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This Friday marks a full month for me on the job as MTFP’s new Helena local reporter. I’m happy to be here!
Helena is a new community to me after growing up on the Blackfeet Nation and spending six years in Missoula, where I studied journalism at the University of Montana. It hasn’t disappointed as I’ve jumped into my new beat.
I’m working to become a regular at community meetings, including city government meetings and local forums like the Hometown Helena group that gathers Thursday mornings at the Montana Club. So far, sitting in on city housing and zoning meetings, I’ve started to learn the ins and outs of Helena’s growing struggle with homelessness. That resulted in my first few stories about Helena’s city code on urban camping and a potential new women’s shelter.
Additionally, I reported on four Helena teen swimmers whose first-aid training helped save their coach’s life, a story I learned about as they were honored at a city commission meeting.
As I continue to learn more about the city, I hope to take the time to cover things thoroughly and accurately to provide its residents with helpful information on the place they call home.
Are there Helena topics you want me to get to the bottom of? People I should meet? Other meetings I should get in the habit of attending? I’d love to hear from you at [email protected].
—JoVonne Wagner, Reporter
Say What? 🤔
The exhibition hall at Great Falls’ ExpoPark echoed with one allegation after another Tuesday as the Cascade County commission considered a resolution to remove Clerk and Recorder Sandra Merchant as the overseer of local elections, replacing her with a nonpartisan administrator hired by commissioners. Some citizens focused their criticism on Merchant’s lawsuit-attracting performance since she took on the job at the beginning of the year, others on her predecessor Rina Moore, and others on the commission itself.
Mixed into the heated six-hour hearing was a statement, delivered by a speaker whose name was garbled by the county’s Zoom feed but who spoke, with rhetorical flourish, to what she saw as the gravity of the situation:
“This is a spiritual battle that we are living in right now. There is no middle ground. You are either evil or good. Choose wisely.”
In the eyes of many of Merchant’s supporters, approval of the resolution Tuesday was tantamount to thievery, part of a grand cabal to overthrow the results of the 2022 clerk’s race and consolidate power in the hands of the three-person commission (currently composed entirely of Republicans). More than a dozen commenters characterized their votes for Merchant, a hardline Republican, as votes against Moore, a Democrat whom they did not trust to run local elections fairly. The 2022 election had been shaded by suspicion and mistrust partly inspired by former president Donald Trump’s efforts to dispute the results of his 2020 election loss. As Merchant’s supporters saw the issue, the county commission’s tyranny and a disgruntled minority of her critics were attempting to strip their will — their votes — away.
On the other side of the debate, Merchant’s critics painted a different picture, one dominated by a string of administrative mistakes that had, since she took office, undermined their confidence in the integrity of Cascade County’s elections. Members of the locally organized Election Protection Committee and others cataloged their concerns with Merchant’s job performance: a lawsuit stemming from alleged ballot errors in two special water district elections, duplicate ballots reported by voters in a Great Falls school election, and the county’s failure to meet a state deadline for certifying its recent municipal elections. Multiple critics questioned Merchant’s ability to properly handle next year’s federal elections, where election mishaps — and the area’s status as a historic swing district — could produce messy litigation brought by deep-pocketed campaigns and national political groups.
The resolution ultimately passed 2-1, making Cascade County the seventh county in Montana to move toward a non-elected, nonpartisan election administrator.
—Alex Sakariassen, Reporter
The Viz 📈
One of the many calculations I did while working on an in-depth analysis of how Montana property taxes have shifted this year (a story we published last week) was a look at per capita tax collections county by county. The results didn’t fit in the main story, but we thought they were worth breaking out as a separate item here.
The chart below compares two 2023 figures for each of Montana’s 56 counties: Up the vertical axis, each county’s average residential property tax bill, and along the horizontal axis, the total amount of state and local taxes collected on a per capita basis across all types of property.
You might expect that these numbers would be closely related — after all, it makes an intuitive sort of sense that the more tax dollars a county collects for each resident, the higher its average residential property tax bill will be. That expectation would be wrong.
In fact, if anything the reverse is true, especially if you exclude Madison County, where the combination of a generally rural county and Yellowstone Club resort properties produces a unique tax situation. (Of the state’s 100 most valuable residential properties, all but one are located in Madison County).
The explanation appears to hinge on non-residential properties, which in some cases contain enough taxable wealth that they allow above-average tax collections without placing much burden on residential properties.
Two eastern Montana counties, Wibaux and Carter, are outliers in their per-resident collections, with MTFP’s estimates for the total county tax bills coming in at $12,939 per capita and $12,908 per capita respectively — more than six times the statewide figure of $2,083. Both counties have small populations and significant tax base wealth in non-residential properties, particularly oil and natural gas pipelines.
As a result, despite the high per capita collections, Wibaux and Carter homeowners pay some of the lowest property taxes in the state, with residential properties producing only about 1% of overall collections. (A caveat: outside towns, many rural residents live on properties that the state revenue department classifies as agricultural instead of residential.)
At the other corner of the chart, Missoula County and Bozeman’s Gallatin County have comparatively high average residential taxes, even as their total per capita collections, $2,267 and $2,600, are fairly close to the statewide figure.
If you’re interested in poking around with an interactive version of the chart that lets you see specific numbers for each county and single out counties we haven’t had space to label, it’s available here.
—Eric Dietrich, Deputy Editor
3 Questions For
Last week the Federal Railroad Administration announced that it awarded a $500,000 grant to the Big Sky Passenger Rail Authority to explore the feasibility of restoring passenger rail service along the North Coast Hiawatha route, which passed through many of Montana’s largest cities along its Chicago-to-Seattle route before the service was scrapped four decades ago. The planning grant will allow the authority, which formed in 2020 under an obscure, century-old piece of Montana law, to catalog what needs to happen to get passenger train service running once more through Billings, Bozeman, Missoula and smaller communities in between.
MTFP caught up with the Missoula County Commissioner and BSPRA board president Dave Strohmaier to better understand the state’s prospects for expanded long-distance train travel. His comments have been edited for length and clarity.
MTFP: What does this planning grant mean for the North Coast Hiawatha route and BSPRA more generally?
Strohmaier: Two big things that were nested under the bipartisan infrastructure act are playing out now. The $500,000 grant we were awarded last week puts us in the planning pipeline for project implementation. It’s huge for us.
We also helped develop language in the 2021 infrastructure act directing the U.S. Department of Transportation and the Federal Railroad Administration to study former Amtrak routes that could be brought back into service as well as brand new routes of 750 miles or more. The final report for the Amtrak daily long-distance service study is expected next spring or summer, and we expect to be included in it.
Between the two developments, I think it’s now almost certain that the Federal Railroad Administration will recommend that Congress restore the North Coast Hiawatha route.
MTFP: What kind of railroad infrastructure improvements will be needed to get the North Coast Hiawatha operational again?
Strohmaier: Fortunately, this is all existing infrastructure — it’s not as if we’re rolling back the clock to 1883 and building a brand new railroad. The grant serves as a foundational, preliminary step that will help us develop a service development plan, which will outline the investments needed to restore stations, install additional signals and build sections of double-track.
Since North Coast Hiawatha service was discontinued in 1979, some stations have been repurposed for other uses, for example, while others have sat empty. There are also places where double tracking might have to be built to avoid congestion with freight traffic. The service development plan will detail all of that.
MTFP: Rail authority skeptics express concern that restoring the North Coast Hiawatha will come at the expense of rural Hi-Line communities such as Havre, Wolf Point and Cut Bank that are served by Amtrak’s Empire Builder. How do you respond to those concerns?
Strohmaier: We need a healthy and vibrant Empire Builder in order to have a healthy and vibrant North Coast Hiawatha route, and that’s one reason we were a co-applicant with Amtrak on a successful $14.9 million grant to do railroad infrastructure work up near Malta. Establishing a section of double track there will help alleviate congestion between freight and passenger rail traffic.
This does not need to be a zero-sum game where if you add service somewhere it must be lost somewhere else. I get where some of the skeptics are coming from after living so long in a place of scarcity, but we don’t have just one airport or one interstate in Montana and I think there’s room for more than one passenger rail route.
—Amanda Eggert, Reporter
In The (Local) News 🗞️
The Lewistown News-Argus has produced detailed coverage of what might be the biggest news to hit the central Montana city of 6,000 in years: the announcement last week that German high-tech manufacturing company VACOM plans to locate a $90 million facility there in two phases, potentially adding 500 local jobs by 2029.
That announcement was trumpeted by Gov. Greg Gianforte as a major economic development win, one that could dramatically bolster the job options available to people who want to live in and around Lewistown.
As the News-Argus reported in a separate story last week, however, the announcement also comes as central Montana is struggling with a very different sort of economic challenge: having too few workers to fill existing job openings, in part because of childcare and housing shortages. The paper also reported that the company’s planned campus near the Lewistown airport would include a training facility, childcare facilities and worker housing.
—Eric Dietrich, Deputy Editor
On Our Radar
Amanda — These fun maps detail the expansion of America’s trans-continental railroad system, demonstrating just how much track companies like Central Pacific and Union Pacific laid between 1870 and 1890.
Alex — Prior to his ascension as House Speaker, Republican Congressman Mike Johnson of Louisiana was a fairly obscure figure in national politics. The most revealing background story I’ve seen came courtesy of the Guardian this week, which focused on the interplay between Johnson’s religious affiliations and his reluctance to join his late father’s fight against a toxic burn pit in the region where his family lived.
Arren — New York City is auctioning off its “detritus” in time for the holidays, per the New York Times. Items on the lot include a 40-foot shipping container. The starting bid? $100.
Nick — Fareed Zakaria’s column in the Washington Post, “Another casualty of war,” offers an excellent analysis of the importance and challenges of maintaining free speech on college campuses.
Mara — Researchers and journalists are paying more attention to the serious rates of health complications and pregnancy-related deaths Black women in America face. Recent studies have highlighted how pervasive bias from health care professionals can affect patient outcomes. This week’s striking reporting by the New York Times summarizes those findings, foregrounding some heartbreaking experiences of too many patients.
Eric — Officials in one Vermont town had a plan to keep downtown from flooding as periodic major storms roll through. But, as Vermont Public Radio reports, it stalled because the owners of a field they needed to build an alternate floodplain weren’t interested in selling — and because resorting to eminent domain for flood mitigation was considered a step too far.
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