Federal officials indefinitely postponed a Wyoming coal lease sale scheduled for Wednesday, apparently in response to what many observers consider a lowball bid on another federal coal lease on Monday in Montana.

Navajo Transitional Energy Company, the only bidder, stunned coal market watchers with an offer of $186,000 for 167 million tons of federal coal associated with its Spring Creek mine in southeast Montana — a fraction of a penny per ton and woefully low compared to past federal coal lease sales in the region. The last such major sale in the region, in 2012, netted $793 million for 721 million tons, or about $1.10 per ton, according to federal data.

Navajo Transitional was also in the queue to bid on the 441 million-ton West Antelope III federal coal lease associated with its Antelope coal mine spanning Campbell and Converse counties in Wyoming. 

Bureau of Land Management and Interior Department officials are still reviewing the Spring Creek bid, and those close to the process expect that another date will be set for the West Antelope III coal lease sale.

“While we would have liked to see stronger participation, this sale reflects the lingering impact from Obama and Biden’s decades long war on coal which aggressively sought to end all domestic coal production and erode confidence in the U.S. coal industry,” the Interior wrote in an email responding to a WyoFile inquiry. “Fortunately, President [Donald] Trump and his administration are rebuilding trust between industry and government as part of our broader effort to restore American Energy Dominance.”

But others say market forces — including cheap natural gas and increasingly efficient wind and solar energy — are bigger factors. 

Others note that the coal industry itself sees the writing on the wall. If a fraction-of-a-penny bid is any indication, some critics say, the thermal coal industry — which relies on U.S. coal-burning power plants — isn’t yet confident that Trump’s policies will turn around years of market decline.

“It tells you that there’s no competition for that coal in the ground, and it’s not worth very much money,” Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis Energy Data Analyst Seth Feaster told WyoFile on Wednesday. “It points to the fundamental, structural decline the coal industry is facing — for thermal coal — and that story hasn’t been reversed, despite all the things that they’re talking about.”

The postponement in Wyoming and lackluster offer in Montana come just days after the Trump administration touted sweeping regulatory rollbacks and $625 million in federal spending to revitalize “clean, beautiful coal.” 

Navajo Transitional tried to set expectations regarding Powder River Basin coal’s market value back in September, urging the U.S. Bureau of Land Management to set its minimum bid requirement for the West Antelope III coal lease much lower than comparable leases in the past. Neighboring Powder River Basin coal operator, CORE Natural Resources, echoed that sentiment and told BLM officials, “the fair-market value of coal in the Powder River Basin will remain soft for the next number of years.”

Gov. Mark Gordon has said recently that Trump’s efforts to revive the coal industry will take some time to bear fruit. He has also underscored the administration’s notion that expanding the coal industry is necessary to meet increasing electricity demand, mostly driven by artificial intelligence and other computational facilities.

The Wyoming Mining Association declined to comment on Navajo Transitional’s Spring Creek coal lease bid, but acknowledged the industry still must reckon with 15 years of drastic market and policy shifts.

“It tells you that there’s no competition for that coal in the ground, and it’s not worth very much money.”

Seth Feaster, energy industry analyst

“As we’ve not seen a lease sale in over a decade, there may be a bit of a learning curve between the agency and industry to determine value given the current market conditions, projected demand and the shift in public policy,” Mining Association Executive Director Travis Deti said.

Regardless of what coal bidders and federal officials ultimately decide is the “fair market value” for Powder River Basin coal, Deti said, it’s vital to resume leasing new tracts of coal.

“If you don’t have the coal leased, you can’t mine it and you don’t have the jobs,” Deti said.

Conservation groups have noted that existing coal leases allow mining in the region to continue at pace through 2041. 

There’s a danger in the Trump administration’s narrative around coal making a comeback, particularly for coal-reliant communities, according to Mijin Cha, who grew up in Laramie and studies energy transition and social justice strategies. 

“It creates false hope and increased distrust between community members and government officials — you know, the folks that actually could help them,” said Cha, an assistant professor of environmental studies at the University of California, Santa Cruz. “It delays help for energy communities, and I think that what they’re doing [selling more federal coal] is so much more detrimental.”

Though the industry has seen slight upticks in demand recently, Wyoming coal production — primarily in the Powder River Basin — has shrunk by more than half since its heyday in the mid-2000s. The state scooped about 191 million tons of coal last year, according to federal data.

The post Trump’s major coal sales flop in Wyoming and Montana appeared first on WyoFile .

The Montana Department of Environmental Quality has approved a plan by the Spanish Peaks Mountain Club, a private residential club that is part of Big Sky Resort, to convert treated wastewater into snow for skiing. 

The project will make Big Sky Resort the first public ski area in Montana to utilize powder made from what was once sewage. Conservation groups have praised the approach as an ideal way to use wastewater, especially as the climate changes and winter becomes drier in the West.

Wastewater will be used to create a base layer of snow on Spirit and Andesite mountains, as well as on the Spanish Peaks base area. According to Lone Mountain Land Company, which owns the club, Big Sky Resort will use up to 23 million gallons of treated wastewater during the initial phase from its state-of-the-art water treatment facility. In the second phase, the resort plans to use up to 44 million gallons of water per year. 

About a dozen other ski resorts across eight states, as well as resorts in Canada, Switzerland and Australia, also use treated water for snowmaking. The nearby Yellowstone Club in Big Sky became Montana’s first ski area to use wastewater for snowmaking in 2023. For several years, the Yellowstone Club has also used wastewater to irrigate its golf course.

Municipal wastewater is usually treated before being released into rivers. However, Richard Chandler, vice president of environmental operations for Lone Mountain Land Company, said that using recycled water to make snow further reduces environmental impact. 

By spraying it through the snowmaking equipment, which mists it onto the slopes as snow, the wastewater is treated again, according to Chandler. As it melts in the spring and enters the ground, it’s filtered a third time. 

Chandler also said that the compacted snow on the slopes will last longer into spring and summer, adding water to the aquifer during a critical time and supporting streamflows later in the season. 

Several conservation and community groups have come out in support of the project, including Trout Unlimited, American Rivers, the Greater Yellowstone Coalition, the Gallatin River Task Force, the Association of Gallatin Agricultural Irrigators and the Big Sky County Water and Sewer Department.

“Reusing water as snow conserves the fresh water that our rivers and community depend on,” Kristin Gardner, chief executive and science officer with Gallatin River Taskforce, said in a press release. “Instead of taking clean water from the river or our drinking water aquifers, water is recycled back as snow to the mountains — a win-win for the health of our rivers and the resort economy.”

The practice hasn’t been without controversy. About a decade ago, a ski area near Flagstaff, Arizona, was sued by a local tribe over environmental concerns about turning wastewater into snow. The Hopi Tribe also alleged that the practice would desecrate a mountain it considered sacred. The tribe eventually lost in court, but during the dispute, some environmental groups, including the Center for Biological Diversity, raised concerns about the potential impact of the recycled snow on local aquatic life.

While the Yellowstone Club began using treated wastewater only a few years ago for snowmaking and irrigation, the concept has been explored in the area for decades. In 1997, the Big Sky Water Sewer District first examined the idea of recycled snowmaking. In 2011, the Gallatin River Task Force conducted a pilot study with the Yellowstone Club and the DEQ, which converted a million gallons of wastewater into approximately two acres of snow, about 18 inches deep. Afterward, DEQ adopted new reuse standards for reclaimed water that included snowmaking. In 2020, the club applied for a permit to use treated water for snowmaking. As part of its permit, the Yellowstone Club is required to erect signs warning visitors not to eat the snow. 

In a press release, Chandler expressed hope that the Big Sky community and the nearby ski resort could serve as a model for others in the state, particularly in light of a changing climate that is affecting communities reliant on snow for tourism. 

“The community of Big Sky’s commitment to being a leader in water conservation has led to this incredible partnership,” Chandler said. “We are seeing less snowpack each year, and I have heard from several ski areas across Montana that are also interested in this technology. I am hopeful recycled snowmaking will become the standard practice someday in our headwater state.”

The post State approves Big Sky Resort plan to turn wastewater into snow appeared first on Montana Free Press.

Missoula-based attorney Graham Coppes entered the spring hopeful. Despite a slow start to winter, most western Montana river basins were reporting a near-average snowpack by April. But when warm May temperatures brought an underwhelming runoff, Coppes knew that thirsty soils had soaked up much of the winter’s melting precipitation before it could reach rivers and lakes.

Coppes recognized early on that it would be a long, difficult summer for aquatic ecosystems and the $1.3 billion recreational economy they support. So did Montana Fish, Wildlife and Parks, which held a virtual town hall in June to discuss fishery concerns. Slow-motion alarm set in as Coppes watched one blue-ribbon river after another dip to record lows.

The Clark Fork and Blackfoot rivers, both of which have nearly a century of streamflow data, had fallen to one-third their typical flows in mid-June. In July, rivers on both sides of the Continental Divide, including the Flathead, Bitterroot, Yellowstone, Gallatin, Big Hole, Stillwater, Tongue and Teton, broke low-flow records. By July 16, FWP had partially or fully closed 13 rivers to fishing after they reached low streamflow thresholds or temperatures that can endanger trout.

Three weeks later, Coppes filed a lawsuit he’d started contemplating 15 years earlier, when he was a University of Montana student learning a new policy language — water law — to protect the wild headwaters he’d come to love during the decade he’d spent working as a fly-fishing and raft guide in northwest Montana.

It was, he told Montana Free Press, the right moment to bring a “critical, missing piece” to the conversation: an evaluation of how Montana’s public trust water resources interact with water rights, which are treated as a property interest that can be bought, sold, leased or — in the case of an “abandonment” — forfeited.

More specifically, Coppes is asking a judge to evaluate whether Montana’s government is fulfilling its constitutional obligation to prevent the “unreasonable depletion and degradation of natural resources” in its administration of water, which the state Constitution says is “the property of the state for the use of the people.” Coppes argues on behalf of Upper Missouri Waterkeeper, Alliance for the Wild Rockies and Save Bull Trout that FWP has not fully used its decades-old water rights and leases, and aquatic ecosystems are suffering as a result.

Coppes is critical of a July 2021 letter Gov. Greg Gianforte sent to FWP directing the agency to “forego a call” on the Smith and Shields rivers because it would “provide questionable, if any, measurable benefit.” Coppes and others argue that the “first in time, first in right” framework for allocating water Gianforte alluded to in his letter too often leaves fisheries in a lurch. As Coppes tells it, FWP is often unwilling or slow to ask more junior water-right holders to stop their withdrawals, even as iconic wild trout fisheries face unprecedented conditions. 

But to other stakeholders, the state-held water rights in question are too junior — and too modest — to turn the tide of diminishing streamflows. Agricultural groups argue that the current system of water management, which benefits those with the oldest water rights, is too foundational and entrenched to change. Still others say FWP is right to defer to locally developed watershed groups that have taken root in basins where demand is snowballing for an increasingly scarce resource. The Big Hole Watershed Committee and Blackfoot Challenge, for example, say carrots have a stronger track record than sticks when it comes to improving watershed resilience.  

The organizations’ executive directors wrote in an early September letter to the editor that cooperative, voluntary conservation measures are working in their basins and highlighted six-figure financial sacrifices irrigators have made to bolster streamflows. Requiring the state to use a heavy-handed approach to managing its instream flow water rights is “a short track to picking a handful of winners and leaving many more losers, including the fisheries and aquatic health of our streams,” they concluded. 

Bill Schenk, who started working on instream flows for FWP in 2003, echoed this sentiment in a late September conversation with MTFP. He said stakeholder-led efforts have proven to be a “more durable, long-lasting solution” than sending out call letters alone. He also described the 84-page Water Right Call Protocol the agency issued in 2022 as an “almost verbatim” record of what FWP has been doing for years.

“There’s nothing to be gained by vilifying landowners and water users,” Schenk added. “The ecological system and the community economic system need to coexist.”

Coppes acknowledged that he’s “kicked a little bit of a hornet’s nest” with the lawsuit, but maintains that the status quo isn’t working. 

“We can’t sit back and throw our hands up and say, ‘This is all we can do. We just have to accept these shitty conditions and fish dying.’” 

Coppes said the state can support locally led drought efforts while upholding its own water rights. If ever there were a time for FWP to use every tool at its disposal — and then some — this would be it, he contends.

“In spite of the State’s ongoing and well-documented drought, as of the date of this Complaint filing, FWP still has not made call on all of its instream flow rights,” the 152-page lawsuit reads. “If the agency will not make call during the largest drought, and lowest river flows, on record, when would it ever do so?” (FWP disputed that characterization of its management approach in its answer to the environmental groups’ lawsuit.)

Coppes maintains that refocusing fraught conversations about water management on the state’s public trust obligation could force policymakers to confront a grim constellation of climate-change drivers pointing toward even lower, warmer, more ecologically compromised waterways in the coming decades.

“To us, the best possible outcome is the establishment of an affirmative duty — the application of that ‘clean and healthful environment’ language [in the state Constitution] that we have seen the court communicate for climate change in Held,” Coppes said, referencing the landmark climate case the Montana Supreme Court decided last year in favor of Rikki Held and her 15 young co-plaintiffs. “If we can establish that duty and that obligation, then we could springboard that to more progressive action in the future.”

‘A PERFECT RECIPE OF DOOM’

Michelle Bryan, who teaches courses on water law and property law at the University of Montana, told MTFP that the state started establishing instream flow rights more than 50 years ago to avoid a legal showdown between the public trust aspect of water ownership and other uses such as irrigation, which accounts for 67% of the water consumed in Montana. 

“The way Montana dealt with the problem was to create instream flow rights so that the public trust and traditional consumptive uses would not go head-to-head,” she said, adding that Montana’s constitutional environmental protections add another layer of complexity to the litigation. “I don’t know of a case squarely on point with this.”

Guy Alsentzer with Upper Missouri Waterkeeper, the lead plaintiff in the lawsuit, argues there is no legal basis to treat instream flow rights as a second-tier water use.

“There is no distinction between the appropriative right to keep water instream for aquatic life and flows, versus somebody taking it out to use it for a number of purposes, whether it’s being sent to an irrigation ditch, a sprinkler or a mine,” Alsentzer said. “All we’re asking for in this lawsuit is that FWP do exactly what [these water rights and reservations] are literally on the books for: to provide for in-stream flows based on science-based triggers.”

Alsentzer also argues that Montana’s wild trout are facing a “perfect recipe of doom,” including fish-killing spikes in water temperature, pernicious algal blooms that deoxygenate aquatic ecosystems, and declining populations of macroinvertebrates, which are an essential food source for trout. Diminished streamflows exacerbate all three.

“There’s no more luxury of waiting for thoughtful solutions that are just magically going to [appear],” Alsentzer said. “The one entity, more than any other, that needs to be leading the charge is our government.”

‘WHAT ARE WE DOING HERE?’

It’s not just fish and anglers feeling the pinch with diminished water supplies. Karli Johnson, Montana Farm Bureau Federation’s state governmental affairs coordinator, said drought has hit agricultural producers along the Rocky Mountain Front particularly hard this year.

Several reservoirs that flow into irrigation projects never filled this spring. Johnson said it will take multiple years of above-average precipitation to climb out of a deficit that dates back to at least 2021, the year Gianforte directed FWP not to use its instream flow rights in some basins.

Johnson, who “moonlights as a rancher in Choteau,” said she’s feeling the strain personally. 

“Where we normally get thousands of bales [of hay], this year we got 43,” she said.“We definitely had a challenging year.”

Johnson cautions against focusing on pipes, pumps and ditches without also considering how irrigation systems benefit people, groundwater and the wild animals such as white-tailed deer, moose, frogs and turtles that frequent irrigated valley bottoms.

“You can’t look at it in a vacuum,” she said. “For example, flood irrigation affects not just the water in the stream — it also affects the recharge of the aquifers. It mimics some of the natural water patterns that we maybe would have seen when there were a lot more beavers on the stream. And it also has the added benefit of allowing us to grow food and fiber.”

Mike Bias, a Twin Bridges-based fly-fishing outfitter, said he has mixed feelings about the lawsuit but acknowledged that more needs to be done to protect the long-term viability of the state’s chronically dewatered rivers.

Bias said he supports the work of the Big Hole Watershed Committee, which he described as “doing more on the Big Hole to help water than anyone else — period.” Bias also argues that FWP’s instream flow rights are generally too junior to make much of a difference in the grand scheme of things, even in “wicked low” years like this one. (In late August, the Big Hole dropped so low that FWP closed the entire river to fishing, an intervention Bias described as “unprecedented.”)

But Bias, the executive director of the Fishing Outfitters Association of Montana, also believes Montana is long overdue for a reckoning about how, where and when water is used. He said he supports the litigation to the extent that it’s advancing the “What are we doing here?” conversation.

“Is irrigating this many acres of this or that — or, for example, growing potatoes in the Ruby Valley — is that more important than keeping water in the river?” he asked. “I think that conversation needs to happen.”

For Coppes, waiting won’t make the inevitable reckoning any easier. He described the lawsuit as the first step in a larger discussion.

“We need the precedent to say, ‘FWP and the state of Montana has a constitutional obligation to do everything in its power to protect these river systems.’ Once we have that, we can talk about what those tools might be,” he said. “There’s nothing, to me, that’s more antithetical to a ‘clean and healthy environment’ than a dead, dry river. And right now there are dead, dry rivers across the whole state.” 

The post ‘Dead, dry rivers’: Lawsuit says state isn’t managing rivers for the benefit of all appeared first on Montana Free Press.

As the country edged closer Tuesday to a federal government shutdown, Walt Schweitzer worried about the two-party checks issued to young grain farmers, which can’t be cashed without the signature of the U.S. Farm Service Agency.

Farmers who use crop proceeds to collateralize FSA direct operating loans must split those checks for grain sold to the local elevator. Those checks will go uncashed as long as FSA signatories are furloughed, said Schweitzer, president of Montana Farmers Union. There were 1,142 Montana farmers with FSA direct operating loans last year. The money they’ve borrowed to pay for seed, fertilizer and other farm basics totaled $118.6 million. 

“It’s frozen funds,” Schweitzer said. “These are people that are living on a shoestring, the young farmers.”

Wednesday marks the beginning of a new federal fiscal year, but without a federal budget passed by Congress and no agreement on a short-term funding bill, it appeared agencies would begin the new budget year without money to function. 

As of Tuesday evening, congressional Democrats had voted to block a budget deal.  Instead of supporting the same continuing resolution they voted for in the spring, the minority party is now pushing to add funding for enhanced health care subsidies and roll back some Medicaid cuts approved earlier this year. Republicans have dismissed Democrats’ demands, accusing them of leveraging a shutdown for unrelated policy aims that could be dealt with later. The boosted subsidies for many Affordable Care Act plans are set to expire at the end of the calendar year.

The Republican leaders of the Montana state House and Senate have both advocated for the passage of a continuing resolution with the same terms congressional Democrats agreed to in the spring.

“Allowing a shutdown would consequently and needlessly disrupt our economies, threaten public safety, and undermine public confidence in our institutions,” Montana House Speaker Brandon Ler, R-Savage, said in a letter to congressional leadership. “Our families and communities would feel the pain with immediate effect and confusion. Put simply, a government shutdown should not be used as political leverage to pass partisan reforms — these are not chips Congress should be bargaining with.”

Past shutdowns indicate the political consequences for not funding the government are minimal for Montana politicians, and so are the concessions gained. There have been three government shutdowns since 2013, with Republicans in each case holding out for concessions they didn’t get. In 2013, the holdout concerned Affordable Care Act funding, in 2018 it was immigration and government spending. In 2019, the issue was funding for a wall on the U.S. border with Mexico, a stalemate that lasted 34 days.

Congress has passed a federal budget before the start of the federal fiscal year only four times since 1974 when it established the process for funding the federal government. Continuing resolutions funding the government for short terms after Oct. 1 have been the norm.

“When it comes to our federal delegation, we could see a couple points movement in public opinion, but blame will likely mostly fall along partisan lines, and should not move with the base,” said Jessi Bennion, a political science professor at Montana State University. “Big picture, voters have short memories, so it’s hard to imagine a shutdown affecting the midterms, for example.”

Regional government offices were tight-lipped about what services would stop, while those in Washington, D.C., deferred to required contingency plans for what departments will do should they run out of money. Many of the plans posted hadn’t been updated since 2023.

Here’s what we know about what happens to federal operations in Montana if the government shuts down:

The U.S. Postal Service continues

U.S. mail will continue to be delivered. Because USPS is funded through fees for services, the postal service isn’t dependent on federal appropriations.

Social Security payments also continue

Because Social Security payments are dependent on annual budgeting by Congress, payments continue through government shutdowns. Employees critical to issuing payments continue to work. But applications for benefits and appeals on benefit decisions cease.

Some things pause at the U.S. Department of Agriculture

The Farm Service Agency plans to discontinue all work unrelated to collateralizing farm loans, while the loans issued by the Rural Development Agency would cease.

Forest Service employees paid from funding sources outside of the general fund would continue working, as would anyone paid with funds carried over from the previous year. Some timber sale contracts would continue to be managed.

Oil, gas and coal leases go on hold

The Bureau of Land Management plans to cease work on new leases to drill and mine for resources on federal land. The pause comes days after the Trump administration announced plans to stimulate interest in coal leases. Review of new mining plans would stop, unless in some cases funding was available from other sources.

At public parks managed by BLM, visitor centers and other facilities will close unless they are managed by a third party that doesn’t rely on BLM staff. Trash collection, toilet cleaning and other sanitation services might not be available at every location.

Camp sites and boat ramps will remain open but restrooms and water might not be available. BLM advises that visitors use these sites at their own risk. 

Additionally, reservations at sites that aren’t staffed during the shutdown might not be honored. Refunds will be issued only when the government reopens.

Bureau of Indian Affairs operates with a skeleton staff

The BIA will continue to provide essential law enforcement, social services and public safety services, while pausing environmental oversight and trust management services. Nearly half the agency’s employees would be furloughed for the first five days of a shutdown.

National Parks are in limbo

It’s not yet clear if national parks such as Glacier and Yellowstone would remain open. Park officials have not said what will happen if the government shuts down, but park concessionaires such as Xanterra have said they are monitoring the situation and will offer refunds if people cannot make planned visits.

Some health care services are disrupted 

Coverage for Medicare and Medicaid health care services are slated to continue if the federal government temporarily shuts down. But other functions of the federal Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services would be disrupted, in part because of workforce furloughs. 

CMS, which exists within the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, oversees investigations into patient harm and quality inspections at hospitals and nursing homes that receive Medicare and Medicaid reimbursements. The agency said it will keep looking into allegations of “the most serious incidents of resident or patient harm” if the government shuts down. But the agency said other types of reviews “would be suspended,” including for recertifications of institutions like the Montana State Hospital.

Other health care programs are set to expire on Oct. 1 unless reauthorized by Congress. The American Medical Association said that pandemic-era expansions for certain Medicare telehealth services would lapse, creating gaps in services for some users. Katy Mack, a spokesperson with the Montana Hospital Association, said many providers will likely continue to offer telehealth services with the hope that new Congressional action will allow reimbursements to restart after the government reopens.

What about the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program?

State and national experts who track food assistance funding say that SNAP recipients will continue receiving monthly support through October but that future funding reserves are less secure. 

The program is federally funded through the U.S. Department of Agriculture but administered by the state Department of Public Health and Human Services. As of August, the food assistance program covered more than 78,000 Montanans. An additional 3,700 applicants applied for food support that same month.

Part of the uncertainty has to do with if and how Trump’s Office of Management and Budget intends to use reserve funds to cover food assistance costs going forward. In a recent memo about the funding crunch, the Food Research and Action Center, a national group that advocates for funding to address chronic hunger, said those funds could come from a variety of places, including the USDA’s contingency reserves. 

Kiera Condon, an advocacy specialist with the Montana Food Bank Network, said Tuesday that the state organization is optimistic about secure funding for the month of October, but said November SNAP benefits are not guaranteed. The same concern goes for WIC, the supplemental assistance program for pregnant women, new parents and young children. 

“Typically [WIC has] remained operational during other shutdowns,” Condon said. “But states have not received any funding for [the next fiscal year], making it more challenging,” Condon said. 

A spokesperson for the state health department did not respond to a question about potential impacts to SNAP and WIC distribution in the event of a government shutdown.

The post Here’s what a federal government shutdown could mean in Montana appeared first on Montana Free Press.

Housing insecurity touches almost everyone in tribal communities in Montana. Its causes and consequences are deep-rooted, confoundingly complex, and often overlooked.

This three-part series, The Shelter Gap, explores Indian Country’s housing crisis by examining the barriers residents and developers face in buying, renting and building homes, investigating the root causes of chronic housing shortages on reservation land, and highlighting what’s possible when residents achieve stable housing. 

Part 1 explains how a widespread reservation housing shortage prevents middle-class tribal citizens from living in reservation communities, perpetuating economic stagnation and cycles of poverty. 

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When Jacqueline Martin, a citizen of the Aaniiih Tribe, retired after a 32-year career in natural resource and fire management around the Mountain West, she wanted to move back to the reservation where she grew up.

Located in north-central Montana, the Fort Belknap Reservation is home to more than 3,000 members of the Aaniiih and Nakoda tribes. Martin had ambitions of bringing her professional skills and experience back to the community. She hoped to help the tribes find funding for natural resource management projects and mentor young people in her field. 

But when Martin looked for homes on the reservation, she couldn’t find any. She’s not alone. 

Though Martin lives hundreds of miles away in Boise, Idaho, she stays in touch with her former high school classmates who left Fort Belknap to work in real estate, construction and health care — expertise that’s in short supply on the reservation.

“Our conversations always come back to we’d love to move home, but there’s nowhere to live,” she said. 

The long-standing housing shortage on Indian reservations in Montana reinforces cycles of poverty by forcing young residents to seek opportunities far from home and by discouraging financially secure citizens from returning to tribal communities, interviews with tribal leaders and housing experts show. Federal funding for tribal housing agencies is inadequate even to maintain limited existing housing stock. Convoluted land ownership patterns, financing hurdles, and lack of access to electricity, water and roads discourage commercial development on reservation land.

The result is a housing landscape inadequate to the needs and aspirations of its current and would-be residents.

“The brightest and best are the ones you need at home, building the future on that reservation,” former Salish and Kootenai Housing Authority Director Bob Gauthier, now deceased, said last July. “But if there’s nowhere to live, what do you do?”

OUT OF STOCK

Current Salish and Kootenai Housing Authority Director Jody Cahoon Perez told Montana Free Press that housing challenges “look essentially the same on every reservation” — a sheer lack of housing stock to buy or rent combined with a chronic shortage of tribally managed rental units.

According to 2019-2023 census estimates, the Northern Cheyenne, Rocky Boy’s and Fort Belknap reservations in Montana had homeownership vacancy rates of zero, meaning there were no unoccupied homes for sale when the survey was conducted. 

With the supply of purchasable homes severely limited or nonexistent, the rental sector becomes overburdened. Tribal housing authorities, whose primary source of funding is the federal government, are often the dominant — and sometimes the only — landlord in tribal areas. With demand for housing consistently outpacing supply, wait lists for rental units swell. 

The wait for tribally managed housing in Ronan, on the Flathead Reservation, is typically two and a half years, according to Cahoon Perez. A 2021 report found the average wait for housing on the Crow Reservation was 10 years.

Because Native families tend to take in friends and relatives, housing insecurity in Indian Country often translates to overcrowding, rather than homelessness, according to a 2017 federal report. About 16% of Native Americans living in tribal areas experience overcrowding — defined by more than one resident per room, including dining rooms, living rooms and kitchens — compared to just 2% of all U.S. households. 

Overcrowding is even more acute in the state. A 2018 tribal health board survey of more than 300 residents of the Northern Cheyenne Reservation found that 31% of respondents lived in overcrowded homes. A similar survey in 2021 found that more than 1 in 4 homes on the neighboring Crow Reservation were overcrowded. Some respondents reported up to 20 people sleeping in a single house. 

The crisis touches nearly everyone in tribal communities statewide. 

When Tyler Baker left the Blackfeet Reservation to pursue higher education — first at Salish Kootenai College on the Flathead Reservation and then at Gonzaga University in Washington — he imagined he’d eventually return home. But today, employed as the coordinator of the Montana Native Homeownership Coalition, Baker can’t find housing on the Blackfeet Reservation.

“There’s always a push for leaving to get educated, come back, and help your tribe,” he said. “I went and got my education, but can’t go back because there’s nowhere to go.” 

Gaylene DuCharme, who was the financial aid director at Blackfeet Community College for 13 years, has watched the negative impacts of inadequate housing play out at both ends of the education spectrum. She said the average BCC student commutes about 54 miles to campus, and some have tried to solve their housing conundrum by asking if they can camp on campus property. DuCharme had to tell them no. 

The same lack of housing that complicates life for students also deters potential teachers, she said. 

“We’ve had faculty accept a job and then find out they don’t have housing and then resign soon after, because it’s such a hard place to get a home or even rent,” she said. 

NO HOMES, NO GROWTH

The difficulties tribal citizens face in finding adequate housing create economic ramifications well beyond the personal. 

Housing deficiencies in Indian Country also stymie the development of a middle class — a demographic that’s vital for a community’s economic growth — said Robert Crawford, former real estate adviser and homeownership coordinator for the Blackfeet Nation. 

That assessment tracks with Jacqueline Martin’s experience. 

“When you take out professional, independent entrepreneurs, individuals who want to help, it makes the community take a step backwards,” she said. “We’re not able to progress at the rate we should be.”

Lack of housing means that many people who work on the Fort Belknap Reservation live outside the community in places like Chinook or Havre, tribal councilmember Randi Fetter said. As a result, dollars earned in the tribal community are often spent outside the reservation.

“So that’s where all of our economic development goes,” she said. 

With few or no homes for sale, federally funded low-income tribal housing is often the only available option. And because tenants must meet a federally determined low-income threshold to be eligible for that housing, earning more money can disqualify a resident. The catch-22 result is that many reservation residents can’t afford to advance economically without losing access to the only housing available to them.

“I refer to it as a square peg going into a round hole, because only if you are poor are you eligible,” said Maria Cohen, a real estate broker and tribal housing consultant in Arizona. “If you are middle-class and above, you are no longer eligible.”

Crawford has owned several businesses on and around the Blackfeet Reservation. He said his biggest challenge has been hiring employees. 

“There’s all this data about [high] unemployment, so I thought, ‘This is perfect, we’ll get everybody a job,’” he said of a cannabis company he oversaw just outside the reservation. “But we couldn’t. Because if they took the job, they’d lose their house.”

That dynamic only adds pressure to tribally managed low-income rental housing, where maintenance backlogs and wait lists are already months or years long, perpetuating a cycle in which many families live in inadequate low-income housing for multiple generations. 

“We can’t get out of it,” Crawford said. “We can’t [house] the people who are definitely going to boost the economy. A rising tide raises all ships, but we can’t get the tide in.”

CULTURE AND RECONNECTION

Because tribal identity is closely tied to land and place, cultural and language revitalization efforts often occur on reservations, but lack of access to housing in tribal communities creates roadblocks to those avenues of connection. 

Living in Arizona with his partner, La’Trell Hendrickson was eager to return to the Northern Cheyenne Reservation for a summer Cheyenne language internship at Chief Dull Knife College in Lame Deer. 

Hendrickson’s grandmother spoke Cheyenne, and when she died he felt a sense of duty to pass the language on to younger generations.

“Our language is the heart of our people,” he said. “It makes us Cheyenne. That’s why it matters so much to me. I don’t want that gift to go away.”

“We can’t [house] the people who are definitely going to boost the economy. A rising tide raises all ships, but we can’t get the tide in.”

Robert Crawford, former real estate adviser and homeownership coordinator for the Blackfeet Nation 

Hendrickson’s family owns a home on the reservation, but like many homes in tribal communities, it’s overcrowded. Eight or 10 people share the four-bedroom space on a given day, Hendrickson said.

“There’s not any space for me,” he said. “We’ve already got someone on the couch, all the rooms are full. So to actually come and learn my language, I have to make a sacrifice.”

Hendrickson’s sacrifice was that for two months he camped outside his family home in a tent or camper van, depending on the weather, during the internship. 

The intergenerational transmission of values and culture is an “inherent right” of Indigenous people, according to Caroline LaPorte, an attorney for the Indian Law Resource Center, a national nonprofit. 

“If you’re a tribal community, and your tribal members, your descendants, your kids, your grandkids, want to stay close to that nucleus of culture, that’s what having access to housing does,” she said. “It keeps us together.”

---

Part 2 of The Shelter Gap, publishing Wednesday, Oct. 1, investigates the historical and contemporary causes of Indian Country’s housing shortage. 

This series was produced with support from the McGraw Center for Business Journalism at the Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism at the City University of New York. 

The post No roads home: How a chronic housing shortage keeps reservation communities in crisis.  appeared first on Montana Free Press.

LAUREL — For Tim and Amy Grandpre, a small slice of land off a gravel road southeast of town, not far from the banks of the Yellowstone River, has been their slice of paradise for decades.

The grass around their house, nestled in a slight hollow shaded by cottonwoods, stays green through the summer without being watered. Chicken coops and neat stacks of firewood are testament to long hours spent making the property a home. Amy, who taught gardening classes for the county extension office before her retirement, tends rows of vegetables in homemade greenhouses.

Most of the surrounding land is a swath of open fields traversed by irrigation ditches. Recent years, though, have brought the Grandpres a new next-door neighbor: NorthWestern Energy’s $316 million, 175-megawatt Yellowstone County Generating Station.

The new plant, among the most hotly disputed industrial developments in recent Montana history, is central to a yearslong debate about how NorthWestern should generate electricity. While environmental groups have pressed the utility to embrace renewable generation, the new natural gas-powered plant represents a concrete-and-steel investment in fossil fuels over its 30-year service life. NorthWestern, which has committed to carbon neutrality by 2050, insists that on-demand gas generation remains necessary to keep Montana’s energy supply reliable — and that it’s capable of mitigating byproducts like air pollution and noise.

In Laurel, where the plant has been in operation for 18 months, neighbors say those more immediate environmental concerns are top of mind.

The small city on the western outskirts of Billings is among the Montana communities where a lively local agriculture scene coexists with some of the state’s heaviest industries. Drivers on Interstate 90, which runs half a mile north of the Grandpres’ home, have a panoramic view of the towering stacks of the CHS Laurel Refinery, often accompanied by a whiff of burnt-rubber odor some locals call “the smell of money.” Just across the interstate, BNSF Railway operates a major switchyard adjacent to the local Walmart.

For NorthWestern, the investor-owned utility that provides electricity to 328,000 Montana customers, the confluence of an adjacent substation, access to an existing natural gas pipeline and proximity to Billings-area customers made a field outside Laurel an ideal location for a major addition to its generating portfolio. Eighteen 78-foot exhaust stacks, one for each of the plant’s natural gas-powered engines, add a row of new towers to the town’s industrial skyline.

Each engine is designed to spin up with a few minutes’ notice, giving the company the ability to rapidly adjust how much electricity it’s generating. NorthWestern says that on-demand flexibility is vital to its efforts to manage its power grid, especially as the company incorporates more generation from weather-dependent wind and solar.

Guiding MTFP journalists around the facility last month, NorthWestern project manager Josh Follman, who oversaw the plant’s construction, showed off its 86 miles of color-coded power cables and spark plugs the size of kitchen trash cans. He also took pains to point out numerous features intended to make the plant a responsible neighbor — among them, dark sky-compliant outdoor lighting, filters that scrub trace pollutants from its exhaust, and sound-dampening measures that muffle the generators’ roar.

“Unfortunately, you’ve got to have power plants. It’s just the nature of the beast,” Follman said. “You want to try to keep them as clean as possible and you want to keep it as least intrusive as you can. And I think we’ve done a pretty good job.”

From the moment the facility was formally proposed in 2021, it has been a lightning rod for public debate. Local and national environmental groups mobilized in opposition, alleging the plant would impair local air quality and spew climate-warming carbon dioxide. Critics have also argued that NorthWestern can provide customers with reliable service without burning more fossil fuels, calling the new power plant an unnecessary way to pad the company’s bottom line at ratepayer expense.

Last fall, for example, the Billings-based Northern Plains Resource Council led a “Stop Godzilla” protest float on the Yellowstone River. Signs labeled the plant a “methane monster” and accused the company of “Poisoning Hard Working People and the Planet for Predatory Profits.”

The opposition also took to court, litigating the plant’s local zoning approval and state environmental review, with the latter case eventually landing before the Montana Supreme Court. While construction was delayed for two months in 2023 following a lower court ruling, the company otherwise forged ahead undeterred.

The plant first fired up in March 2024 and was substantially completed last fall, producing power for Montana customers and for sale to other utilities. As of this month, 16 of the 18 generating units are fully online as operators work to troubleshoot start-up issues with the other two, according to NorthWestern staff. 

The company says the facility employs 22 workers and expects to pay a $3.41 million tax bill this year. Because the plant is located outside Laurel city limits, that bill doesn’t help pay for city services, but does include taxes for Laurel Public Schools.

Even so, the plant remains a high-voltage hot potato. An ongoing case before Montana’s utility-regulating Public Service Commission will determine how much of the plant’s price tag will be passed along to NorthWestern’s customers in the form of higher power bills. The facility’s generating capacity may also become a factor as NorthWestern, which is proposing a merger with a South Dakota utility, looks for ways to serve power-hungry artificial intelligence data centers.

Across the Yellowstone River, a little less than a mile southwest of the plant, Carah Ronan is a NorthWestern neighbor, but not a customer. The small organic flower farm she and her husband run on eight acres gets its power from a rural electric cooperative.

Nonetheless, the plant’s exhaust stacks peek through the trees as Ronan tends her flowers, which she cuts for sale at grocery stores in Bozeman and Red Lodge. As she paused during an interview on a still August evening, their low rumble hummed like a jet plane idling in the distance.

Ronan, who has farmed on the property since 2021, said she’s accustomed to intermittent noise from trucks on the highway to Red Lodge and the noon bell ringing at the Laurel refinery, which sometimes reminds her to eat lunch. But she finds the perennial drone of the new power plant more irritating.

“It’s consistently there now as a background noise, so there’s no listening to the water or the birds or the toads at night,” she said. “You hear that sound 24/7. And that is not amazing.”

Ronan’s 91-year-old grandmother, Nita Rowland, first moved to the property in 1962. She said noise from the plant feels like a “tremor.”

“It shakes the whole house all night now,” Rowland said.

Ronan also worries about a plant-feeding gas pipeline she saw installed near her home’s sole access road, saying an incident could leave her family trapped.

Along with other neighbors along Thiel Road, which runs south of the river, Ronan opposed the plant in its planning stages, weighing in at public meetings. A coalition of neighbors was a plaintiff in the litigation challenging the facility’s zoning approval.

Ronan said she remains frustrated about what she described as NorthWestern’s failure to mend fences with her and her neighbors.

“They know they’ve pissed off everyone over here by putting in the plant,” Ronan said. “It would take them a half a day to come out and talk to all of us.”

Sitting in the shade of their garage on a sunny August day, the Grandpres were more upbeat about their relationship with the company and the heavy industry it planted across the property line from their backyard. Multiple company staffers shared their cell phone numbers, they said, and South Dakota-based CEO Brian Bird even visited. Told that Follman, the NorthWestern construction engineer, was in town to meet with MTFP reporters, Tim Grandpre said he was going to call him to set up lunch.

“Very open book,” Amy Grandpre said about the company’s interaction with the couple. “They were very forthcoming to visit with us.”

“But they were going to do it. They didn’t ask permission,” Tim Grandpre added.

Follman said the facility’s footprint was designed to minimize impacts on the Grandpres, placing the plant’s parking lot on their side of the company’s property to buffer them from the generators. NorthWestern built a berm to help shield the couple’s home from noise and planted view-diffusing saplings on top.

The steady stream of semis and cement trucks rumbling past their home made for a rough couple of years while the plant was under construction, the Grandpres said. But today they’re relatively unbothered by the facility, saying it’s less of a nuisance than the refinery, the interstate and passing trains. As the couple chatted with reporters, the hum of the power plant was drowned out by buzzing cicadas.

“It’s almost like it was before,” Amy Grandpre said.

The couple said they had rebuffed outreach from the opposition movement, saying they thought opponents exaggerated how much the plant would change their rural neighborhood.

“Dogs barking and kids screaming and horns blaring — can you imagine living in town? These guys are better neighbors,” Tim Grandpre said.

This story was reported in collaboration with the Laurel Outlook as part of Montana Free Press’ 2025 Reporter Residency program, which places MTFP reporters for weeklong stints in community newsrooms throughout the state. Special thanks to Laurel Outlook reporter Jaci Webb for her insight.

The post A power plant next door appeared first on Montana Free Press.

MISSOULA — Four of the youth plaintiffs challenging the Trump administration’s climate policies had their day in court Tuesday, telling a judge that climate change-fueled wildfires and extreme weather prevent them from living their lives the way they want to.

The testimony came alongside that from three expert witnesses who also took the stand during the first day of a hearing in federal district court in the Lighthiser v. Trump case, arguing the court should find Trump’s executive orders on energy issues unconstitutional and halt them. The plaintiffs seek a temporary block while the full case plays out on three orders aimed at boosting the coal industry and declaring a national energy emergency. 

The youth ages 11 to 20 described damage to their physical and mental health from climate change-related wildfires, flooding and hurricanes, and said the executive branch’s efforts to “unleash” American energy will worsen pollution and other climate conditions. 

Attorneys representing the federal government argued in their opening statement that U.S. District Court Judge Dana Christensen should dismiss the case because the plaintiffs are not entitled to ask the court to resolve an energy policy dispute by interpreting the Constitution to require a particular policy. 

In May, 22 young Americans — 10 of whom were plaintiffs in the Held v. Montana constitutional climate lawsuit — sued the Trump administration to undo three executive orders they argue violate their Fifth Amendment rights to life and liberty. Tuesday was the first of a two-day hearing.

Joseph Lee, a 19-year-old California resident, told the court that wildfire smoke, extreme heat and humidity trigger his asthma. After being hospitalized due to a heat stroke in 2023, Lee said his lungs have been more sensitive and he is “terrified” to go outdoors in extreme heat. Lee said he struggles with anxiety related to the climate, wildfires and safety. 

“It prevents me from going outdoors and really pursuing things I want to do in nature,” he said.

In her testimony, 17-year-old Livingston resident Jorja M., whose last name is not part of the court record, said climate change has shortened winter ski seasons and increased the number of wildfires and smoke in the area. Jorja said she is concerned about the health effects of breathing in wildfire smoke. She also described how severe flooding in 2022 blocked the road near her family’s veterinary clinic. 

Avery McRae, 20, from Oregon, similarly described worsening wildfires and smoke, as well as the experience of evacuating from hurricanes while attending college in Florida. McRae said she has a hard time picturing any location she would feel completely safe from climate-related disasters and, as an environmental studies major, she said she is unsure what a future career looks like. When asked how she would feel if the wildfire season gets longer, McRae said her “general sense of despair would increase.” 

“I already feel anxious,” she said. “Wildfires are scary. The more of them there are, the more anxious and defeated I’ll feel.”  

McRae was also a plaintiff in the Juliana v. United States lawsuit, a federal constitutional climate case that concluded earlier this year in the government’s favor. 

Federal attorney Michael Sawyer, speaking in defense of the Trump administration, said this case is trying to deal with “fundamentally the same claim” as the Juliana case.

Julia Olson, an attorney with Our Children’s Trust representing the plaintiffs, said this case is different because it is not asking the government to prepare a plan to reduce emissions and curb climate change, but is asking to stop three executive orders. 

In his testimony, Steven Running, a climate science researcher, described how scientists have tracked increasing carbon emissions and said every ton of carbon dioxide emissions adds to climate change. 

“It’s clear to us scientifically now that the warming trend that we’re experiencing and emission trend is a continuum,” he said. “There isn’t a safe level where we’re OK up til now then things fall apart. Literally every additional ton matters to the whole world and definitely matters to these plaintiffs.” 

John Podesta, an adviser on climate policy and clean energy in the Biden administration, described how executive orders are processed. Podesta, who worked for Biden during the Juliana case, said while the administration viewed that request as “unworkable,” this case is asking for a direct remedy. 

“These kids are being harmed by this action and this court can do something about that,” he said. 

Attorneys representing the federal government said each new presidential administration can reconsider the previous administration’s regulations and that it’s inappropriate for the court to intervene before that process is complete. 

“When those agencies issue final decisions, those will be subject to judicial review in courts of appeal,” Sawyer said. “That is the proper forum.” 

Montana Attorney General Austin Knudsen, along with 18 other states and Guam, in July filed a motion supporting the federal government’s request to dismiss the case because they have “significant property and economic interests in this matter.” Attorneys representing the state did not speak during Tuesday’s hearing. 

Continuing witness testimony and oral arguments are set for Wednesday.  

Amanda Eggert contributed reporting. 

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