MTFP Staff, Author at Montana Free Press

Poll week: How Montanans feel about sales tax, immigration and state officials

MTFP Staff — Mon, 02 Mar 2026 16:27:32 +0000

It’s poll week here at Montana Free Press.

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

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

Here’s what we’ve got:

Most Montana voters don’t want a statewide sales tax

Nearly half of respondents, 48% indicated that they “strongly” oppose a statewide sales tax even if the revenue is used to reduce property tax bills. That sentiment was firmly bipartisan, with only 34% of Republicans, 38% of Democrats and 32% of independents voicing support for a sales tax.

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

Montana voters named cost as a major perceived barrier to mental health care access. Fewer respondents rated physical distance and stigma as a significant hurdle.

‘The mostly flat part’: what our poll respondents say about where Eastern Montana really begins

A question on how to divide Montana’s eastern region from its western one didn’t produce a clear consensus. The top selections for a dividing line were quite literally hundreds of miles apart — Billings and the Continental Divide.

Montanans want more solar, natural gas development, are less interested in new coal plants

Solar and natural gas power make up a small share of the state’s energy mix, but Montanans are bullish on generating more electricity with them. Additional power from coal plants and wind farms proved to be less popular among poll respondents, with roughly one-third saying they would prefer less electricity from these sources.

75% of voters want Montana to have at least as much federal land as it does now

A majority of Montana voters across the political spectrum say they want the scope of federal land ownership to stay the same or expand. With 62% of Republicans polled agreeing, the findings suggest a gap between the Montana Republican Party Platform — which supports federal land transfer to state ownership — and Republican voters.

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

Showing up for Roberto

MTFP Staff — Fri, 30 Jan 2026 20:00:00 +0000

The MT Lowdown is a weekly digest that showcases a more personal side of Montana Free Press’ high-quality reporting while keeping you up to speed on the biggest news impacting Montanans. Want to see the MT Lowdown in your inbox every Friday? Sign up here.

On Jan. 28, 14 Froid residents woke up at 3 a.m. and drove seven hours to Great Falls for their neighbor’s court hearing.

Keith Nordlund, who works at a local power plant, said the group had one goal: “To see Roberto, and to have him see us.”

The group filled two benches in the federal courthouse, and some people stood in the back. The room went quiet when their neighbor, Roberto Orozco-Ramirez, walked in. Wearing jeans and a dark gray pullover, he flashed a quick wave to three of his sons sitting in the front row. Orozco-Ramirez then sat next to his public defender, his back to the crowd. As the judge spoke, Orozco-Ramirez’s sons, all wearing black sweatshirts, sat with their backs straight and leaned forward, hanging on to the judge’s every word. One of them tapped their foot on the courtroom floor.

Froid is a tiny town of 195 residents in the northeast corner of the state. And in the last election, 75% of voters there supported President Donald Trump, who has made deportation a centerpiece of his administration. But Border Patrol’s recent arrest and detainment of Orozco-Ramirez — a beloved father of four and hard-working mechanic — has, according to one resident, “rocked everybody’s world.”

As people fight to support their neighbor and friend, many are also forced to confront their own complicated views on immigration. Some people said they thought the purpose of Trump’s policy was to deport gang members and criminals, not a hard-working neighbor who’d lived in the community with his family for more than a decade, and according to court documents, has no criminal record. Others were surprised to see the tentacles of the national immigration crackdown stretch into their tiny town.

Orozco-Ramirez’s initial appearance hearing was just eight minutes long, and not much was decided. The judge set two more hearings for next week and said Orozco-Ramirez would remain detained until then. On Jan. 30, his name appeared on the Cascade County Jail roster.

When a U.S. marshal escorted Orozco-Ramirez out of the courtroom, the Froid residents who attended his hearing flooded into the hallway. In the courthouse elevator, Orozco-Ramirez’s sons, the oldest of whom is 18, looked down at their shoes, tears welling in their eyes.

“Do you guys want hugs?” Rachel Sundheim, a Froid resident, asked, dabbing her own tears with a tissue. The boys shook their heads no.

“OK,” she said.

Then, the 14 Froid residents got back in their cars to drive the 400 miles home.

“Everybody’s gotta work tomorrow,” Nordlund said. “More people wanted to come today, but the whole town would’ve shut down.”

— Nora Mabie

Blowback 💨

About two dozen people packed a public meeting room Tuesday to express to the Laurel City Council their vehement opposition to the state proposal to build a new psychiatric facility on the outskirts of town, one intended to treat people in the criminal justice system.

City council members sat in silence as they listened to nearly two hours of commentary from frustrated community members about the selection of a 114-acre parcel just off Old Highway 10 and Golf Course Road. The council is not currently considering a request from the Gianforte administration to annex the property to connect it to Laurel’s city water and sewer infrastructure. But the prospect of such a request materializing in the not-so-distant future has led the Laurel city attorney to repeatedly instruct elected officials to refrain from issuing any opinions or views on the matter to avoid the perception of prejudging any request that might come before them.

While the council members’ lips were tightly sealed, residents of Laurel and the surrounding area gave them an earful.

First, they criticized the state’s proposed location for the 32-bed facility, which would put criminal defendants and convicts with severe mental illness within 500 yards of an elementary school, adjacent to residential homes and, some opponents noted, close to a community golf course.

Some went as far as to call the facility a “mental health prison” that would be filled with “the worst of the worst.” Others said they supported the need for more mental health treatment options in the area, just not at that precise location.

“Safety is more than just access to the building. It’s the students and the teachers state of mind,” said Chris Lorash, chair of the Laurel Public Schools board, which recently announced its opposition to the site location. “I’ve already had my children coming home asking about this facility and wondering about what it means. So I think that it’s something that needs to be considered.”

Second, opponents said that connecting the facility to city services would burden Laurel’s limited tax base. Residents are already holding private fundraisers to support schools and emergency first responders, some community members said. Why would Laurel agree to put tax dollars toward a facility that is exempt from paying property taxes and doesn’t obviously support the city’s bottom line?

Perhaps more than any other complaint, residents expressed mistrust and confusion about how Laurel found itself at the top of the state’s list for possible site locations. Repeatedly mentioned by residents was a Nov. 17 letter from the city’s chief administrative officer, Kurt Markegard. Unlike bids from other localities expressing interest in the facility, Markegard’s letter explained that there were no appropriate locations in Laurel’s city limits for the facility, but explained the process for annexing a property to city services.

Residents pointed to that letter as an indication of obscure dealmaking that had been in the works to bring the facility to Laurel dating back to mid-2025.

“Backdoor deals have been made without consulting the Laurel community. We deserve answers,” wrote resident Samantha Mayes, whose public comment letter was read into the public record at the meeting by the city attorney. “I again want to know what role the city played in this decision, how Laurel was selected over other willing communities, and most importantly, how the voices of residents and elected officials are intended to be heard.”

In a statement in between rounds of public comment, Markegard briefly responded to some of the criticism filed against him via email and letters to council members and city staff. The Gianforte administration approached him and the mayor back in July, Markegard said, along with officials from Billings and Yellowstone County, to consider possible local sites for the facility. Markegard told community members that he was willing to go through his emails and all his communication about the issue since then, promising to be an open book.

“I want open and transparent government. That’s what I want. That’s what I want from the council members. That’s what I want from the mayor and I want that from the public,” Markegard said.

The city commission did not take any action related to the mental health facility after public comment.

— Mara Silvers

Following the Law ⚖️

A federal judge on Jan. 26 ruled that a lawsuit filed by two Montana State University students whose visas were temporarily revoked last year under the Trump administration’s “student criminal alien initiative” can proceed.

The students, who are from Turkey and Iran, are referred to as John Roe and Jane Doe in the lawsuit they filed last year. One was pursuing a master’s degree in microbiology and the other was working toward a doctorate in physics and electrical engineering when MSU discovered during a routine review of international student records that their F-1 visas had been revoked.

Shortly after that discovery, the American Civil Liberties Union filed a lawsuit against Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem on behalf of the students, arguing that their visas should be restored because they were in “full compliance” with their visas’ terms and the federal government failed to provide the students or their school with “any meaningful explanation” for their visas’ termination.

Days after the lawsuit’s filing, Dana Christensen, a federal district court judge in Missoula, blocked the Department of Homeland Security from revoking the visas. DHS asked the court to dismiss the lawsuit in September, arguing that the plaintiffs’ claims were moot because their visas had been reinstated and DHS had changed its policies. The students opposed the motion, maintaining that “there is no assurance that [the federal government] will not once again unlawfully and arbitrarily” revoke the students’ visas in the future.

In a 15-page order issued on Jan. 26, Christensen sided with the plaintiffs, writing that “it is simply not clear what DHS’ new policy is, and consequently, whether that new policy fully addresses the issues presented in this case.” Christensen also agreed with the plaintiffs that it is not clear that “the challenged conduct will not recur.”

Alex Rate, an attorney for ACLU, told the Helena Independent Record that the judge’s order will allow the plaintiffs to depose immigration officials about their actions.

The Doe v. Noem lawsuit is one of at least 65 lawsuits filed against the federal government last year in response to its move to “quietly and unexpectedly” terminate international students’ visas, according to reporting by Inside Higher Ed. Judges assigned to those cases blocked the revocations in more than half of them, Inside Higher Ed found in its April report.

—Amanda Eggert

Wildlife Watch 🐦

The Montana Department of Livestock has confirmed the presence of Highly Pathogenic Avian Influenza — bird flu — in a backyard chicken-and-duck flock owned by a Carbon County resident.

In a press release, the Montana Department of Livestock said it’s the first confirmed detection in a domestic poultry flock since October. Outbreaks tend to increase during spring and fall, when waterfowl are migrating.

“The Carbon County case is part of the avian influenza outbreak that has been going on for almost 4 years now,” Montana Assistant State Veterinarian Emily Kalecyzc said in the Jan. 27 press release. “Even though the disease has only impacted a small percentage of Montana flocks, ongoing vigilance and increased biosecurity remains important to protect the health of poultry, domestic animals and people.”

The virus can spread to humans, though the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention considers the transmission risk to the general population low. Other animals, both domestic and wild, can contract the virus by coming into contact with infected birds or feeding on their carcasses.

According to a database maintained by the U.S. Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service, hunters and wildlife managers have found HPAI in more than 40 wild birds since Oct. 1, including great-horned owls, red-tailed hawks, bald eagles, and Canada geese. In 2023, three western Montana grizzly bears infected with HPAI became sick enough that the wildlife managers euthanized them. The grizzlies exhibited blindness, disorientation and other neurological issues, according to Montana Fish, Wildlife and Parks. Testing confirmed that they had contracted the virus.

The years 2022 and 2023 were particularly bad for HPAI, with tens of millions of birds infected with the virus nationally. Since 2022, more than 160,000 birds have become infected in Montana, which has contributed to stubbornly high egg prices at the grocery store.

—Amanda Eggert

Highlights ☀️

In other news this week —

A fireworks-and-gasoline “device” caused Helena High School students to cancel an anti-ICE protest.

Montana’s population growth remains well below the COVID boom years.

An earthquake rocked central Montana this week.

On Our Radar

Katie — As someone who is trying to eat less meat without completely foregoing protein, I’ve been on the hunt for recipes that fight the tasteless-tofu stereotype. This kung pao tofu was a recent hit in my household, and I’d love to hear your tofu favorites!

Jacob — I have long thought I had dreamt up the image of a figure with a shifting masquerade mask, who introduces himself as an angel named Satan, delivering an eerie, existential monologue to a group of children. But the scene is real, it’s in a movie, and is just as unsettling as my subconscious led me to believe. Watching it now, it’s wild that this was marketed as a children’s film.

Holly — I’ve got a request for my fellow Montanans: does anyone have a link to The Daily Show with Jon Stewart episode from 2006 in which correspondent Jason Jones mocks Butte’s efforts to make the Berkeley Pit a tourist attraction? IIRC, the segment features Fritz Daily, one of the Mining City’s biggest champions, who died this week. Fritz was the most Butte “Butte guy” that ever lived and left an indelible mark on his community.

Mara — Here’s an exercise in vulnerability: The older I get, the harder I find it to elegantly crack an egg. The issue, perhaps, comes down to a lack of confidence. I overthink it, tap too lightly, press on the wrong spots and end up with shell all over. In that vein, here’s a timeless overview of why cracking an egg remains a fascinating test of physics.

Eric — It’s been a week. Here’s a cat video, one of the all-time classics.

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The post Showing up for Roberto appeared first on Montana Free Press.

Property tax ‘relief’ heads to court

MTFP Staff — Fri, 23 Jan 2026 22:00:00 +0000

The landmark property tax legislation state lawmakers passed in 2025 reduced the tax bills sent out last fall for an estimated 4 in 5 Montana homeowners.

As of this week, it’s also facing a lawsuit that could send lawmakers back to the drawing board.

The court challenge, brought by Senate Taxation Committee Chair Greg Hertz, R-Polson, and two other prominent Republicans, attacks the new tax law over alleged flaws in the convoluted legislative process that brought the policy change to the desk of Gov. Greg Gianforte. It asks a judge to invalidate one of two implementation bills, potentially smashing a hole in the framework that sought to provide middle-class homeowners relief from years of rising taxes.

Last year’s legislative session saw a long and vocal fight over the tax legislation, which is also slated to raise taxes for second homes, Airbnb-style short-term rentals and other properties that don’t qualify as principal residences, as it takes full effect this year.

Gianforte, a Republican, had campaigned on the relief concept during his 2024 re-election bid. That, however, didn’t stop Hertz and other lawmakers aligned with the Montana GOP’s hard-right wing from fighting the concept tooth and nail over concerns that it would shift higher taxes onto family cabins and certain businesses.

The measure’s primary advocate, Rep. Llew Jones, R-Conrad, overcame that opposition by working with minority Democrats. In exchange for their votes, Democrats negotiated for a more progressive rate structure, delivering bigger tax cuts for lower-value homes offset by heftier increases on high-value ones.

That tack to the center, combined with similar negotiations around the state budget and a very public feud among Republican senators over a scandal centered on former Senate President Jason Ellsworth, has inflamed the long-running rift between the hard-right and comparatively moderate wings of the Montana GOP. Jones, long a standard-bearer for the party’s centrist “Solutions Caucus” wing, is facing a hard-right challenger as he runs for a state Senate seat this year.

As party leaders and candidates trade barbs in advance of this year’s legislative primaries, the tax legislation — and its effects on different types of taxpayers — is being weaponized as political fodder by both Republican factions.

“I’ve heard from many of my constituents who are suffering from the tax shift these bills created,” Hertz said in a statement Wednesday announcing the new lawsuit. “Lifelong Montanans are struggling to figure out how they’re going to afford to pay their massively increased property taxes, and many will likely have to resort to selling their homes and cabins that have been in their families for generations.”

Jones responded in an interview that the lawsuit could undo the reductions that many taxpayers saw on their 2025 tax bills.

“This puts at risk a whole lot of average Montanans that are a whole lot better off,” he said.

Hertz told MTFP in an interview this week that he doesn’t expect the litigation to force the state to recalculate last year’s tax bills or claw back the year’s $400 homeowner tax rebates. But he is hoping his attorney, former legislator Matt Monforton, can convince a judge to nullify the legislation so lawmakers can take a fresh crack at tax relief when they meet in 2027. Depending on how fast the court system works through the case, Hertz said the litigation could also keep the second-home tax from taking effect this fall.

Here at MTFP, we’ll be keeping an eye on what happens — and doing the best we can to help our readers understand what it means for both their pocketbooks and the state’s political landscape.

—Eric Dietrich

Glad You Asked 🙋🏻

After Montana Free Press wrote about the Bureau of Land Management’s decision to revoke the grazing permits that American Prairie has used to sustain its bison herd, readers wrote us with a handful of questions about Montana law and the economics of grazing on public land. Here’s what we’ve dug up:

• Will the revocation threaten American Prairie’s long-term vision? American Prairie has said its operation will remain “resilient” in the face of the decision and has hinted at a legal challenge. The revoked leases covered about 50,000 acres of bison grazing, while American Prairie has more than 600,000 acres under its control – much of which is leased to cattle ranchers.

• Is there pent-up demand for public land grazing leases? Yes and no. BLM grazing permits rarely become available. But they are highly coveted because they offer ranchers a much more affordable option for livestock forage than a state or private lease. Former Interior Department solicitor general John Leshy told MTFP that federal grazing permits are “pretty heavily subsidized” as compared to private land grazing leases, which can cost 10 times as much — or more. The permits change hands when a rancher sells all of the nearby private property that’s linked to the permit; they’re otherwise a “relatively permanent” feature of a ranching operation because they often pass down through generations and are rarely revoked, Leshy said. A permit holder can lease the federal grazing authorization to another operation, but they must pay BLM an additional surcharge to do so, according to Vicki Olson with the Public Lands Council, an organization that represents agricultural producers’ interests on public land issues.

• Are bison classified as wildlife or livestock under Montana law? They are treated as both. If the animal in question has never been “reduced to captivity” and never been “owned by a person,” it is considered a “wild buffalo” or a “wild bison.” All other bison, except those owned by tribes, are subject to a per-capita livestock fee, per a law state legislators passed in 2021. A section of Montana law associated with Montana Fish, Wildlife and Parks describes “wild buffalo or bison” as a “species in need of management.” Under that law, which addresses disease transmission risk (read: brucellosis), FWP cannot release, transplant or relocate wild bison on private or public land in Montana without securing landowner approval.

— Amanda Eggert

Following the Money 💵

On Thursday morning, more than a hundred health policy wonks filled an auditorium on the campus of Montana State University. They were there to try to understand how Montana’s Rural Health Transformation Program — the deluge of federal funding that could amount to more than $1 billion over five years — will actually take shape in just a few short months.

The vibe was somewhat buzzy, as advisory committee stakeholders from Miles City to Pablo talked about their ideas for spending the state’s massive first-year grant of more than $233 million. Many attendees were also plainly bemused about that exact predicament.

Federal health administrators have dictated that states must distribute and start spending the 2026 grant by September. By August, the state must file a report showing how the money is actually making progress toward specific goals. To add even more pressure to that timeline, state health officials Thursday said that they won’t begin accepting applications for trickle-down grant opportunities until March.

In the plainest of terms, that gives Montana’s state health department, rural hospitals, medical associations and other groups about six months to turn $233 million into action. How well the state meets its goals in the first year will also impact how much federal funding Montana receives in 2027 and the years after.

So, some attendees asked, how in the world is this even possible?

“The targets and the metrics, I believe, especially trying to do them by August, seem really, for the most part, unrealistic to me,” said Jim Swan, a grant writer and policy consultant, during public comment.

The state health department has used a dizzying array of numbers, acronyms, metrics and bullet points to explain how it plans to put the federal health funding to best use. But, as the meeting showed, achieving those goals will mostly depend on how effectively health care providers scattered across Montana can turn those ideas into reality.

“Many of you are wondering, when will the dollars start to flow? When will the money start to move?” state health department director Charlie Brereton said.

Brereton explained that most of the funds will leave the state’s coffers through typical procurement methods, including opening up a competitive bidding process for grant awards, contracts or other joint agreements with state agencies.

While many stakeholders wait for those application opportunities to open in March, an even more existential financial question hung over Thursday’s proceedings.

“What happens to all of this in five years? What is the sustainability of all of these things when there is no more money left?” said Atty Moriarty, a Missoula pediatrician and head of Montana’s chapter of the American Academy of Pediatrics. “Because we all know there’s nothing worse than a bolus of money coming into a town and then disappearing.”

Brereton acknowledged the legitimacy of the question. The state is working hard to avoid creating funding “cliffs,” he said, where a program is set up to topple once funding dries up.

“Generally speaking, our plan is centered on one-time only investments that get provider organizations, communities and others to the place that they need to be in order to continue services into the future,” Brereton said.

— Mara Silvers

Verbatim 💬

“Businesses operating on tribal lands have a responsibility to treat Native people with fairness, dignity, and cultural awareness.”

— The Blackfeet Nation’s statement in response to a viral video, taken on Jan. 14, in which a McDonald’s employee in Ronan refuses service to the Browning High School wrestling team.

McDonald’s franchise owners Chris and Melissa Crawshaw issued an apology Jan. 15, saying the incident “was the result of an unfortunate misunderstanding.”

“Everyone is welcome in our restaurant,” they said in a joint statement.

The video sparked widespread outrage, and on Jan. 20, the tribe issued a statement calling the employee’s action “unacceptable and deeply concerning, particularly given the long history of discrimination that Native people continue to face in towns across Montana.”

The tribe also called on McDonald’s corporate leaders to address the incident “and take steps to ensure that discriminatory treatment does not occur again.”

— Nora Mabie

Following the law ⚖️

Our Children’s Trust announced late last week that their clients’ challenge to three climate-oriented bills the Montana Legislature passed in 2025 will move forward despite the Montana Supreme Court’s decision not to immediately take up the case.

On Jan. 16, a group of young Montanans asked the First Judicial District Court in Broadwater County to overturn a trio of bills relating to environmental reviews, greenhouse gas analyses and air quality standards on the grounds that they don’t comply with a 2024 ruling by the Montana Supreme Court that Montanans’ constitutional right to a “clean and healthful environment” includes the right to a “stable climate system.”

Lawmakers passed the three bills last year in response to the Held v. Montana litigation that the Montana Supreme Court upheld in 2024. In December, Rikki Held and 15 co-plaintiffs asked the Montana Supreme Court to strike down the bills, arguing they don’t comply with the 2024 ruling. The youth plaintiffs argue that the bills limit the scope of state agencies’ climate reviews and prevent the state from denying or limiting fossil fuel developments based on those reviews.

“Since these laws have been in place, 44 new fossil fuel projects have moved forward unchecked, exacerbating the harms we are already living with, including wildfire smoke, precipitation variability, drought, and polluted rivers and lands,” Held said in a press release. “Montana has a constitutional duty to protect our environment and our home, and we are taking action to ensure this is done especially for children and youth now and future generations.”

Held and her co-plaintiffs initially submitted an “original jurisdiction” petition to the Montana Supreme Court, arguing that the relevant facts had already been established and the worsening effects of climate change require urgent legal review. The Supreme Court denied the petition shortly after receiving it, finding that a lower court is well-equipped to take up the matter.

“The Supreme Court directed that these claims move forward in district court, and today we are taking that next step,” Our Children’s Trust attorney Nate Bellinger wrote in the Jan. 16 release. “We are ready to hold the state accountable and ensure that Montana upholds the constitutional rights of its youngest residents.”

— Amanda Eggert

Highlights ☀️

In other news this week —

University of Montana President Seth Bodner resigned; he’s still mum on a potential Senate run.

The Canadians aren’t coming! The Canadians aren’t coming! Economy and tourism experts said that political strife is causing a sharp decline in border crossings.

How much? The Montana secretary of state spent nearly $200,000 in tax money on recent mailers.

On Our Radar

Jacob — I stumbled upon a strange fact this week: The Hoover Dam includes a 26,000-year astronomical clock. Monument Plaza’s floor maps Earth’s axial precession, the slow cycle behind changing North Stars, fixing the dam’s completion date in celestial time. It’s a deep-time monument hiding in one of America’s great engineering triumphs of the 20th century.

Nora — If you’re looking for a fun TV show to binge this winter, I can’t recommend “The Traitors” highly enough! The show brings together a group of celebrities (reality TV stars, athletes, actors, etc.) in a game-show format. Some people are assigned to act as “traitors,” others are “faithful” and no one knows who’s who. It’s full of lying, strategy and humor. Plus, the show is accepting applications from normies (aka not celebrities) for next season. So apply if you’re so inclined!

Zeke — If you’re looking for political drama unrelated to American politics, this story from the Associated Press features budget airlines, Irish humor and Elon Musk.

Mara — To be completely honest, my primary thought at this moment has to do with the many forms of breakfast I could be making myself if I weren’t writing this brief newsletter entry. Top of the list: perfectly constructed breakfast tacos.

Eric — It’s been a while since I’ve read a journalism thinkpiece that has, well, actually made me think. This thread on the AskHistorians subreddit scratched that itch this week without even getting into what’s happened to American media over the past 20 years. Among the takeaways: how early 20th century newspapers were de facto extensions of political parties and how “objectivity” made the New York Times “immensely boring” in the 1950s.

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This week’s edition of the Lowdown was edited by Nick Ehli, with additional copy-editing by Holly Michels.

The post Property tax ‘relief’ heads to court appeared first on Montana Free Press.

Where does the marijuana tax money go?

MTFP Staff — Fri, 16 Jan 2026 22:00:00 +0000

After our story this week about Montana’s legal marijuana market, Montana Free Press heard from a reader wondering how tax revenue from cannabis sales is spent and whether the current system matches what voters approved in 2020.

The short answer: The basic statewide tax rates haven’t changed (20% on adult-use sales, 4% on medical marijuana), but the Montana Legislature has significantly reshaped how that money gets divided, directing nearly half of it to the state’s General Fund in 2025. When voters passed Initiative 190, the law called for sending only one-tenth of the collected money to the General Fund.

In 2025, Montana collected roughly $60 million in marijuana tax revenue. After the Department of Revenue sets aside a three-month operating reserve, here’s where the rest goes:

First, 11% flows to the HEART fund (Healing and Ending Addiction through Recovery and Treatment). The remaining money is then split among several accounts: 20% goes toward wildlife conservation, parks, trails and recreational facilities and nongame wildlife programs each get 4%, and veterans’ services get the lesser of 3% or $200,000. The Board of Crime Control receives $150,000 for crisis intervention training.

What’s left — roughly 49% of the total, or about $29 million in 2025 — goes to the General Fund, the pot of money the Legislature uses to pay for everything from schools to prisons to state employee salaries.

When Montanans voted for Initiative 190 in November 2020, they were told the tax revenue would be split quite differently. The initiative promised 37% would go to Fish, Wildlife and Parks for wildlife habitat, while just 10.5% would flow to the General Fund. Another 10% was designated to offset Medicaid rate increases and pay raises for workers providing home and community health services.

The 2021 Legislature, however, rewrote those allocations. Among other things, lawmakers eliminated Medicaid funding, reduced the wildlife habitat allocation, cut funding for veterans and their surviving spouses, and boosted the general funds share.

More recently, the 2025 Legislature changed how the tax gets calculated at the point of sale — it’s now based on retail prices after discounts and promotions — and increased the HEART fund allocation to 11% from “an amount not to exceed $6 million.” Lawmakers also authorized counties to impose their own local tax of up to 3% on marijuana sales, though implementation varies by jurisdiction.

The changes to Initiative 190 aren’t the first time Montana lawmakers have modified voter-approved marijuana policy. In 2004, voters approved medical marijuana with 62% support through Initiative 148. But in 2011, the Legislature passed Senate Bill 423, which dramatically restricted the program by limiting caregivers to just three patients. Voters responded in 2016 by passing Initiative 182 to lift those restrictions. The back-and-forth over I-190’s implementation continues this pattern between what voters approve and what lawmakers ultimately implement.

— Jacob Olness

Wildlife Watch 🐻

Federal authorities are seeking information about the shooting of a grizzly sow found just west of the Montana-Idaho border near Perkins Lake.

The sow was part of the Cabinet-Yaak grizzly population, which includes parts of northwestern Montana and northeast Idaho. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and nonprofit wildlife advocacy groups are providing up to $15,000 for information about the bear’s shooter.

Grizzly biologists were alerted to the bear’s killing Oct. 28 when the radio collar she had been fitted with started sending a mortality signal. Grizzly bears are federally protected under the Endangered Species Act, meaning it is illegal for members of the public to kill them except for exceptional circumstances. According to a December press release, there is no indication that the bear was shot in self-defense.

“Service staff and [Idaho Department of Fish and Game] officers investigated and determined the grizzly was shot in a manner indicating it was not a threat to the shooter,” according to the release.

Two nonprofit organizations have joined the USFWS in offering a reward for information that leads to an arrest or civil penalty. USFWS is offering up to $7,000, Idaho’s Citizens Against Poaching is offering $700 and the Center for Biological Diversity announced on Jan. 13 that it is adding another $7,300 to the reward pot.

In a press release about the reward issued this week, Kristine Akland, the Center for Biological Diversity’s Northern Rockies director, emphasized the outsized importance of female grizzlies, particularly for the Cabinet-Yaak Ecosystem’s struggling population. After decades of reintroduction efforts in the Cabinet Mountains, recent estimates put the range’s grizzly population at just 30 to 35 grizzlies.

“This was a tragic, completely preventable loss, and the consequences to grizzly recovery are enormous,” Akland said. “In a population this small and fragile, every female is critical to survival. Losing even one can tip the balance toward the decline of the entire population. We’re increasing the reward because the person responsible for killing this bear needs to be held accountable.”

USFWS is encouraging anyone with information to call 1-844-397-8477 or make a report to www.fws.gov/wildlife-crime-tips. Reporting portals are also available through the Citizens Against Poaching website and hotline. Callers can remain anonymous.

— Amanda Eggert

By the numbers 🔢

Number of passengers served last year by the Bozeman Yellowstone International Airport, which was again on track to be Montana’s busiest as of November. According to figures published by the airport, that’s a 6% increase over 2024 — and an all-time high.

The figure is also close to triple the 1,021,155 passengers the airport reported serving in 2015. That year, it touted the fact that it had become the first Montana airport to serve 1 million passengers in a calendar year.

— Eric Dietrich

The Gist 📌

The Montana Missing Indigenous Persons Advisory Council recently launched a sponsored license plate to support its efforts. The new plate depicts several tipis and includes the advisory council’s emblem with a red handprint, the symbol of the Missing and Murdered Indigenous People movement. “Help find the missing,” the plate reads in block letters at the bottom. Proceeds from the license plate support the advisory council, which is tasked with improving communication and cooperation among state, federal and tribal entities in cases involving missing persons. Though the group was first established by the Legislature in 2019, it only recently gained the ability to accept funds to support its efforts. A new law that passed the last legislative session allows the group, which consists of tribal, state and federal leaders, to accept donations, grants, gifts and other money to support training, equipment and operational expenses.

Native Americans go missing at disproportionately high rates in Montana. While Indigenous people comprise about 6.7% of Montana’s population, as of Wednesday, they accounted for about 26% of the state’s active missing persons population.

— Nora Mabie

Snapshot 📸

The community group Missoula Sings led about 500 people in songs, including “And When I Rise” and “This Little Light of Mine,” during a vigil for Renee Good along the Beartracks Bridge on Jan. 11 in Missoula. Good was shot and killed by an ICE agent in Minneapolis earlier this month.

News of the News 📰

Jan. 16 marks the end of an era in Montana journalism. Phil Drake, the editor for the Helena Independent Record and Montana Standard in Butte, is retiring.

Phil has worked lots of jobs in newsrooms around the Big Sky state and elsewhere; we first met when he was the Capitol reporter and columnist for the Great Falls Tribune and I was a state bureau reporter for Lee Newspapers. We were competitors, but he was also one of the people who made sure I knew when the important press conferences happened, where the bathrooms were and how to get a copy of a bill draft.

We maintained a jokingly (most of the time) adversarial relationship, and I know that the most annoying thing I could do to Phil is take an earnest tone in this newsletter — so that’s what I’ll do now.

In addition to knowing how to sniff out a good story, one of the most valuable roles Phil played in the Montana journalism world was as a teacher. He must have taken dozens of reporters out for hundreds of meals and mentorship. From breakfast at Steve’s Cafe to dinner at the Motherlode Sports Bar, he made sure that young journalists could fill their stomachs with food and minds with advice (always get the dog’s name, show up when an official comes to town in case they’re assassinated, follow the money).

Ask anyone who went through the University of Montana’s Legislative News Service, and they’ll tell you Phil’s time and attention were formative for learning the ropes around government and politics reporting. They valued his wisdom and level-headedness, as well as his levity about covering complex situations.

Phil left an indelible imprint on generations of journalists by taking the time to offer up a meal to eat, an ear that listened and advice that hit all the right notes. He’ll be missed.

— Holly Michels with Nora Mabie

Highlights ☀️

In other news this week —

University of Montana President Seth Bodar is planning a run for the U.S. Senate as an independent, much to the chagrin of state Democrats.

The Trump administration terminated about $2 billion in substance abuse and mental health grants, many of them in Montana. A day later, it reversed course.

NorthWestern Energy doubles down on coal.

And, about that postcard you received from the secretary of state …

On Our Radar

Nora — I’ve been thinking a lot about the concept of blood quantum lately, as the Crow Tribe considers legislation that would change who counts as a member. So I was eager to read David Treuer’s essay in The Atlantic about Chief Buffalo Child Long Lance, who posed as a Blackfeet leader but turned out not to be who he said he was. The piece interrogates the history of Indigenous identity in the United States and explores the nuances of what it means to be Native American.

Nick — I’m a sucker for “The Hunt,” a regular feature in the New York Times that tracks folks’ search for a home and lets you weigh in on what digs you would have chosen in their shoes. This week, the Times followed a couple in Helena. No kidding.

Zeke — When Montana Free Press reported on flooding in Libby in mid-December, freelancer Justin Franz included a brief mention of a man who plummeted into the river while driving his truck over a defunct bridge. I was very glad to see Missoulian reporter Sam Wilson follow up. The story is worth a read.

Mara — Winter ski plans are not quite panning out as expected, as many of you are probably also experiencing. That said, some friends and I weren’t ready to abandon our scheduled trip to Red Lodge this weekend. Does anyone have recommendations for January trail runs in that neck of the woods?

Eric — MTFP’s holiday vacation was long enough this year that I, uh, might have ended up with a touch too much time on my hands. So I filmed a YouTube video showing the process of making a handmade wooden box for our post-holiday office gift exchange. (Yes, it includes a cameo from one of our office dogs.)

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This week’s edition of the Lowdown was edited by Nick Ehli, with additional copy-editing by Holly Michels.

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What will ‘mega-properties’ mean for Montana?

MTFP Staff — Fri, 09 Jan 2026 15:00:00 +0000

A recent search for a thought-provoking quote about land ownership yielded two that feel relevant to Montana Free Press’ story this week on a study examining the rise of “mega-properties” in Montana and what that means for its wildlife.

The first is a tidy Mark Twain quip: “Buy land. They aren’t making any more of it.” The second was a new-to-me observation made by writer and lecturer Henry George in 1887, when this swath of the Northern Rockies was still the Montana Territory.

“The ownership of land is the great fundamental fact which ultimately determines the social, the political, and consequently the intellectual and moral condition of a people,” George wrote in “Progress and Poverty.”

It makes me wonder what George would say about some of the statistics that surfaced in the study, which demonstrate that a growing percentage of Montana’s private land is owned by individuals or corporations with especially large holdings.

Lead author of the study, Alexander Metcalf, a University of Montana social scientist specializing in natural resource issues, told MTFP that his analysis revealed that 13 owners control 15% of the state’s private land. Metcalf said that gives a select number of people an outsized ability to improve or degrade conditions for Montana’s treasured wildlife, which are held in trust by Montana’s government to be managed for the common good.

I was fascinated by the study because it brings together subjects that play a prominent role in Montanans’ cultural consciousness (to the extent that’s a cohesive thing): an orientation toward private property rights and a love for the state’s open spaces and wildlife.

Montana’s wildlife is varied and unique. Despite considerable pressure ranging from habitat loss and shifting climate regimes to invasive species threats, Montana has the type of biodiversity that’s the envy of much of the world. Montana’s an outlier for retaining the full complement of large mammals that were present before European settlement. All of which is to say that the stakes are quite high. Like Metcalf, I’m curious about the condition of the public trust resources that future generations of Montanans will inherit.

— Amanda Eggert

5 Questions For ❓

On Monday, Jan. 5, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention announced it would drop six vaccines from the routine schedule for childhood immunizations. The changes scale back recommendations for hepatitis A and B, influenza, rotavirus, RSV and meningococcal disease.

That decision — shared by top officials at the federal Department of Health and Human Services — took many public health experts by surprise, in part because of how the administration of President Donald Trump departed from the CDC’s typical process for changing childhood vaccine recommendations.

Montana Free Press spoke to Atty Moriarty, a Missoula-based pediatrician and president of the Montana Chapter of the American Academy of Pediatrics, about her perspective on the CDC’s changes. The interview has been edited for length and clarity.

MTFP: What happened in this most recent change and how does that differ from the CDC’s normal process for adjusting childhood vaccination schedules?

Moriarty: The way that vaccines have traditionally been recommended in the past is that vaccines were developed, and then they traditionally went through a formal vetting process before going to the [CDC]’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices, or ACIP, which did a full review of the safety data, the efficacy data, and then made recommendations based on that. Since November 2025, that committee has completely been changed and is not a panel of experts, but it is a panel of political appointees that don’t have expertise in public health, let alone infectious disease or immunology. So now, this decision was made purely based unilaterally on opinion and not on any new data or evidence-based medicine.

MTFP: Can you walk through some of the administration’s stated reasons for these changes?

Moriarty: To be honest, these changes are so nonsensical that it’s really hard. There’s a lot of concern in the new administration and in the Department of Health and Human Services and the CDC that we are giving too many immunizations. That, again, is not based on any kind of data or science. And there’s a lot of publicity surrounding the number of vaccines as compared to 30 years ago, and questioning why we give so many. The answer to that is fairly simple. It’s because science has evolved enough that we actually can prevent more diseases. Now, some comparisons have been made to other countries, specifically Denmark, that do not give as many vaccines, but also are a completely different public health landscape and population than the United States and have a completely different public health system in general than we do.

MTFP: Where is the American Academy of Pediatrics [AAP] getting its guidance from now, if not ACIP?

Moriarty: We really started to separate with the [CDC’s] vaccine recommendations earlier in 2025. So as soon as they stopped recommending the COVID vaccine, that’s when [AAP] published our vaccine schedule that we have published for the last 45 years, but it’s the first time that it differed from the CDC’s. We continue to advocate for immunizations as a public health measure for families and kids, and are using the previous immunization schedule. And that schedule can be found on the [AAP’s] healthychildren.org website.

MTFP: Do any of the recent vaccine scheduling changes concern you more than others?

Moriarty: I think that any pediatrician will tell you that 20-30 years ago, hospitals were completely full of babies with rotavirus infection. That is an infection that is a gastrointestinal disease and causes severe dehydration in babies. I’m nervous about that coming roaring back because babies die of dehydration. It’s one of the top reasons they’re admitted to the hospital. I’m nervous about their recommendation against the flu vaccine. [The U.S. is] in one of the worst flu outbreaks we’ve ever seen currently right now and have had many children die already this season.

MTFP: Do you think, though, that hearing this changed guidance from the Trump administration will change some families’ minds about what vaccines they’ll elect to get for their children?

Moriarty: Oh, absolutely. We saw that before this recommendation. I mean, social media is such a scary place to get medical information, and [listening to] talking heads on the news is just really not an effective way to find medical information, but we see people getting it all the time. I meet families in the hospital that make decisions for their kids based on TikTok. So I think that one of the effects of this is going to be to sow more distrust in the public health infrastructure that we have in the United States that has kept our country healthy.

— Mara Silvers

Say What? 🤔

Nearly eight months after the 2025 session of the Montana Legislature adjourned, legislative staff say they’re still working on combining the nearly 1,000 laws passed last year with existing statutes to produce the 2025 edition of Montana Code Annotated, the state’s official lawbook.

That codification process traditionally concludes in the fall after Montana’s every-other-year legislative sessions, which start in January and typically run through late April or early May. This cycle, though, legislative staff say a combination of bill volume, legislative complexity, delayed bill signings and technical difficulties has slowed the process. They’re now hoping electronic versions of the 2025 code book will be available in early February, with print versions delivered to subscribers by mid-March.

The Legislature’s chief attorney, Todd Everts, told MTFP in an email this week that a “tidal wave” of increasingly complex bills passed in 2023 and 2025 has combined with “extremely vexing” issues with the state’s software to delay the publication of updated code books each of the past two sessions.

Legislative data indicates lawmakers passed 950 bills last year and 885 in 2023, compared to 725 in 2021 and 597 in 2019. In some cases, Everts noted, major legislation like 2025’s property tax bills has also been structured in ways that force legislative staff to split it apart as they incorporate it into existing statutes.

Lawmakers and legislative staffers are exploring ways to speed things along in 2027, Everts said, including working “strenuously” with the software vendor and potentially limiting the number of bills lawmakers can introduce.

For the time being, however, the lack of a published 2025 code book hasn’t kept 2025’s laws from taking effect. Unless they specify otherwise, last year’s batch of laws — ranging from a ban on government use of artificial intelligence for surveillance in public spaces to bigger fines for introducing an invasive species to the state — went into effect Oct. 1.

— Eric Dietrich

By the Numbers 🔢

Pounds of pork harvested from a herd of feral swine in Phillips County and donated to the Montana Food Bank Network over several months.

The roughly 100 uncontained, roaming hogs were originally identified in September by Wildlife Services, an arm of the federal government. The Montana Department of Livestock intervened to initiate trapping operations and collaborated with a Livingston-based nonprofit that supplies donated livestock to food banks and pantries throughout Montana to process and deliver the pork to food distributors. This week, the Producer Partnership, the only U.S. Department of Agriculture-inspected nonprofit meat processing plant in the country, affirmed that the USDA cleared all the donated pork for distribution.

— Mara Silvers

Departed 🥀

Indian Country mourned the loss of two giants this holiday season. Former U.S. senator, renowned jeweler and Native advocate Ben Nighthorse Campbell, Northern Cheyenne, died Dec. 30 at the age of 92. And Harold Monteau, gaming leader and chief judge of the Chippewa Cree Tribe, died Dec. 27 at age 72.

Nighthorse Campbell served in the U.S. House of Representatives from 1987 to 1993 and in the Senate from 1993 to 2005. He was the only Native American serving in either chamber at the time, according to his New York Times obituary. In Congress, he advocated for Indigenous sovereignty, improved health care and the return of sacred items. Nighthorse Campbell told his colleagues in Congress that his great-grandfather fought in the 1876 Battle of the Little Bighorn, where Lakota, Northern Cheyenne and Arapaho warriors defeated the U.S. cavalry and killed Col. George Custer. In 1991, he successfully brought legislation that changed the name of the site in southeast Montana from the Custer Battlefield National Monument to the Little Bighorn Battlefield.

“This is the only battlefield I’ve ever heard of being named after a loser,” he said at the time.

Nighthorse Campbell also served on the council of chiefs of the Northern Cheyenne Tribe, and in 1964, he was a member of the inaugural USA Olympic Judo team. In a Dec. 31 statement, Northern Cheyenne President Gene Small called Nighthorse Campbell “one of the most remarkable Northern Cheyenne leaders and visionaries in our history.”

Harold Monteau was an expert in economic development and Indian law. In 1994, President Bill Clinton appointed him to serve as the first chair of the National Indian Gaming Commission at a time when there was no existing structure for the growing tribal gaming industry. As chair, he played a key role in shaping and implementing new federal legislation that oversees gaming on tribal lands.

Monteau served as a professor of Indian law at the University of New Mexico School of Law and at Stone Child College, the tribal college on the Rocky Boy’s Reservation. At the time of his death, he was the chief judge of the Chippewa Cree Tribe in north-central Montana.

The tribe wrote in a Dec. 29 statement that it was “deeply honored when [Monteau] returned home to serve our people once more as Chief Judge, guiding our court with dignity, wisdom and quiet strength.”

— Nora Mabie

Highlights ☀️

In other news this week —

Anti-dark-money group again files effort to change the Montana Constitution, prevent corporate spending.

Campaign season heats up to challenge Rep. Zinke for his seat in Congress.

Still no drinking water in Libby.

Turns out, you can make a decent amount of money winning football games.

On Our Radar

Amanda — Given the mix of TV news and podcast personalities involved, this episode of The Daily podcast about the state of media was pretty chaotic. But it was fascinating to see the panelists coalesce around two big issues: a frustration with the role of algorithms in information consumption and a hunger for more face-to-face communication.

Nick — Seymour Hersh is one of the country’s great investigative journalists. If you’re into that sort of thing, I highly recommend “Cover-Up,” a newly released Netflix documentary about Hersh and his work.

Matt — Prominent conservative donor and industrialist Bill Koch consigned a large collection of western art to Christie’s, which will hold an auction later this month in New York City. Total auction sales are expected to hit records near $50 million, according to Christie’s. The auction items include multiple high-value pieces by Charles M. Russell, whose namesake museum in Great Falls holds an annual art auction and apparently didn’t get any of this Koch art.

Mara — After a high-stakes week of news and dueling narratives about an ICE officer using deadly force in Minnesota, I began wondering how national journalists verify and authenticate eye-witness videos and social media content. Among other tools, some visual investigative reporters measure shadows, evaluate weather patterns and consult satellite imagery to suss out what’s real and what’s not.

Eric — This YouTuber modded a driving simulator computer game to run soapbox-derby-style races with fully modeled crash physics. It’s waaaay more entertaining to watch than it has any right to be.

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This week’s edition of the Lowdown was edited by Nick Ehli, with additional copy-editing by Holly Michels.

The post What will ‘mega-properties’ mean for Montana? appeared first on Montana Free Press.

A year of meaningful stories

MTFP Staff — Fri, 26 Dec 2025 15:00:00 +0000

We here at Montana Free Press always want our work to have meaning. “Meaning,” though, is a difficult thing to measure because, after all, clicks and page views only tell us so much.

For instance, those metrics don’t gauge how we’ve helped Montanans understand their state when a small-town newspaper publishes one of our stories in its pages. They can’t quantify whether we’ve aided a voter in casting their ballot or assisted a homeowner as they try to sort through the nuances of their property taxes.

They don’t calculate whether a reader was compelled to show up and speak at their local school board meeting or to write a letter to their congressman about water quality. And they really can’t gauge if a city council member, county commissioner or legislator takes note when one of our reporters, pen and paper in hand, is in the room.

Yes, knowing how many readers visit our website can be a helpful tool, but “meaning,” I’ve found, is just as often conveyed over coffee at a diner or in the line at the grocery store. As an editor, few things give me as much pleasure as overhearing someone say, “Did you see the story about…?” and knowing that it came from our reporters here at MTFP.

So, with that in mind, I’ve asked our reporters to share here their favorite stories from the last year. For a variety of reasons, these are the stories that they found somehow meaningful. We hope that you will, too.

A programming note: Lowdown will not publish next Friday, Jan. 2, as most of our staff takes time away from work for the holidays. We’ll return on Jan. 9.

— Nick Ehli, Lowdown editor

From Mara Silvers

Some of my most meaningful assignments in 2025 stemmed from Montana Free Press’ partnership with ProPublica regarding Dr. Tom Weiner, a former Helena cancer doctor who left behind a trail of suspicious deaths and accounts of poor patient care, despite his local popularity. I learned about the limitations of Montana’s medical malpractice laws, the obscure process of medical licensing board investigations and how families are often left in limbo when they try to peel back the layers of deaths that happened years ago.

Later on in the year, I reported on another family trying to make sense of the death of a loved one. Since MTFP first uncovered the death of Billings nurse Amy Young, state lawmakers and the state labor department have taken steps to overhaul a recovery program for medical providers who have struggled with addiction. The private company the state hired to run the program, Maximus, Inc., has decided to exit its contract at the end of January.

Just when I thought the year was winding down, news about Weiner surfaced again. On Dec. 19, a panel of medical board members agreed to revoke Weiner’s license based on findings that he violated the standard of care for seven unnamed patients.

From Nora Mabie

After years of wondering why it’s so hard to build housing in Indian Country, I spent this year reporting out an answer, talking to dozens of people and driving thousands of miles across the state along the way. My three-part series, The Shelter Gap, documents Indian Country’s housing crisis, investigates the root causes of chronic housing shortages on reservation land and highlights what’s possible when residents achieve stable housing. I hope you’ll read it if you haven’t already.

I also wrote two stories this year focused on how Blackfeet community members are working to prevent suicide, a chronic issue for Montana that’s often heightened in tribal communities where people must often rely on overburdened and underfunded systems of care. Community members told me that solutions must come from within — and be culturally informed. On the Blackfeet Reservation, educators are using heavy metal music to help students process grief and face darkness head-on. And following their brother’s death, two sisters are creating a horse-based alternative to typical therapy.

From JoVonne Wagner

Some of my most memorable reporting on the Helena local beat included stories I’ve covered in my newsletter, Helena This Week. The first thing that comes to mind is coverage about the reaction of Myrna Loy’s executive director to some grant cuts after the National Endowment for the Arts changed funding criteria under the Trump administration. A (close) runner-up was the time I got to cover how the Holter Museum of Art handled a former employee’s massive book collection after his passing. Another favorite was my story about the Original Montana Club’s comeback.

From Eric Dietrich

I’ll keep this brief: Some of the most fun things I wrote about this year were a luxury home loophole in the state’s agricultural tax code, a super-lobbiest hiding in public documents we went to court for and five of the many fascinating treasures on display at the state’s new history museum.

From Katie Fairbanks

Some of my most memorable reporting in Missoula this year was for stories about changes to the city’s services for unhoused people.

In light of the city’s March announcement of the closure of the Johnson Street homeless shelter, several service providers detailed the challenges involved in getting people off the street and into permanent housing. While the city’s housing sprint resulted in dozens of shelter residents finding permanent or temporary housing, speaking with a handful of people on the day the Johnson Street shelter closed was a reminder of the varied circumstances and barriers unhoused people face. Even when people have access to more resources at the YWCA Missoula’s domestic violence shelter, securing housing is still a challenge.

Despite these barriers, many homeless service providers told me that Missoula is a generous community and that solutions are possible through ongoing support and collaboration.

From Amanda Eggert

Wolves and water were prominent themes in my 2025 coverage. In January, MTFP partnered with WyoFile to publish a type of oral history to recognize the 30-year anniversary of wolf reintroduction that allowed me to work with some of the talented journalists on the other side of the Montana-Wyoming border.

This summer, I used some of the water law expertise I’ve cultivated over the years to write about an (incredibly rare) enforcement action the state’s water-right regulator pursued against a luxury resort in Shields Valley that incensed ranchers when it started applying water historically used for agriculture to an in-progress golf course without first securing the required approvals. Ripple effects from that dispute are fascinating, and ongoing.

Finally, it’s been interesting to watch the Montana Supreme Court’s ruling in the Held v. Montana youth climate lawsuit (which justices issued almost exactly one year ago), surface in somewhat unexpected arenas, including a lawsuit that aims to protect streamflows in blue-ribbon fisheries and litigation related to wolf hunting and trapping regulations.

From Tom Lutey

The chaos that erupted in the Montana Senate on the very first day of the Legislature set the tone not only for the session, but for the entire year.

Republican leadership lost control of the body within minutes of gaveling into session, in large part for assigning Democratic minority leadership and Republican moderates to a never-before-seen committee that objecting lawmakers said had a questionable purpose.

The senators assigned to the committee, including Minority Leader Pat Flowers, D-Belgrade, and immediate past president Jason Ellswoth, R-Hamilton, whipped the 26 floor votes needed to get themselves assigned to committees dealing with the meatier subjects of the session: property taxes, Medicaid expansion, the state budget.

Once that voting bloc — all 18 Democrats and nine Republicans — was created, it became the functional majority of the Senate. That bloc partnered with like-minded Republicans and Democrats in the House to prevail on the big issues.

In the midst of all this, the Senate launched an ethics investigation into Ellsworth, resulting in his permanent ban from the Senate floor.

From Zeke Lloyd

Last year was my first reporting in Montana, about 1,500 miles from my hometown of Lithopolis, Ohio. Despite the distance between me and my provenance, I discovered powerful examples of familial connections during reporting trips around the state.

In central Montana, I wrote about a local, family-owned newspaper undeterred by a blaze that destroyed its building. In southwestern Montana, I reported on Mary Sturgeon’s “welcome home” party for her son, a Dillon resident pardoned by President Donald Trump for his actions on Jan. 6, 2025. Down the road in Deer Lodge, I investigated a parenting program at Montana State Prison that the state shuttered despite excess federal funds, and in nearby Anaconda, I explored the economic future of a tight-knit town in the wake of a mass shooting.

From Matt Hudson

Some of my favorite stories in 2025 featured people who do cool things and have called Great Falls home. This year, I interviewed an off-road rally team whose competition rig is also the vehicle of choice for picking up kids from school. I also talked to a Great Falls native about his team’s ascent of a 22,500-foot Himalayan mountain on a route that hadn’t previously been recorded.

On the historical front, I spoke to the family of Jim Loud Thunder Gopher, an Ojibwe man who lived at Hill 57 in 1920s Great Falls and was a towering Indigenous figure, both in stature and reputation. A stretch of highway was named for Loud Thunder Gopher earlier this year.

A Great Falls man was also confirmed as a United States attorney this year.

I’m proudest this year of my reporting on the Calumet oil refinery and its transformation into a facility that primarily produces biofuels. It took months of public information requests, interviews and reviews of permit documents to bring a fuller view of that facility’s impact on the local air quality and tax base.

In addition, all that reporting helped build a foundation for articles about the facility’s federal grant status, wastewater permit requests, unique tax exemptions and impacts to public budgets. As the city’s largest taxpayer and a major employer, the refinery is an important institution to cover.

Thanks to everyone for reading.

The post A year of meaningful stories appeared first on Montana Free Press.

Fresh history at the revamped state museum

MTFP Staff — Tue, 23 Dec 2025 18:22:33 +0000

Journalism, as the saying goes, is the first rough draft of history — a rapid accounting of the present delivered with as much accuracy as we journalists can manage within sometimes turbulent moments.

As the dust settles on old newspaper clippings, however, the task of helping the public remember the past falls to other professions: museum curators and historians. I was reminded of that this week while touring the newly renovated state museum in Helena, which reopened to the public Dec. 3.

There’s no question the $107 million facility is a monument to the second, third and further drafts of Montana history. The product of decades of advocacy, legislative debate and private fundraising, it gives the Montana Historical Society an additional 70,000 square feet to share its 60,000-artifact collection with the public. Supporters hope to see it become a landmark destination for schoolchildren, tourists and anyone else looking to learn more about what makes Montana Montana.

As curators let reporters and photographers roam the exhibit halls in advance of a formal ribbon-cutting ceremony Tuesday, one artifact in particular among the hundreds, perhaps thousands, on display in the museum’s main history exhibition stopped me cold: a face mask from the COVID-19 pandemic.

As of 2025, the pandemic is, of course, still within recent memory, the sort of thing that feels like yesterday instead of history. In my case, it was also something I covered as a reporter.

Along with other MTFP colleagues, I watched in 2020 as public health authorities tried to assess the unknown risks of the rapidly spreading novel coronavirus, and as then-Democratic Gov. Steve Bullock tried to mitigate the spread by enacting a mask mandate. I watched, too, as backlash to the mask mandate and other public health measures helped derail Bullock’s bid for U.S. Senate in the 2020 election, which opened Montana’s current political era by delivering Republicans the unified control of state government they still enjoy today.

As I sat there peering at the face mask behind the museum glass, its black cloth stretched around a mannequin head, I realized two things: First, I’m pretty sure I still have a couple of masks a lot like the one on display scrunched up in the bottom of my work bag. And second, that mundane face mask really does deserve its place in Montana’s history museum, as much a symbol of an era as a Butte miner’s helmet or a pair of Blackfeet moccasins.

As history like the pandemic starts to fade into Montana’s past, fresh artifacts like that face mask are a good reminder that many of the tens of thousands of items in the historical society’s collection carry stories at least as complex as the fraught public debates and swirling emotions that rattled many of us through the COVID years — even if the precise details of those stories have been lost to time.

In any case, I’m sure I’ll soon be back at the museum for a longer look — on a day when I’m not in a hurry to write a story about its grand reopening.

SEE MORE: 5 Montana treasures to see at the state’s new history museum.

— Eric Dietrich

Reporter’s notebook ✍️

Last month, I spent hours talking to Montanans about health insurance costs. With enhanced government subsidies for insurance plans through the federal Affordable Care Act marketplace expiring at the end of 2025, many Montanans are steeling themselves for price increases next year.

I spoke to several people in exactly that predicament. As a born-and-raised Montanan, I wasn’t surprised to hear toughened-up residents express a weary sense of resignation, explaining how they plan to make ends meet even with painful price jumps. I wasn’t even surprised to hear people gripe at their elected officials who, in their eyes, are failing to understand an urgent issue affecting working-class people.

But I was surprised when one person — and then another, and then another, and then another — brought up a proposed policy fix I rarely hear Montanans talk about: the need for a federally created universal health care system.

“Why are we the only industrialized country in the world that doesn’t have universal health care?” asked Kirby Walborn, a rancher near Busby featured in our early December article about increasing health care premiums. “Everybody else can figure it out. Why can’t we?”

“We are getting less by paying more,” said Ellie Martin, a self-employed consultant from Bozeman who also purchases insurance through the federal marketplace. “Would we be interested in exploring options in a universal health care system? Absolutely. Because it’s barely affordable now, and it’s going to continue to be a mess.”

The phrase “universal health care” triggers wide-ranging reactions, depending on your political and social views. In essence, it refers to health care services (sometimes more comprehensive, sometimes less) that a broad swath of residents can access at little or no cost, typically financed through taxpayer dollars. Many countries have a publicly financed health care program that covers basic services, with the option to access specialized services through the private market.

The U.S. has Medicaid, for low-income people, and Medicare, for older adults, but neither program fits the “universal” concept — each has strict eligibility requirements and sometimes costs paid by users, a departure from public health care programs in other countries. Today, most adults in the U.S. pay for private health insurance — including monthly premiums, co-pays for services and annual deductibles — either through their employers or purchased through the Affordable Care Act marketplace.

Bryce Ward, a Montana economist who has studied health care access and affordability, told me he’s not surprised that Montanans are advocating for a universal health care program as subsidies are dipping.

“Even before the recent shocks, the share of people who support more government intervention in health care was rising, and support for the private system was falling,” Ward said in a Thursday email, pointing to ongoing national polling by Gallup.

A universally accessible, no-cost health program in the U.S. doesn’t appear to be on the political horizon. At the state and federal level, Republicans have pushed to add more eligibility, cost-sharing and paperwork requirements for Medicaid beneficiaries. National Democrats, meanwhile, have recommitted to subsidizing insurance companies that sell private plans through the marketplace as a means to affordability for middle-class consumers.

But that doesn’t mean that systemic reforms and upheaval to the current U.S. system aren’t on the table. Conservative advocates critical of private health insurers are pushing to move away from an insurance-dominated market, possibly with the help of tax-free Health Savings Accounts.

In Montana, free-market health care reform advocates published a recent op-ed seizing on a November social media comment from President Donald Trump criticizing how much insurance companies benefit from the Affordable Care Act. The think tank behind that piece, the Frontier Institute, endorsed Trump’s call for a “pay the people” system, rather than one that boosts insurers.

The executive director of that institute, Kendall Cotton, told me that health reformers on the left side of the political spectrum have done a good job marketing universal health care as a solution for affordability woes. Conservatives, he said, are trying to propose their own systemic reforms.

“I think people want an actual, concrete plan,” Cotton reflected. “On the free market side of things, we’ve been talking about for a long time, universal Health Savings Accounts … That’s like the Republican [version] of universal health care.”

— Mara Silvers

Viewshed 🌄

Bozeman photographer Beth Moos captured this photo Nov. 30, when four bull elk got stuck in frozen ice at a pond in Manhattan. Here’s her report to MTFP: “The Montana Fish and Wildlife were tipped off at 8 a.m. that bull elk were stranded in the pond. The elk had made no progress in getting out, as the path in had iced over. A private citizen became aware of the trapped elk and offered the services of his helicopter company, Central Copter Inc., to entice the elk to move. They actually had to get a lot closer than I think the pilot anticipated before the elk responded, and I was told they actually touched down momentarily a few times to break the ice. After approximately 10 minutes, the elk made it to the roadway. As a person who enjoys watching wildlife and finding opportunities to photograph it was heartwarming to see the elk rescued.”

Verbatim 💬

“We put a person on the moon in the 1960s in less than 10 years. For God’s sake, we should be able to get a train running on existing infrastructure in less than that.”

—Dave Strohmaier, the chair of Montana’s Big Sky Passenger Rail Authority, is pushing for a new passenger rail route through Billings, Bozeman and Missoula as part of an interstate line that would connect Chicago and the Pacific Northwest. Strohmaier hopes the new route, which would likely cost about $4 billion, will begin service within the next decade, but coming up with the money remains a significant obstacle.

In the early stages of planning, BSPRA is seeking $11 million, most of it federal funding, to develop an outline of the proposed line. Rep. Denise Baum, D-Billings, tried and failed to secure an investment from the state during the 2025 legislative session. And in Congress, U.S. Sen. Tim Sheehy, R-Montana, is sponsoring a bill that enables the planning to be funded entirely by the federal government. The bill has not progressed since Sheehy introduced it in late September.

Opponents of the proposed line point out that Montana already has passenger rail service in 12 northern towns where Amtrak’s Empire Builder stops on its roughly 46-hour path from Chicago to the Pacific Northwest. And, like many of Amtrak’s long-distance routes, the Empire Builder isn’t doing particularly well. The number of people boarding and offloading in Montana has decreased by a third since 2010, according to the U.S. Bureau of Transportation. Strohmaier, though, is undeterred by the opposition or the financial barriers.

“I would not have spent the last five years of my life doing this unless I thought it was something that we could actually achieve,” Strohmaier said.

— Zeke Lloyd

Three Questions About ❓

On a Friday afternoon in late November, the day after Thanksgiving, Gov. Greg Gianforte’s administration announced that it had selected Laurel, the roughly 7,000-person town about 20 minutes west of Billings, as the location for a new state-run psychiatric hospital intended to serve patients in the criminal legal system.

That announcement was news to many people, including state and local elected officials from Laurel. Despite the state health department and the Montana Board of Investments trying to fill the information void with letters, legal analysis and other documents, much remains unknown about the new behavioral health facility.

Here are some of the most prominent unanswered questions:

Where will it be? State officials have not yet specified the exact location where they intend to build the 32-bed facility. The state’s draft floor plan depicts the facility as having a total area of 32,300 square feet, and representatives of the in-charge agencies have said they are looking for a land parcel of at least 10 acres. Laurel officials have said that a suitable location does not exist within city limits, but could be available just outside the city’s existing boundary. If the state wanted to use Laurel’s water and sewer services, the facility’s land would have to be annexed into the city.

When would it be built? No construction timeline for the proposal has been released by state officials, in part because of the unanswered question about a land purchase and annexation request. Laurel’s city attorney on Dec. 2 directed city council members to refrain from making public statements about the facility in case the state submits an annexation application in the future. That process, she added, was likely “months away.”

How can the public weigh in? The restrictions on Laurel city council members create a challenging dynamic for constituents who might want to ask elected officials about the future of the facility. But state lawmakers who represent the Laurel area are under no such restrictions.

Kelly Lynch, the executive director of the Montana League of Cities and Towns, also told Montana Free Press that locals can read up on Laurel’s annexation policy and other land use regulations to prepare to give public comment at a later date.

— Mara Silvers

The Gist 📌

The Environmental Quality Council on Dec. 2 voted 14-1 to send a letter to the federal government expressing the council’s support for pulling critical minerals from existing mines and mine waste in Montana.

The letter highlights Montana’s “exceptional mineral resources” and urges Pete Hegseth, secretary of the U.S. Department of War, to fund a Montana Mining Association-led critical mineral project as part of the U.S. Army’s research and development program.

In addition to touting Montana’s “available technologies” and “ready workforce,” the letter names specific critical minerals present in Montana that are used in fighter jets, drones, missile systems and semiconductors.

“By funding this project, Congress can stimulate economic growth, create new jobs and enhance our national security,” the letter reads. “The United States’ overreliance on foreign sources of critical minerals currently poses economic and national security risks.”

The U.S. Geological Survey’s official (and recently updated) list of critical minerals includes 60 minerals that are “vital to the U.S. economy and national security that face potential risks from disrupted supply chains.”

The original version of the letter that the council discussed at the meeting didn’t name existing sites. After a bit of back-and-forth over the merits and drawbacks of a more general letter, the council opted to amend the letter to include five sites with a nod to “future phases [that] could include legacy sites.”

The list includes the Berkeley Pit in Butte, the Anaconda smelter site, Sibanye-Stillwater’s platinum and palladium mine, the recently permitted Black Butte copper mine near White Sulphur Springs and a contact mill operated by the Antonioli family in Phillipsburg.

Matt Vincent with the Montana Mining Association told council members that the project focuses on mines that already have permits because they face a more certain regulatory future. The Montana Bureau of Mines and Geology’s analysis also indicates they have “appreciable amounts” of critical minerals, he said.

“The only way for us to meet these critical needs right now is to focus on the legacy sites and the sites that already have permits,” Vincent said. “We can’t ask for the moon all in one funding year’s request. This is the first phase of priority projects in what [could] be a larger program.”

The lone council member who voted against sending the letter was Rep. Tom France, D-Missoula, who argued against the reference to future projects. He said the council should have more information on such sites before endorsing them.

In a Dec. 5 conversation with Montana Free Press, Montana Bureau of Mines and Geology Economic Geologist Adrian Van Rythoven said the federal government can facilitate the extraction of critical minerals by expediting permitting timelines and encouraging coordination between government agencies.

The current approach to ore mining in the U.S. leads to useful material sitting in tailings piles rather than moving into the manufacturing process, he said, describing it as an irresponsible use of natural resources.

“When you shoot a deer, you can be a bad hunter and just take the antlers, and leave the carcass to rot, and that’s incredibly wasteful,” Van Rythoven said. “We kind of do that with our ore deposits in that we’ll look at an ore deposit and just take the most valuable thing off the top, usually gold, and leave other things in there. … That’s where our government is coming in and incentivizing, seeing the bigger picture.”

The council issued a similar letter to Congress last year, describing the Berkeley Pit as presenting a “unique opportunity” for the extraction of rare earth elements, an especially hard-to-find subset of the critical minerals list. It was originally set to receive $8 million, but Congress’ budget process effectively eliminated that funding, Vicent told MTFP.

In addition to Hegseth, the letter lawmakers discussed this week will be sent to Montana’s federal delegation, the U.S. Army, the National Energy Dominance Council and Gov. Greg Gianforte by the end of this week.

—Amanda Eggert

On the Road 🚘

The Montana Department of Justice unveiled a redesigned Montana driver’s license this week, incorporating what it says are additional security measures as well as a U.S. citizenship marker to comply with a law passed by the state Legislature earlier this year.

Among the changes with the new licenses noted by the justice department’s Motor Vehicles Division are black-and-white photos and a “Montana sapphire,” including the licensee’s initials and year of birth. The division says the new cards include laser-engraved images, multi-color ink, “color-shifting elements” and “raised tactile features” to make unauthorized duplication more difficult.

The citizenship marker, a black eagle, is required by the new law for licenses issued to U.S. citizens after Jan. 1.

As has been the case previously, the license redesign also includes an optional star-inside-circle marker for licenses that comply with federal REAL ID requirements. Those enhanced licenses, once resisted by Montana elected officials over privacy concerns, are increasingly being enforced by the Trump administration as requirements for commercial air travel and accessing certain federal facilities. Obtaining a full-fledged REAL ID remains optional for Montana drivers.

— Eric Dietrich

Highlights ☀️

In other news this week —

Montanans brace for health insurance increases as federal subsidies come to an end.

Montana Family Foundation is raising money for a Christian advocacy center in Helena.

More parking issues in downtown Great Falls.

On Our Radar

Nick — I’ll be frantically switching channels this Saturday as both the UM Grizzlies and MSU Bobcats begin their quests for the FCS football championship. Both games kick off at noon. I’ll be shocked — shocked — if the Cats don’t trounce Yale, but my beloved Griz have a tough matchup against Big Sky Conference nemesis South Dakota State, which I fear is still ticked about 2009 when Havre’s Marc Mariani led UM’s legendary comeback. My goal is not to swear at the TV. I make no promises.

Holly — Is the plot realistic? No. Does it take a hot minute to get to the action? Yes. But did I still enjoy every single page of “The Librarians,” by Sherry Thomas? Very much so. Engaging characters who all work at a library solve some murders — what more could a nap-trapped parent ask for in a book?

Tom — I’ve never been a Black Friday shopper, but when Specialized teased that their $279 double BOA gravel cycling shoes were just $219, I bit hard. The hook, the shoes are blaze orange and neon red, which you get a lot of in a size 46. If you see an ad for a deeply discounted handle-bar gun rack, send me a link.

Nora — I can’t stop thinking about this story about a man who goes missing after kayaking on a lake in Wisconsin. It’s hard to say much more without spoiling the ending, but this story is full of twists and turns. It’s a fascinating read, and as a writer, I’m jealous of how it’s told.

Zeke — The Holdovers, a 2023 holiday comedy about boys who remain at boarding school over winter break, features Paul Giamatti in his magnum opus role: being an absolute grouch.

Mara — My colleague Lauren Miller and I have likely been scrolling through the same digital holiday treasure trove: Cookie Week from New York Times Cooking. The recipe names are almost as tantalizing and provocative as the photos. Introducing Coconut Cake Snowballs, Vietnamese Coffee Swirl Brownies and Dark ’n’ Stormy Cookies featuring (you guessed it) warm rum. The holiday season is officially here.

Eric — As your occasional reminder to appreciate at least some parts of the modern world, here’s a guy on YouTube demonstrating just how much work goes into making a piece of linen from scratch. He literally starts by planting flax seeds.

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The post Fresh history at the revamped state museum appeared first on Montana Free Press.

Trying to avoid ‘death by numbers’

MTFP Staff — Fri, 12 Dec 2025 21:26:40 +0000

“Death by numbers.” That’s how Crow Tribal Chair Frank Whiteclay describes blood quantum. Tribal Secretary Levi Black Eagle calls it “a form of eugenics.”

Blood quantum, a concept created by White settlers and rooted in assimilation tactics, refers to the fractional amount of tribal affiliation in an individual’s ancestry. Most tribes nationwide use blood quantum to determine citizenship eligibility. And being an enrolled citizen of a tribe matters because it can qualify someone for certain health care and housing services and determine whether they can vote in tribal elections, access educational scholarships or inherit certain land.

The concept of blood quantum is central to an individual’s sense of identity and belonging. It’s sensitive and highly controversial. And from a mathematical perspective, blood quantum is something that experts say tribes nationwide must confront in the coming years if they are to survive. A tribe cannot exist without members. With each new generation, and as tribal members marry non-members and have children, it becomes harder for any tribe using blood quantum to maintain its population.

Headquartered in southwest Montana, the Crow Tribe is beginning to grapple with the issue.

Currently, to enroll as a member of the Crow Tribe, a person must “possess one-quarter Crow Indian blood,” according to the tribe’s enrollment policy. But Whiteclay has proposed legislation that would change things so that all existing members would be considered as having 100% Crow “blood.” If his proposal becomes law, it would change the daily lives of 14,289 enrolled Crow members and potentially thousands of descendants who would be more likely to access services. Whiteclay said he brought the legislation to “break a cycle of lost enrollment.” The tribe, he said, has lost more than 300 members since he took office in 2020.

His announcement, shared on Facebook, was met with both widespread support and sharp criticism. Supporters say that revising the blood quantum standard and expanding membership would strengthen the tribe’s political influence. Some see the move as a symbol of the tribe’s sovereign power. Others argued that the policy didn’t go far enough. By counting living members as “100% Crow” now, they say the legislation will essentially kick the can down the road for future generations to contend with.

Critics of the legislation argue that the expanded membership would mean more people would have to vie for fewer resources in a federal system where resources for critical services like housing and health care are already scarce. Others worry that expanded blood quantum standards could somehow make it easier for non-Natives to enroll as citizens.

Jill Doerfler, who heads the department of American Indian Studies at the University of Minnesota Duluth and appeared on the national radio show Native America Calling this week, said there are two common ways in which tribes nationwide have contended with the blood quantum conundrum. First, tribes can, as Whiteclay has proposed, broaden their blood quantum standards. Second, tribes can eliminate blood quantum entirely and instead determine membership by “lineal descendancy.” That means a person may be eligible for membership if they can trace their ancestry to someone on a past enrollment list, as determined by the tribe. Tribes that use this method often use birth certificates and family trees to confirm someone’s eligibility.

Where Doerfler likened the expansion of blood quantum standards to a “band-aid” solution that will need to be addressed in years to come, she said the lineal descendancy model offers “a perpetual change that will allow [a tribe] to go forward sustainably into the future.”

St. Croix Chippewa Indians of Wisconsin Chair Conrad St. John, who joined Doerfler and Black Eagle on the radio show this week, said his tribe adopted the lineal descendancy model in 2023. In the year and a half since, he said, the tribe’s membership has “about doubled.”

But, he added, “the strongest and the hardest fight” was over the dilution of money and resources.

“We’ve been colonized where money often outweighs culture and involvement and family,” he said on the radio show. “We’re slowly defeating those stereotypes. But to alleviate some of those dilutions of those monetary funds, the tribe has made substantial efforts into getting our membership educated, whether it’s through apprenticeship programs or certificates, paying for college tuition, helping with room and board for college.”

He hopes that enhanced access to education will improve members’ financial independence. The elimination of blood quantum, he said on the show, “really solidifies St. Croix’s future forever.”

“In Indian Country, there’s strength in numbers,” he added. “The more Indians we have that unite together, the stronger we’re going to be fighting our fights.”

Whiteclay’s proposed legislation for the Crow Tribe will be added to the Legislature’s January meeting agenda. A committee will discuss the legislation and propose amendments. And if the act passes by a simple majority, it will be returned to the chair, who can then sign it into law.

I’ll be following this story, and I’m eager to see what happens.

— Nora Mabie

For the Record 📣

Tuesday night in Laurel, the 7,000-person south-central Montana town, members of the city council listened to two officials from Helena read prepared remarks during a public comment period — statements that, at some points, sounded a lot like “mea culpa.”

At issue: the decision by Gov. Greg Gianforte’s administration to build a 32-bed psychiatric facility in Laurel’s backyard to treat mentally ill patients involved with the criminal legal system.

“I also understand that some of you learned about this announcement from the press rather than from the state directly. That process could have been and indeed should have been handled better,” said Dan Villa, the director of the Montana Board of Investments, the entity spearheading the land purchase and development of the state-run facility. “Going forward, you can expect a different sort of state partnership that is grounded in transparency, is respectful of local process, and genuinely interested in the well-being of your community.”

The state’s site selection for the new 32-bed facility — intended to make state-ordered psychiatric services more accessible for patients and law enforcement officials in eastern Montana — has been full of false starts, abrupt pivots and brake pumping. Elected officials in Billings and Yellowstone County initially cold-shouldered the project, irked that the state appeared set on locating the facility in their communities without providing robust details or addressing downstream impacts on the workforce, community services and safety.

Later on, officials in Miles City and Hardin said their towns would welcome the facility (and the stable jobs it would likely provide). While Villa and other Helena representatives toured those locations, the state ultimately announced it would place the facility in Laurel — despite Laurel officials having said that a suitable parcel of land didn’t exist within the city limits. Any nearby site, then, would need to be annexed if the state wanted to link up to city water and sewer services.

The state’s announcement about selecting Laurel — without mention of a specific plot of land — came in the form of a Friday afternoon press release the day after Thanksgiving. Reading about the news in media outlets was the only way many local officials said they had learned about the state’s decision.

Addressing the council Tuesday, Villa said that the information pipeline would change going forward.

“When and if BOI enters into a contingent buy-sell agreement with a property owner, the city council will hear about it first,” Villa said. “You will hear about it during the public comment period of a city commission meeting. You will not read about it in a press release. You will not see it covered by news media before you have been informed directly by me.”

The other official speaking to the council remotely was Charlie Brereton, the director of the Montana Department of Public Health and Human Services. In his remarks, Brereton pledged that the future facility would be exceedingly secure and that patients would be transported to and from as part of a “closed-loop system” directed by law enforcement and judges.

“In other words, patients will be securely transported to the facility under court order and then will return to their county detention facility of origin, the Montana State Hospital in Warm Springs, or the Montana State Prison or Montana Women’s Prison after treatment without ever leaving this campus,” Brereton said. “I want to be clear that patients cannot leave the facility. In the highly unlikely event that a court decides the patient should be discharged into the community, DPHHS would coordinate with the judicial system to return the patient to their home community.”

Neither Villa nor Brereton provided a timeline for the state’s next steps.

— Mara Silvers

By the Numbers 🔢

Last week’s top wind speed in Montana was recorded Dec. 8 in Deep Creek, a station next to Dog Gun Lake in Glacier County in northwestern Montana, according to the National Weather Service.

Thor Terland, a lifelong resident of Sweet Grass County in the south-central part of the state, where the wind speeds reached 97 mph, said the wind woke him up around 3 a.m. Later that morning, Terland discovered his Ford Focus crushed under a Ponderosa pine.

“As far as wind, this is the worst I’ve seen,” Terland told Montana Free Press.

Though Big Timber had some of its strongest gusts on record, a high bar for one of Montana’s windiest cities, both sides of the Continental Divide experienced windy weather this week. Valleys and foothills usually fill with pools of cold air, creating a dense barrier that buffers high winds. But a recent warm spell has kept lower elevations unusually warm, pulling down strong winds from the jet stream overhead.

“Those winds are there almost every year, but they’re restricted to the ridgetops. So to get them down to the valley bottoms this time of year — particularly the further west you go in the state — it’s been phenomenal,” meteorologist Dan Borsum with the Bureau of Land Management said.

— Zeke Lloyd

Verbatim 💬

“I think you can be sure that if I’m confused, and my office is confused by this proposal, consumers are definitely going to be confused.”

—Montana Consumer Counsel Jason Brown speaking at a hearing before the Montana utility board about NorthWestern Energy’s plans for the additional shares of the Colstrip coal-fired power plant it’s acquiring in January.

Brown offered his thoughts during an hour-long hearing before the Montana Public Service Commission. In that Dec. 9 meeting, NorthWestern pitched its regulators on a novel accounting framework that would allow it to retain some of the money it generates from power sales after adding another 222 megawatts of the Colstrip plant to its portfolio.

The proposal is a departure from the traditional framework the utility is beholden to, which directs the company to apply money from excess power sales to its customers’ accounts to help offset their bills. NorthWestern argues its proposal is in the interest of its customers because they’ll benefit from some of the generation made available by the company’s acquisition of Avista’s share of the plant.

Although NorthWestern didn’t pay Avista for the acquisition directly, the plant comes with a hefty operation and maintenance expense. NorthWestern estimates it will be on the hook for another $18 million a year in annual operation and maintenance expenses for the 41-year-old plant after the transfer. NorthWestern said it won’t ask customers to shoulder those maintenance costs if the PSC allows it to hang on to the revenues generated by contracts for Colstrip power it has signed with three companies. The utility has declined to make those contracts available for public review.

NorthWestern’s attorney Mike Green described the request as a “narrow, transparent and temporary” change that will help the company “minimize our losses.” Green said the change is necessary for the utility to achieve control over the plant’s future, something it has long sought in order to keep Colstrip operational.

Jenny Harbine, an attorney representing the Montana Environmental Information Center and the Sierra Club, countered that the request is unprecedented and last-minute. NorthWestern has produced a “striking lack of evidence” necessary to demonstrate that the expanded plant ownership is “used and useful for Colstrip’s customers,” she said.

With the exception of Commissioner Brad Molnar, who described the proposal as a “dumpster fire,” the commissioners offered little insight into how they’re inclined to rule, but indicated a decision would be forthcoming in mid-January.

—Amanda Eggert

Back and Forth 🏓

Ensnared in a months-long feud with the Northern Cheyenne tribal president, the tribal council has turned to an unlikely messenger to reach the public: artificial intelligence.

Let’s provide some context before we get into it: The volatile situation sparked last spring when Northern Cheyenne Tribal President Gene Small initiated an audit into the council’s use of federal COVID-19 relief funds. Some council members balked, but the examination moved forward. Then in September, the tribal council voted to remove Small, citing alleged constitutional violations, although they maintain the vote was not in response to the audit. On the same day, a group of traditional leaders, known as chiefs, issued a declaration calling for the removal of the eight council members who voted to oust the president. In October, the tribe held a controversial election that excluded women from running to replace the eight council members, most of whom are women. That newly elected council has been meeting regularly, and the eight original council members have also continued to meet. Whew.

Conflicting statements about who’s in charge have swirled around the community for months. And because the Bureau of Indian Affairs said it won’t get involved, meaning there’s no outside arbiter to weigh in, both the council and the president are focused on winning public opinion.

Facebook is popular among tribal communities nationwide, and the Northern Cheyenne tribal president and council have both turned to the platform to convey their messages.

For months, Small has shared updates to his official Northern Cheyenne President’s Office page. There, he posts images of communication with the BIA, court filings and council resolutions. He’s also shared more than a dozen videos where he tells viewers his side of the conflict.

The council has mostly issued official statements on its Facebook page, but in the latest effort to explain its side of the story, the group has turned to AI.

In a four-minute video shared by the council’s Facebook page on Dec. 8, Lexi, a Black AI avatar wearing a black blazer and white shirt, tells viewers that she is speaking on behalf of the Northern Cheyenne Tribal Council. The message, she said, is intended to explain what is happening with the tribal government.

“This is not about personalities,” she says. “It’s not about pride. And it’s not about one side ‘winning.’ This is about protecting our Constitution and the democratic government that our people chose.”

Lexi goes on to recount various events of the conflict, claiming that the actions by the chiefs and president were “unlawful” and that the original council is the “legitimate council.” She also outlines several demands of the BIA, urging the federal agency to announce which body it recognizes, among other things.

Council member Melissa Lonebear told Montana Free Press that the group decided to use AI because “we’re trying to catch people’s attention.” A neutral messenger like an AI avatar, she said, was especially appealing to the group, who say they’ve been subject to threats of violence and online harassment.

In another short video shared by the council on Dec. 9, a cartoon drawing of a woman speaks in a robotic voice about the chiefs’ role in the conflict.

As the character speaks, corresponding images, like a microphone, a crown and a question mark, appear in her dialogue bubble. Sometimes, though, seemingly random images appear — a pair of shoes, a lock, and a dumbbell, among other things.

“We’ve gotten recommendations to use AI and to use TikTok,” Lonebear said. “And unfortunately, none of us are real masters at it. It’s new for us, but [the videos] provide a tutorial for people. It breaks things down.”

— Nora Mabie

In Case You Missed It ↩️

After a multi-month lull, measles cases in Montana resurfaced again in late November and early December. According to the most recent update from the state health department, two measles cases have been identified in Broadwater County, with another one appearing in Gallatin County.

Broadwater County public health officials say that the two cases in their county are no longer contagious and that residents are only at risk of exposure if they have recently traveled to other communities where the highly transmissible disease may be circulating.

The Gallatin City-County Health Department has published a list of locations where people may have been exposed to measles in recent weeks. Officials there advise members of the public who may have been exposed to monitor for symptoms from Dec. 16 to Dec. 27, depending on the date of exposure.

Measles was first reported in Montana in April, as cases cropped up in hotspots across the country. Before that, the disease had been absent in Montana for more than 30 years. Since it resurfaced, Gallatin County has had the most cases by far, with 20.

Health officials have advised residents that the most robust, long-lasting defense against measles is medical immunization with the measles-mumps-rubella (MMR) vaccine. Children typically become eligible for the first dose of the MMR vaccine at 12 months of age, with the second dose typically administered after a child turns 4 years old. However, in periods of high exposure, health officials can approve an accelerated vaccination schedule to allow for infants as young as 6 months to receive an early MMR dose. Gallatin County currently has an accelerated vaccination schedule in place.

If contracted, measles can cause serious health issues in children and adults, including pneumonia and brain swelling. In extreme cases, measles can be deadly.

No measles-related deaths have been reported in Montana in 2025, though three people have died of the virus nationally, according to the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

— Mara Silvers

Viewshed 🌄

This week, I was hoping to make a nice image of something holiday-y, like trees covered in luscious snow. Admittedly, selfishly, I wanted that as a skier as well. The weather, though, at least until Friday morning, had other intentions. Also this week, I went through all my photos from this year for a forthcoming retrospective. So, as I sit looking out at the gray, drab day, I figured why not share an image from late August of the Schillhammer family skipping rocks and swimming in the Clark Fork? The last breath of summer and pre-school freedom while I patiently wait for my last breath of rain this fall.

Highlights ☀️

In other news this week —

An “atmospheric river” caused flooding and prompted an emergency declaration in the state’s northwestern corner.
Montana farm groups had some thoughts about President Trump’s assistance package.
A group of Montana youths is suing the state, again, over its climate laws.

On Our Radar

Nick — I’ve had an unhealthy, if seemingly irrational, fear of quicksand since watching Gilligan’s Island as a kid. Seems I was right, as this Utah hiker can attest.

Zeke — The season of Spotify Wrapped and Apple Replay, the year-end summaries of music streaming habits shared with each user in early December, is one of the best times to ponder the habits that define us and the apps that track them.

Jacob — If you’re willing to get away from the lights of town and brave the cold, this Saturday brings the peak of the Geminid meteor shower. It is one of the few astronomical events that really shines without a telescope. NASA estimates that, at the peak, there could be upwards of 120 meteors per hour if the skies are dark enough. This map is great for finding a spot with dark enough skies.

Mara — I ran a series of at-home experiments over the last couple of days to see what combination of over-the-counter medicines, nasal spray, hot toddies or spicy food could help rid me of a demonic cold. A neighbor dropped some Alka Seltzer in my mailbox, which may (?) have at least contributed to a better night’s sleep. Turns out, I probably should have turned to Google much earlier in the hopes of finding this helpful article.

Eric — In recent years, I’ve found YouTube to be the most helpful place to turn for help picking up a new tactile skill, at least when I can manage to separate true expertise out from influencer clickbait. As I get into making wood bowls this winter, I’ve been watching hours upon hours of videos from legendary Australian woodturner Richard Raffen. Now in his 80s, Raffen seems to be keeping himself busy in “retirement” by pumping out instructional gems.

Lauren — For reasons relating to a future story, I’m currently part of the Deer Lodge Community Group Facebook page, which was no easy feat. Being based in Helena, I had to apply twice! Two weeks ago, there was a kerfuffle regarding a missing cat named Moose, who I initially thought was a real moose, and that had apparently been catnapped! But here’s the twist: According to the post, the cat’s rightful owner knew the napper and was threatening to call the police if the cat wasn’t returned — and soon! Unfortunately, the original post has been removed, so while we may never get closure on Moose the cat, I can only hope that they were returned safely home, no worse for the wear and with an epic story.

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This week’s edition of the Lowdown was edited by Nick Ehli, with additional copy-editing by Holly Michels.

The post Trying to avoid ‘death by numbers’ appeared first on Montana Free Press.