Did the City’s Indoor Recreation Center and Aquatic Facility consultant selection process violate the Federal Procurement rules? In June of last year, the City hired a local architectural/geotechnical engineering team, without advertising so all interested local firms could compete for the Department of Defense $10M grant pre-application project. After the award, the City Manager said,…
What’s a 50 meter pool that is 25 meters short? If you answered, “very short-sighted”, you’d be correct, but that’s what you are going to get with the new Indoor recreation Center and Aquatics Facility. Why is a 50M pool an important feature of an Indoor Aquatics Center? According to a Cost Benefit Analysis (CBA)…
The following excerpts are from an article in the Montana Petroleum Report newsletter entitled “BIDEN TORPEDOES KEYSTONE XL PIPELINE”, written by Alan Olson, Executive Director of the Montana Petroleum Association. You can read the entire article here. “President Biden’s recent executive order to rescind the permits for TC Energy’s Keystone XL, including a section of the pipeline…
The Great Falls City Ethics Committee voted on Wednesday, February 3, 2021 to dismiss all allegations of conflicts of interest and ethics violations I made against city officials for providing city employee time and city resources to Big Sky Country National Heritage Area (BSCNHA) Inc. Their decision seemed to be based mostly on the city’s…
HISTORY JUST KEEPS REPEATING ITSELF After Mantle and Maris hit back-to-back home runs in 1961, Yogi Berra said “It’s déjà vu all over again”. That quote could have been the inspiration for the 1993 movie Groundhog Day, which was about a real -time entrapment in the time loop. In Groundhog Falls we are caught in…
Last summer, I submitted a formal complaint to the Cascade County Attorney against the City of Great Falls regarding use of government resources (aka our tax money) to support a private nonprofit—Big Sky Country National Heritage Area Inc. I cited portions of both the Montana Code Annotated and the Official Code of the City of…
As they say, location is hugely important in real estate. Process is equally important in a fair and competitive selection of an architectural firm to design a $20.2 municipal project financed by the taxpayers. In the case of the Indoor Recreation and Aquatics Facility both the location and the process have been fatally flawed. In…
Editors note: E-City Beat has requested and received permission to copy and paste Great Falls City Commissioner Rick Tryon’s reports from his public commissioner’s Facebook page, ‘Rick Tryon for a Greater Great Falls’. “At Tuesday’s (1/19/21) City Commission meeting the commission voted 4 – 1 to approve a land swap between the City of Great…
If it wasn’t enough for the Great Falls Public School District to deforest the Great Falls High School original campus by cutting down 80 mature and environmentally beneficial city trees without a permit, now they want to do the same thing to a neighborhood icon, Kranz Park. Donated to the City of Great Falls by…
What is the purpose of an elected city commission? As representatives of the citizens how should commissioners direct the affairs of government? Should they simply be an affirmative “rubber stamp” for staff policy and actions, or should they play a larger role in the decision-making process? Some would say that we hire professionals to run…