Connecting Communities: The Big Year for the Big Sky Passenger Rail Authority

This week, commissioner Strohmaier gives an update on the Big Sky Passenger Rail Authority. The rail authority is a division of state government that encompasses 19 counties in Montana that are working to bring back passenger train service in the southern part of the state. 

2023 is a major year for this effort: the U.S. Department of Transportation is studying which inactive rail lines could be restored. The North Coast Hiawatha stretched from Chicago to Seattle and passed through Missoula County until 1979, when the line was discontinued. Listen to this episode to learn more about how tribal communities and private businesses are involved and what’s next for the Big Sky Passenger Rail Authority.

Learn more at bigskyrail.org.

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

Transcript

Juanita Vero: [00:00:11] Welcome back to Tip of the Spear with your Missoula County Commissioners. I'm Juanita Vero and I'm here with my fellow commissioners, Dave Strohmaier and Josh Slotnick. And today Josh and I have a special privilege of interviewing Dave the Big Sky Passenger Rail Authority, which I don't think we've actually had a chance to talk to you about since we were outside the train station like two years ago.

Dave Strohmaier: [00:00:29] So it was one of one of our, if not the first one of these Tip of the Spear gatherings.

Juanita Vero: [00:00:37] I think it was the first one.

Josh Slotnick: [00:00:38] Yeah. And back then, if I remember right, a lot of the focus was on the formation of the rail authority and getting other counties to sign on. And now that is a done deal. So what is the rail authority? What is the Big Sky Passenger Rail Authority?

Dave Strohmaier: [00:00:51] Yes. So it would probably be important for folks to know a little bit of the history of rail, which will help inform where we are today and where we're going as far as the rail authority. So right here in Missoula, Montana, and folks might either be too young to realize this or it's been so long that they've forgotten. In 1979, we had Amtrak service coming right through Missoula and you could get off at the train or get on the train at the north end of Higgins Avenue and go to Chicago, go to Seattle to Portland, and all points in between and beyond. But that came to an end in 1979 during a period of retrenchment of federal government services during the Carter administration. And so for the past 43 years that we've been without service, there have been all manner of attempts to try to get passenger rail or Amtrak service back here. And clearly, since we don't have an Amtrak train rolling down the tracks today here in Missoula, Montana, that's not been effective. What has happened over that course of those four decades, primarily the effort of advocacy has been carried by passionate individuals, isolated, siloed communities like, say, a community such as Missoula or Helena, passing a resolution supporting the idea of returning passenger rail service. But what we always lacked was any sort of real concerted effort in a way that would bind the entire state together and buying the state to other regions. So when I came onto the Board of County commissioners, believe it or not, it's been six years ago now.

Dave Strohmaier: [00:02:23] One of the things I thought about was what can counties do differently that these isolated communities, passionate individuals, 501(c)3 advocacy groups could not accomplish? And the no brainer that popped out from a map to my consciousness was the one thing that's contiguous across the entire state of Montana are counties. So what can counties do that these other efforts were unable to? Thankfully, here in Missoula County, we've got a whole cadre of really sharp deputy county attorneys. And one of these deputy county attorneys found that there was a and is today a statute on the books, Montana Code Annotated, that authorizes counties and only counties to come together and jointly establish regional rail authorities. And that's what we did. We figured, okay, this is a mechanism that allows us to form a new governmental entity. Big Sky Passenger Rail Authority is a unit of state government, a subdivision of state government. It allows us to be that liaison between local, federal, state government, Amtrak, with host railroads. The law is written so broadly that we could actually be a railroad if we want it to be. That is not what we are about. We're not I'm not going to be wearing a conductor's hat on the train anytime soon, but we could. But that is not what we're about. We're looking for ways to leverage resources, to form relationships, to bring the resources to the table, to get passenger rail service back here to Missoula and points beyond.

Josh Slotnick: [00:04:00] So if I remember right, Dave, the Big Sky Passenger Rail Authority has had some real financial success at the federal level. What you get and what are you doing with it?

Dave Strohmaier: [00:04:09] Yeah, so if folks can think back all the way back to early 2020, the start of the COVID 19 pandemic, one of the things that we were working on at that time with the rail authority and leading up to that even was how to rally resources during this time of a real national crisis. And some people would ask us, Why the heck are you worrying about trying to restore passenger rail service or create this thing called a rail authority when we have this international public health emergency? And the response that we provided folks was because at some point in time there mark our words, there will be a large infrastructure bill coming through Congress. And if we don't set ourselves up for success right now, even if we've got all these other things going on, and if we don't set ourselves up for success, there will be an infrastructure bill and it gets passed, signed into law and we will be completely caught off guard and we won't. We'll have missed it, kind of, a generational opportunity. So to do a bit more recap. 2019 we barnstormed across the state of Montana, and this is a county led initiative and were it not for Missoula counties. Fairly insightful position on this, realizing that even though passenger rail is much bigger than the boundaries of Missoula County, if we can get this thing back, it's going to directly benefit our constituents here in Missoula County.

Dave Strohmaier: [00:05:36] But we, as one of the leaders in this effort, barnstorm the state of Montana. We're able to, in late 2019, early 2020, put together a coalition that coalesced in November of 2020. 12 counties coming together, executing and signing a joint resolution to establish the rail authority. And we were up and running and had our first board of directors meeting just a little over two years ago in January of 2021. It's a long way of getting around to answering your question here, but our signature accomplishment in 2021 was realizing that work was afoot in the US Congress to develop what became known as the Bipartisan Infrastructure Bill. And we worked with members of Congress to draft language that actually got incorporated into the final version of this bill signed into law that directed the US Department of Transportation to conduct a nationwide study of restoring discontinued long distance Amtrak routes. It came with $15 million attached to do this study. So there were actually dollars associated with doing this thing. And I'm pleased to report and this is maybe a drum roll moment, but one week from today, on the eve of Valentine's Day, I will be in Denver, Colorado, for the first regional workshop related to this national passenger rail study.

Dave Strohmaier: [00:07:06] So this is a big deal for us. And the other bit of big news, two bits of big news. One, this route that we're talking about through Missoula, Montana. Missoula County is one of the routes being considered in this study. We waited a long time to know whether or not that would be the case or not, but it is part of the study. And also the other big piece of this is that unlike prior pieces of legislation that might have given folks some glimmer of hope that maybe we're going to actually expand passenger rail in this country. The Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, or Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, includes significant dollars to implement projects like this, in fact, to the tune of $12 billion for enhancing intercity passenger rail. And that's the pot of money that we're hoping to tap into once this study comes to full fruition. And that would be in November of this year. Oh, the report. It's on a tight time frame. Congress gave direction to US, Department of Transportation and the Federal Railroad Administration that by November of 2023, not that far off, they needed to deliver a report back to Congress with recommendations on which routes to restore.

Josh Slotnick: [00:08:20] So November of 2023, the recommendation could be: "restore". And so the Big Sky Passenger Rail Authority wouldn't have to compete for money. You would. You'd be included in in a list of federal projects.

Dave Strohmaier: [00:08:31] That is our hope. Our goal is to do everything humanly possible in the next ten months to make sure that this route is at the top of the heap for recommended routes.

Josh Slotnick: [00:08:42] How do you do that?

Dave Strohmaier: [00:08:43] Good question. Well, it helped that we had a hand in writing the criteria by which these routes would be reviewed. So, for instance, one section of the review criteria pertains to level of community support and engagement. We're not only have we accomplished a whole lot in a short period of time to demonstrate that we have a ton of community engagement here in Montana, but we know what to work on this year. So, for instance, the Federal Railroad Administration, as I mentioned earlier, is kicking off a series of stakeholder engagement workshops across various regions in this country. We're in the Northwest region. They're only doing four of these workshops for the entire region during the course of the study. What that means is there is a whole lot of territory here in the state of Montana and throughout this region that there will not be community engagement and stakeholder engagement happening. So we are seizing that moment ourselves and that opportunity to do our own and to feed that data, that information that we're gathering back into the study itself. We've been invited as of late to submit an application to the Montana Health Care Foundation for grant funding to do tribal and rural stakeholder engagement across Montana. Why, some folks might ask, would the Montana Health Care Foundation be interested in such a thing? Well, when it comes to social determinants of health, transportation is a huge. Factor and what we've heard from folks in tribal communities such as northern Cheyenne Crow, rural communities in far eastern Montana, is that some folks need to drive hundreds and hundreds of miles to reach a medical facility, say, in Billings, or to catch a plane to go seek medical treatment somewhere else, not to mention all of the other community benefits that come with rail. If we're successful in that grant opportunity or others, we're going to plow that back into our own community engagement, stakeholder engagement work over the course of the next few months.

Josh Slotnick: [00:10:42] So Dave, how are tribes involved?

Dave Strohmaier: [00:10:44] Here is a great irony of this effort. So arguably the introduction of transcontinental trains in the 19th century...

Josh Slotnick: [00:10:54] Oh boy.

Dave Strohmaier: [00:10:55] Really was a huge factor...

Juanita Vero: [00:10:58] Nail in the coffin.

Dave Strohmaier: [00:10:58] ...In the demise And adverse impact upon tribal nations, tribal cultures.

Josh Slotnick: [00:11:04] It was. It was a vector for a lot of negativity.

Dave Strohmaier: [00:11:07] Totally. It was. It was the emblem of manifest destiny on this continent. But it brought with a yet another sense of it being okay to confiscate lands, to impose upon the landscape culture that was at odds with the native peoples who have resided here since time immemorial. So it's with some irony that some of our greatest partners in this revival of passenger rail are the tribes themselves. Here in the state of Montana, the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes Crow Nation, Northern Cheyenne tribes are all ex-officio members of our board of directors, and they see passenger rail as an opportunity to provide transportation equity for their friends and neighbors, tribal members, tribal communities that oftentimes have too few transportation options. And this is a means to the end of prosperity, of health equity, of transportation equity.

Josh Slotnick: [00:12:08] You know, on the other side of rail and equity, were it not for rail, the Great Migration, the integration of the urban North with African American people fleeing Jim Crow and a host of other indignities in the South would not have happened. Passenger rail was literally the vehicle for the Great Migration from 1920 to 1970. The movement of, I think, 9 million people, the greatest migration we've ever seen in the United States.

Dave Strohmaier: [00:12:33] Rail brings with it a whole nest of ironies and connections that are pretty interesting and useful for us to understand not only our past, but where we might go into the future.

Josh Slotnick: [00:12:45] Thanks for that perspective.

Juanita Vero: [00:12:47] So how many routes are being considered are?

Dave Strohmaier: [00:12:49] Excellent question. Good question. I'll know more when I'm actually in Denver in a week, but a number. So in our region there are two primary routes. And by our region I'm talking what we call the Greater Northwest region. And this stretch is basically from Minnesota to the Pacific Northwest down into the northern Great Basin area of Utah and even into Wyoming. So two primary routes that will be examined. One is what's called the north coast Hiawatha Route. This is the route that extended from Chicago to Seattle through Missoula, Montana, up until 1979. That's one route and that's the one that we are most laser focused on. Another very important route is the pioneer route, which extends from Salt Lake City or actually Cheyenne, Wyoming, and Denver to the west through Boise, Idaho, on up to Portland. That was discontinued in the 1990s. Both of these would connect regions of the country that are currently a real wasteland when it comes to connectivity for passenger rail. The other beautiful thing about this study is that when it comes to long distance passenger rail routes and that means a route over 750 miles in length, not only is this study looking at and open to IDs for restoring discontinued Amtrak routes, but also the possibility of brand new long distance routes that may have never existed before. If you look at a map of the western United States, west of the Mississippi River, there are precious few North-South connections by passenger rail. There's a few arguably not enough east west connections, but very few North-South routes. Nowhere close to what we see by way of interstate highways. What folks also probably don't realize is that at one point in time there was passenger rail service between Denver and Billings, Montana. So one of the things I'll be bringing up next week, I'll be making the pitch that we also need to be looking at connectivity from Denver to Calgary, Alberta through Montana, possibly even all the way from El Paso, Texas, up to Denver and on to Calgary.

Josh Slotnick: [00:14:57] Dave, you should be more ambitious.

Dave Strohmaier: [00:14:59] I know, I know. I figure if we can fly a helicopter on Mars, we can figure out how to how to run trains on planet Earth here.

Josh Slotnick: [00:15:07] Let me just toss another question. As we were coming into this room, we passed our climate team.

Dave Strohmaier: [00:15:12] Yes.

Josh Slotnick: [00:15:12] And wondering how does passenger rail help us and other communities meet their climate goals?

Dave Strohmaier: [00:15:18] So there are really three main clusters of benefits to passenger rail. One is economic development. It's proven to be a job creator. It's proven to be a way to enhance the vibrancy of our downtowns and main streets and communities. And in fact, we commissioned an economic analysis this last year and that yielded the preliminary result that between Chicago and Seattle, if the north coast Hiawatha route were to be restored, you could expect at the start up conditions of this to deliver about a little over $270 million of economic benefits to the communities and states through which this line would pass. That's a big deal. So economic development is one cluster of benefits. Another is transportation equity. There are folks who either can't afford to travel any other way beyond train or don't have the physical ability or just don't have the wherewithal to catch a plane or own a vehicle. And passenger rail provides a mode of transportation to really provide a means of transportation for this cross section of of our friends and neighbors and communities. The third cluster is environmental sustainability benefits. In an age when we are keenly aware of the need to reduce our carbon footprint and look for more sustainable modes of transportation. It's a bit of a back to the future moment and recognizing that this rather old technology, even as it stands right now, these diesel locomotives are way more efficient at moving supplies, goods and people than either air transportation or moving folks over our highways in motor vehicles or trucks. Our goal is clearly with an eye towards sustainability, restoring a mode of transportation that can deliver those environmental benefits and also with an eye to the future, recognizing that there are technologies out there such as, again, not that new electrification of rail lines, folks may not realize that between Harlow and Montana and Avery, Idaho in the early 20th century, that line of the Chicago, Milwaukee and St Paul Railroad was electrified. So we would be doing what has been done in the past and...

Juanita Vero: [00:17:33] A hundred years ago!

Dave Strohmaier: [00:17:33] A hundred years ago. And so it's not completely unprecedented, but it's the direction we need to be moving into the future.

Juanita Vero: [00:17:41] You mentioned freight, so so people kind of wring their hands around freight and passenger on the same rails or tell us how to think about that.

Dave Strohmaier: [00:17:49] Yeah. So one of the beauties of the rail authority is the breadth of representation and participation we have. I mentioned earlier we started with 12 member counties stretching from Sanders to Wibaux County on either end of the state. We're now up to 19 counties.

Josh Slotnick: [00:18:06] Amazing.

Dave Strohmaier: [00:18:06] We're on the cusp of maybe having the 20th county join us.

Juanita Vero: [00:18:10] Yes. So how many counties who are between the east and west?

Dave Strohmaier: [00:18:13] Yeah. So we extended invitations to 26 counties. So right now, like I say, we've got 19 counties on board the possibility of a 20th waiting in the wings. So we've got the majority of counties that we want to have in this rail authority on board right now. We don't need to have every single contiguous county, but there is power in numbers politically and and otherwise.

Josh Slotnick: [00:18:35] So, Juan's question on freight?

Dave Strohmaier: [00:18:37] Yeah. So going back to freight. So I got diverted and talking about the the composition of the rail authority. And the reason for that is that besides the member counties that each appoint someone to our board of directors, we also have three tribal nations represented. We have Amtrak, we have the Montana Department of Transportation, and we have BNSF Railway on our board of directors. This is not an insignificant thing because for years now we've gotten this question of what are the freight railroads think about this. Well, I can report they are at the table. They're literally at the table. They're on our board of directors. And why is that? Well, BNSF Railway operates their lines across the country that co host both freight and passenger operations. So this is this is nothing new to them. They know how to do this. And it's totally possible to co-exist with freight and passenger operations. In the case at hand right here through Missoula County, southern Montana, and points east and west and beyond the boundaries of Montana. What would need to happen to co exist in that manner? Because we're not planning on just throwing a bunch of additional trains onto the system without upgrades. That's the key. If that were the case, I too would be opposed to this harebrained idea. But that's not what's being proposed. And BNSF Railway, our partner in this endeavor, realizes that also what would need to happen would be adding additional double track. Because right now there's there's lots of miles of track that are just a single track. Well, that means that a train has to pull over and let the other train go. Whereas if you're able to double track the two trains, passenger and freight can run unimpeded. And that's just one example of some of the infrastructure improvements that would need to happen.

Josh Slotnick: [00:20:27] So I've got a political question for you. Yeah, it seems that there's definitely a really a moment for rail right now. We have Amtrak Joe being the leader of the free world and Mayor Pete's the secretary of Transportation, unknown rail advocate, and there's money been set aside and the Big Sky passenger rail authority is primed to accept that money after the results come back from this study. And a super proud that we can just be ancillary. We're watching you with enjoy this great success. To what degree is all this success vulnerable to a switch in administrations?

Dave Strohmaier: [00:20:57] Yeah, it's not lost on us that the political winds of change in Washington DC can certainly change our trajectory in all of this. What's going for us and what for me is, is makes me more optimistic than I oftentimes am in life. And that is that if you look at the 19 counties that came together to establish and to our current state of affairs with the Big Sky Passenger rail authority, these are not bright blue liberal urban counties. These are from a political and perspective, many of these the majority of these are deep red conservative Republican counties. But they are on board with this because they recognize the benefits of passenger rail. Similarly, if you extend outside of the state of Montana, when we started cranking up this effort a couple of years ago, who are some of the signatories urging the US Department of Transportation to get on board with this effort? Both of the US senators from North Dakota, both U.S. senators from Idaho, Mitt Romney from Utah. So I think at this moment in time at least, we have an opportunity, even if administrations and the political majority in Washington change, I think we're well poised to to move forward with this initiative regardless.

Josh Slotnick: [00:22:17] So is the money being allocated to act on those recommendations from the study or is that still up in the air?

Dave Strohmaier: [00:22:23] The money in the bipartisan infrastructure law is allocated in these different buckets, and it's part of basically the five year surface transportation bill which got folded into this big piece of legislation. So it's there. It still needs to be appropriated as part of the budget process, but I'm fully confident that we will be able to avail ourselves of it when the when the recommendations come in, as.

Josh Slotnick: [00:22:50] We hope so. Dave, a lot of people here in this are going to think this is the coolest thing I've heard about in ages. I would just so love to be able to get on the train in Missoula and land in Seattle or have my friends from Seattle come here for a show and a weekend of boating and then go back to Seattle all on the train. How amazing. What can I do to help? Because I think this is so great. I want to see this happen. What can I do to help? So what do you say to those folks?

Dave Strohmaier: [00:23:11] Yeah, so one of the beauties with the Big Sky Passenger Rail Authority is even though we are a unit of government, we in our meetings and our initiatives are fully embracing of citizen volunteers. So we have a number of committees working on various aspects of what the rail authority does, from planning to communication to fundraising to finance. And all of those need dedicated folks to help. So, for instance, our communications folks are far flung across this country. Our social media person is in San Diego. We've got other folks on the East Coast helping out. So if you're interested, go to our website, Big Sky Rail, dot org, a treasure trove of information, contact information on there. You can take a look at what we're up to, figure out how you would like to be involved. We would love to get you engaged and plugged into this because we have got a finite moment in time. [00:24:10] 2023 this year is arguably the most important year in the past 43 years when it comes to passenger rail in southern Montana and east of Bismarck and Fargo and west of the Pacific Northwest, this is our moment. And if we fail to rise to the occasion, it's not to say that our efforts are completely torpedoed by that, but it is to say it's going to be a whole lot tougher going forward. And unless we do everything that we can to make sure that in November of this year, our preferred route is at the top of the heap when it comes to recommendations to Congress. [00:24:48]

Juanita Vero: [00:24:48] All aboard!

Dave Strohmaier: [00:24:50] All aboard, Montana! Absolutely.

Josh Slotnick: [00:24:52] Man, I just commend you, though. I mean, who would have thought that the list of counties, those soon to be 20 counties could ever have been linked around anything? It's an it's an incredible feat. And it was not.

Juanita Vero: [00:25:04] Especially in this day and age.

Josh Slotnick: [00:25:05] In this day and age where we're told to be polarized and we and we absorbed that. Message. This sounded at the outset a few years ago, like a moonshot, like this is incredible. It would couldn't nothing could really happen there. Rail is dead. It's a mid 20th century thing. And here we are this close. Hats off to you, man. Well done.

Juanita Vero: [00:25:23] Back to some more storytelling real quick. When I first met you 16 years ago, you were talking about passenger rail, and it...

Dave Strohmaier: [00:25:29] I was the only...

Josh Slotnick: [00:25:30] Wow.

Juanita Vero: [00:25:31] Yeah. When you were twelve.

Josh Slotnick: [00:25:32] Just out of high school!

Dave Strohmaier: [00:25:34] I was at Hellgate High.

Juanita Vero: [00:25:35] Yeah. And I, I had... I'd never thought like that. I mean, it blew my mind and I thought it was a little crazy. And I really struggled with it for the first maybe like 30 seconds of the conversation. So where did you become inspired or where, yeah, where did you get this vision?

Dave Strohmaier: [00:25:51] Oh man.

Juanita Vero: [00:25:52] We were at market on front. It was new market on front. I remember sitting at a table with you. Yeah. And I was like, What are you talking about?

Dave Strohmaier: [00:26:00] People still tell me that when I'm sitting in the market in front, what are you talking about? So this is a classic case where, you know what? I didn't grow up around trains.

Josh Slotnick: [00:26:10] And because you can't hunt them.

Dave Strohmaier: [00:26:13] Right, they are not that tasty. So I was serving on the Missoula City Council in the mid 2000s. One of my constituents up the Rattlesnake was was our preeminent rail fan. He loved this stuff. He lived and breathe trains. And the more I listen to him, the more I realized that this is just not crazy stuff. There's certainly plenty of folks that live and breathe trains in a way that I do not and probably don't ever want to live and breathe trains in that way. But this person was on to something as far as a mode of transportation that we ought to think about embracing again. So I remember sitting down at the farmer's market in a little booth with a banner behind our table that said Restore the North Coast, Hiawatha And this was like 14 years ago probably, And it was part of that era of trying different things, hoping for different results. And what impressed me about some of these passionate advocates was the kernel of truth that they were on to and that we simply needed to find a tipping point for this effort. In some cases, you just got to keep after it, and at some point there will be that critical mass of support in the case at hand. I've seen this in county government, certainly in municipal government. We too often underestimate our ability to accomplish big things collectively. This effort...

Juanita Vero: [00:27:42] The only way we can accomplish big things.

Dave Strohmaier: [00:27:44] Well, that that's exactly the case. And with what we've accomplished in the last two years by way of this rail authority, four years ago, I had no idea this was even a possibility. I didn't know that we had the authority to do such a thing. We've since found that that was not the case, that counties can actually rise to the occasion and look beyond the borders of their jurisdictions, work with folks who we have never worked with in the past. When's the last time we worked with a Dawson or Wibaux County in Montana? Never. This is never happened before. And here we are. So it's restored. For me, a sense of possibility, a sense of bipartisan collaboration. And it's a classic case of just sticking with it. And and it's a team effort. This was certainly not any singular, singular person's accomplishment, but it's it's been something that has taken many folks not in the limelight who've and this this extends to Missoula County admin staff, people in other counties across the state who've just been passionate about this. And here we are.

Juanita Vero: [00:28:53] Okay. So before we close, share with us a book or podcast or nugget of wisdom you've come across recently.

Dave Strohmaier: [00:29:01] So I've got a whole stack of either unread books. I have that stack, big stack, multiple stacks of unread books, or our books that have bookmarks like five pages in. And that's where it's kind of stopped.

Juanita Vero: [00:29:17] Is it just one stack or do you have them scattered or...

Dave Strohmaier: [00:29:19] They are scattered around And and it's it's admittedly way harder to find the time to read anything beyond email. And, and, uh, some of the documents we have to wade through as part of our day jobs here. But one book that I am well into that's pretty intriguing. It's a book called Down From the Mountain by Bryce Andrews.

Juanita Vero: [00:29:38] Oh, very own Bryce Andrews.

Dave Strohmaier: [00:29:40] Yes. It's it is a great story.

Josh Slotnick: [00:29:43] This is his latest.

Dave Strohmaier: [00:29:45] No, he's got another...

Juanita Vero: [00:29:46] This is about a grizzly bear.

Josh Slotnick: [00:29:47] Oh, the grizzly that ate the corn.

Dave Strohmaier: [00:29:49] Yes, the grizzly bear that ate the corn. It's a fascinating book of culture and wildlife and western Montana. I'm only partially into the thing. We'll have to revisit the topic when we come back at a future date, but it's a great read. I would highly recommend it. And Bryce does have another book coming out. I just learned. So stay tuned. Yeah.

Josh Slotnick: [00:30:12] He's a local treasure for sure.

Juanita Vero: [00:30:14] Fantastic. Thanks so much for this, Dave. This was. This is fantastic.

Josh Slotnick: [00:30:19] That's really fun to hear.

Dave Strohmaier: [00:30:20] Well, thanks. Thanks for having me. And we'll do it again.

Juanita Vero: [00:30:23] Got to do it.

Dave Strohmaier: [00:30:23] When those recommendations come out.

Josh Slotnick: [00:30:25] Oh, boy.

Dave Strohmaier: [00:30:25] To Congress. Yeah. Yeah.

Juanita Vero: [00:30:27] Thanks, everyone.

Josh Slotnick: [00:30:28] See you next time. 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 at Missoula County 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.