_______________________________________________________________________ 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…
________________________________________________________________________ Today someone directed my attention to a KRTV Facebook post and news story about the next “Future of the Falls Forum”. Here’s how the KRTV story describes the Forum events: “The next “Future Of The Falls” forum will be on Monday, December 3rd, from 6:30 pm to 9:30 pm at the Civic Center….
________________________________________________________________________ Well, it’s the day after Election Day 2018 and most observers of the national election results are calling it a “split decision”. Being a big boxing fan I have to disagree a little bit – a split decision means that on two of the three scorecards one of the pugilists scored higher than…
________________________________________________________________________ Recently someone brought to my attention some comments on the Kavanaugh nomination written by a so-called “leader” in Great Falls, Tracy Houck, and posted last week on Senator Steve Daines’ public forum page. Here’s a screenshot of her comments: After seeing her comments here’s what I wrote on my FB page in response,…