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In Montana, there aren’t a lot of resources for people suffering from intense, destabilizing mental illnesses. There might be local hospital providers, a few short-term crisis beds or the local jail. But for hundreds of people a year facing mental health emergencies, most roads lead to the Montana State Hospital in Warm Springs.
The public facility, just north of Butte, is a century-old institution that has struggled for years to retain staff and keep patients and employees safe. As readers may recall, conditions were so bad at the hospital in the throes of the pandemic that federal regulators yanked its certification in 2022.
Since then, the Gianforte administration has pledged to stabilize the hospital and help it regain federal certification. But, nearly two years after the hospital fell out of good standing with regulators, that effort seems to be hitting substantial snags.
A few months ago, I started to hear from health care sources that employees were concerned about the institution’s direction and started making some calls. Leadership at the hospital was shifting rapidly, employees said in off-record conversations. They saw new mandates handed down from administrators, supposedly geared toward recertification, as impossible to implement and bad for patient care. Those insights certainly piqued my interest.
State employees are notoriously tight-lipped with reporters, especially when it comes to criticizing higher-ups, the governor’s administration or department policy — one of the reasons I was surprised about the level of pushback I was hearing. But most sources were adamant that going public with their concerns would get them fired, or compromise their medical licenses.
MTFP has a policy about using unnamed sources, which boils down to using them only as a last resort. We believe that naming our sources is an essential transparency step that helps our readers vet our reporting and also keeps the people we quote accountable for the truth of their comments. In this case, as my sources balked at going on record, I began to accept that I might not be able to publish anything about employee concerns at the Montana State Hospital this spring.
I got a break earlier this month though, when I obtained recordings of two recent staff meetings between medical providers and administrators. In those conversations, I heard employees repeatedly bring their concerns directly to their bosses and was able to listen to how the hospital’s top brass responded. My editors and I felt that those recordings were the missing piece this story needed — not only did they help confirm what sources had been telling us off-record, but they allowed us to quote hospital employees without them delivering an on-the-record interview.
We think the piece we published this week contains plenty of important information about the current struggles of a vital public institution. We also hope that readers will appreciate how MTFP was able to bring that information to the public square: We worked with brave, honest and patient sources. We tunneled our way into an obscure facility when the main entrances were blocked. And we made sure that the facts of our eventual article were solid.
Thanks for reading our work — and, we hope, trusting our journalism.
READ THE STORY: State psychiatric hospital employees raise alarm over rampant turnover and ‘crisis’ of leadership.
—Mara Silvers, Reporter
Wildlife Watch 🐘
An escaped circus elephant that briefly wandered the streets of Butte Wednesday drew all manner of commentary from across the state and nation. “A f*cking elephant walking down the road — oh my god,” one bystander put it as they and a companion filmed a widely shared video clip attributed to Brittany McGinnis. “Only in Butte.”
On social media platform X, formerly Twitter, political commenters made the obligatory jokes about a traditional icon of the Republican party running amok in one of Montana’s longtime Democratic strongholds. “Rarest of signings — a Republican in Butte,” wrote user Ed Gohlan. “The @mtgop taking Silverbow County by storm,” chimed in Montana GOP chair Don “K” Kaltschmidt, punctuating his comment with a blushing emoji. (Silver Bow is officially spelled as two separate words).
Elsewhere, social media commentators (and a press release from People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals) used the viral video as a moment to debate the morality of having elephants perform in circuses (“seriously I thought the circus would be canceled by now,” one commenter wrote in a thread on KTVQ’s Instagram page.)
The elephant, Viola, is part of the Jordan World Circus. According to the Montana Standard, a handler had been bathing her behind the Butte Civic Center when the animal was startled by a truck backfiring. Viola then took off down Harrison Avenue, bringing traffic to a brief standstill before she made it to a Montana Lil’s Casino parking lot.
—Eric Dietrich, Deputy Editor
Following the Money 💵
As of this week, school election ballots are in the mail to voters in communities throughout Montana. With some of the state’s largest districts facing multi-million-dollar budget deficits — this despite last year’s historic property tax increases — many of the ballots include requests for additional financial support from local taxpayers in the form of general fund levies, tech levies and school safety levies.
In Belgrade, the ask on the May 7 ballot looks a little different. The Belgrade School District is seeking voter approval on a $60.5 million bond, roughly a third of which is flagged for the construction of what would be the district’s fourth elementary school. Belgrade voters already greenlit the project in 2019 as part of a $48 million bond. Roughly $20 million of that went to building Story Creek Elementary, the district’s third, which opened its doors in fall 2022. But construction costs skyrocketed before Belgrade could move on the fourth school, leaving the district about $20 million shy of what it needed to complete the project.
In an interview with MTFP, Belgrade Superintendent Dede Frothingham said elementary classrooms are already close to capacity, even with Story Creek now in operation and the district’s fifth graders housed at Belgrade Middle School. The student population is only expected to grow in the coming years, Frothingham continued, meaning without another elementary school, “we can’t last much longer.”
The bond on the May 7 ballot is designed not only to finish Belgrade’s fourth elementary school but to secure more than $30 million needed to upgrade the middle school to meet future enrollment needs. Even then, Frothingham said, the work may not be done. Parents in the district have expressed a desire to see fifth graders transferred back from the middle school to elementary schools, which Frothingham estimates would leave 400 seats across four schools to accommodate future elementary growth. Within 10 years, she predicts Belgrade will need a fifth elementary building.
“Nobody yet has told me ‘that’s a dumb idea,’” Frothingham said. “People are supportive of the idea. They recognize that we’re a growing community, that these are important things, and I think that’s great. The challenge of talking about increasing taxes at this time with property values going up is definitely a challenge. Our voters are going to make a decision about, ‘Is this the right time or not?’”
—Alex Sakariassen, Reporter
Verbatim 💬
“(T)his atmosphere of meanness and sadness and distrust has warped our politics. In normal societies, we practice what you might call the politics of redistribution … We argue about how high our taxes should be, how we should spend our resources. That’s normal politics. But that’s not mostly what our politics is about. We live with the politics of recognition. Some people feel unrecognized and they want to shame the other side who they feel are ignoring [them]. … This is the politics of ‘I want to feel admired, and I want them to feel embarrassed and humiliated.’”
—Columnist and author David Brooks, speaking at a public event sponsored by Montana State University’s Honors College in Bozeman on Thursday.
Brooks, a prominent political and social observer, writes an op-ed column for the New York Times and appears regularly on PBS NewsHour. During his hour-long talk, Brooks urged attendees to model an approach favored by writer James Baldwin, that of “celebrating and defending the connection and the respect between persons and their ultimate ability to know one another.”
—Amanda Eggert, Reporter
Following the Law ⚖️
The federal Office of Surface Mining Reclamation and Enforcement has indicated it will reject a law the 2023 Montana Legislature passed to loosen water quality laws that govern coal mining.
In a letter dated March 28, Jeffrey W. Fleischman with the agency’s Casper area office, flagged components of House Bill 576 as “inconsistent with” and “less effective than” federal laws such as the Surface Mining Control and Reclamation Act. Because federal law prevents states from adopting mining regulations that are weaker than federal standards, that assessment is likely to nullify the new state law.
HB 576, sought to amend the legal definition of “material damage” to water resources so it includes only “long-term or permanent” effects.
Since federal laws have no such temporal guidelines, HB 576 would limit the Montana Department of Environmental Quality’s ability to initiate enforcement actions and order remediations for short-term, high-pollution events, Fleischman wrote. OSMRE also said that “long-term or permanent” is a “vague and difficult to enforce” standard that is not defined in Montana laws or rules.
The letter gave the state DEQ two options: share proposed policy changes to address the federal agency’s concerns within 30 days or leave the new law unimplemented.
OSMRE issued the letter about five months after it hosted a hearing in Billings to take public comment on HB 576 and Senate Bill 392, another measure state lawmakers passed last year. SB 392 seeks to require an individual or organization that sues to overturn a coal-mining permit to cover the legal fees incurred by the other party if they are unsuccessful in their legal challenge.
Most commenters at that Nov. 8 hearing opposed the new laws, arguing that coal mining already threatens their access to high-quality water and saying they’ve seen sub-standard enforcement or remediation when violations are reported under the existing framework.
DEQ spokesperson Moira Davin wrote in an email to MTFP that the department has not received a letter from its federal counterpart on SB 392, which has been incorporated into the latest version of Montana Code Annotated.
—Amanda Eggert, Reporter
Highlights ☀️
Also in the news this week:
- Are you among the 150,000 Montanans who’ve been mailed a copy of the newspaper-esque “Montana Independent”? As Arren Kimbel-Sannitt reported this week, the new media outlet is thoroughly entangled with liberal political interests, backed by progressive dark money and written mostly by out-of-state journalists — plus a veteran Montana author who’s married to the Biden administration’s Bureau of Land Management director.
- Environmental groups celebrated a BLM rule announced this week that will recalibrate the agency to put conservation initiatives “on equal footing” with commercial uses of BLM-managed federal land, such as livestock grazing and leases for oil and gas extraction.
- Republican legislators held a hearing Thursday where they heard testimony, mostly from opponents, on an abortion rights initiative proposed for this fall’s ballot. Democrats and the initiative sponsor group, who believed the hearing was unnecessary given an April 5 Montana Supreme Court ruling that cleared the way for CI-128’s signature gathering, stayed away.
On Our Radar 
Amanda — Colorado-based writer Nick Bowlin spent a year working on this piece for Harper’s about the intersection of private equity and local governance in Big Sky, an unincorporated community where “great skiing, awful housing [and] billionaire indulgence” are on full display.
Alex — During a concert at Missoula’s Wilma Theater this week, Old 97s frontman Rhett Miller drew cheers from the crowd (me included) when he noted he wrote one of the longtime Dallas, Texas, rock band’s newest songs — Where The Road Goes — on the banks of the nearby Blackfoot River last year. The river even gets a shoutout in Miller’s lyrics.
Arren — Here’s an interesting story from my friends at the Arizona Agenda about a Democratic primary candidate whose social media shows him hobnobbing with one of the state’s foremost hard-right figures, Kari Lake.
JoVonne — The University of Montana hosted its first Matriarchal Storytelling event this week, an event intended to showcase how Indigenous knowledge is preserved through Native women. The Missoulian’s Nora Mabie covered a few keynote speakers who shared traditional stories from their tribal histories.
Mara — As Montana spring clings on to some colder temperatures, The Flathead Beacon’s Maggie Dresser has a tantalizing piece about a new Finnish sauna in Columbia Falls. It’s a great read that makes me ready to start a road trip north.
Eric — Are we headed toward a dystopic future where granular consumer data lets companies personalize their prices to wring every possible cent out of begrudging customers? This piece in The Atlantic argues we might well be.
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