At last week’s Great Falls city commission meeting we voted to approve a $150,000 funding request, using federal ARPA funds, for the Great Falls International Airport. The money will be used as part of a matching fund package for a Small Community Air Service Development Grant (SCASD) to help lower air fares at Great Falls’…
During the public comment portion of last night’s Great Falls City Commission meeting quite a few local residents got up and expressed their opinions on the “homeless encampment” at the First United Methodist Church. You can view the video of the meeting here. Public comment begins at about 7 minutes 30 seconds into the meeting….
This week I received and reviewed some of the latest economic data put out by Patrick Barkey and the Bureau of Business and Economic Research at the University of Montana. Once again I found it interesting, and a little discouraging to be honest, to see how Great Falls/Cascade County is faring compared to other Montana…
Yesterday I received some photos from a local resident showing handbills posted in Great Falls promoting a ‘White Lives Matter’ agenda. I’ve included the pictures in this piece. I was troubled by the pictures. Just as I was troubled by some of the incendiary and hateful messages at the ‘Defund The Police/BLM’ rallies in Great…
With 2022 almost here, I thought it would be a good time to provide Great Falls folks with a brief outline of what I, as a City Commissioner, consider to be two very important areas of focus in the coming year. First, I believe we need to make it a priority to follow up on…
After seeing someone named Ed Caffrey ‘quote’ me incorrectly on public news sites twice over the past week regarding the Great Falls Crime Task Force, I decided it was time to set the record straight. The following comment was attributed to Mr. Caffrey on the Great Falls Tribune Facebook page; I simply thought Caffrey was…
In case you missed it, the City Commission was recently asked by City Manager Greg Doyon about how to proceed with City Commission meetings in light of a recent spike in local Covid-19 cases. In an informal consensus vote commissioners decided 4-1 to move the upcoming September 7 City Commission work session and regular meeting…
The Great Falls Crime Task Force has been meeting on a bi-weekly basis since the first week in June and so far the meetings have been mostly informational presentations giving members, and the public, a solid foundational understanding of the scope and issues involved related to local crime and the local criminal justice system. The…
At last night’s Great Falls city commission meeting we unanimously voted to adopt the proposed fiscal year 2022 City of Great Falls budget. This graph depicting the government entities to which our local property tax dollars go is interesting and informative: The 27.1% share of total local property taxes is only one of the City’s…
Are all those booms, pops and ka-bams we heard over the weekend as Great Falls celebrated Independence Day 2021 the sound of freedom – or the sound of irresponsibility? Here’s something I posted on my personal Facebook page last Wednesday: “Let’s be careful and kind out there, Great Falls. Hot and dry conditions here means…