Tackling Challenges Together: City and County Year in Review with Mayor Hess

As 2022 comes to an end, the Missoula County commissioners sat down with Missoula City Mayor Jordan Hess to discuss lessons learned and what they’re looking forward to in 2023. They reflect on notable collaborations from this year and how a strong partnership between municipal governments enables solutions for our community.

Thank you to Missoula's Community Media Resource for podcast recording support!

 
Thank you to Missoula's Community Media Resource for podcast recording support!

Transcript

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Dave Strohmaier: [00:00:10] [intro music plays] Well, welcome back, everyone, to Tip of the Spear with your Missoula County commissioners. I'm Commissioner Dave Strohmaier. I'm joined here today by my colleagues, Commissioners Juanita Vero and Josh Slotnick and we are delighted to have with us today Missoula Mayor Jordan Hess. Thanks, Jordan, for joining us.

Jordan Hess: [00:00:27] Absolutely. Thanks for having me.

Dave Strohmaier: [00:00:28] Today's episode is going to talk a little bit. Well, it's always tough to know exactly where these things go, but we're going to we're going to start out by talking about what the year 2022 has looked like for both the city and the county and our relationship with one another. And this year is a big one for you, Jordan,yYou moved over from being on the city council to being mayor of the city of Missoula, from the legislative branch to the executive branch. Can you just kick things off here by talking to us a little bit about how that transition was for you?

Jordan Hess: [00:01:02] Yeah, it's been a crazy whirlwind, but I think the the one thing that has made it a really smooth, good transition is just how many city staff there are that care so deeply about the organization. I have had so much help getting up to speed and understanding the work that the city does at a deeper level. And every day when I get up and go into the office, I am just so impressed at the dedication to the organization and just the good work that everyone is doing. It's been a transition for sure, but I'm honored and it's just fun. It's just exciting to go into work and get to work on all of the things that make our community a good place to be.

Dave Strohmaier: [00:01:38] Are there I guess just to follow up, are there? Yeah.

Juanita Vero: [00:01:41] What surprised you?

Josh Slotnick: [00:01:42] Yeah, I was I was going to get him with I want to surprise you in this role. So you were in city council for a long time, right?

Jordan Hess: [00:01:48] Yeah, Yeah, just about nine years. And the thing that surprised me in the mayor's seat is the volume of work that comes through the city. There is so much, I mean, and the county, too, you know, we're just big service providers and we do so much and we touch the lives of so many people. And I think local government has this ability to really be a transformative force in people's lives, a force that makes people's lives better. And we do that for the residents we serve day in and day out. And just the volume of good work that's been the biggest surprise.

Josh Slotnick: [00:02:15] Wow, this was a really big year. And I'm going to start on a sad point and then move forward. Our friend passed away, not just our colleague, but our friend and kind of a legend in local politics. When you think about John [Engen]'s legacy, what comes to mind?

Jordan Hess: [00:02:30] When I think of what John's legacy I think about his ability to plan really for four decades. I mean, he was making decisions on a 50-year time horizon when he made the move to acquire our water system. That's, you know, that's a multi-generational decision when he supported an open space bond, same thing. That's a multi-generational decision. And that's something that I think we can all learn from. John Rankin was just really looking out what kind of community do we want our grandchildren's grandchildren to live in and what can we do now to lay the groundwork to make sure that that community exists in the future?

Josh Slotnick: [00:03:06] Wow. So given those are the steps you're standing on. What are your priorities?

Jordan Hess: [00:03:11] Well, so big shoes. But also such a good foundation.

Josh Slotnick: [00:03:14] Yeah, for sure.

Jordan Hess: [00:03:15] To take off from I think that we have across in Missoula but across the region and around the West and throughout the country, we have really three converging crises and those are housing and climate and equity and figuring out how those are interrelated here in Missoula and how we go about solving and moving the needle on those. Those are the defining issues of our generation and those are the lenses that we're trying to look at. Municipal decisions throughout the city of Missoula. What does that do for housing? What does it do to make our community a more just equitable and inclusive place to live? What does it do to make us a more climate resilient, more sustainable community? And I think those are really where our opportunities are. We have challenges in those areas and that's why we're looking at those lenses. But we have so much opportunity and we have the ability to be hopeful. I heard recently that “hope is earned,” and we've earned the ability to be hopeful about these because we're doing good work in these areas.

Josh Slotnick: [00:04:09] This feels a bit like a shift in local government and I can say we are in on those same three things as well, and that for such a long time, most of what local government did was keep the wheels on the bus. In this case, we get the roads plowed today rather than attempting to address these huge intractable national, if not international problems. How does it feel saying you're going to dedicate yourself to something that is so much larger than just our place?

Jordan Hess: [00:04:33] Well, I think it goes back to what I said at the outset, that we have dedicated staff, we have dedicated community. We have a community that cares about itself, that cares. We care about one another. And we have over and over and over again as Missoulians made a collective commitment to one another. So we're going into to big challenges, but we're doing it with good partners. We're doing I mean, you've said it a lot, Josh, that this is the golden age for government. And it is I mean, we're able to do so much because we approach these problems together and because we approach them with a goal of getting to a solution. I think that that's the comfort is that we're approaching the issues. Of our time as partners and as teammates.

Dave Strohmaier: [00:05:12] I think that is so true. So I started on the City Council in 2006. So over the 17 years that I've been involved in either city of Missoula government or Missoula County, I really do believe that we are at a point in time when collaboration has never been better than now. So that is a super exciting foundation to build upon and to. To launch from. And also something just part of the, I think, the ethos of both city and county government. And I heard former Mayor John Engine say this a lot is let's not make the perfect the enemy of the good because when we're talking about multigenerational big, bold projects, it's I think, pretty easy to just get paralyzed by the magnitude of it. But to be able to come to these issues and problems and challenges with a spirit of. You know what? We might not get this thing totally perfect, but we got to start. We're burning daylight.

Juanita Vero: [00:06:07] So and that idea of partnership, too, isn't just with the city and county. I mean, it's the faith community, the business community, the private sector. I mean, that's the level of partnership that made this the golden age of local government or this kind of secret sauce, or allows us to be successful and us the community to be successful. We couldn't do it just with the governmental entities, be insufficient.

Jordan Hess: [00:06:31] Absolutely, totally true.

Juanita Vero: [00:06:33] Thinking back over the year, like what's a memorable city county collaboration?

Jordan Hess: [00:06:38] Well, so it's been a multi year collaboration, but our work around the pandemic was really monumental from a collaborative standpoint. I remember March of 2020, there was a group of city and county and university and folks from around the community that met twice daily and, you know, and really figured out how to respond to the pandemic as it was developing, as guidance was changing on the hour. We were we were meeting and collaborating in real time. And I think that that was a really good collaborative effort that a lot of things grew out of. So our operation, our Operation Shelter efforts over the past couple of years now have been a really impactful effort. The work around collectively making sure that those in our community who are experiencing crisis have the ability to have their basic needs met. That collaboration from this year and, you know, we've got some challenges looking forward with figuring out how to fund those programs. But looking back over the last year, we've had some phenomenal successes in that area. And, you know, we're going to need to regroup now moving forward, but we've got a good foundation to stand on.

Dave Strohmaier: [00:07:41] Yeah, I think that that's so true. I try to put myself back in February of 2020 and what we were thinking and working on then and the just the dramatic changes over the past couple of years, including just from a technology standpoint, I think this what we're doing right here by way of a podcast is at least partially borne out of the need to or the desire to enlarge the conversation with the community beyond our traditional ways of communicating.

Juanita Vero: [00:08:11] Yeah, in real time, because we just it's hard to remember how chaotic it really was because now we've kind of like normalize things and it's hard to remember. Yeah, that uncertainty. In March of 2020.

Josh Slotnick: [00:08:24] I remember being in this room looking out the window and seeing no cars parked on the street like, Wow.

Jordan Hess: [00:08:31] Yeah.

Dave Strohmaier: [00:08:32] Well, in the nexus between the pandemic and Operation Shelter Initiatives, where we were really dealt a hand, where the Poverello [Shelter], for instance, was not able to be at full capacity and we needed to figure out a way to address house lessness. And we tried some things. Some things work better than others. And that's okay. The option would have been just getting wrapped around the axle of the problem and doing nothing.

Josh Slotnick: [00:09:00] And you mentioned those big three intractable problems. Seems that came out of the pandemic. A new light shined on equity issues and on housing. Those things, all those issues just became more exacerbated.

Jordan Hess: [00:09:11] Yeah, well, they all they all relate to our community well-being, our ability to have our needs met and thrive in our community. And the joint city county effort around justice, equity, diversity and inclusion calls for creating a community where everybody can have their needs met. And I think that's something that there's a lot of lessons we can move forward with from that.

Dave Strohmaier: [00:09:32] In any of these collaborations, whether it's climate, whether it's housing and a subset of housing is is Operation Shelter, whether it's equity. In any of those cases where we've worked on these seemingly intractable problems, can you think of any particular take home message or lesson that you personally or is the city of Missoula learned over the course of the last year?

Jordan Hess: [00:09:55] Yeah. So first of all, these are issues we can solve. These are issues that we can make an impact on. We can move the needle on homelessness, we can move the needle on climate. It's maybe not as far as it needs to move. It is within our ability as local government to have an impact on people's lives. So that's the biggest thing, is that with a seemingly intractable problem, inaction is the worst possible option. If you look back at our housing policy, the city of Missoula's housing policy, a place to call home, has a variety of different strategies that can be employed. And those range from land banking where we hold city owned land to be redeveloped in a in a way that's beneficial to our housing goals. It goes to how we use our tax increment financing. So investing, urban renewal, district financing into workforce housing, it goes to our affordable housing trust fund, which was the first in the state of its type. All of these things are tools that address a really large problem, and that's the affordability and attainability of housing in our community. None of them work on their own in a vacuum, but all of them have an impact. And collectively we've got over 400 units of income qualified housing that will come online in 2023 because of that housing policy. And so you look at a problem that is seemingly intractable and you just have to break it down into steps that make it approachable.

Juanita Vero: [00:11:16] How do you eat an elephant?

Josh Slotnick: [00:11:18] Yeah, right. Great. Great, great.

Juanita Vero: [00:11:20] Where do you think that we made some missteps? I think it would be helpful for folks to know that we have made mistakes and we've learned from them. And examples come to mind.

Jordan Hess: [00:11:29] We're going to have to regroup after the crisis services levy failed. Yeah, those programs are important and they're important to our community. And we're also up against an untenable property tax situation. And so I think one way, of course, correction is to go to the legislature and really compel the urgency of our property tax situation. We have this this fundamentally broken property tax system that was built on an economy that doesn't exist anymore. And so I think pivoting from that loss on the on the crisis services levy and looking at some of the root issues, it's not that the services aren't important, it's that the way that we fund these services is broken and we've got to figure out how to move forward and how to regroup.

Josh Slotnick: [00:12:08] Amen to that man.

Jordan Hess: [00:12:10] And I think that we need to be really proactive at the legislature about just raising awareness of how untenable our property tax situation is, because keeping the lights on is important and keeping the ability to innovate and run these innovative services is really important to our community. But we're really boxed in as far as how we can fund the services that our community relies on.

Juanita Vero: [00:12:31] Relies on and expects and deserves.

Jordan Hess: [00:12:34] Yeah, and you know, nobody wants the roads to be plowed less often or exactly.

Dave Strohmaier: [00:12:39] The.

Jordan Hess: [00:12:39] Never the police to come, you know, less quickly or the dog poop bags and the park to be stocked less frequently. Nobody wants those things. People value the services and we really do provide a tremendous value. But the method of how we pay for it is broken.

Josh Slotnick: [00:12:53] So is there an area of focus that you'll be hitting on next year that we haven't mentioned yet?

Jordan Hess: [00:12:58] Well, so in 2023, I'm really excited about acquiring the Federal building. The federal building is, you know, it's a century old asset and it is this beautiful building in downtown Missoula. They don't build buildings like that anymore. We are receiving that building at no cost from the federal government and we are meeting our long term needs as local government in a way that is cheaper than any of the alternatives. So we're preserving this beautiful piece of history. We're moving into this building that has all of this integrity and grandeur, and we're doing so in a way that saves the taxpayers money over the life of the project. And that is so cool. That is what local government should be.

Josh Slotnick: [00:13:34] Lots of wins there.

Dave Strohmaier: [00:13:35] Yeah, I'm looking for that too.

Josh Slotnick: [00:13:36] It's like to be your partners in that.

Dave Strohmaier: [00:13:38] You know, something else that comes to mind is something that for many folks is probably flying under the radar, and that is the huge change is happening out in the area, the Sx͏ʷtpqyen (S-wh-tip-KAYN) neighborhood, the Build Grant area. And Josh and I took a tour here a month or so back and the infrastructure that's going in out there, the housing that's being developed, is truly going to be transformative. And you are a big part of this from the very beginning. I remember we were when you traveled.

Josh Slotnick: [00:14:07] We were in D.C. together to see the amount of construction happening right now is mind boggling.

Jordan Hess: [00:14:12] Well, and I think that goes back to the partnering around the community. I mean, that was I think there were 20 some people in that delegation to to DC and almost all of them were private sector people. And they were talking about the benefits on the cost of homes or the benefits in our in our ability to develop in an orderly manner. And we had all of these private sector partners who were in D.C. talking about the transformative value of this federal infrastructure investment. And now to see it on the ground is great. It's amazing that, you know, Mary Jane Boulevards open now and it's this pressure relief valve already that's that relieves pressure off of Mullan and Broadway and reserve. That project when it wraps up in 2023 I think will be a really great asset.

Juanita Vero: [00:14:51] I can't emphasize enough how important that trip was.

Josh Slotnick: [00:14:55] It was big.

Juanita Vero: [00:14:55] It's September 2019. I mean, I was a brand-new commissioner. It was the first time I met you, Jordan, and me too. I met all of you. It really set the foundation for us to work together. And I mean, I've said this before, but it set us up to be successful in. Dealing with a pandemic that hit us six months later.

Josh Slotnick: [00:15:12] Yeah. Really, really true. Totally.

Juanita Vero: [00:15:15] Just really grateful for that trip. And then, yes, of course, to see it actually playing out on the ground, it's pretty amazing.

Josh Slotnick: [00:15:21] One of our favorite questions here to ask our guests as we close out, could you share with us some kind of nugget of wisdom? Something interesting you've come across could be in a book, podcast, movie, whatever, a piece of culture.

Jordan Hess: [00:15:31] My background is as a geographer, and my career before falling into this line of work was in transportation. And I just recently reread an urban planning classic, The Jane Jacobs...

Josh Slotnick: [00:15:45] The Life and Death of an American City.

Jordan Hess: [00:15:47] Yeah.

Josh Slotnick: [00:15:47] Oh My God, it's the...

Juanita Vero: [00:15:49] What year was this?

Jordan Hess: [00:15:50] I want to say ‘64.

Josh Slotnick: [00:15:52] Early, early sixties. I mean, I'm sure you're I'm sure you're right. I mean, her language around what urban cores could be has absolutely come true. Yeah. Unfortunately, the equity side is not what she would have wished, but her vision. If you go to major urban areas, it's come true. Even in minor urban areas like Missoula, it is the hubbub of sidewalk community and diversity of businesses and people living and working and playing and shopping all in the same spot. Yeah, it all happened. It just didn't happen as fairly as she.

Jordan Hess: [00:16:18] Would have liked. Yeah. We're embarking on a zoning code rewrite at the city of Missoula, and, I mean, we can return to these forms of development that made our that made our communities great. If the university district, you know, our most one of our most beloved neighborhoods, if that burned down today, we couldn't rebuild it as it is now.

Juanita Vero: [00:16:34] But what else inspired you?

Josh Slotnick: [00:16:37] It's a great book.

Juanita Vero: [00:16:37] ...about her work, though. The nugget of wisdom that you glean from Jane's work.

Jordan Hess: [00:16:41] I think that when we develop a community with with people in mind.

Juanita Vero: [00:16:45] Make it human scale. Yep,

Josh Slotnick: [00:16:46] That's it.

Juanita Vero: [00:16:46] Yeah.

Jordan Hess: [00:16:47] Yeah. So we have a community that cares about itself, and that is how you build a community. You make investments in, in the people and in the social infrastructure of a community. That's how you build a resilient future. And that's  what we need in uncertain times. We need to build resiliency in our community.

Juanita Vero: [00:17:03] Absolutely, well-said.

Josh Slotnick: [00:17:04] Thanks so much for coming by today, Jordan. It's a pleasure to hang out with you.

Jordan Hess: [00:17:07] Thanks for having me. Good to see you all.

Juanita Vero: [00:17:09] Thanks so much, Jordan. Thanks. Thanks for listening, folks.

Dave Strohmaier: [00:17:13] As we close out 2022, we'd like to thank you for listening to Tip of the Spear. We're looking forward to recording more episodes in 2023. In this episode, we talked about friends who had passed away this year and we recently heard from a constituent that their pet, Jeremiah, who had run for pet commissioner this summer, also passed. We're thinking of you, Oliver, and sending warm wishes this holiday season. The holidays can be tough, but we're thinking of all our listeners who may be struggling with the loss of a loved one. Thank you. And we'll see you in 2023.

Josh Slotnick: [00:17:48] [outro music plays] Thanks for listening to the Tip of the Spear podcast. If you enjoy these conversations, it would mean a lot if you would rate and review the show on whichever podcast app you like. And if you know a friend who would like to keep up with what's happening in local government, be sure to recommend this podcast to them. The Tip of the Spear podcast is made possible with support from MCAT, better known as Missoula Community Access Television and our staff in the Missoula County Communications Division. If you have a question or topic you'd like us to address on a future episode, email it to communications@missoulacounty.us and to find other ways to stay up to date with what's happening at Missoula County. Go to Missoula.co/countyupdates. And thanks for listening.