More than a year ago, Kalispell City Councilor Chad Graham requested a work session meant to reevaluate the impact the Flathead Warming Center was having on the community after hearing a slew of complaints from neighbors. The negative feedback centered around a high concentration of homeless people loitering around the North Meridian Road neighborhoods, with complaints ranging from mentally ill folks experiencing psychotic episodes to large volumes of trash.

That first meeting almost exactly one year ago on May 13, 2024 drew a crowd of divided residents that overflowed council chambers until midnight with emotionally charged testimony from neighbors, social workers and lawmakers. Some public commenters expressed support for the homeless shelter while others just wanted it out of their neighborhood. The meetings also drew political candidates like Rep. Tanner Smith, a Republican legislator from Lakeside, who was running for governor at the time and used the public hearing to express his disdain for “bad actors” who were “getting drunk and badgering our women and children.”

“Some things I would like to see as governor, we need to double down on these NGOs (non-governmental organizations),” Smith said last year. “If you’re gonna operate a homeless shelter, you guys can pass an ordinance where you drug and piss test these residents. That will get these bad actors and the people that have the bad outcomes out of the state.”

Many more unhinged public meetings would follow over the next four months until the city council voted to rescind the Flathead Warming Center’s conditional use permit and effectively shut down the homeless shelter.

But the Flathead Warming Center followed through on threats to sue the city and a federal judge issued a preliminary injunction that allowed the shelter to stay open until the lawsuit concluded. By March, the city and the shelter reached a settlement agreement and the conditional use permit was reinstated.

Exactly one year after that first city council meeting, I attended a Warming Center board meeting where staff presented an end-of-season report and post-lawsuit update. The agreement requires continued communication between the Warming Center staff and the city, a quarterly in-person board meeting open to the public and an official apology from the city to Flathead Warming Center Director Tonya Horn.

It appeared some dust had settled and staff reported successes like improved neighbor relationships but also emphasized challenges like the rise in chronic homelessness and a lack of wraparound social services in the Flathead Valley.

“We have seen chronic homeless numbers go up, but we’ve seen the resources go down and because of that, we have seen crisis played out over and over in public spaces,” Horn said.

While the year-long saga ended in continued social services for the valley’s most vulnerable population, the marathon of late-night public meetings, court hearings and press conferences may have broken some public officials and local journalists. I can’t speak to why Mayor Mark Johnson and Councilor Chad Graham are not running for their respective fourth terms on the council, but I can confirm that I quite frankly wanted to go to bed before midnight and have since switched beats to cover a governing body that attracts the same crowds, but meets during the day.

I’m Maggie Dresser, here with a daylight dispatch of today’s top stories from northwest Montana and beyond …

In her latest column, Bigfork-based cookbook author and food blogger Julie Laing shares her recipe for Moroccan-inspired mint tea. Check it out here.