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 Magic And Wonder Of Presidents Day
This is a special time of year for me and my family. Presidents Day holds so much meaning and so many great memories for me even now as an adult. When I was a kid, every year my brothers and I, with barely contained excitement and anticipation, would count down the days until that magical,…
How Long Before Biden’s Climate Change Agenda Damages Great Falls?
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…
Ethics, Great Falls, And A National Heritage Area
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…
Groundhog Falls
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…
Commissioner Houck Requests Closed Ethics Hearing Claiming A “…Personal Attack On Me”
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…
Location, Location, Location: Haste Makes Waste
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…
GF City Commission Swaps Kranz Park Land, Tryon Lone ‘No’ Vote
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…
Board of Health Votes to Adopt Revised COVID-19 Control Measures
Editors note – below is the press release from Cascade County sent Wednesday, January 20, 2021 2:40 PM “Great Falls, MT — This morning, the Cascade City-County Board of Health met to vote to adopt less restrictive COVID-19 control measures in light of Governor Gianforte’s recent directives. Last week, Governor Greg Gianforte announced that he was…
Timber
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…