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Run Mark Sheets Against Her

Run a Woman Against Her

Find Groups that Don’t Really Like Her

Run a Forester or Logger Against Her

Run a Kid Against Her

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Pumping throughput to 100 Mbps would take infrastructure work — more fiber-optic lines buried across the state and into neighborhoods, plus the addition of fiber-connection ports in the residential and business buildings.

 

Without a fiber connection, cable Internet providers can't scale up or down when traffic is high, so speed drops, she said. Fiber's much higher capacity vastly increases reliability.

 

When the Bitter Root Economic Development District started a $50,000 study of broadband capability in its three-county Western Montana region, said Marcy Allen, executive director, "we really set out to look at broadband as an essential piece of infrastructure like roads, water and sewer. What should government's role be," as well as what is the effect on the economic-development community, health care and education.

 

And he said Great Falls businesses and businesses that located here may see productivity suffer with slow connections and could just end up expanding elsewhere.

 

She said businesses scouting for locations may skip Montana as a potential site just from perception of a rural area, which is not helped by spotty cell-phone service in mountainous regions.

Senators Wheeler and Murray

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“with his departure, a certain vigor and controversy disappeared from Montana’s political life. As his biographer Richard Ruetten observed, no one, before or since, ever wielded such political power in Montana as did Burton K. Wheeler.” (Malone, A History of Two Centuries, p 312)

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#1: Run Larry Jent Against Him

#2: Run a Man Against Him

#3: Run a Native Montanan Against Him

#4: Run a DINO Against Him

#5: Lawyer Him to Death

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Economists tell us that two ingredients crate a dynamic economy: the ability, first, to make things, and then second, to sell them. Montana does little of either. Its raw materials are extracted and peddled without much intermediate processing. Eighty percent of the timber cut, for example, is simply sawed into dimension lumber and studs and sold out of state.

Already the wave of the future is here in the form of the Science and Technology Alliance established by the 1985 Legislature – the single most creative, productive, and portentous act of public policy in the decade.

Montana must enlarge and enhance its nascent travel and recreation industry, for in this regard it is the most underdeveloped state in the nation. For too long the state has relied on the federal government to promote tourism by pitching the national parks and the Custer battlefield. A sales tax on motel room enacted in 1987 helps to promote Montana, but that is not enough. A modern travel economy is geared to development. It requires investment and a good telecommunications network. The list of destination points which might be touted – from Absarokee to Zortman – is endless.

Montana must also encourage what is already its top-ranked industry as measured by total income – the ‘transfer industry’ of pensions, retirements, rents and royalties, and Social Security payments – all new money coming into the state and spent here by residents. The transfer industry compels a new look at the old cracked whip economic interpretation of Joseph Kinsey Howard and K. Ross Toole. It also suggests ways of expanding the economy, primarily via tax policies and environmental preservation.

Already people are moving here for non-traditional, non-economic reasons. They are attracted particularly to the counties of western Montana, not especially noted of late for their dynamic, expanding, labor-intensive economies. Who are they? Without much hard date to go by, suppositions include retirees, small-business people, students, granolas. Surprisingly, for the first time in the modern era, the fastest growing cohort consists of young adults, aged 20 to 39. Why are they coming? For scenery, recreation, education, residential privacy, safety, and cultural amenities – qualities in short supply in much of America but readily available in Montana. 

More and more Americans are finding it possible to separate their residence from their workplace. Computer technology will allow twenty-first century Montanans to be employed by a big-city firm while living here…Montana is poised to overcome its greatest historical economic-disadvantages – long distances, high transportation rates, and the social costs of space.