Four of Whitefish’s best, our local firefighters are in California for a nearly three-week shift to fight the most destructive urban firestorms in American history. Our neighborhood heroes left our small town to help the tens of thousands of Americans suddenly homeless as firestorms ravage Los Angeles, devastating lives and putting everyone nearby in grave danger.
The National Aeronautics and Space Administration along with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration recently said that last year was the hottest year ever, a record that’s been broken every year over the past decade as our climate turned notably fiercer, the forest drier, and weather evermore chaotic than before.
It’s hard to fathom the amount of chaos when temperatures swing wildly. This week’s polar vortex is running roughshod over the nation. Our state leaders in Montana and Washington, D.C. essentially keep saying don’t worry about it. But they’re mostly all gazillionaires. With multiple homes. And escape in private jets to second homes when the local smoke is too thick to breathe or the air too cold to tolerate.
Firestorms have destroyed some quarter trillion dollars’ worth of homes and small businesses in California. It’s a prelude for the rest of us. The firestorms are biblically apocalyptic in size, seismically bigger than the hurricanes that walloped Florida and devastated homes as far inland as Tennessee, and orders of magnitude stronger than storms that battered Vermont or Texas in recent years.
You’ll be lucky to find affordable home insurance in Montana soon. Expect to pay more either way. Many homeowners already voiced distress as industry cancelled policies with little notice.
Our Legislature is in Helena right now, working for us, and could provide leadership on home and car insurance. Yet the majority remains distracted, making sure we use the right bathrooms and look and act proper according to their archaic rules.
In Montana, home insurance premiums skyrocketed, often by double digits as industry seeks to assure profit and cover losses from fire, wind, and water. Lawmakers remains silent about most homeowner costs, preferring to eat up their 90-day public work clock by focusing on other matters like stripping unemployment benefits away from workers who recently lost a job.
Lawmakers introduced over 4,000 bill drafts but wildfire and insurance seem important enough to bubble up to the top of any legislative trough.
There’s plenty of concern about firestorms and insurance, particularly if homeowners live in one of the many rural areas which border our towns and especially if a home is built in a geographical region which has but one practical way in or out, like so many of the large developments in our resort valley.
We expect more from our Legislature and given Montanans sent a dozen more Democrats to Helena maybe some good policy will materialize via cooperation. We pay legislators rather well. They enjoy free health insurance, retirements, housing and food allotments, and many discretionary dollars for constituent services. We expect a decent plan on the big issues facing working Montanans.
The governor’s budget returns a small amount of property tax dollars back to people living in their homes to partially compensate for the past two gigantic state revaluations of existing property which produced $500 million of state overtax for homeowners and small businesses throughout Montana.
There’d be no political debate on how best to return a portion of state property tax money back to homes and businesses if lawmakers didn’t overcharge in the first place and inflate existing home values by over a hundred billion dollars via reappraisals.
Lawmakers must stop overtaxing homes and small business, stop giving our hard-earned money to someone else, and stop making us do more paperwork to get a portion of our money back. Just let us keep our hard-earned dollars upfront. It’s that simple.
The state overtax sent retired neighbors back to work to pay the “rent” to live in their home of 30 years, long after the mortgage is paid. The state overtax puts local safety and school levies in severe danger as people are “taxed out” by lawmakers.
The Montana Legislature will shuffle money and keep the bulk of your state reappraised tax dollars to pay for other “services” like income tax cuts. There’s no way to balance the state budget without someone, in this case homeowners and small businesses, paying way more so others acquire an income tax cut.
Given the kids beat the state, Whitefish Rep. Debo Powers sponsored a bill that codifies the Montana Supreme Court decision that people today and tomorrow have a right to a clean and healthful environment.
Powers’ bill removes the ban that prevents Montana from analyzing the pollution generated from new power plants that a hungry nation craves to run new technologies and artificial intelligence data centers.
Her bill is intuitive yet stands a “snowballs chance in Hell” of passing a Republican-controlled Legislature. They don’t much care what our top court says. They’re busy pushing legislation to strip Lady Justice of power and create partisan courts where the next constitutional questions facing Montanans can be put out to pasture.
“Hope not a plan for killer hurricane” was the headline two months ago in the Sarasota newspaper right before Milton blew the roof off the local airport, flooding homes, agonizing locals, and devastating yet another part of our nation.