Jennifer Swacina
Missoula

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In the distance, just beyond the entrance of the now-defunct factory, a handful of Ruis Construction vehicles milled about the roughly 80 acres of land that will become 421-unit Teakettle Heights, marking the early stages of Columbia Falls’ largest residential development ever approved. 

The residential project within the Superfund boundary also served as a focal point of Thursday’s tour, with officials highlighting it as a prime example of redevelopment and reuse to return a site to productive use.

“I think it’s amazing that we have a private developer, a local community, and a state agency that have come together, put aside differences, to build that consensus and to create that vision,” EPA Region 8 Administrator Cyrus Western said. “I think that’s one of the coolest things about the Superfund program, is that if we all work together, we can achieve these amazing outcomes that are good for our communities and good for the environment, and that’s exactly what we have here today.”

The Columbia Falls City Council in June approved a series of measures that began clearing a path for the development of Teakettle Heights, which is backed by local developer Mick Ruis. 

The planned unit development calls for a total of 421 units, including 125 single-family residences on detached lots, 56 single-family townhouse sublots and 240 multi-family apartment units, on 78.05 acres south of Aluminum Drive. The subdivision, which will be completed in three phases, will have two access points — one to Aluminum Drive and the other directly to the North Fork Road. 

An outcry of community disapproval followed the project as it made its way through the planning commission and city council, with dozens of residents voicing a variety of concerns ranging from the subdivision’s proximity to the active Superfund site, the strain on city infrastructure, the project’s high density disrupting the existing neighborhood’s way of life, and its disruption to wildlife in the area. 

Ruis, who attended Thursday’s CFAC tour, told the Beacon that he’s already adjusted the development’s configuration in response to community concerns, saying single-story homes for age 55 and up will now be adjacent to the nearby Aluminum City neighborhood, as opposed to three-story apartment buildings as it was first designed. Ruis said he is hopeful construction on the first homes will begin within a year. 

“I have so much property and it’s so beautiful, so you don’t have to go so high like we do in the town,” Ruis said. “People that could afford a single-family home, and then the elderly could live in that [age] 55 home, and then say younger families that can get into a townhome, and you put all three of them together and it becomes one community.”

While the city fielded several complaints from residents about the apartment complex heights, one of the most prominent concerns was about the development’s location within the Superfund boundary. 

On Thursday, Allie Archer, a project manager with the EPA, relayed the same message as she had during Teakettle Heights’ application process: the land has been carefully evaluated and cleared without need for remediation efforts.

“I think just helping residents understand when it is within a Superfund boundary, you would expect there to be some sort of cleanup, but that although there’s no cleanup, it doesn’t mean it wasn’t looked at very, very closely for that residential standard,” Archer said. 

“The whole 2,000 acres was sampled and would have been included in any cleanup measures that were required,” she added. “There was none required for where that Teakettle Heights redevelopment is going, so it’s free to be redeveloped and reused, and we just stay in communication with Mr. Ruis on what his future plans are, so that we can support that public communication. There won’t be any restrictions on the area once we’ve completed that sole remediation that’s happening now. The groundwater has specific requirements around it and that won’t be a factor because the Teakettle Heights will be a part of the city water.”

Archer also noted that there’s no concern regarding the development’s construction, saying “construction here won’t impact anyone, especially the workers that are doing the construction.”

Thursday’s visit from top officials came about two months after the announcement of the Superfund site’s consent decree where Columbia Falls Aluminum Co., LLC officially agreed to the roughly $57.6 million price tag attached to the cleanup plan, which is outlined in the Record of Decision (ROD) signed by the EPA and the Montana Department of Environmental Quality (DEQ) in January 2025. 

The ROD — a 423-page document that followed a proposed plan released in 2023 — provided a detailed account of the EPA’s plan to contain pockets of toxic waste buried on the sprawling property at the base of Teakettle Mountain that has been dormant since CFAC shuttered in 2009.  

Throughout the tour on Thursday, Archer walked Gianforte and Zeldin through the key components of the cleanup plan, which includes: ​slurry walls designed to isolate waste and prevent contaminant migration; ​improved waste covers to reduce exposure and infiltration; an on-site landfill to safely encapsulate contaminants without off-site disposal; and ​long-term monitoring to ensure the effectiveness of the remedy over time. 

“After a lot of scrutiny, this is going to address the contamination, hazardous materials, and eliminate exposure to prevent contamination of groundwater and the Flathead River, which is right over here, near and dear to my heart,” Gianforte said in reference to the ROD. “The First Lady and I one month ago were camping on the gravel bar just down below here, having floated from the Canadian border all the way to Evergreen, so we got to keep it clean.” 

During his remarks, Zeldin told the crowd that Columbia Falls is at an “important milestone moment.”

“One of the most exciting steps of the Superfund process is being able to delist a project at the end of it; to be able to get an important vision not just started, but completed,” Zeldin said. “Unfortunately, while I’ve had a chance to visit a lot of Superfund sites, I have to tell you that some are facing what will likely be decades of work, and really never-ending work, unfortunately. We are at a very important milestone moment here in Columbia Falls, where there is just so much incredible progress imminently ahead on this project.”

On Aug. 31, the EPA and DEQ filed the proposed consent decree for the CFAC site with the U.S. District Court, meaning a federal judge will now review the decree, along with the public comments submitted. 

Grassroots group Coalition for a Clean CFAC submitted one of two public comments for the consent decree, with the group saying it finds “a number of issues of concern including lack of specifics on: long-term monitoring and maintenance; long-term financial assurance; discovery of new hazards; and enforceable requirements for maintenance, monitoring, repair, and corrective action.” The group, however, noted the lack of specifics gives the EPA and DEQ “discretion to adjust the actual process as construction progresses, and new monitoring data comes in.”

“While we continue to believe there are other options more favorable to the long-term effectiveness for the protection of human health and the environment, we understand the Record of Decision has been made and the Proposed Remedy is moving forward,” Board of Directors Chair Tony Haag stated in the public comment. 

lauren@flatheadbeacon.com

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“I think we saw a settling tonight,” Olszewski said after the meeting. “When there was good order and clearly defined rules, a quorum of 70 out of 86 members did good work tonight.”

Topping the list of new leaders was Giuseppe “GMan” Caltabiano, a Republican sitting on the Whitefish city council who defeated state GOP chair Art Wittich for his seat on the central committee. Caltabiano won election as the FCRCC’s chair-elect, besting Tanner Smith, a former gubernatorial candidate and the state GOP’s national committeeman, for the role.

Caltabiano was part of a slate of candidates put up for the FCRCC’s executive roles — which include a chair, vice chair, finance chair, secretary, treasurer and representatives to the state party — by a faction of Republicans who are new to the body.

Several of those new members ran for their precinct captain positions following Kalispell’s 2025 mayoral race. In that nonpartisan contest, Republican-aligned candidate Kisa Davison lost to Ryan Hunter, a more left-leaning candidate who is now mayor. The outcome frustrated a swath of local Republicans who saw the FCRCC as lacking in its support of Davison during the contest.

Olszewski, the now-former chair, previously said state law prohibited the FCRCC from making an outright endorsement in a nonpartisan race. Nonetheless, what they saw as an abandonment of one of their own spurred a slew of new members to action.

Following a summer in which those new members used their majority to effectively kneecap the body’s activities, their showing was dominant at the county convention. Candidates nominated by the new faction bested members of the FCRCC more aligned with the old guard for each executive role. Some, like Caltabiano and Davison, who will serve as the FCRCC’s new state committeewoman, referenced the body’s decisions not to back some Republican candidates in their candidacy pitches. Still others simply spoke to Republican principles they hoped everybody in the room shared.

Their elections represent the turning of a new leaf for one of the state’s most influential local central committees, as the FCRCC has led the state on contentious topics like primary endorsements and the Flathead is home to some of the state legislature’s heaviest hitters, many of whom serve on the central committee. How, exactly, the body’s activities will shift as the new leadership steps into their roles remains to be seen.

The leadership team Caltabiano will serve with during his two-year tenure as the chair includes vice chair Catherine Potter; finance chair Skylar Rieke; state committeewoman Davison; state committeeman Bill Moseley; secretary Jakoby Isles; treasurer Tyron Byers; congressional committeewoman Julie Perchy; and congressional committeeman John Thomas. Of the group, only Isles, an 18-year-old Glacier High graduate, previously served in FCRCC leadership. Perchy has long been on the central committee, but not in a leadership role. Caltabiano, Potter, Davison and Moseley were all elected as precinct captains this June.

As for the former leadership team, some will continue serving in their roles as precinct captains on the FCRCC. Olszewski, the former chair, is not among them. While he said he’d be around if the new FCRCC leadership needed him, for now, he’ll be stepping away from the body in an effort not to crowd them. After taking some time with his family, he said he plans to look for new ways to serve his community.

As he steps away from the FCRCC, Olszewski said he leaves behind a “deliberative” body where people weren’t afraid to speak their minds.

“My hope is that they see success at the primary mission, which is to get Republicans elected in November,” he said.

That’s a mission Caltabiano agrees with. He sees the FCRCC’s main goal as fielding strong Republican candidates and helping to get them into office, though he acknowledged there’s a role he’ll likely have to play in helping to repair divisions among the FCRCC’s membership.

“As a leader, I believe in living by service,” Caltabiano said. “I don’t believe in living by authority. So, I’d love for people to follow their principles, which are the principles of freedom, liberty, community, family, opportunity. And I believe if I challenge anyone in this room, they won’t argue with those principles. So, I’m not asking anybody to follow me. I’m asking them to follow those principles, because I follow the same principles, and respect is one of those … I will not tolerate disrespectful behaviors, simple as that. And then we can deal with everything with stability.”  

Beyond those tasks, though, Caltabiano has another vision he hopes to fulfill.

“[I want to] project this group as a joyous, shining light to attract a high number of young — and less young — new, conservatively-minded Republicans,” Caltabiano said.

mariah@flatheadbeacon.com

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That protective legacy is under direct assault by state leadership and the Montana Department of Environmental Quality (DEQ) with their recently proposed draft guidance framework titled “Eutrophication Assessment Method for Wadeable Streams and Medium Rivers.”

Once again, the DEQ is attempting to transition away from strict numeric caps, toward vague, subjective “narrative” standards. Citizens for a Better Flathead has joined leading statewide conservation groups, including Upper Missouri Waterkeeper and the Montana Environmental Information Center, to formally oppose this severe dismantling of our water protections with extensive professional and fact-based research and comments.

DEQ’s proposed framework treats excess nitrogen and phosphorus as secondary issues, evaluated only after biological damage has already occurred. Waiting for visible degradation, like massive algal growth or severe shifts in aquatic life, means the waterbody has already suffered ecological harm.

Under DEQ’s new proposal, waterways must fail multi-year instream assessments before they are legally classified as impaired; this change to reactive response variables instead of proactive nutrient limits, and introducing permissive exceedance rates, DEQ’s framework effectively shields point-source dischargers (including water and sewer districts) from regulatory accountability. These entities can, under this rollback of regulations, delay necessary infrastructure upgrades, discharge higher levels of effluent, and hide behind a rigid multi-season testing buffer. In short, DEQ is shifting the financial and environmental burden from polluters onto local communities, landowners, and recreational water users.

Make no mistake: DEQ’s proposal is not designed to protect Montana’s water. It exists to lower compliance and infrastructure costs for development by allowing investment entities to dump higher levels of nutrient pollution into public waterways. Rather than preventing pollution at the pipe, the state’s new rule says essentially: Keep discharging until the river is choked with algae and fish begin to die. Only then will we intervene.

We are already seeing how this dangerous philosophy plays out in the Flathead Watershed. Look no further than the proposed expansion of the Lakeside County Water and Sewer District. Despite overwhelming public outcry and science-backed concerns, state regulators issued a groundwater discharge permit authorizing massive volumes of treated effluent over shallow, sensitive aquifers hydrologically linked to Flathead Lake.

Instead of requiring advanced nutrient removal technology before permitting expansion, the state’s proposed weakened rules going forward will allow developers to rely on mixing zones and delayed monitoring. But Flathead Lake is an ultimate nutrient sink; nitrogen and phosphorus do not wash away, they accumulate. Allowing higher nutrient loading upstream creates a slow-motion ecological crisis in places like Flathead Lake and the rivers and streams that feed it, inviting toxic cyanobacteria blooms and oxygen depletion.

Furthermore, DEQ’s proposal relies on non-binding guidelines and “best professional judgment,” allowing political and economic pressure to dictate whether a degraded stream gets cleaned up. We see this same “administrative convenience” at the local level, where the Flathead County Commissioners routinely treat Lake and Lakeshore Protection Regulations as mere administrative checklists designed to accommodate rapid development rather than their legal duty to enforce even the basic minimal protection standards set forth in state law.

It is totally unacceptable that State and local agencies, by rolling back longtime protective water quality laws, keep prioritizing cheap development over clean water, threatening the very foundation of our regional economy. The Flathead Valley’s multi-billion-dollar economy – our tourism industry, outdoor recreation, property values, and local businesses – rely entirely on our world-class, crystal-clear water. People move here, visit here, and invest here because Flathead Lake is clean. Lowering the bar for wastewater discharges to save money today guarantees catastrophic economic and environmental bills for local taxpayers tomorrow.

Clean water is guaranteed by the Montana Constitution, but defending it requires constant vigilance. Citizens for a Better Flathead and our partners will continue to stand against these regulatory rollbacks in the halls of the DEQ, in our county offices, and in the courts. We owe it to our community and future generations to ensure Flathead Lake remains pristine, protected, and unpolluted.

Tonya Derrickson is the Co-Executive Director at Citizens for a Better Flathead.

The post Montana’s Water Quality Is Not for Sale appeared first on Flathead Beacon.

Nurses ratified their first contract with SEIU Healthcare 1199NW representing them in 2021, a process that took two years and included a three-day strike amid tense bargaining negotiations. The following contract, ratified in 2023, took about eight months. This one took about four.

“I saw that as progress,” Nelson said. She’s worked at Logan Health for nearly 15 years and took part in all three bargaining processes. “I also see it as acceptance of the union … we’re not going away.”

The new three-year contract gives all nurses an 18% raise upon ratification, rising to 24.5% over the life of the contract, along with improved vacation scheduling. It also raises pay for various differentials, including when nurses are precepting, working as a charge nurse, or hold additional certifications.

The contract adds five new steps to the wage scale, which is based on years of experience. Nelson, who will hit 35 years as a nurse in January, will move from Logan Health’s previous cap of step 25 to step 30, a change that affects more than 100 nurses, or roughly a sixth of the union’s 650 members. Combined with the 18% raise, Nelson said the change amounts to about a $16 increase in her hourly pay, which is “life changing” for many.

“You know how expensive to live in the valley, and those kinds of wages are what we need to keep local nurses here, because it’s too easy to pick up and travel and go make more money,” Nelson said. “We need stable community members taking care of our community.”

For other nurses, like registered nurse and union delegate Tara LaHaise, the higher differential pay is an incentive to take on additional duties and night shifts.

“I also will be starting to work night shift now that the differential has increased,” LaHaise said. “It might attract nurses like me who have been a nurse for 16 years to stay on night shift to maybe a little bit longer to get that extra pay raise and then in turn creating more quality care on the night shift, catching maybe things we might have missed overnight.”

This was also the first contract nurses negotiated on their own, without outside representation — a milestone in the union’s push to become fully member-led. Since their second contract, the nurses have shifted to an “all in to win” model, in which members run the union themselves, from new-employee orientations to bargaining-table negotiations.

Nelson described a mutual respect in the bargaining room with Logan Health negotiators, which she credited in part to turnover in Logan Health management in recent years.

“There were tenuous moments in this bargain as with any bargain,” she said. “But I feel like we had a little more respect and they listened to what we had to say.”

Logan Health’s Vice President and Chief Nursing Officer Amy Vanterpool called the new contract a “significant step forward” in the hospital’s effort to keep competitive wages and benefits for all registered nurses, “regardless of the union contract.” With the wage increase, the starting rate for registered nurses at the hospital now sits at $41.78, “among the highest in the state,” Vanterpool noted.

“This agreement reflects a shared commitment to supporting our nursing workforce and ensuring continued high-quality care for the patients and communities we serve. We appreciate the dedication, professionalism, and collaborative spirit demonstrated by all parties throughout the bargaining process,” she said in a prepared statement. “We are grateful to everyone who contributed to the process and look forward to moving ahead together in service of our patients, employees and communities.”

zoe@flatheadbeacon.com

The post Logan Health Nurses Ratify New Contract with Immediate 18% Raise appeared first on Flathead Beacon.

Then Cari Klepper, the festival’s cofounder, walked through the doors of downtown Whitefish’s Slow Burn Records, where Torgerson works part-time. 

“Cari was bringing in a poster for the festival and she said hi and she left, then she came right back and she walked all the way back to the back of the store where I was, and she said, ‘Tim, do you know that we’re doing a songwriting contest?’”

Torgerson was aware of the contest, but thought the summer deadline had already passed. When Klepper informed him of a deadline extension, he quickly got to work filming his contest video. Racing against the deadline and the 100-entry cap, Torgerson slipped in his submission just before the contest’s close, he said.

“I thought once I sent it off, I’ll get in touch with Cari and see if she got it OK because I didn’t want to have it get lost,” Torgerson said. “She looked and she found it and she said, ‘And you’re number 99.’” 

“It was a close shave.”

After a few weeks and multiple rounds of judging — which included the third-party, discerning eyes of the contest’s partner, Nashville-based Quartz Hill Music Group — Torgerson was selected as a finalist from a crop of songwriters from across the country.

“That was a really nice surprise,” Torgerson said this week while sitting in the plush, red velvet seats of Whitefish’s O’Shaughnessy Center, where he will perform as part of the contest on Friday. 

Now in its sixth year, the Whitefish Songwriter Festival is a nonprofit organization dedicated to celebrating the art while expanding access to music education and creative opportunities in Whitefish and the Flathead Valley. The 2026 edition takes place Sept. 18-20 in multiple venues across downtown Whitefish, bringing accomplished hit songwriters, emerging artists and rising talent together for three days of original songs, stories and intimate performances throughout the community.

This year’s festival will mark the inaugural “It’s All About the Song” Songwriting Contest, a new initiative created by the nonprofit Whitefish Songwriter Festival to discover emerging talent and give aspiring songwriters meaningful exposure to working professionals in today’s music industry.

“I’ve always believed in the power of a song, as well as in both the joy and in the healing that music can bring,” said Benny Brown, Quartz Hill Music Group founder and president. “I’m excited to partner with the Whitefish Songwriter Festival because it’s a wonderful opportunity to celebrate the talented songwriters who create those special moments with a new audience that truly values great music and how it all begins.”

Torgerson was one of five adult finalists, and the only one from the Flathead Valley. The under-18 category saw four of five finalists hailing from the valley — Kaelyn Marie Saenz, Annabelle Christine, and Kodi and Madison Holmes of Kalispell, and Liam Robert Gingras of Polson.

The 10 finalists will perform at 2 p.m. on Friday, Sept. 18, at the O’Shaughnessy Center, and one Grand Prize Winner from each division will receive $1,000 and an invitation to perform at the 2027 Whitefish Songwriter Festival, along with additional opportunities.

Torgerson will officially debut his song, Gettin’ in Touch, at the finalist showcase — a piece of work he said he has been “hiding up [his] sleeve for a while.” Ahead of the performance, Torgerson decided to keep the song hidden just a bit longer, choosing not to reveal any of its lyrics or the meaning behind the composition.

“I think saving the surprise on this one is going to be kind of important,” Torgerson said with a faint laugh. “I’ve played it from time to time through the years. I had some friends kind of egging me on one time to play it because they knew about it, and I was like, nah. They twisted my arm, and so I was like, OK, fine. So I played it, and the whole place kind of shifted; it changed the atmosphere to a certain extent. It was kind of a good sign, you know. But the song has had very little exposure.”

Although the song has been largely under wraps, the tune did at one point find the ear of the “Zen Cowboy” himself, Chuck Pyle. An accomplished songwriter, Pyle’s songs have been recorded by John Denver, The Nitty Gritty Dirt Band and Suzy Bogguss. 

“I opened for and ran sound for Chuck Pyle up on the Big Mountain,” Torgerson said. “He had a pretty good feel for the business, and he listened to it, and he said, ‘Tim, you got a hit.’ He said, ‘But every step is a miracle. Coming up with the concept is a miracle. Writing the song is a miracle. Getting it recorded is a miracle, and getting it down the right avenue to the right artist is a miracle.’ So it’s kind of the aligning of the planets, so to speak, in the music world.”

While the feedback was encouraging, Torgerson also recalled it being “a little bit daunting at the same time,” saying Whitefish’s distance from major music hubs like Los Angeles or Nashville seemed to be a roadblock. 

“I haven’t really known how to approach that, being from Whitefish, Montana, far away from all of the music hubs that usually engage in those kinds of situations,” Torgerson said. “So I wasn’t sure how to go about it. I had a variety of thoughts of how I might want to approach that, but I had family and a lot of other things going on too that made me kind of have it on the back burner.”

Enter the “It’s All About the Song” Songwriting Contest — the proverbial outstretched hand for songwriters in small towns across the country to get an introduction to the faraway music industry.

“When I was growing up playing a lot of music, I was always mystified by jazz,” Torgerson said. “When Crown of the Continent happened, I got to study in the jazz class, and so it kind of nourished me in a way that I was really hungry for, and I think the same thing is true with all of us that are songwriters. 

“There are opportunities for learning about it, but they’re kind of few and far between, and especially from people who have a really deep, mastered quality to it. So it’s a real gift to be able to be a part of something like this and to have the opportunity to grow and be stirred and encouraged.”

As Torgerson prepares for Friday’s performance, he said he’s “excited and scared at the same time,” noting a different set of nerves accompanies this special opportunity to potentially take his songwriting to another level. 

“I have so many people in this community and beyond this community that have been so encouraging to me, and I just love the fact that maybe there’s an opportunity for me to continue doing that in a way that might be on a little higher level because of this festival and some of the things that I might be able to glean from it,” Torgerson said.

“It’d be cool if it opened up the opportunity to have some relationships and some new friendships that might be a little bit of a guidepost,” he added. “But I think the surprise of what’s coming around the corner is probably better than trying to speculate what it might be.”

lauren@flatheadbeacon.com

The post Whitefish Native Selected as Finalist in Nationwide Songwriter Festival Contest appeared first on Flathead Beacon.

Commonly known as rabbit fever, the highly infectious disease primarily affects rabbits, beavers and other small rodents; due to the quick period between contraction and death, infected animals are often found already dead.

Park officials warn that humans and pets are also susceptible to tularemia through transmission from infected animals, bites from infected ticks, and ingestion of contaminated food and water. The disease is rarely spread from human to human.

Tularemia can be treated through antibiotics if caught early. Humans often experience flu-like symptoms like fever and chills, joint and chest pain, muscle aches, as well as skin ulcers or sores near a tick bite and swollen lymph nodes. Symptoms typically appear three to five days after exposure, though onset can take up to 21 days.

To reduce risk of infection, visitors are advised to remain a safe distance from wildlife, only drink water that has been treated, wear insect repellent and wash hands frequently when recreating in the park. 

Visitors can report suspected infected animals to a park resource manager and National Park Wildlife Health. Any confirmed infection in a human should be reported to the National Park Office of Public Health and a healthcare provider. More information regarding tularemia can be found on the NPS website. 

reporter@flatheadbeacon.com

The post Beaver Tests Positive for Tularemia in Glacier National Park appeared first on Flathead Beacon.

Sean and Melodye Rooney worked with Flathead Land Trust to place a conservation easement on the property, which includes nearly a mile of Stillwater River frontage and borders two existing Flathead Land Trust easements, as well as U.S. Forest Service and Stillwater State Forest land. The agreement permanently bars subdivision and development on the tract, which mixes riparian forest, shrubland and wetlands with more than 20 acres of hay ground still in agricultural production.

The family’s tie to the valley goes back to Sean Rooney’s grandfather, who homesteaded near Cut Bank before working for the Great Northern Railway in Whitefish. Sean’s father later traveled internationally before settling permanently in the Flathead Valley, where he taught English and geology at Flathead Valley Community College. Sean and Melodye bought the land alongside his parents in 2003, later acquiring full ownership, and now live on the property year-round.

For the Rooneys, the decision to conserve the land grew out of years spent watching what moved through it. “Our family and friends have been fortunate to enjoy and learn from the wildlife and nature on our property, and we are pleased to know that this piece of the Stillwater River corridor will be protected from development through Flathead Land Trust,” Melodye Rooney said in a press release announcing the easement.

For the Flathead Land Trust, that wildlife value was apparent from the start. On his first visit to the property, Flathead Land Trust’s Ryan Hunter watched a bear swim across the Stillwater River just below the Rooneys’ house.

The family has since turned that kind of encounter into data. The property serves as an official study site for Snapshot USA, a nationwide mammal survey run annually by the Smithsonian Institution, and the Rooneys’ daughter, Brigit, coordinates the program. Setting camera traps on the land has documented grizzly and black bears, mountain lions, gray wolves, moose, river otters and bald eagles passing through — sometimes in close succession. Brigit has recalled pulling a memory card to find a photo of herself walking the property, followed eight minutes later by a mountain lion on the same trail.

In 2025, the family began a habitat enhancement project to restore a ponded area and its surrounding wetland, adding to work they’d already been doing to track and support the land’s ecology.

Beyond wildlife habitat, the property’s river frontage and wetlands help protect water quality in the Stillwater River, which supports bull trout and westslope cutthroat trout. Flathead Land Trust says the new easement strengthens an interconnected corridor of protected land along the river and Highway 93, keeping the working landscape — hay fields included — intact alongside the habitat.

tscott@flatheadbeacon.com

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A Title IX compliant and subsequent investigation in 1978 — the deadline year for schools to comply with the athletic regulations in the landmark non-discrimination education legislation — forced this reality to shift.

After feedback from the community about what could fill the winter girls sports team gap, the options were narrowed down to table tennis and volleyball, with the latter winning out in a student vote, Colleen Sullivan, who was part of the first team’s coaching staff, said.

While pressure from federal Title IX officials initially served as the catalyst for expansion, the school, community, and, most of all, the students, welcomed the team with open arms, Sullivan recalled. More than 80 girls turned out for tryouts to earn a spot on the program’s inaugural varsity, JV and freshmen teams.

“Our kids were pretty excited,” Sullivan said. “It was a real funny time for girls’ sports here, funny in a good way. We won the state basketball tournament in the fall [of 1978], and so lots of the same players were basketball players that came out. We didn’t have uniforms; they wore the basketball uniforms to play.”

A proponent for equality between girls and boys in sport at the school, late, former Athletic Director Bob McLeod proposed sanctioning volleyball to the Montana High School Association (MHSA) ahead of the Bulldogs’ first season, given that nearly all other Montana schools also had unbalanced scales in girls and boys sports participation. 

“Everybody laughed at us in Helena when we suggested girls’ volleyball,” McLeod told the Whitefish Pilot in a Feb. 1, 1979 article. 

“[McLeod] said association members apparently feel they can get by another couple of years without adopting another girls’ sport,” the article stated. “In the meantime, a Whitefish High School girls’ volleyball team exists and will play its first game next week.”

Despite the discouraging response from MHSA, the Bulldogs continued with their eight-game season — which featured games against Bigfork, Kalispell, Polson and Ronan — commencing nearly five decades of players and coaches building a trailblazing program that has captured six state championships. 

Now, the historic program will celebrate this legacy with a reunion open to all former players, coaches, managers and fans at the Bulldogs’ game against Ronan on Thursday, Sept. 17. The event will also mark the 40th, 25th and 20th anniversaries of the teams’ 1986, 2001, and 2006 state titles. 

The celebration will include a pre-match gathering at the Bulldog Saloon at 3 p.m. before being recognized in-between the JV and varsity matches on Thursday night. The reunion will conclude with a post-match celebration at Whitefish High School.

“The contacts over the last few weeks of reaching out with kids and hearing from them has been really fun, so hopefully we’ll have a good turnout,” Sullivan said. “I think we could have five members of the original team, which would be awesome.”

Having been part of three coaching stints spread out over nearly 40 years, Sullivan has witnessed the growth of the program, as well as the game of volleyball itself. 

Unsurprisingly, that first Bulldog volleyball season in 1979 presented its own unique obstacles. 

“In that window of time, we didn’t have a gymnasium,” Sullivan said. “Our school had a fire, and the gym had burnt. Most of the school had burnt out, and it wasn’t rebuilt yet. We used our middle school gym, which is much smaller and had a much lower ceiling.”

But even once they secured a gym to play in, a major question still remained for the unsanctioned sport — what are the rules?

“There was an association called AIAW, the Association of Interscholastic Athletics for Women, and when I was in college, that was the rule books that you found,” Sullivan said. “Everything that had women’s rules were part of that, and that association existed before the NCAA for women. So we had a choice between that, and then there was an international federation.

“Which rules should we go by? Then we had to find officials, and we had to find them and teach them the game, so they could officiate the game.”

By the time Sullivan returned to the Bulldog coaching staff in the early 2000s, three-set matches where teams could only score off the serve turned into five-set athletic affairs with scoring on every possession — “pass, set, spike” had transitioned to “dig, set, kill,” she noted.

“That kind of language just changed, and so did the level of play. The strategies, the amount of offensive things that you are running, the defensive things that you’re putting up now, I think we were just glad to get three hits and get the ball over the net in the first season,” Sullivan said with a laugh.

Led by longtime Head Coach Jackie Fuller, the program saw its most sustained success throughout the 2000s, capturing five of its six state titles, including going back-to-back-to-back-to-back from 2002-2006. 

“Winning breeds winning, there’s no doubt about that,” Sullivan said. “They understood the hard work it took, and spent the time in the off-season training and conditioning and working on their ability to jump and trying to home in on fine details. They did a really nice job with that. So that was a culture, and then there’s always a few young kids on a team, and that became the mindset.”

Thursday’s reunion, however, will be about far more than state titles, Sullivan said.

“It’s about reconnecting, just reaching out and recognizing their hard work and their accomplishments,” Sullivan said. “Whether you were a team that won or didn’t win, it’s an accomplishment to complete the season and to play and to represent your town and take a prideful moment.”

As Fuller often told her teams, “the game is bigger than the white ball,” and Thursday’s event will be no different, as everyone from former managers, to parents, to bus drivers will be celebrated. 

“We always tried to find some place for kids if we could,” Sullivan said. “We needed managers, we needed statisticians, we needed filmers, and they all played such a huge part in it. Everybody from like getting officials; the bus drivers, they just hung in there with our little whims of saying, ‘Hey, we need to do this. We want to go there.’ That means getting everybody on a bus and moving them back and forth.”

“The bricks and mortar of our community have been really supportive,” she added. “Even when we went and looked for support for this event, you know, like that was a no-brainer for a lot of people. They just said, ‘Oh, absolutely.’”

lauren@flatheadbeacon.com 

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“This is our first community solar project that is paired with a utility-scale battery,” FEC Board President Stacey Schnebel told the crowd gathered at the site on a bluebird September morning. “The battery allows us to store electricity and release it when it can provide better value to our electrical system, including during those periods of higher demand.”

Participating members purchase the generation associated with individual panels and receive bill credits based on their share of the output. It’s the same model the co-op employed at its first two community solar projects, Schnebel said, giving members who can’t install solar at their own home or business another way to buy in.

Of the 448 panels, roughly 80 are set aside to benefit low-income households across FEC’s service territory, funded through a $50,000 grant from the Bonneville Environmental Foundation and a donation from YETI Photovoltaic, a Whitefish-based nonprofit. Schnebel also credited the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Rural Energy for America Program, or REAP, with a $463,307 grant that covered a large share of the project’s cost.

So far, the array’s output is tracking with projections, said Doug Gilmore, FEC’s power resources manager. The system has hit its 200-kilowatt nameplate capacity, which is capped by inverters, on multiple days for hours at a stretch. The paired lithium ion battery has been discharged during summer evening peak-demand periods, which Gilmore said has already shaved several peaks off FEC’s system-wide load, translating into a savings of a few thousand dollars per month for the broader membership, not just the project’s participants. One evening’s peak-shaving alone reportedly saved on the order of $5,000.

All 368 member-purchased panels are spoken for, Gilmore said, with roughly a dozen of the income-qualified allocation still being assigned. FEC is not currently planning a fourth phase but keeps an interest list for future projects. Qualification for the income-based panels runs through the state’s Low Income Home Energy Assistance Program (LIHEAP).

At $700 per panel, Gilmore said the 368 participant-purchased panels account for roughly $257,600 of the project cost, with the remaining 80 panels split between the BEF grant (72 panels), a YETI Photovoltaic donation (seven panels), and the City of Whitefish, which received a single panel in exchange for the leased land. Unlike the first two phases of FEC’s community solar project, where participants owned their panels outright, FEC retains ownership of all panels in the third phase and structures member participation as a power-purchase arrangement — a condition of the REAP grant, which requires the utility to hold ownership.

Craig Workman, Whitefish’s public works director, said the idea for the community solar array traces back to the city’s 2018 Climate Action Plan, developed with the Whitefish School District and the nonprofit Climate Smart Glacier Country. The city’s wastewater treatment plant was slated for a mechanical upgrade that would use significantly more power than the old lagoon-based system, and city staff pitched FEC’s board on running a community solar program at the plant.

The city set aside 8 acres for solar within a 30-acre master plan for the treatment plant property; the current array occupies just over an acre, leaving room for a possible future phase, though co-op officials said none is currently in the queue.

A broader city-wide energy audit is now underway, signaling Whitefish’s first comprehensive analysis since the original climate plan. It will show how the city’s overall energy use has shifted, officials said, and whether the new panels and other efficiency work have offset other energy-intensive growth; for example, the newer, larger wastewater plant, a bigger city hall, and a larger staff have all pushed total usage up.

Karin Hilding, a retired project engineer with the city of Whitefish and one of the early architects of the community solar project, said her tie to the array isn’t merely professional. She bought into FEC’s initial community solar project as well as this newest phase; having lived in the valley for decades with no plans to leave, she’s now far enough into her Phase I plans to soon begin seeing real savings on her bill.

A representative from USDA’s Rural Development office did not attend but sent remarks, calling the project “a working example of public-private collaboration” that would “generate power” as well as “goodwill and interest in additional partnership opportunities.”

Travis Jordan, of Jordan Solar, the firm that built the array, said the site posed an engineering wrinkle. With more than 3 feet of elevation change across the property, plus city stormwater and sewer manholes that couldn’t be graded around, standard solar panel racking systems weren’t practical. Instead, Jordan’s crew used driven steel piles to level the array across the undulating ground, holding to roughly the same overall cost while improving aesthetics. “It’s a lot more visually pleasing for the people walking up and down Monegan,” Jordan said of the result.

Steve Thompson, founder of the nonprofit Climate Smart Glacier Country, which helped shape the city’s original climate action plan, said the value of projects like this one shows up cumulatively rather than all at once. Pointing to FEC’s other local renewable efforts — investments in landfill gas-to-energy, a biomass facility at F.H. Stoltze Land and Lumber Co. and FEC’s supporting role in the city’s Haskill Creek micro-hydroelectric plant — he said none of them individually amounts to “a big bang,” but together they add up to meaningful, locally generated power. He called FEC “a real leader in finding local renewable solutions.”

tscott@flatheadbeacon.com

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