More than a dozen trained volunteers fanned out across 19 of Missoula County’s 22 polling stations on June 4, fixing their eyes not on the results of inter-party primary battles but on the election process itself. Their presence constituted the trial run of the Montana Election Observation Initiative, a new effort by a pair of former political heavyweights in Montana’s election integrity debate to combat misinformation with firsthand nonpartisan insight. “We want to provide a process and a report and generate data that folks can trust and have faith in,” said former Montana Commissioner of Po ..read more

Backers advancing a pair of constitutional initiatives that would overhaul how Montana voters elect state and federal candidates said Wednesday that they have collected enough signatures to have the measures placed on the November ballot. The first initiative, CI-126, would replace Montana’s current party-based June primary elections with a fully open primary that sends the top four vote-getters from a party-agnostic ballot onward to November general elections. The second, CI-127, would specify that candidates must receive at least 50% of the November general election vote in order to be decl ..read more

Montana Free Press recently investigated the challenges facing working families and childcare providers in Montana, in collaboration with the national news nonprofit Open Campus. The following portrait provides a deeper view into the experience of one of the sources crucial to that reporting, offering readers another lens through which to understand how childcare issues are impacting everyday Montanans. On a Wednesday afternoon this spring, Sara Low watched her two children play in the fenced backyard of the Wild Wonders Early Learning Program, a home-based Missoula childcare outfit owned and ..read more

Public health advocates in Montana are endorsing a boost in federal grants for maternal home-visiting programs and asking Biden administration officials to continue funding services for Montanans who are pregnant and parenting young children. Health Resources and Services Administration head Carole Johnson appeared in Bozeman Tuesday to tout $5.4 million in grants for home visiting that will be available to Montana in the upcoming fiscal year, a roughly $400,000 increase over the current allocation. Annual grants for states will continue to grow over the next few years, Johnson said, based on ..read more

Montanans can anticipate a generally normal fire season this summer, a regional fire weather forecaster reported at a Tuesday morning briefing in Bozeman. Dan Borsum, a Missoula-based forecaster with the Northern Rockies Coordinating Center, said springtime moisture has mitigated the impacts of a generally dismal winter snowpack in Montana. (Water supply forecasters noted in early January that half of their monitoring stations were reporting record-low accumulations due to an exceptionally dry stretch of weeks in November and December, but that trend later improved with the development of sto ..read more

06/03/2024 “Helena This Week” is reported and written By JoVonne Wagner. Send your Helena news and tips to jwagner@montanafreepress.org. Real estate experts say that Helena’s housing market shows signs of stabilizing this spring but still faces challenges.  The Helena Association of Realtors maintains housing market statistics for Helena, Lewis and Clark County, and the surrounding counties. The median sale price for Lewis and Clark County in April was about $435,700, compared to a median of $425,000 a year ago.  As of April, Helena’s median sales price was $427,500, up from $405,200 ..read more

A multi-agency effort is underway to develop the latest long-range transportation plan for Great Falls, which was last updated in 2018. Drivers shouldn’t expect major changes coming from this effort. Great Falls and Cascade County are seeing nearly flat growth trajectories, which is a departure from Montana’s other largest counties. Thus, the top-line goal for the 2024 plan is the preservation and maintenance of the existing transportation system. “That’s definitely a little bit unique to the Great Falls area,” said Scott Randall, the consultant project manager for the plan. “It’s had a more ..read more

The city of Kalispell is considering amending or revoking the permit for the area’s only low-barrier homeless shelter following a rash of complaints from area residents about how it has impacted their neighborhood.  The Kalispell City Council has been grappling with complaints about the Flathead Warming Center on North Meridian Road over the last few weeks, and shelter officials will have the chance to respond to those concerns next month. Opponents of the shelter in its current location point to an increase in crime in the area since it opened in 2020, as well as strewn trash, drug para ..read more

FAIRMONT HOT SPRINGS — In the first debate of Montana’s high-profile U.S. Senate race, Republican challenger Tim Sheehy Sunday repeatedly portrayed America as a country ravaged by problems enabled by Democrats and said he’s part of “new leadership” that can fix things. “Americans, they don’t have confidence in their government anymore,” he said. “They want to have common sense back. … They want cheap gas, safe streets, boys are boys, girls are girls.” His opponent, three-term Democratic U.S. Sen. Jon Tester, said he’s the real Montanan who understands rural America and has used his influence ..read more

This story is adapted from the MT Lowdown, a weekly newsletter digest containing original reporting and analysis published every Friday. Yellowstone National Park is proposing a major shift in its strategy for managing bison, one that could mean larger herds, expanded hunting opportunities beyond park borders, and more bison transfers to tribal governments. The park prepared its new bison management plan in response to research regarding brucellosis, a bacterial disease that can cause cattle to abort their young. That research has concluded brucellosis transmission to livestock — a concern th ..read more