The numbers are painful. Last year, 1,700 Montanans lost jobs in our timber industry. Timber harvest across our state plummeted a staggering 40 percent. Several mills – including Montana’s largest – boarded up. If we do nothing, Montanans who work in the woods will get hit even harder. It’s an industry that today directly employs […]

No one with a lick of sense would suggest that the economy is setting cash registers on fire. Few people know this more than restaurant owners, which is why you see them going out of their way to please their customers these days. Just the other day, a friend was in a new restaurant in […]

Congressman Denny Rehberg had a good week after a Federal Election Commission report showed his campaign coffers dwarf his challengers’. Meanwhile, Amtrak reported fewer Montana riders in 2009. HIGH NEW ORLEANS – With Mardi Gras about to begin and a Super Bowl championship team, one of America’s great cities seems poised for resurgence. JON TESTER […]

My name is Jim Spaulding and my wife is Debbie Spaulding, the chairman of the Lakeside Neighborhood Plan committee. I felt the need to respond to Allegation No. 8 of Moonlighting Detective Agency’s investigative report to the Flathead County Commissioners. In this allegation, Jeff Larsen stated that he was defamed because Flathead County Planning Director […]

History may be the best indication of where things go from here. Property rights groups opposed Flathead County Commissioner Gary Hall in the 2008 Republican primary, and he lost to Jim Dupont by more than a 2-to-1 margin. Some of those same groups campaigned against Kalispell Mayor Pam Kennedy in 2009, and she lost to […]

I read the article in the Feb. 3 Flathead Beacon about the investigation into the Flathead County Planning Department (“‘Closure’ Uncertain in Planning Investigation Aftermath”). The statement attributed to Jeff Harris at the end of the story on page 13 illustrates the problem that often exists. The article stated: “He expects there will always be […]

It’s said that good fences make good neighbors – and in the West, that also applies to good water laws. So what happens when a legal loophole allows some well users to take more than their fair share? The neighbors aren’t happy. In Montana and throughout the West, rural homeowners have long relied on small […]

People aren’t the only thing that matters in this Reboot the Flathead process. The structure of the process itself is critical. Get off on the wrong foot in that department and it may not matter which people are involved. A big challenge to that is the Lens of Now. The “Lens of Now” means looking […]

Now that our timber beast friends have morphed themselves into money beasts, let’s take a look at why it matters. Montana Fish, Wildlife and Parks is about to close on a $14 million buy of 41,000 acres of former Plum Creek land in Mineral County, the Fish Creek country around Tarkio. This is yet another […]

On Jan. 21, 2010, George W. Bush set the government and big business in the same boardroom. Now that people can give $2,400 to federal candidates per election, and businesses can give billions to candidates per election, it appears that the corporations have now, not only been given the rights of people, but also given […]

Jeff Harris had a good week after a third-party investigation cleared his office of wrongdoing. Meanwhile, the federal deficit will peak at a heart-stopping $1.6 trillion this fiscal year. HIGH BARACK OBAMA – He came out swinging last week, with a tough State of the Union address and a feisty debate with the House GOP, […]

Some have shrugged at the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision last week to overturn parts of the decades-old campaign finance law that now allows corporations and unions to spend as much money as they please on elections. And perhaps those with more modest means – individual voters – have little to worry about. Doug Pinkman, president […]

In many cities, surveillance cameras are being installed, and their residents are always told it is for their safety. Being here in Libby, I have not been too concerned about this loss of personal privacy and freedom, because I thought that people in small towns in Montana would not want to be under government surveillance, […]

After a lifetime in Montana and a career in the Forest Service, I welcome Sen. Jon Tester’s Forest Jobs and Recreation Act as a way of making our national forests and communities healthier. Born in Butte two years before the opening of the Berkeley Pit, I grew up in the foothills of the Highland Mountains. […]

Last week, I mentioned that it’s likely going to take a small group of folks getting together and hatching a plan to “Reboot the Flathead”. A well-thought-out plan might eventually look nothing like the plan the group starts with, that being the nature of thinking big. No, that’s not a flip-floppy excuse, it’s just life. […]