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. 

The post The future of coal country: Money, power, politics, and tradition appeared first on Montana Free Press.

A busy rail corridor through northwest Montana was closed over the weekend after a train derailed and spilled hundreds of tons of grain on the southern edge of Glacier National Park. 

On Saturday morning at approximately 5:42 a.m., a westbound BNSF Railway grain train derailed near Bear Creek, about four miles east of Essex. Nobody was injured in the derailment but 12 rail cars went off the tracks, with two sliding down a steep embankment above U.S. Highway 2. BNSF officials told Montana Free Press that the cause of the derailment was under investigation. 

The derailment blocked both main line tracks for hours and forced the closure of BNSF’s busy route between the Midwest and Pacific Northwest. Passengers aboard Amtrak’s Empire Builder, which connects Chicago with Portland and Seattle, had to ride buses between Whitefish and Shelby to get around the derailment. One of the main line tracks was cleared and rebuilt by late Saturday, enabling some rail traffic to resume through the area. The second main line track was expected to reopen by Monday. 

While no hazardous material was spilled in the wreck, the hundreds of tons of grain that did will likely concern wildlife officials in northwest Montana. Grain spilled along Glacier Park from leaking rail cars or derailments has been an issue for decades because when the grain ferments it attracts bears to the railroad right-of-way. 

According to a lawsuit filed earlier this year by two environmental groups, BNSF trains have allegedly “killed or contributed to the deaths” of more than 50 bears between 2008 and 2018, between Shelby and Sandpoint, Idaho. BNSF has been working with wildlife officials to come up with a plan to address the issue, most notably by thoroughly cleaning up derailment sites. On Saturday afternoon, at least two vacuum trucks were spotted at the derailment site ready to begin picking up the spilled grain. 

According to the Federal Railroad Administration, more than 1,000 trains derail every year in the United States.

The post Train derails near Glacier, spills hundreds of tons of grain appeared first on Montana Free Press.

A Montana business owner and supporter of former President Donald Trump has been sentenced to two years in federal prison for his role in the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection at the U.S. Capitol that interrupted certification of the 2020 Electoral College vote.

Henry Phillip “Hank” Muntzer, 55, of Dillon was also sentenced Thursday to a year of supervised release and ordered to pay $2,000 in restitution.

Muntzer was arrested two weeks after the siege based on social media posts and videos taken inside the Capitol, according to court records.

He was found guilty in February of obstructing an official proceeding and civil disorder, both felonies, following a bench trial before U.S. District Court Judge Jia M. Cobb. Muntzer was also found guilty of four misdemeanor charges. However, the charge of obstructing an official proceeding was dismissed before sentencing because a U.S. Supreme Court ruling in June made it more difficult to prosecute that charge.

Prosecutors presented evidence that Muntzer and a group of friends traveled to Washington to attend the “Stop the Steal” rally. After Trump’s speech at the Ellipse, Muntzer joined the crowd walking to the Capitol, where he spent about 38 minutes inside.

Muntzer was involved in physical confrontations with law enforcement officers near the Senate chamber and in the Capitol Rotunda, resisted law enforcement efforts to get him to leave and was among the last to do so, prosecutors said.

More than 1,500 people have been charged with Capitol riot-related federal crimes. Over 1,000 rioters have been convicted and sentenced. Roughly 650 of them received prison time ranging from a few days to 22 years.

In Dillon, Muntzer is known for a pro-QAnon mural on the building that houses his appliance store, according to the Dillon Tribune. Many QAnon followers believe in baseless conspiracy theories.

The post Montana businessman gets 2 years in prison for role in Jan. 6, 2021 insurrection at the US Capitol appeared first on Montana Free Press.

Community support has been overwhelming as the Three Affiliated Tribes battle round-the-clock to contain wildfires raging across northwest North Dakota. 

One of at least six outbreaks over the weekend, the Bear Den Fire near Mandaree remains 20% contained at time of publication. As of early afternoon more than 11,000 acres were actively burning, including significant portions of the Fort Berthold Indian Reservation.

The fire has burned more than 28,000 acres since it began early Saturday, according to the North Dakota Forest Service. They said a priority on Monday was controlling the fires with air support from the National Guard Black Hawk helicopters. 

The Bear Den Fire destroyed two residences and multiple structures but caused no injuries, according to authorities. The Mandan, Hidatsa and Arikara Nation’s Emergency Operations Center lifted mandatory evacuation orders for residents of both Four Bears and West reservation segments by Sunday afternoon.

Authorities said a fire located near Ray killed one man, 26-year-old Johannes Nicolaas Van Eeden of South Africa, and left another in critical condition.  

As crews continue battling blazes that began in the early morning hours on Saturday, community members are ensuring hot meals, toiletries and other supplies are available to those coming off long shifts or residents affected by the fires. 

Rancher Howard Fettig was on fire watch near Bear Den Bay when he spoke to Buffalo’s Fire in the late morning on Monday. It’s been “neighbors helping neighbors, both on and off reservation,” he said. 

“I think it’s an eye-opener.” 

Howard Fettig, rancher helping create fire guards north of Mandaree

MHA Nation’s Emergency Operations Center in New Town is requesting donated snacks, coffee, toiletries, and bottled water. Community members at the Emergency Response building in Mandaree welcome donations of brown paper bags to make sack lunches, toilet paper, paper towels, hand soap, kitchen trash bags, coffee, bath towels, and laundry soap. 

Lyda Spotted Bear told Buffalo’s Fire the support staff and fire fighters have been very thankful for the consistent supply of hot meals as they rotate through shifts. A steady flow of local volunteers is providing supplies and delivery, Spotted Bear said.

The fire’s path missed Fettig’s home by just half a mile, razing fences, trees and the pasture where he had planned to graze animals this fall. 

The crisis was nowhere over, he said, as Monday’s southern winds were making flare-ups’ path unpredictable. 

He was one of many farmers and ranchers standing by with tractors to create fire lines –  stretches of tilled soil stopping the spread of flames.

“I think it’s an eye-opener,” Fettig said. He hopes people understand it will happen again and “we need to have a better understanding on how to protect people.” Western North Dakota is in moderate to severe drought with no relief of dry conditions in the near future. 

The Bear Den Fire drew  a coordinated response from the tribes,  U.S. Bureau of Indian Affairs, North Dakota Forest Service, Department of Emergency Services, Army National Guard and Highway Patrol. 

Dry conditions and high northwest winds – with gusts recorded over 75 miles per hour – pushed fires southeast on Saturday. The exact cause of the fires remains unknown. 

Elkhorn Fire, which has burned more than 20,000 acres south of Watford City, was 20% contained Monday afternoon, with no reported injuries or destroyed residences.

By Sunday evening, emergency responders had almost entirely contained a fire near Arnegard and another by Charlson, the Garrison Fire near Emmet and two fires that merged between Ray and Tioga. Downed power lines have left more than 300 without electricity statewide. 

The post Three Affiliated Tribes emergency responders combat 11,000-acre Bear Den Fire appeared first on Buffalo’s Fire.

At a hearing last week in Rapid City, S.D, a roomful of people offered more than six hours of testimony. Area tribes testified in favor of revoking military Medal of Honor awards to cavalrymen of the 1890 Wounded Knee Massacre.

Descendants of massacre victims and survivors answered an invitation from Oglala Sioux Tribal President Frank Star Comes Out to join the hearing on Sept. 18. The live broadcast took place pursuant to Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin’s July order for a review of the 19 Medal of Honor awards.

Robert Anderson, the Interior Department’s principal deputy solicitor, joined review panel chair Tom James in the hearing. Anderson will prepare a report for the Defense Department, which will submit recommendations to President Biden, according to James.

The speakers carried on a century-old pressure campaign to rescind the honors that stem from one of the worst massacres in the country’s Indian Wars. In addition to being descendants of massacre survivors, many witnesses spoke from their perspectives as military veterans. It was the U.S. 7th Cavalry that gunned down over 300 unarmed Lakota men, women, and children after their surrender at Wounded Knee, S.D.

Star Comes Out, a veteran, argued the medals violated military rules of engagement, as the soldiers killed unarmed civilians. “I don’t see any honor in that… They should be court martialed instead of honored,” he said.

Cheyenne River Sioux Tribal Chairman Ryman LeBeau highlighted the intergenerational trauma the massacre has inflicted on the Lakota people. “My grandmother would say, ‘There’s a pervasive sadness throughout our people.’ And I believe she was talking about that historical trauma that we all carry.” His grandmother Marcella LeBeau served as a World War II nurse and fought for revocation of the medals until her death at 102.

“The White Buffalo Calf Woman came to give us a message… This is a prophecy she sent me to tell you—that you will get these awards rescinded.”

Cheryl Dupris, retired paratrooper and sister of Arvol Looking Horse

Cheyenne River Sioux citizen Manny Iron Hawk spoke of losing his grandfather, uncle and other relatives during the massacre on the Pine Ridge Reservation. A high school teacher, he recounted his grandmother’s harrowing account of her survival. Growing up with such stories he and others said the emotional and psychological impact passed down over the years.

“We talk about trauma in the DNA, and that transferred to me—but I want to stop that,” he said. “This issue is our fight today. We need to finish it. We don’t want to pass it on to our children and grandchildren. We descendants look at this as a medicine way.”

Iron Hawk received cheers for telling officials,”You have the authority to make this right. Either revoke all the medals, or don’t revoke them at all.”

“We talk about trauma in the DNA, and that transferred to me—but I want to stop that.”

Wounded Knee Descendant Manny Iron Hawk

Janet Alkire, the first woman elected to chair the Standing Rock Tribe, linked the massacre to the prior killing of Chief Sitting Bull. She said, “Had Sitting Bull not been arrested, Wounded Knee would never have happened.”

When Minneconjou Chief Spotted Elk, known to the settlers as Big Foot, learned of Sitting Bull’s assassination, he knew there would be trouble, as Dee Brown relates in “Bury My Heart At Wounded Knee.” He gathered his band and headed toward Pine Ridge. En route the 7th Cavalry intercepted them, escorted them to the place where they camped along Wounded Knee Creek. It was there the following morning that the massacre occurred.

An Air Force veteran who served in both Desert Shield and Desert Storm, Alkire said, “Medals are for valor and bravery.” The soldiers at Wounded Knee “did not demonstrate that. It’s like a slap in the face, too, because you don’t kill women and children,” she said.

Cedric Broken Nose, a descendant of Wounded Knee survivors, shared his family’s painful history, including how his great-grandfather had instructed relatives to keep mum about it. “Do not tell the story,” Broken Nose paraphrased. “Otherwise, the United States government is going to find you and do the same thing to you, too – to eliminate you.”

Cheryl Dupris, retired paratrooper of the Army’s 82nd Airborne, brought a prophecy to the hearing. She is a sister of Arvol Looking Horse, who is the designated carrier of the Great Sioux Nation’s White Buffalo Calf Woman’s sacred bundle.

“The White Buffalo Calf Woman came to give us a message to the Miniconjou,” she said. “She told us the prophecy of the military coming, the white men coming, the invaders. But this is a prophecy she sent me to tell you—that you will get these awards rescinded.”

Sicangu Lakota grandmother and water protector Cheryl Angel was among several witnesses who noted the troops at Standing Rock and Wounded Knee were acting outside their jurisdiction. They should not have deployed after the 1868 Fort Laramie Treaty that reserved the territory for the Seven Council Fires of the Great Sioux Nation.

The treaties signed between Native nations and the U.S. government were supposed to uphold the welfare of her people, she said. “We signed treaties and were massacred even as we honored them,” she said. “Because we agreed to live in peace. Now give that to us,” she said.

“My relatives, it’s been over a hundred years,” said Angel. “Start somewhere. Rescind those medals, now, Biden. It’s a good time to start.”

The post Century of trauma fuels Lakota push to revoke Wounded Knee medals appeared first on Buffalo’s Fire.

” width=”224″ height=”168″ align=”right” hspace=”10″ alt=”The future of grizzlies hangs in the balance as FWS weighs delisting” title=”The future of grizzlies hangs in the balance as FWS weighs delisting” />State Fish, Wildlife and Parks has released its final EIS proposing a statewide grizzly management plan.

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” width=”224″ height=”168″ align=”right” hspace=”10″ alt=”A cow and bull moose in Grand Teton National Park” title=”A cow and bull moose in Grand Teton National Park” />The state Game and Fish
Department confirms the first case of anthrax in Wyoming wildlife in decades.

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Editor’s note: This article was produced with support from the Education Writers Association Reporting Fellowship program.

In a state full of rural, tucked away corners, Lincoln County is one of Montana’s most rural and tucked away.

The county of 20,000 people is located in the state’s far northwest corner, bordering Canada and Idaho’s panhandle. Its communities are dotted around the Kootenai National Forest, whose 2.2 million acres of firs, pines, spruces and towering mountains define the craggy landscape.

Libby, the county seat of 3,100 residents, is 69 miles from Eureka, the county’s second-biggest city of 1,500 residents.

Lincoln County is rural and rugged, forged by industry and ecology and steeped in a complicated history of extraction, exploitation and economic struggle. It is a place where everyone knows someone who knows your cousin — a place where the future is still being dug out of the past. 

Related: Interested in innovations in the field of higher education? Subscribe to our free biweekly Higher Education newsletter.

Montana’s changing economy is palpable in Lincoln County, where formidable mills and mines once powered its small towns. The area used to be a historic powerhouse of timber and vermiculite production before shifts in the natural resource economy in the 1990s and 2000s marked the closure of nearly every local timber plant and Libby’s vermiculite mine, leaving thousands unemployed.

At the vermiculite mine, workers for decades were exposed to deadly asbestos fibers that killed hundreds, and trains carrying asbestos products blew toxic chemicals across town. As of 2021, 694 Libby residents had died of asbestos related diseases. The mine’s owner, the W.R. Grace Company, kept workers in the dark about the dangers of asbestos exposure.

It is under the shadow of the shuttered mills and mines that Lincoln County is forging ahead, crafting a future that community leaders hope will honor its history while breaking free from its dependence on extractive industries. At the center of that future is a local community college, which is helping Lincoln County residents adapt to a brave new world, building careers close to home and granting them a once elusive future in the community that raised them.

It’s a future that, according to Megan Rayome, the director of the college, is built on the premise that Lincoln County “hasn’t been left to die.”

“It was almost like a guaranteed job,” Kathy Ness, executive director of the Eureka Chamber of Commerce, said of the logging industry in Lincoln County.

On an early summer day in the small town, Ness recounted her own journey to Eureka. 

Ness “married in” to Eureka, settling in the town with her husband who was raised there. She’s been in Eureka for 45 years, a period during which she watched the economy ebb and flow, including her husband’s now long gone career as a logger. Her children and grandchildren have largely left home, seeking jobs in bigger markets. While they’d like to come home, “There’s not a lot in Eureka,” Ness said.

After decades of strong timber markets in Montana, a confluence of local and global factors began to slow the industry’s production in Lincoln County. Overharvesting led to a downturn in timber availability on National Forest land. Economic uncertainty in the 1990s and 2000s forced fluctuations in demand. Environmental litigation shut down operations. Four mills in Lincoln County shut down between 1993 and 2005, leaving more than 500 residents without work.

Following the closure of Libby’s vermiculite mine in 1991, the county’s unemployment rate reached 29%. A decade later, after Libby’s Stimson Lumber Mill closed in 2002, unemployment hit 15.8%.

“It was very damaging to the overall psyche,” Rayome, who grew up in Libby, said.

Related: Is the secret to getting rural kids to college leveraging the entire community?

Rayome is the director of Flathead Valley Community College’s (FVCC) Lincoln County Campus (LCC). LCC is a satellite campus of FVCC, which for four decades has offered career training and college courses to local students. It’s a small campus, boasting seven employees who work in its sole building near downtown Libby.

As a kid, Rayome remembers when the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency set up shop in Libby in the late 1990s, tearing up lawns and attics in order to remove toxic asbestos. She remembers her father, a former miner, attending classes at LCC to learn computer skills in hopes of building a new career. She sometimes attended classes with him when he couldn’t find childcare.

Rayome also remembers moving to Coeur d’Alene, Idaho, during her youth so that her mother could pursue a degree in nursing. While critical for her mother’s career, the move was disruptive for Rayome, who had known nothing but Libby her entire life.

“I did not enjoy that my mom moved me from my childhood home,” she said. “It’s a small town where you have the same friends and your family is all there. It was difficult for us, in a lot of different ways, for our family.”

Rayome finished high school in Idaho, then moved to Arizona for college, where she earned her bachelor’s and law degrees from Arizona State University.

While in Arizona, Rayome read about how people from rural communities who sought advanced degrees were often forced to leave home to do so, many never returning. The phenomenon, often called rural “brain drain,” stuck with her. She knew she needed to go back to Lincoln County.

After law school, Rayome returned to Libby to practice law. When LCC needed a director in 2020, she jumped at the opportunity.

Lincoln County’s first college program was born in 1979, after a group of local stakeholders identified a need for a college-level course in supervisory and management skills to meet industry needs. The coalition of local residents partnered with FVCC in Kalispell to bring a supervisory management certificate to Libby the next year. It proved so successful that the Libby Chamber of Commerce formed a committee to investigate expanding higher education.

Four years later, FVCC and the county reached an agreement to open a satellite campus in Libby. LCC classes were initially held in local high schools before the college found a home in an old school building on Mineral Avenue.

By 1987, the campus enrolled 73 full-time students, ranging from teenagers to middle-aged mothers heading back to work. According to local reporting, the campus’ “bread and butter” was non-traditional college students, including those who were looking for job changes, facing career-altering injuries or rebounding from layoffs. By 1994, enrollment had risen to 150 students.

A financial dispute between LCC and FVCC’s main campus in Kalispell nearly severed the colleges’ ties in the late 1990s, but the campuses were able to make amends.

In 2002, LCC moved to its current building, which was formerly occupied by the U.S. Forest Service.

“For the first time in the history of the LCC, we will take on the image of being a viable college in Libby and Lincoln County,” interim director George Gerard told the Daily Inter Lake at the time of the move.

Related: Rural universities, already few and far between, are being stripped of majors

LCC Director Pat Pezzelle in 2004 made local headlines after appearing at a board meeting virtually — a rarity at the time — through the campus’s first interactive, video teleconferencing (ITV) equipment. The distance learning classroom further expanded access for rural students. It was acquired through a $350,000 grant championed by then-U.S. Sen. Conrad Burns. 

According to college leaders, LCC’s success has been grounded in a collective impact framework that designs programs from the ground up, rather than the top down. It’s a model that responds directly to industry needs, carving out degree programs with local relevance and, for graduates, long-term economic benefits. 

After the Stimson Timber layoffs in 2002, college leaders vowed to retrain Libby’s nearly 300 displaced workers.

“We have to figure out what kind of training we can provide to make these people employable,” LCC instructor and advisor Chad Shilling said at a staff meeting after the closure, according to newspaper archives. “I don’t know if they’re going to be here for the long-term commitment, but we’re going to be here to take care of their immediate needs the best we can.”

FVCC President Jane Karas said she has “lots of those kinds of stories” about locals who showed up at the college’s door jobless and left with a new career. 

Karas described one student who, before being laid off by the Owens and Hurst Mill in Eureka in the mid-2000s, had “never done anything but run logs through this mill.” After enrolling in FVCC, he completed a degree in computer science and went to work in IT. 

In 2011, the college trained its first batch of welders through a 10-week program that catered to workers who had been laid off from mining and timber jobs. The program was designed to place workers at Stinger Welding, an Arizona-based bridge building company that brought 70 jobs to Libby before its closure in 2013.

When Kalispell-based Nomad Global Communication Solutions (GCS) announced its expansion into Libby in 2022, the need for welders and machinists grew. LCC worked with the local school district to launch an evening welding class at Libby High School. In its first class, the college filled seven of eight welding booths with eager learners from all walks of life.

Through the Running Start dual enrollment program, eight Libby High School students this spring passed their 3G 3/8 Welding Qualification in a college-level course. Many said they plan to expand their skills next year in pursuit of the 6G test. 

With their welding certification, Karas said, students are filling the need for skilled workers that new industry has brought to Lincoln County.

“We focus on how to be most cost-effective, support our community and meet the needs of our students and our employers,” Karas said. 

“What the college did, that is extremely important in terms of working with smaller rural communities, is to go out and establish a relationship,” Lisa Blank, executive director of workforce development for FVCC, said. “Not waiting for them to come to you, but you going out to them.”

Blank acts as the conduit between FVCC, businesses, the Montana Department of Labor and Industry, public schools and students, all of whom have a vested interest in the college’s career programs. Her job was created specifically to streamline communication between those stakeholders.

“There were lots of things going on on campus — great opportunities — but they weren’t necessarily synergistic or integrated,” Blank said. “One of the tasks that this position was given was to come up with a way to integrate the effort so that we can better leverage it for the use of students.”

Related: ‘We’re from the university and we’re here to help’

Blank sought out grants to expand LCC’s capacity in welding, commercial driving and Computer Numerical Control (CNC) machining following the expansions of Nomad GCS and Alpine Precision into Lincoln County. She helped to create a fully online land surveying program, which will begin this fall. She worked with the Montana Logging Association to buy a $100,000 state-of-the-art forestry simulator to prepare students for jobs in logging.

Blank says the college is the “linchpin” that holds together stakeholders in Lincoln County, but that it is not alone. Blank works closely with the Libby School District, Libby Job Service, the Department of Labor and companies in fields from healthcare to heavy machining.

“Everyone needs to be at the table,” she said. 

For Rayome and LCC administrators, the college’s work goes beyond developing hard skills. It is an institution that breaks down many of the barriers to higher education faced by rural students. 

“Being rural is hard,” said Tabitha Viergutz, a longtime Libby resident and the local community officer for the LOR Foundation, a community development fund that works in small towns across the West.

Sitting in a combined coffee shop and carpet store in downtown Libby, Viergutz described her own arc at the college, one that brought her to her current work in the community. 

Viergutz moved to Libby 13 years ago as a nail technician. Unable to get her esthetician business off the ground, she struggled to feed her family. She decided to enroll in LCC with the goal of earning an associates degree in social work. While at the college, she took a combination of in-person and virtual classes through the ITV system, which she described as “amazing.” When LOR needed a local leader to run its Libby branch, mentors from the college tapped Viergutz. 

“I wouldn’t have gone back to college had LCC not been here,” she said. 

Viergutz’s story is common in Libby. A young mother, the idea of moving to Missoula or Kalispell for college was out of the question. The cost of full-time enrollment was daunting. So, too, was the idea of becoming a non-traditional student in a traditional classroom setting. 

Before financial aid — which, FVCC officials note, there is plenty of — a full semester of tuition and fees for an in-district student at LCC costs $2,810. Comparatively, an in-state resident at the University of Montana in the same semester will pay $4,273. At Carroll College, a private university in Helena, a semester costs $20,066 before aid. 

“When you become a resident of a small, rural area, that’s where your heart lies,” she said. “The idea of going to a large college just isn’t in the cards.”

Jayne Downey, director of the Center for Research on Rural Education at Montana State University, said that beyond being smaller and more affordable, rural colleges like LCC are able to draw on the “unique strengths and assets” of their small towns, building curriculum and preparing students for careers in a way that is rooted in specific community needs. 

“These smaller graduating classes, everybody knows everybody. You are known. You are cared for. Your academic needs can be addressed individually,” she said. “The places where our schools are situated — the communities are a wealth of knowledge and resources, of history and culture, of science and technology. It surrounds them.”

Viergutz is an unofficial spokesperson for the new Libby. She said the town is “changing our focus to what we have versus what we lost.”

Libby’s first brewery, Cabinet Mountain Brewing Company, just celebrated its 10th anniversary. A kickboxing studio came to town last fall. In the new Kootenai Business Park, a former Stimson Lumber facility, there’s a pickleball court and a large Nomad GCS office. Dollar General is now in Libby and Eureka. 

“I think that Libby is still very much ingrained in our history, and very much would love to see those industries come back,” Viergutz said of mining and timber. Yet, she added, there’s “a forward facing view on reality.” 

Rayome said Nomad GCS’s arrival in town “increased the upward spiral of hope.” 

“We’re seeing people not just coming in to ogle at our sadness,” Rayome said. 

Blank, FVCC’s workforce development director, said the future of LCC’s success lies not just in training workers, but in developing local leaders who can spearhead programs and help recruit a next generation. Cultivating homegrown leadership is part of the community resilience model that Blank bases her work off of. 

“We want to build leadership in these communities,” she said. “They know what they need most, and they will always know better because they live there.”

In the future, Rayome hopes to open a dedicated building at LCC for hands-on trades education. She wants to invest in new technology, revamping the college’s ITV infrastructure. Like Blank, she wants to continue to foster leaders who were born and raised in Libby — those who want to help the town move into the future. As more jobs arrive, so too will demand for restaurants, healthcare facilities, homes, schools and the workers who power them. It’s all part of the “upward spiral of hope” that she described. Though it will be challenging, Rayome said, Lincoln County will adapt to a new economic future.

“They’re doers. They believe in themselves,” she said of Libby. “It’s a community of survivors.”

The post A community college promises a rural county it ‘hasn’t been left to die’ appeared first on The Hechinger Report.

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