Montana is built by the people who drive patrol vehicles, rebuild our roads, tend to the sick, lead our classrooms, sell us groceries, and maintain our buildings. If we want our state to be its strongest, we must give working Montanans everything possible such that they can thrive. This includes ensuring safe working conditions, fair compensation, and bargaining rights. Yet right when many of us are struggling, attempts are being made to do the reverse. “Right-to-work” legislation? Narrowing access to pensions for public employees? Cutting essential services? Shame.
If you spent all your time in the Legislature's Education Committees, and you didn't know any better, you'd believe teachers and school administrators were the cause of Montana's problems. Yet most parents would express the reverse: Our public schools and the people who run them are Montana's engine for propelling our young people into the future. More than that, our schools are at the heart of our communities. You would think that our leaders would be confronting our mushrooming teacher shortage or confronting the mental health crisis overwhelming our children, or finding ways to keep our kids safe in classrooms, or finding ways to help teachers to do their best work. But no, instead, this committee is forwarding laws that vilify, undermine, and threaten our teachers. Instead, it is siphoning off millions from public schools and shifting it to private schools that serve the elite.
Each of us should be free to make decisions about our own health and our own families without political interference. We should trust women to know what’s best for their bodies, their physical and mental health, and their lives. Likewise, we should trust parents to make decisions related to the physical and mental health of their children. While medical professionals belong in these discussions, politicians do not.
Home ownership, let alone rent, has grown out of reach. Legislators need to take on the problem...with diligence and seriousness. And yet amidst this fiasco, state leadership has multiplied the tax burden on home owners and allowed Northwestern Energy to spike its rates!? Montanans who work in our restaurants and grocery stores, let alone those who want to start here as young teachers, must have ways to afford life here.
These troubles include some of the highest suicide rates in the nation, increasing poverty, drug and alcohol abuse, and diminished care for seniors. Yet rather than creatively empower public services to take on such challenges and offer support, laws are getting passed to minimize or gut services altogether. Fewer services means less support...right when we need them most.
This includes ensuring that wealthy landowners don’t get special access. Right now, laws are getting passed that expand land access and hunting rights for the rich, yet limit it for everyone else. We all live here and contribute; what makes these people think they should get more than the rest of us?
When local Montanans go out on a limb to start a business from scratch, take on the immense risk, and invest all the work necessary to make it get off the ground, we need to be there with opportunities and structures meant to help them succeed. Small, independent business owners are like the other workers described above: Key to Montana's strength, we must get behind them.
