Serving the Flathead Valley & Montana since 2006. A reality based independent journal of observation & analysis. © James Conner.

 

17 November 2014

Whitefish City Council notes

Helicopter landing pads and an expensive parking garage are on the Whitefish City Council’s agenda tonight, and a local human rights group will speak in favor of a hate ordinance during the time allotted for public comments.

Helicopter landing pads

Suppose you are rich and can afford to jet from the city to the country for a weekend. You don’t want to waste a moment, do you? So Friday afternoon you take a helicopter from your office to an airstrip, board your private jet, fly to Glacier Park International Airport, and break the speed limit driving your Hummer to your multi-million-dollar home on Whitefish Lake. It’s that ride in the Hummer that galls you. A helicopter would be faster and more dignified. Noisier, too, but that’s a problem for the lazy little people who didn’t earn the right to do whatever they can afford to do. Unfortunately, those lazy little people live and vote in Whitefish, where the people they elected to the city council just might ban private helipads within the city limits. Let’s hope the council does just that. The council might also want to consider buying the town constable another radar gun, and setting the fine for speeding to the speeder’s wealth and ability to pay.

Does Whitefish really need an expensive parking garage?

Whitefish wants, and probably needs, a new city hall. And the community’s leaders want the new city hall to be in the heart of the old downtown area, which has limited parking. The current solution? A $7.7 million city hall, plus a $6.9 million parking garage, for a total of $14.6 million. That’s a lot of money for a town as small as Whitefish. The parking garage strikes me as an especially dubious idea. If the decision were mine, I’d look for an area south of the old downtown, build a modern, super-insulated, solar powered structure, and park cars on a large paved lot ringed by grass and trees. And I would employ architects who are not contemptuous of their clients.

Does Whitefish need an anti-hate group ordinance?

Love Lives Here, a local human right organization, believes it does, and it urging its members to:

Please attend the Whitefish City Council Meeting this Monday Nov. 17th at 7:10pm to show your concerns with the dicriminatory and hateful views by Whitefish resident Richard Spencer and his group, the National Policy Institute. We encourage you to make a brief public comment asking the City Councilors to consider drafting an anti-hate group ordinance for Whitefish. Please spread the word and invite your friends to join.

Spencer, a white nationalist whom I've written about before, is a law abiding resident of Whitefish, an embarrassment to the community, and a man with some friends in the community. He seems to make his living selling white supremacist propaganda to bigots at conferences around the country. Sometimes he travels to Europe where he makes the kind of trouble that strengthen his bona fides with the people who buy his products.

A resolution embracing human rights, and condemning bigotry, especially the kind of bigotry to which Spencer panders, might be the best response here. But caution is in order. Spencer has exactly the same rights as the rest of us, including the right to free speech. When we defend our own rights, we defend everyone's rights, including Spencers’. And when we attack Spencer’s rights, we attack our own rights. That’s what makes drafting an anti-hate group ordinance that passes constitutional muster such a difficult task.

Spencer’s views are reprehensible. He’s an embarrassment to most residents of Whitefish. He’s not a direct threat to the community. But he’s an indirect threat in that outrage over his beliefs and activities could result in an overreaction that becomes an assault on everyone’s civil liberties.

Readers seeking more information on this and similar issues might want to watch Skokie, the movie starring Danny Kaye (possibly his greatest performance), Eli Wallach, and Brian Dennehy, and read Philippa Strum’s outstanding case study, When the Nazis Came to Skokie.