The national gun debate has nothing on what is poised to be a hotly contested local Second Amendment battle. Yes, concealed weapon permit holders are currently allowed to carry their weapons in city parks, including the River’s Edge Trail, according to our City Attorney Sara Sexe. Sexe reported at the November 17 city commission meeting…
After several months of inactivity, E-City Beat is back! We have spent our hiatus adding contributors and developing an improved reader-centric site and we think we have succeeded. Our core values remain the same: to examine and to comment on important and timely issues that matter to residents of Great Falls, our Central Montana region…
Holy sh*t. What else can really be said about the stunning news of Republican Congressional candidate Greg Gianforte allegedly body-slamming a reporter, the Guardian’s Ben Jacobs, today in Bozeman? The audio, which you can listen to here, doesn’t sound good for Gianforte. After an hour or so, Gianforte’s press secretary, Shane Scanlon, offered the following statement: “Tonight, as…
From a front-page, AP story in the Tribune this morning on Trump’s budget: “The Trump administration’s budget plan for 2018 assumes that a mix of sharp spending and tax cuts can both shrink the deficit and fuel economic growth of 3 percent a year — a level it hasn’t achieved in more than a dozen…
In an earlier piece, we pointed out that City Commissioner, Tracy Houck, complained about an alleged conflict of interest by a member of the Community Development Council, which allocates CDBG funds among various local government entities, charities, and other groups. Houck had gotten wind of the fact that a particular individual had down voted the…
The Tribune finally caught up to the Tracy Houck, CDBG funding story, but the reporter didn’t have nuthin’ on this commenter: Robert Tyler Great Falls, Montana How can Houck claim to be personally handling this issue because of concern about the privacy protections of a male employee while in tandem exposing the sexual harassment complaint…
On Tuesday, May 16, Gregg Smith wrote a post about the City’s CDBG allocation process, our fifth and most recent article on the topic. Since the publication of our first CDBG content on April 27, this blog has received nearly 8,000 page views. Suffice it to say, then, that this has swelled into an issue of significant community interest. Things…
On April 20, the filing period opened for Great Falls Mayoral and City Commission candidates. Despite an otherwise quiet municipal electoral landscape, we were recently alerted to the online presence of one Commission candidate, Tyson Habein. You can follow his campaign on Facebook here. While he doesn’t seem to possess particularly high name ID, Habein’s could make for an interesting candidacy. He’s…
On May 15, 2017, I had the opportunity to sit down with City Manager, Greg Doyon, City Attorney, Sara Sexe, and City Planning Director, Craig Raymond, to discuss City Commissioner Tracy Houck’s involvement in the allocation of CDBG funds to the Paris Gibson Square where she serves as the Executive Director. Some takeaways: The March…
Have you noticed that when it comes to Community Block Grant funding and voting, the Great Falls City Commission abounds with apparent conflicts of interest, or with situations with the appearance of conflicts? We’ve already seen an article in E-City Beat about Commissioner Houck and the appearance of a huge conflict of interest involving Paris…