THE (local) BALLOTS ARE COMING! 🏇

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This is, in some ways, a quiet year for elections, one of our bread-and-butter coverage areas at Montana Free Press.

Most of the state’s big-money races for state and federal officeholders are even-numbered-year affairs, meaning 2025 is a respite of sorts between the 2024 and 2026 election cycles. As such, especially if your ears are still ringing from last year’s $300 million barrage of political advertising, you could be forgiven for turning your attention away from this year’s crop of campaign signs and toward, say, the changing colors of autumn leaves.

That could be a mistake. Many of Montana’s cities and towns put their key leadership roles — mayors, commissioners and council members — on the ballot in odd-numbered years like this one. That makes for less raucous campaign seasons, but also ones where your ballot carries more sway than it does as a single vote among the hundreds of thousands cast in statewide contests. It’s not uncommon for local elections, even in Montana’s larger cities, to be decided by margins of a few hundred votes. As recently as 2023, a race in one of Missoula’s council wards ended in a tie (it’s up for a rematch with the same candidates this year).

Of course, with less attention on these comparatively quiet races, it can be hard to find enough information to vote confidently. Even as someone who covers Montana politics for a living, I’ve sometimes had the queasy experience in years past of looking at my ballot in local elections and realizing I don’t know enough to be sure I’m filling in bubbles for solid candidates rather than cranks.

Helping our readers avoid that sensation is a big part of why MTFP and other news outlets exist. Of course, with 127 incorporated cities and towns across the state, our team of 10 full-time reporters can’t cover every candidate in all of them — especially when there’s plenty of non-election news we need to stay on top of.

This year, we’ve focused our local election coverage on the three communities where we currently have full-time local reporters — Great Falls, Helena and Missoula — publishing ballot guides for each of those communities as well as deeper-dive stories on the Helena mayoral race (where we also hosted a forum) and a slate of Democratic Socialist hopefuls angling for slots on the city commission in Missoula. We’ve also put together a broader piece highlighting notable races and ballot items across the state, including a year-round fireworks ban in Great Falls and a “water or affordability” initiative up for a vote in Bozeman.

As ballots for municipal races start to reach mailboxes in advance of the Nov. 4 election, we’re hoping that coverage will be helpful to readers who are trying to evaluate their local candidates. If you’re on top of a local election in a part of the state we haven’t been able to reach this year, we’d love to hear about what’s going on there as we plan our results coverage, too. As always, reach out at [email protected].

—Eric Dietrich

Hot Potato 🥔

In recent months, Montana Public Service Commission President Brad Molnar has pushed his fellow commissioners and agency staff to do more of their work determining what utilities can charge their customers out in the open. That includes calling for forums where ratepayers can at least try to understand the calculations and considerations that factor into what, for many Montanans, is one of their largest monthly expenses: their power bill.

Molnar has also been critical of “black box” ratemaking settlements and the relationship between PSC staff and the state’s largest utility, NorthWestern Energy, which he describes as overly cozy.

That culminated in an Oct. 14 motion Molnar made to reject an electricity rate hike settlement NorthWestern reached in April with a dozen of its largest customers and the Montana Consumer Counsel.

Molnar made his motion a month and a half before the all-Republican commission is scheduled to decide how much money NorthWestern can collect from its 410,000 electricity customers. When it first filed its request to increase rates, the utility asked its regulators, who are elected by district, for authorization to collect an additional $164 million annually from its electricity customers. A year later, NorthWestern entered into a partial settlement with some, but not all, of the parties to the rate case for a lower figure in a “quasijudicial” proceeding that shares much in common with court processes.

“Every rate case, [NorthWestern] comes in with this huge number, and in every rate case you want to settle at the lower number. And we always do. How about the right number?” Molnar said, going on to describe the company’s latest rate hike request as multiple requests smashed into one big ask that should have instead been considered separately.

Molnar flagged elements of the rate recovery for the Yellowstone County Generating Station, the $316 million gas plant NorthWestern finished constructing last year, as being problematic due to “secret meetings and black-box settlements or findings” that have prevented the PSC from scrutinizing costs that could be passed onto ratepayers. He said he’s also troubled by a lack of information regarding NorthWestern’s plans for the hundreds of megawatts of electricity it’s scheduled to acquire from coal-fired utilities in January.

PSC Vice President Jennifer Fielder, who is in the midst of an ongoing legal fight with Molnar regarding his workplace conduct, said she’s receptive to his effort, but uncomfortable moving forward without a more detailed proposal.

“If we’re going to make a decision this big, we need to have some basis for it,” she said. “We had an eight-day hearing, we have comprehensive notes, we have an application that’s thousands of pages long. You’re coming to us with this one sheet of paper and asking us to make a monumental decision right now.”

Commissioner Annie Bukacek was critical of Molnar’s request, arguing that his description of key parts of the proceedings differ from her recollection of participants’ testimony. She made an unsuccessful motion to defer the vote to an unspecified future date. Commissioners Jeff Welborn and Randy Pinocci said very little during the hour-long discussion.

Pinocci was the lone commissioner to join Molnar in his motion to scrap NorthWestern’s settlement. The other three commissioners rejected Molnar’s proposal.

—Amanda Eggert

News of the News 📰

The Billings Gazette will stop publishing a printed paper on Mondays starting in November, leaving Montana without a daily printed newspaper.

According to longtime Gazette editor and Montana News Guild Vice President Brett French, the publication will continue to post stories online on Mondays. The guild represents Gazette employees.

“The Billings Gazette’s dropping of Monday print editions beginning in November is just the latest in what have been numerous cost-cutting measures leveled in the past decade,” French said in a statement to Montana Free Press.

In early June, the Gazette printed its final in-house newspaper before shutting off its 1968 Goss Metro printing press for good in anticipation of a now-stalled sale of the newspaper’s downtown building. The paper now prints in Bozeman.

Lee Enterprises, which operates in 73 communities across 26 states, has reported declining circulation for the Gazette.

When Lee purchased the Gazette — along with six other local Montana papers — from the Anaconda Co. in 1959, the paper’s circulation was about 36,000, according to a 1975 interview with longtime Gazette employee J. Strand Hilleboe. Back then, the number of papers delivered accounted for about 70% of Billings’ roughly 50,000-person metropolitan area — though Hilleboe made clear that copies of the Gazette were delivered well outside the urban area to places as far as Plentywood, a town about 350 miles away.

Print circulation grew over the next few decades — Hilleboe reported the total to be around 56,000 in 1975 — but by 2024 the net press run had decreased to about 7,000, according to a Statement of Ownership published in the Billings Gazette in September of that year.

Print advertising revenue has declined alongside circulation, though digital subscriptions have increased, according to Lee Enterprise’s financial reports.

Montana Newspaper Association spokesperson Jim Strauss said the news media’s transition to the digital age is akin to “changing a transmission while you’re still driving down the highway.”

In November, the Gazette will join the state’s list of formerly daily papers now printed six times per week, including the Daily Inter Lake in Kalispell and the Great Falls Tribune.

— Zeke Lloyd

The Gist 📌

The conflict between the Northern Cheyenne tribal president and council reached a boiling point in recent weeks. Council members were arrested. Tribal bank accounts were frozen. A controversial special election is scheduled for Oct. 30.

Let me back up a bit.

Northern Cheyenne Tribal President Gene Small, who campaigned in 2024 on transparency, initiated an audit last spring into the council’s use of federal COVID-19 relief funds. While some council members opposed the audit for cost reasons, the body ultimately approved it. The call for an audit was widely popular among community members, and the hesitancy from some council members sparked controversy, though Small has said the audit is now underway.

On Sept. 11, the council voted to remove Small for alleged violations of the tribal Constitution. On the same day, a group of traditional leaders, called chiefs, issued a declaration, calling for the removal of the eight council members who voted to remove the president. The chiefs then selected eight new temporary council members, and Small held a swearing-in ceremony for them. Meanwhile, the eight original council members continued to meet and issued a public statement saying they were the official governing body of the tribe. For weeks, the council and president have issued conflicting statements about which entity is in power. Bureau of Indian Affairs Superintendent of Northern Cheyenne Agency Andrew Werk, Jr., wrote in a statement that it is the tribe’s responsibility to resolve the dispute and the BIA would not get involved.

Here’s the latest developments:

In a Sept. 24 meeting, the original eight council members passed a number of resolutions, including one revoking Small’s check-signing authority related to tribal bank accounts.
On Sept. 29, the newly appointed interim council, chosen by the traditional chiefs, and Small voted to approve a one-time special election on Oct. 30 to fill eight council seats. The concept for the special election, Small said, was developed by the chiefs. Women are prohibited from running in the special election, as are the eight original council members, according to rules adopted by the chiefs and the interim council.
The exclusion of women drew controversy in the community. The Northern Cheyenne Tribe notably elected five women council members and a woman president and vice president in 2020. In an Oct. 6 Facebook address, Small asked the public to respect the chief’s election rules. “I just ask that you hang in there,” he said. “I know it’s a tough time right now.”
The eight original council members announced on Sept. 29 that the tribe’s bank accounts with First Interstate Bank were frozen amid growing confusion about leadership.
The newly appointed interim council met on Oct. 7 to approve budgets for fiscal year 2026. The group also passed resolutions allowing Small and other officials to act as signatories for tribal bank accounts. The president later announced that First Interstate Bank allowed the tribe’s payroll office to process checks. However, the eight original council members told Montana Free Press on Oct. 17 that they could not access tribal accounts and were not paid in the most recent pay period.
On Oct. 8, four original council members and their family members were arrested upon entering the tribal building. They were charged with offenses related to the protection of government officials, employees and law enforcement officers, according to the tribe’s updated law and order code.
Council member Melissa Lonebear told MTFP on Oct. 16 that she and the other council members were held for 52 hours before they were released. “This whole thing has been so stressful and traumatic for us,” she said.

MTFP will continue to follow this story. Read our past coverage here and here.

— Nora Mabie

Viewshed 🌄

While coming home from a packed reporting trip to Libby earlier this week, reporter Mara Silvers and I saw the steam rising off a lake along U.S. Highway 2 and had to stop. The fog and silence hung heavy around us as we took a moment just to be.

— Lauren Miller

Highlights ☀️

In other news this week —

Water leaks at the state prison jumpstarted $21 million in overhauls.

One lawsuit says the state’s wolf hunting quota is too low, another says it’s too high.

A judge dismissed a federal lawsuit from young climate activists.

On Our Radar

Tom — After a chilly midnight drive home from Missoula on Saturday, I turned to O’Reilly Auto Parts to winterize my car and order a new blend door motor. There, I found seven assorted colors of antifreeze, every color of the rainbow, plus Toyota pink, each representing a different mix of chemicals. I needed a color analyst. I needed swatches. I chose the hybrid organic acid technology, or HOAT variety, better known as yellow. It’s the beige of the coolant world, good to 54 degrees below zero.

Zeke — I need new songs for my running playlist, because Olivia Rodrigo’s “GUTS” and MARINA’s “Electra Heart” just aren’t cutting it anymore. Please email me your recommendations.

Mara — Lauren Miller and I stopped at some pretty great eateries on our drive up to Libby this week. The spot I’d be quickest to go back to? Cabinet Mountain Brewing Co., where I wanted to eat everything on the menu and linger for entertaining barside conversations with strangers. Also excellent: Bonelli’s Bistro in Kalispell.

Holly — I recently got to spend a few days at an Idaho hot springs blissfully outside the reaches of cell service. I started and finished two books and knitted a toddler-size sweater. I can’t recommend enough how nice it is to completely detach from all your regular obligations. In the vein of Mara’s suggestions, I’d be remiss to not thank the gentleman at JJ’s Diner in Dillon who reminded me that food tastes better once you close your laptop.

Eric — Someone outside of Boulder, Montana has a Facebook Marketplace listing up trying to sell a “1 Bed 1 Bath” house that, according to the pictures, appears to actually be a 60 square foot shack at the entrance of a hard rock mine. List price is $375,000.

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