_______________________________________________________________________ Earlier today I saw the following meme/comment on a popular Great Falls public Facebook page, Remember Great Falls When… What I found particularly interesting were the comments posted by local citizens and employers. You can click here to see all of the comments, but I’ve copied a few excerpts here that are very revealing…
_______________________________________________________________________ In my most recent article here on E-City Beat I said I would be doing a series of articles focusing on what we can do to build a better Great Falls by looking at what other Montana cities are doing to grow and develop while we struggle to remain stagnant. In other words, what…
_______________________________________________________________________ Someone sent me a link the other day to a very interesting news piece from KBZK in Bozeman, MT. – ‘Bozeman ranks #1 for strongest micropolitan economy’. That’s the strongest micropolitan economy in the nation, not just the state. As the report explains: “According to Policom, an Economics research firm, Bozeman is ranked number…
_______________________________________________________________________ On January 10 the Montana Office of Public Instruction announced “record high graduation rates for Montana in 2018”. In today’s Great Falls Tribune, January 29, one of the headlines on the front page is “Graduation rate of GFPS students in 2018 dropped”. Recent data from City-Data.com shows the Great Falls’ poverty rate above the…
_______________________________________________________________________ “I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by…” …their political party affiliation or ideological leaning? …their level of hatred or support for Trump? Martin Luther King Jr.’s dream was that we would…
_______________________________________________________________________ On Friday, January 4, last week, I hand delivered a request for public information to the Cascade County Attorney’s office regarding employees at the Cascade County Sheriffs Office. The names of the CCSO employees listed here were included in the FOIA because several reliable sources provided information that the CCSO employment status of these…
_______________________________________________________________________ It is never wrong for local citizens to stand up and speak up in order to hold local public officials and institutions accountable and to keep them honest. Yet some folks in Great Falls still think that any criticism of our so-called “leaders” and public policies is somehow wrong, even damaging to our community….
_______________________________________________________________________ By now most local citizens are aware that there’s something going on at the Cascade County Sheriffs Office. And it’s not a “riot down in cell block number 9”. It’s a criminal investigation stemming from “irregularities with regard to some purchases”. Since I became aware of some activity going on late last week regarding…
Today someone sent these pictures to me with the following note: “Interesting pictures of the City parking their tractor/trailer on M&D’s vacant lot while they are performing asphalt patching on an adjacent street. The same lot that they ran M&D off of for parking the same type of trucks there.” The ‘M&D’ referred to here…
________________________________________________________________________ I thought it important to share the following letter I recently received from someone in Great Falls and E-City Beat has agreed to publish it with small portions redacted to protect the anonymity of the sender. Let me say a word about that anonymity, which the writer explains his reasons for in the…