Columns
The birds outside my bedroom window go crazy every morning. I love it. They wake up – sometimes one by one, other times as groups - all with something so say, something to contribute. Perhaps they are calling out to friends or family; perhaps they are marking their territory or chasing squirrels from their nest; perhaps they simply like to hear themselves sing. It doesn’t matter to me. I just like the music – and or – noise they make. Because when they all chirp and tweet and whistle and trill and screech and caw and hoot and peck and squawk it often doesn’t sound much like music. It’s almost like they each are trying to outdo the other and th...
As the Ukraine invasion enters another week, our gas and diesel prices now eclipse the old record set in 2008. Mindless partisan haranguing on causation and solution play out with hackneyed ‘Trump did it better’ and ‘Biden has the vision.’ Our energy conundrum is best addressed by an ...
We are five of the youngest lawmakers in the Montana Legislature. At 20, 21, 24, 29, and 31 years old, we are in various stages of renting and home ownership, and all of us are concerned about the housing crisis facing Montana. In every one of our communities—Billings, Belgrade, Columbia Falls, and eve...
Cities around the globe are transforming urban jungles into literal jungles. Driven by rising sensitivity to environmental and air quality issues, cities are opting to boost their tree populations in urban areas. In a previous column, I described a pitfall to this approach in the past: overplanting female tr...
It’s been almost a decade since I spent my first glorious summer in the shadow of the Mission Mountains, which felt like heaven after living the entirety of my life in the humid eastern Texas heat that stifled from April to September. Over the years I’ve lived in numerous places across the wester...
If you are like me, it is difficult to think of a reason why we would want to make Montana more like California. Nonetheless, this election cycle, there are several ballot initiatives being proposed to adopt California policies here in Montana. One such proposal by former Governor Marc Racicot and former Sec...
As I watched Russian troops march across the Ukrainian border in an unprovoked war that immediately made the world less safe for our kids and grandkids, I thought about the words of a World War I veteran from Great Falls named Mike Mansfield, spoken in the days after Hitler invaded Poland in 1939: “...
A three-member arbitration panel recently rendered decisions in favor of Lake County on two of the three issues contested in a lawsuit brought against the Montana Department of Revenue (MDOR), by the County related to the Temporary Tribal Tax Exemption (TTTE), a statute enacted in 2012. The statute provides ...
Spring has sprung and we are gearing up for a busy March at the North Lake County Public Library. The book drop is always available as is our online catalog and Montana Library2Go with eBooks, audiobooks and magazines. The big news is the much anticipated Friends of the Library Book Sale happening ...
A year ago, we launched the Snowbird Fund to help families and friends of missing and murdered indigenous persons by offering immediate cash assistance (no questions asked) to search for their loved ones. Since then, the fund has not only survived but it has doubled its cash amount and increased its fundi...
