Category: Great Falls

On Sunday I received the following message and picture from a Great Falls resident:

“Hey Rick we went to watch 50 Watt Sun (at the Beacon) last night and under the train bridge this is what we saw! Who need to clean this mess up? I hate that this is happening in the city I grew up in.”

I contacted City Manager Greg Doyon on Monday to find out what is being done about this issue and here are the email responses outlining the course of action that is being undertaken:

Email from Mr. Doyon to me:
Commissioners: The location appears to be on Burlington Northern  property – I suspect it’s a displacement from the encampment of the 6^th Street bridge...

Email from Mr. Doyon to BNSF:
I hope this email finds you well. Please be advised that I received [an email] from a City Commissioner.  I wanted to be sure you were aware that there appears to be a homeless encampment on what appears to be BNSF property in Great Falls. The City does not perform clean-up on private property, but would assist with the removal of trespassers using appropriate law enforcement personnel. If you’d like to discuss further, please feel free to give me a call.

Email from BNSF to Mr. Doyon:
Hello, Greg!  Thank you for sharing this information. I’ve notified BNSF Resource Protection. They weren’t aware of this trespass site and will look into it.

I will continue to follow up on this public safety and health/sanitation issue and report back to the public as needed.

Last week the Great Falls City Commission voted 4-0 (Mayor Kelly was not present) to accept the City Manager’s FY24 budget which includes adopting the proposed total allowable property tax increase of 4.38%.

The approved proposal includes the 1.92% permissive medical levy and the 2.46% inflationary factor increases.

Those increases would equate to the following for Great Falls homeowners:

• $100,00 home – $10.51 annually or 88 cents per month.
• $200,00 home – $21.02 annually or $1.25 per month.
• $300,00 home – $31.53 annually or $2.63 per month.

The numbers could vary slightly either up or down depending on the final total property valuation for Great Falls released in August by the Montana Department of Revenue.

The additional revenue is general fund revenue to pay for the increasing cost, due mostly to inflation, of providing public safety – police, fire etc. – and for the 8% increase in city employee health insurance premiums.

Over 70% of the City workforce is under public employee union collective bargaining agreements.

Latte Factor?

I have never and will never use the ‘it’s only a latte a week’ line to justify a tax increase of any kind. It’s not up to me or anyone else to determine how much is ‘too much’ or ‘not that much’ for you.

I pay the exact same local taxes as everyone else in my hometown of Great Falls and I rely on the exact same city services as everyone else here, so I ‘get it’ when it comes to the seemingly endless ‘little lattes’ that add up over time from every single direction.

But I also want to live in a safe, clean, modern community with an appropriate level of public services – and that’s not free.

The times they are a changin’ in Montana and we can no longer rely solely on property taxes to pay for every school district, county, and city service being provided to citizens.

The solution, in my opinion, is state tax reform and I urge every Great Falls citizen to contact their state legislator and Governor Gianforte and ask them to make tax reform THE top priority for Montana starting now.

There have been a number of questions from the community about the IRS/ATF raid on a Great Falls gun store.

In response, here is some further information concerning the involvement of the Great Falls Police Department in that event.

First here is a a screenshot of the email that city commissioners received from GFPD Captain John Schaffer this morning showing the press press release concerning the incident sent out to local media on Thursday June 15 at 3:00 PM, the day after the raid. There has been no attempt to ‘cover up’, or ‘play mum’, or stall by GFPD.

Second, below is the transcript from last nights Great Falls City Commission meeting where Captain Schaffer laid out the basic facts. I then asked a few follow-up questions. You can view the statement and exchange here starting at 1:01:40 of the video.

Captain Schaffer: I just wanted to provide a little bit of background on what took place last week involving Highwood Creek Outfitters and the Great Falls Police Department’s involvement there.

We were notified last Friday by the Internal Revenue Service that they were requesting a standby to provide scene security on a search warrant that they were going to execute, and that’s search warrant was going to be done on last Wednesday. We were not told of the location, we were not told of the contents of the search warrant, we knew nothing about what the search warrant entailed, only that the IRS was asking us for standby assistance.

On the morning of the search warrant we were told where it was, we responded with 2 officers that were in uniform and in a marked squad car and we were there to provide scene security.

We were there for about a total of a half hour, and then released by the IRS.

That is about the extent of what the Great Falls Police Department knows what happened there.

Commissioner Tryon: The request for assistance for that raid, you guys get those once in a while from various other law enforcement agencies, is that correct?

Captain Schaffer: Yes, Commissioner. Whether it be at the state level the local level or the federal level we have partners at all of those.

Commissioner Tryon: I’m just asking these questions because I’m getting the questions as well, so are there state laws or other pertinent statutes that apply or that would be applicable to that situation?

Captain Schaffer: Well, not necessarily that situation, but depending on who asked us if it involves any federal firearms laws there’s Montana code annotated that we have to follow when it comes to whether not we’re gonna get involved.

Commissioner Tryon: But you didn’t know that there was a firearms store when you were…

Captain Schaffer: This was the IRS that asked us for help and we did not know the location where it was going to be.

Commissioner Tryon: And you weren’t providing ‘paddy wagon service’ for the IRS?

Captain Schaffer: No sir.

Commissioner Tryon: Thank you.