing should be in every corner of Missoula and every neighborhood,” they said. “This type of process makes it exciting to understand how to scale this program, how to bring affordability into different areas of Missoula.” 

Trujillo, with Homeword and the Ethel MacDonald Charitable Foundation, said for many Missoulians, buying a home is not an option without the community land trust. 

“It’s easy to get bogged down in, ‘I’m only one person, what can I do?’” she said. “But if 50 people took action in the way Ethel did. This one human made such a difference in not only her foundation and giving to nonprofits but in her gift of a home. If 50 more people did that, imagine the impact.” 

The post ‘A really beautiful gift’: Missoula philanthropist sought to enhance city’s affordable housing before her death appeared first on Montana Free Press.