When dad gave grandma’s Dodge Dart to my younger brother, he told him that D was for drive and R was for reverse. That kind of life advice is easy to remember. Regardless of how dysfunctional politicians became over the past decade, Montana drivers still know forward from backward or when it’s our turn at four-way stops.
The season of change is upon us. Outside its more subtle. The chokecherries are turning deep red. The garlic curing in the shade. The apples getting fatter with rain. Across the nation, change is blowing in the air as Montanans are being repeatedly stung by the high cost of living.
Everyday people are getting overcharged. Everything at the grocer cost more. Insurance, power and whatever else is out of control expensive for retirees and wage earners. Everybody elected to power appears too rich to notice or too scared to help. Who elected Do Nothing?
Those $7 coffee beans at Costco suddenly cost $10 a pound. In the past month, tariffs hit home. America cannot grow enough java beans in Hawaii to satisfy our national appetite for the morning-time, caffeine. Everything now costs even more at the store.
Wages aren’t keeping up with costs. Something’s gotta give for the small business owner getting squeezed from both ends and the working folks just looking to buy some groceries and school supplies.
Hurled from the Great Recession to a global pandemic, traditional means for working Montanans to advance economically were ravaged. Housing and supply chains got whacked hard.
Working Montanans seek opportunity to do better, a chance at success. We’re willing to work hard but want change. A fair shot.
Montana dismantled local planning regulations across the state to increase building heights, lessen parking requirements, reduce building lot sizes, and add density to existing neighborhoods yet the price of rent and housing keeps increasing in the valley.
Montana is building as fast as we can but land speculation and the national tariffs on lumber and constructions supplies dramatically increase costs for homebuyers. And those interest rates are way too bloody high. Is Congress still on vacation?
Not many working Montanans can afford that $1 million condo on a five-floor downtown midrise or the current median selling prices of a $900,000 home in the Flathead or that $2,000 monthly rent happening valley wide and across the state.
Montana Republicans outlawed the one tool local governments used to guarantee housing affordability. It helped steer the international developers working in our small towns across Montana to build something a local working stiff can afford to buy with local wages.
Montana increased state property taxes in counties like Flathead by 95%, nearly doubling the amount a median homeowner paid from 2020 to 2024. The government shouldn’t charge homeowners extra taxes just because it reappraises your home every couple year.
Racing toward homeowners and renters is the ever-increasing cost of electricity, scarcity driven by data centers, artificial intelligence and social media with its incessant thirst for more juice. Thought crypto was a power hog? Stay tuned for AI.
I remind myself that Democrats are the minority. There are only 60 left elected in the state and work in the Legislature, plus County Commissioners in places like Bozeman and Missoula, sheriffs and school superintendents elsewhere, and hundreds of local central committee members.
Statewide redistricting pulled seats back from the legislative supermajority but Montana remains run by Republicans, bigtime. Beet red, except places like college town Missoula. The 90 legislators, the five statewides like governor or attorney general, and the entire U.S. Senate and U.S. House delegation are all Republican, who won big last go.
As I talk with locals, people tell me that Democrats lost everything. Of how we need change. To stop doing the same, expecting different results. Get over losing and get organizing, build central committees in each county statewide. Recruit candidates in every race and talk with people on the ground. Stop dictating to locals. Locals know best. Listen. Get to work. Win.
No Montanan needs a poll telling locals that jobs, housing, healthcare, schools, taxes and the Great Outdoors matter to middle class workers. Every local knows that stuff got too expensive over the last years. People know whether their job is going forward or backward.
My brother and his high school friend drove that Dart as far as they could, up over mountain passes, down by the rivers and lakes, along long gravel roads, and on the rural routes. Its 225 cubic inch, slant-six engine was a marvel of American engineering, built to keep going, dependable.
Months later it sat upside down, in a side road ditch. Roof dented by the boulder that wedged between the seated pair of lap-belted teens. That was close, they laugh when back home. Dad stood silent, not amused. There’d be more instruction with the next rig.