Is Great Falls business friendly? Does the City encourage growth? Why are these never-ending questions? Perhaps the answers are obvious after all. The Great Falls City Commission recently voted unanimously to deny a Conditional Use Permit (CUP) to locally owned and operated M&D Construction. City staff, the City Zoning Commission and Neighborhood Council 7 all…
In the first two installments in this trilogy I provided some missing pieces of the puzzling GFPS action concerning the award of the General Construction contracts for Giant Springs Elementary School and the CM Russell Additions. Some of you appreciated the information presented and some of you viewed the pieces as “sour grapes”. In any…
In Jeni Dodd’s recent piece about the proposed Friesen development, Great Falls Concerned Citizens chief organizer, George Nikolakakos, writes: “On Mr, [Tom] Jacobson, as an economic authority in the region, his opinion matters and carries weight. What he has pointed out (unrelated to this project) is that the average wage in cascade county is $18 an…
Mr. Nikolakakos, I think you’re better off opposing this on the water/Madision Aquifer issue. That may be the strongest argument. You called Weissman’s assessment regarding jobs “silly.” However, I found much of your information to be misleading. First, you mentioned you posted the One Montana Feasibility Study. I found no such study posted on the…
Kudos to Craig Raymond and his staff in the City of Great Falls Planning and Community Development Department for working to find solutions to help keep a local private sector employer, M&D Construction, in the heart of Great Falls. This is the attitude we need from our city employees across the board; not “You can’t…
Great Falls, Montana is a great destination for any responsible Agricultural based processing industry. Madison proposes to put in a ‘State of the Art’ processing plant here. The new plant says eventually they will employ up to 3,000 people! If they are serious, have financing and regulatory permission in place they will be a very…
Watch the short video below. It’s Rhett Hulett, owner of M&D Construction which employs 30 folks here in Great Falls, making his case for a Conditional Use Permit at the January 2, 2018 Great Falls City Commission meeting. “I want to be a good neighbor” “We want to be a positive part of that part…
Phil Faccenda’s articles about Great Falls Public Schools building procurement procedures made me want to take a closer look. State law (Montana Code Annotated or MCA) dictates requirements for the use of alternative delivery project contracts. So I visited Great Falls Public Schools website and perused the documents I could find that are related to…
Great Falls Tribune “reporter” Seaborn Larson seems to have it out for Cascade County Sheriff Bob Edwards. After we objectively pointed to an earlier instance of Larson’s Fake News, said Tribune reporter grew angsty and angry, and lambasted E-City Beat in an amusingly shameless and unhinged Twitter meltdown — again and again. Not to be outdone,…
In the previous piece of this three-part series, Missing a Few Pieces of the Puzzle, we have shown that most of the $3M in architectural fees for the Great Falls High project will in fact be leaving Great Falls and Montana. We also shed some light on the unconventional selection of general contractors for the…