17 May 2018 — 1406 mdt

No cell tower at FHS, no slammer stay for Phil Mitchell

At the end, the cell tower vote wasn’t close. Tuesday evening, School District 5’s trustees rejected 7–1 Verizon’s request to put a powerful cell phone base transmitter atop Flathead High School. Some takeaways:

• A well executed campaign against the tower prevailed. More than 1,000 persons signed a petition opposing the project. Dozens of letters opposing the tower were submitted. So were almost 100 pages of studies raising questions about the safety of cell phone base stations. Almost two dozen opponents testified in person that they opposed the tower. Kay Walker, Ming Lovejoy, and Erin Blair, conducted a textbook campaign for social change.


• Trustee Jack Fallon, the board’s lone supporter of the project, did not accept defeat graciously. He alleged the board had been intimidated and bullied, that parents who opposed the tower but paid for cell phones for their children were hypocrites, and left the impression he believes critics of the cell tower are hysterical luddites.


• An over-reliance on property taxes, and too much money spent on athletics, are at the heart of the district’s difficulties in securing the level of funding it believes is needed to operate the schools. Saving money by eliminating the football program would have the added benefit of not subjecting students to an activity notorious for injuring brains. Expanding the tax base will require moving at least some of the tax load from property taxes to taxes based on income and/or transactions. That won’t happen overnight, but I’m at the point where I would seriously consider replacing residential property taxes with a value added tax.

Commissioner Mitchell escapes slammer time for killing cottonwoods

County Commissioner Phil Mitchell plead guilty on 11 May to a misdemeanor charge of criminal mischief for killing cottonwoods at a public park on Whitefish Lake. He received a six-month suspended sentence and agree to pay $16,000 in restitution. But he won’t go to jail, and because he wasn’t convicted of a felony, he won’t be removed from the Flathead County Commission.

Not everyone is happy. Sheriff Chuck Curry denounced the deal. So did former Kalispell mayor Tammi Fisher, who’s the treasurer for Commissioner Gary Krueger’s campaign. There’s no love lost between Mitchell and Krueger, incidentally, as Mitchell donated money to the campaign of Randy Brodehl, one of the three candidates challenging Krueger in the Republican primary.

I don’t particularly like the deal, but I think it obviates the risk of a trial’s ending in an acquittal and thus is defensible. Moreover, Mitchell is not a violent offender. He doesn’t belong in jail. Instead, he belongs in the library, doing research on a court ordered research paper on the glories of cottonwoods, and in the county’s parks, planting new trees, raking leaves, and shoveling snow.

The parks department should put at the site of the murdered trees a large sign reading something to the effect of: