The Octopus in the Room: Why should you give a shit?

September 14, 2026

By: Isabella Brown, Flathead Lead Organizer

TL;DR: 

Flathead County is growing faster than the systems we rely on to support that growth. Transportation is one tentacle. Housing is another. Workforce. Health care access. Wildfire. Water. Open space. Public land. Trail connectivity. Energy. Parking. Insurance. Even downtown business access. They look like separate problems when you’re looking at them one at a time. But they’re all attached to the same body. And right now, we’re all chewing on a different tentacle.

Everyone is looking at a real problem. The challenge is that we’re often trying to solve them independently, even though what we do in one system can create demand, costs, or constraints somewhere else. We need to start planning for the place we’re becoming as one connected region.

You don’t have to care about every tentacle. Find the one that speaks to you. This fall, the Amazing Race Flathead Edition and a bunch of other events and opportunities will give us a chance to dig into these connections, experience some of them firsthand, and start figuring out what we can build together.

Current Partners include: 

Whitefish Legacy Trail partners, United Today Stronger Tomorrow, Protect Our Winters, Center for Native Grass, Rockfish Climbing Gym, Land to Hand, The Making Place, Tamarack Cannabis, Bias Brewery, Bike Walk Montana, and Flathead Trail Association are already helping us bring this thing to life.

Don’t See Your Name?

Know a business, organization, or community group that should be part of it? Come join us! We’ve got room in the Zoom for our final planning meeting for the National Voter Registration Day Amazing Race on National Day of Service. Come team up, throw in your ideas, and help us put the final touches on this wonderfully ridiculous adventure.

Get Involved This Fall

There are some very practical opportunities to get involved in these conversations this fall.

  • First, get registered to vote!. We have a lot of seats up for election, and local elections are where many of these decisions about housing, transportation, land use, infrastructure, energy, and growth actually get made.
  • Then come find your tentacle: We’re kicking off our fall work with a September 18  kickoff party for the Amazing Transportation Challenge. From September 18–26, the Amazing Race will give people an opportunity to experience the Valley’s transportation system for themselves: walking, biking, riding transit, carpooling, and figuring out what connections work and where the gaps are. You can plug into the transportation piece, the housing conversation, climate action, outdoor recreation, local government, health care access, voter engagement and protection, or any of the other pieces we’re working on.

You do not have to care about everything. Find the thing you care about and if you want to help us connect the pieces, even better. Come chew on the Tentacles with us! 

Save the Dates: 

  • September 11th: NVRD Planning Meeting
  • September 18: Come Celebrate National Voter Registration Day with us and help us kick off our Amazing Race: Flathead edition! 
  • September 18–26: Amazing Race Flathead
  • October 2: Candidate Forum: PSC 5, Energy, Affordability, Technology & Growth
  • Join us at Upcoming events: Upcoming Events!
The questions we’re all asking 

  • Downtown businesses: How do I get customers through the door?
  • Workers: I have to take my car to work. Where am I supposed to park?
  • Employers: How do I hire and keep people who can actually afford to live here?
  • People looking for housing: Can I afford to live here?
  • Health care providers: How do my patients get to their appointments?
  • Older adults and people with disabilities: What happens when I can’t drive?
  • Emergency responders: Can we get people out and responders in when something goes wrong?
  • Wildfire planners: Do we have enough routes to actually evacuate people?
  • Planners: Where should growth go, and how are we going to pay to serve it?
  • Conservationists: How do we grow without giving up the water, habitat, farms, forests, and recreation people care about?
  • Utilities: How much more energy will the community we’re building require?
  • Transportation planners: How do we move more people without building more congestion and more infrastructure we can’t afford to maintain?
  • Taxpayers: Who pays for all of this?
  • Residents: Can I afford to live here, get where I need to go, and actually participate in my community?
The problem with planning in silos

Those aren’t fourteen different problems; rather, they’re fourteen different views of the same system. Everyone is looking at a real problem. The problem is that we’re often trying to solve each one independently, even though the solution in one system can create demand, costs, constraints, or vulnerabilities in another. Emergency management starts from a pretty simple premise: systems fail at the points where we assume they are separate.

This is where emergency management and conflict management give us a useful lens. We’re seeing the same problem show up in different places, with different people responding to different parts of it. When we don’t account for those connections, we end up with patchwork, band-aid solutions that solve one piece while creating new problems somewhere else. Eventually, it starts to look like spaghetti code: one fix layered onto another, then another workaround to deal with the last fix, until we’re managing a system that nobody designed as a whole.

We’re working on the same octopus. The tentacles may have different names, but they’re attached to the same body. And while we’re arguing over which tentacle deserves attention, the Kraken is still here. 

Same Problem, Different Tentacle

The question isn’t whether transportation, housing, wildfire, health care, water, or economic development are separate issues. They aren’t. They’re different parts of the same set of decisions about how the Valley grows, where people live, how they move, and what infrastructure that growth requires.

Housing affects where workers can live and how far they have to travel. Whitefish’s transportation plan explicitly connects affordable housing and regional mobility. Mountain Climber was built as a regional system serving Kalispell, Whitefish, and Columbia Falls, including fixed routes and paratransit. Transportation affects whether people can reach jobs, medical appointments, schools, businesses, and emergency services. Land use determines where those trips happen and what infrastructure is needed to support them. Kalispell’s own planning documents recognize that development decisions have transportation, pedestrian, bicycle, and multimodal impacts. And then there is the infrastructure itself: what we build, what we maintain, what we fund, and what we leave for someone else to pay for.

Kalispell’s budget makes that division pretty visible. In the proposed FY2027 budget, the Special Street Maintenance and Traffic Signal fund totals about $5.07 million. The city’s sidewalk system is funded through separate mechanisms, including a 50/50 sidewalk program where property owners share the cost with the city. In the May 2026 budget discussion, city staff told Council that the 50/50 program replaces roughly three to four blocks of sidewalk a year, as the season allows. And this isn’t happening because nobody knows there’s a problem.

Kalispell already spent years developing a Main Street Safety Action Plan through the federal Safe Streets and Roads for All program. The adopted plan identifies 25.3 miles of priority streets for safety, connectivity, and accessibility improvements. The city’s own SS4A materials identify pedestrians, bicyclists, transit users, motorists, and micromobility users as people the transportation system needs to serve. In April 2026, the city was considering pursuing up to $25 million in federal implementation funding, with a required 20% local match, to actually put some of those safety projects into the ground.

So we have a pretty strange situation: we have a federal safety program telling us to redesign streets for all users, a city safety plan identifying miles of problem corridors, and local budgets that still make it easier to think about the roadway and everything around it as separate pieces. And then we wonder why we keep getting stroads.

A stroad is what happens when we ask the same corridor to move traffic like a road while also functioning as a street: a place where businesses open their doors, people live, walk, bike, catch transit, cross the road, and spend time. The transportation system wants vehicles to move efficiently. The commercial district wants people to stop. Those are different functions competing for the same piece of pavement. And this is where the downtown revitalization conversation gets a little absurd.

We’re spending money and political energy trying to revitalize downtowns while maintaining major corridors through those same downtowns for moving vehicles. Whitefish’s own transportation plan says Highway 93 changes should support downtown businesses rather than function merely as a conduit for regional through-traffic. It also calls for streetscape improvements, better pedestrian and bicycle infrastructure, and transportation investments that support economic vitality. And that’s the contradiction: we’re spending enormous amounts of people power trying to work around policies and infrastructure that are still pushing us in the opposite direction. 

A person driving past a storefront is moving through the district. A person walking past it can actually experience it. They can see the business next door, stop for coffee, wander into a store they didn’t plan to visit, cross the street, meet someone, or keep walking to the next destination. A street can move people through a commercial district, or it can help people participate in one. And when we build the first kind and then ask the second kind of place to emerge around it, we’re making the job harder than it needs to be.

This is also why we can’t treat parking, traffic, and housing as isolated fights. If we use traffic concerns to make infill harder, we push housing outward. If housing moves outward, people travel farther. Longer trips create more pressure on the transportation network. More traffic creates pressure for more roadway capacity. More roadway capacity reinforces the same development pattern. Then we need more parking at the destinations.

That’s the spaghetti code!

You fix the parking problem with more parking. You fix the traffic problem with more road capacity. You fix the resulting housing problem by pushing development somewhere else. Then you try to retrofit sidewalks, bike routes, transit, and emergency access around the pattern you’ve already created. And meanwhile, we’re all arguing over which tentacle deserves the money. The Flathead doesn’t experience these as fourteen separate problems. Neither should we. The systems are connected whether our institutions acknowledge it or not and that is where the parking conversation gets much more interesting.

The August 24 Kalispell City Council work session left me thinking less about Flock cameras and more about what the parking conversation was actually telling us. We have a downtown access problem. We have a parking problem. We have traffic problems. And the City already knows the transportation system has places where it is falling short. Kalispell’s own Main Street Safety Action Plan identifies 25.3 miles of priority streets for safety, mobility, and connectivity improvements, including Main Street and US-93.

This isn’t a theoretical problem we are trying to predict ten years from now. We are already trying to manage the demands being placed on the system. At the August 24 work session, approximately 40 people came out around the proposed Flock license plate reader. The proposal was for a $70,000 system mounted on a parking-enforcement vehicle to electronically track vehicles in on-street and permit parking areas. The goal was to make parking enforcement more efficient and improve availability in downtown.

Some downtown businesses were frustrated when Council removed the funding. And I understand why. If employees and customers cannot reliably find parking, that affects whether people can get to work and whether customers can get to businesses. But look at who we are asking to absorb the solution. One of the City’s own proposed near-term strategies was smarter enforcement and dedicated employee parking areas to free up customer spaces.

There is a legitimate argument for managing limited parking. But if the practical result is that employees are pushed farther and farther away from their workplaces while we protect curb spaces for customers, we need to ask whether we are actually solving the access problem or just moving the burden onto the people who keep those businesses running. That is where the stick-and-carrot question comes in.

Richard Thaler, one of the founders of behavioral economics, calls this choice architecture: the environment around us shapes the choices we make. The way a choice is presented can nudge people in one direction or another without forcing them to do anything. That is part of what the proposed camera system was trying to do. 

The camera was a stick. Better monitoring and enforcement were supposed to change parking behavior. If people know they will be ticketed for overstaying a time limit or parking where they shouldn’t, some people will change what they do. But we should not stop at whether the stick works. The camera itself becomes another piece of infrastructure. It collects data. That data has to be transmitted, processed, stored, and managed. What looks like a simple parking solution is actually another layer of the infrastructure we are building and paying to maintain.

That matters in the Flathead right now. We are already having public conversations about data centers, electricity demand, transmission infrastructure, water, and the environmental costs of expanding our digital infrastructure. We cannot talk about technology as if it exists somewhere outside the physical world. Technology still has a physical footprint. And if we want people to make different choices about how they get downtown, we also have to change the choices available to them.

The City’s own May parking discussion was already moving in this direction. The proposed near-term fixes included better signage, smarter enforcement, and dedicated employee parking areas to free up spaces for customers. Downtown has roughly 2,410 parking spaces, but only about 28 percent are on-street. That raises a bigger question. If the solution is to make sure customers get the convenient spaces while employees are expected to park somewhere else, where are we asking the workforce to go?

Downtown businesses need customers. They also need the people who open the doors, make the coffee, stock the shelves, cook the food, clean the buildings, and keep the businesses running. We should be careful not to solve a customer-access problem by simply shifting the burden onto the people who work there.

That is where the carrots come in. A stick can tell someone what not to do. A carrot gives them a realistic alternative. Can employees get to work without needing to park directly in front of their workplace? Is there convenient employee parking somewhere else? Can people park once and walk between destinations? Can someone bike downtown safely? Can someone take transit from another part of the Valley and actually get home after their shift?

If we want fewer people competing for the most convenient parking spaces, then we need to make the alternatives convenient enough to actually use. That means employee parking. It means safe walking and biking routes. It means transit that runs when people actually work. It means being able to park once and walk to several destinations. It means building housing closer to jobs so that getting downtown does not automatically mean getting in a car.

We cannot keep asking people to change their behavior without changing the conditions that make their current behavior necessary. And this is where parking stops being just a parking conversation. Parking is one tentacle. It is one place where we can see the larger infrastructure problem showing up. The Flathead is growing. The demands on our roads, parking, sidewalks, transit, utilities, digital infrastructure, and emergency systems are growing with it.

And we can see this same question playing out in other parts of local government. Flathead County is building a new public safety facility because the existing jail, built in 1987 for 63 inmates, has been stretched far beyond what it was designed to handle. The County says the current facility can no longer meet long-term demand, and voters approved a $105 million bond for a new facility designed for up to 260 inmates. The project includes medical and mental-health space, programming, and re-entry services. There are legitimate reasons to build it. The current facility is old. Capacity is constrained. The County has identified a real need. But it still raises a question that applies far beyond the jail: When demand grows, what kind of capacity do we build?

Do we primarily build more capacity to manage the demand once it arrives? Or do we also invest in the conditions that might change the demand upstream? The same question applies to parking. We can build better enforcement to manage parking demand. We can build more parking to accommodate more cars. We can build more road capacity to move more vehicles. Those things may all be necessary in some circumstances. But if every new pressure leads us to build more capacity around the existing behavior, we can end up reinforcing the very pattern we are trying to manage.

That is why the stick and carrot distinction matters. The stick can change behavior by making the existing choice more costly. The carrot changes the choice itself. If we want fewer people competing for the most convenient parking spaces, we need alternatives that actually work. Employee parking. Safe walking and biking routes. Transit that runs when people work. Housing closer to jobs. The ability to park once and walk between destinations. We need to be willing to build the conditions that make a different choice possible. Otherwise, we are just getting better at managing the consequences. The question is whether we are going to keep adding another stick every time a new pressure appears, or whether we are going to start building the carrots that make a different system possible.

The Energy Tentacle

We have been talking about technology as a way to solve problems. But technology also creates infrastructure demand.A camera may look like a small piece of equipment. But once it captures information, that information has to be transmitted, stored, secured, accessed, and maintained. The same is true of sensors, connected devices, digital services, and the other technologies we increasingly build into public infrastructure.

More technology means more data. More data means more digital infrastructure. And digital infrastructure uses energy. The same is true of the physical community we build. A spread-out community requires more driving, which means more gasoline or electricity for transportation. Longer distances also mean more time and more money spent simply getting to work, school, health care, and other daily needs.

That matters for affordability. The cost of a community is not just the price of a house. It is also the cost of living in that house. A cheaper home farther from everything may not be cheaper once transportation is added. A household can pay less for housing and more for fuel, vehicle maintenance, insurance, and the time required to get everywhere.

The energy we need tomorrow is partly determined by what we build today. NorthWestern Energy has a formal process for thinking about part of this problem. Its 2026 Integrated Resource Plan looks twenty years ahead, forecasts electricity demand, models different scenarios, and evaluates the resources needed to maintain reliability and affordability. That is sensible planning. We should be doing more of that thinking with the community itself.

If we know the Flathead is growing, we should be thinking ahead about what that growth will require from transportation, electricity, fuel, water, wastewater, emergency response, and the infrastructure connecting them. Because the cost does not begin when we build the next power plant or transmission line. It begins when we decide what kind of community we are building.

The Health-Care Tentacle

Transportation is health infrastructure, and in Kalispell that means more than getting local residents to an appointment.

Kalispell is a regional health-care hub for a much larger area. Logan Health’s main medical campus is in Flathead County, but its service area stretches across 20 counties, nearly 50,000 square miles, and almost 700,000 people. People come to Kalispell from well beyond the Valley for care. The American Hospital Association describes residents in northwest Montana traveling more than 30 miles to reach the closest hospital in Kalispell.

That makes transportation part of the health-care system whether we call it that or not.

And the people coming here for care do not simply disappear after their appointment. They buy gas. They eat at restaurants. Family members stay in hotels. They shop while they are here. They may come back for follow-up appointments. Some eventually decide to move here, start a business, or retire here. Kalispell’s own economic-development materials describe the city as the regional trade center for Northwest Montana and report $1.26 billion in nonresident spending. Local economic research has also documented the role of medical facilities in bringing rural patients into the community and generating spending at local businesses.

So when we talk about transportation to health care, we are talking about more than whether one person can get to a doctor’s appointment.

We are talking about whether people across a large rural region can reach the services concentrated in Kalispell. We are talking about whether families can make those trips without taking on an unreasonable cost or logistical burden. And we are talking about the economic activity that comes with Kalispell functioning as a regional center.

That becomes even more important when the health-care system itself is under financial pressure. Logan Health is a major regional provider. If health-care funding or transportation support is reduced while people are still relying on that regional system, the transportation burden does not disappear. It moves somewhere else. It moves onto patients who have to drive farther. It moves onto family members who have to take time off work to provide rides. It moves onto transit systems. It moves onto communities that have to absorb the additional cost of getting people where they need to go.

The Mountain Climber is already part of this picture. It provides transportation for medical appointments and other essential trips, including paratransit. But transit is only one piece. The other piece is the environment people have to move through once they get here. We talk a lot about making health care available. We talk less about whether the community around that health care makes it possible to move without a car. Can someone walk from a medical appointment to a pharmacy? Can they safely cross the road? Can they get to a grocery store or a bus stop without walking along a highway shoulder? Can an older person or someone with a mobility limitation make that trip without having to arrange another ride?

That is where walkability becomes health infrastructure too. We have built a community where driving is often the easiest answer because the alternatives are not always designed to be realistic. Then we measure access by whether the service exists instead of asking whether people can actually reach it.

And there is another piece to this. People are not only traveling to Kalispell for health care. Health-care workers have to travel here to provide it. Nurses, doctors, technicians, aides, administrative staff, maintenance workers, and countless others have to be able to get to work. If housing is farther away and transportation options are limited, the same system that depends on a regional concentration of health-care services also creates longer commutes for the people staffing those services.

So the health-care question is not simply, Do we have a hospital? It is also: Can people in Flathead, Glacier, Sanders, Lincoln, Lake, and the surrounding rural communities actually get to the health care concentrated here? People travel to Kalispell for specialty care, hospital services, appointments, and procedures. Older residents may be especially dependent on those services as Montana’s population continues to age. If that care becomes harder to reach or moves farther away, the transportation problem does not disappear. The miles just get longer, the costs go up, and someone has to make the trip. That is why Kalispell’s role as a regional health-care hub is a transportation issue. Health-care access depends on getting people to the care.

Montana as an Aging State Tentacle

Transportation choice matters because driving is not a permanent condition of life. People’s ability, need, and ability to afford to drive changes over time. And at some point, everyone becomes a pedestrian. That makes accessibility part of the transportation system, not a special accommodation. A sidewalk, crossing, bus stop, or entrance only provides access if people can actually use it safely. If we build transportation around the assumption that everyone will always be able to drive, we are building a system around a condition that will not hold for everyone, or forever. A resilient community gives people options.

The Workforce Tentacle

And once we’re talking about access to jobs and services, we have to talk about the workforce. Whitefish gives us a pretty good example: 

The City’s 2025 Housing Needs Assessment found that 60% of the workers in ZIP Code 59937 live outside the ZIP code. That area has 7,833 workers. That works out to roughly 4,700 people commuting into work. City staff has also cited estimates that 61% to 76% of Whitefish employees live outside the city. That is a lot of people traveling into Whitefish every day to keep the place running.

They work in hotels and restaurants. They are nurses, teachers, firefighters, EMTs, dispatchers, bus drivers, mechanics, construction workers, utility crews, child-care providers, and public employees. They run businesses and maintain the services and infrastructure the rest of us depend on.

When those workers cannot afford to live near their jobs, the commute gets longer. They drive farther. They spend more time and money getting to work. They need somewhere to park when they get there. That has consequences for employers too. A job is not really accessible if the person filling it cannot reasonably get there, if getting to work takes enough of their paycheck to make the job unsustainable, or if the job does not provide enough hours or income for the worker to support themselves without taking on additional work. 

And then there is the part that matters during an emergency.

Firefighters have to get to the station. EMTs have to get to the ambulance. Dispatchers have to get to the communications center. Utility and road crews have to get where they are needed. Hospital staff have to get to the hospital. During a wildfire, flood, major crash, or other emergency, those people are part of the response. If the people we rely on to respond are living farther from the communities they serve, their commute becomes part of the readiness picture.

Transportation Is Also a Readiness Problem

The same transportation network that gets people to work is also what gets emergency crews where they need to go. It is what moves people out of an evacuation area. It is what gets firefighters, medical personnel, utility crews, and other essential workers where they need to be when something goes wrong.

Whitefish’s new Community Wildfire Protection Plan puts this problem in much sharper focus. The City is not only looking at where wildfire risk is highest. The plan specifically examines wildfire response, firefighting capability, and feasible evacuation routes. The City has also identified its rail crossings as potential barriers to emergency services and wildfire evacuation.

That matters because Whitefish already has a transportation problem before an evacuation ever begins. We have already established that 61 to 76 percent of Whitefish employees commute from outside the city. Every morning, thousands of people are moving into Whitefish for work. Every afternoon, many of those same people are moving back out.

That is normal traffic. Now add a wildfire.

The same roads that are already carrying commuters, residents, visitors, freight, and emergency services would also have to move people out of danger. At the same time, firefighters and other responders would be trying to move in. If a major route is blocked by fire, an accident, congestion, or another emergency, the number of people trying to move does not get smaller. That should concern us.

An evacuation is not just a question of whether a road technically exists. It is a question of whether that road can move the number of people who need to use it, while still allowing emergency personnel to get where they need to go. That is where transportation becomes a readiness issue.

We should not be building a community where our everyday transportation system is already under strain and then assuming it will somehow perform perfectly during a mass evacuation. Readiness means having options before we need them: more than one way out, connected local streets, transportation that does not require every person to drive their own vehicle, and routes that emergency responders can actually use. Most days, transportation is how people get where they need to go. During a wildfire, transportation is part of whether we can get people out and responders in.

The Land-Use Tentacle

This is where Montana’s current land-use planning conversation matters. I do think sprawl is part of the problem. We already know it costs more to serve development when it spreads farther from existing infrastructure.

Whitefish says this directly in its 2045 plan. The city’s planning document notes that lower-density development farther from existing infrastructure creates disproportionate costs because roads and utilities have to cover longer distances, while police and fire services have to cover more area. The plan’s response is to prioritize infill and reinvestment within the existing built footprint and use infrastructure to help guide growth rather than simply respond to it.

Columbia Falls has reached a similar conclusion from its own experience. Its Growth Policy says that low-density development in outlying areas has been the predominant growth pattern and that the lack of density makes providing public services uneconomical.

Kalispell’s new land-use plan acknowledges the same tension. It anticipates both infill and redevelopment within the existing city and continued outward expansion through annexation and subdivision. It also warns that unchecked sprawl risks eroding the agricultural land, riparian corridors, and open space that make the Valley what it is.

We already know the basic math. Sprawl costs more to serve. And yet we are having a hard time paying for the transportation infrastructure we already have while continuing to build a community that requires more of it. We complain about the cost of maintaining roads, adding sidewalks, improving intersections, expanding transit, and making streets safer. Then we keep approving or accommodating development patterns that put more distance between people and the places they need to reach. That is an expensive way to grow. We are effectively choosing the most infrastructure-intensive version of growth and then acting surprised when the infrastructure bill gets bigger.

That is where MLUPA comes in. The law requires communities to plan for how they will accommodate projected population growth and its impacts, including housing, infrastructure, public services, economic development, natural resources, and hazards. It also requires them to look at the financial feasibility of supporting anticipated economic growth. But planning does not automatically mean we will make the cheaper choice.

We have already seen this tension in Whitefish. The city’s own planning work has recognized that a thriving downtown needs more people living within roughly a mile of the core. The consultants working on the city’s plans agreed that additional density in that area was important to supporting a healthy downtown. And then the conversation moved in the opposite direction.

Instead of asking how to make that additional density work, the city moved toward protecting existing development patterns, including efforts to designate areas as historic neighborhoods. Parking and traffic became arguments against adding density in places where the planning work had identified density as part of the solution. That matters because you cannot solve the cost of growth by refusing to put growth where the infrastructure already exists.

If we keep density out of the places where people can live close to jobs, businesses, services, and existing transportation infrastructure, the people and housing do not simply disappear. They go somewhere else. And that somewhere else is often farther out. We then build more roads, extend infrastructure, increase vehicle travel, and spend more money serving development farther from the center. We cannot complain about the cost of transportation infrastructure while using transportation concerns to prevent the kind of development that could make the system more efficient. That is how the easiest decision today can become the most expensive decision later. If we make it difficult to accommodate growth in places that can already be served, we should not be surprised when growth moves farther out. Columbia Falls has already documented what happens when development spreads into areas that are expensive to serve. Kalispell is now trying to balance infill with continued outward growth. They determine how far people have to travel, how much infrastructure we have to maintain, and how much energy it takes to move people around the Valley.

The Water Tentacle

Growth doesn’t just require land. It requires water and sewer capacity. And this is not some future problem we’re inventing for the sake of this article. People in the Flathead are already worried about water and wastewater. We have ongoing conversations about groundwater, wells, sewer capacity, treatment plants, development, and whether our infrastructure can keep up with the number of people we are adding.

Every new house needs water. Every new business needs water. Every hotel, apartment building, subdivision, and industrial use adds demand. And once that water is used, we have to treat the wastewater too. That puts a very practical question on the table: how much growth can our existing systems actually handle, and what does it cost to expand them?

This is where the sprawl conversation matters. Building inside an area that already has water and sewer is different from building farther out and extending those systems to reach it. The farther development spreads, the farther pipes and other infrastructure may have to go. Then somebody has to maintain all of it.

We are already having a hard enough time paying for the infrastructure we have. That is the part I think gets lost when we talk about growth as if every new development is just a new set of buildings. It isn’t. A subdivision comes with water demand. It comes with wastewater. It comes with roads. It comes with emergency response. It comes with more trips between homes and jobs, schools, stores, and health care. The location of growth changes the cost of serving it.

And we already know this. Kalispell’s own planning documents identify the need to expand water, sewer, and stormwater infrastructure as the community grows, particularly toward the northern and western edges of the city. Whitefish’s planning documents similarly recognize that development farther from existing infrastructure can cost more to serve.

So when people are worried about whether the Valley has enough water, whether the sewer system can keep up, or whether we can afford another major infrastructure expansion, those concerns are not separate from the growth conversation. They are the growth conversation.

The Flathead Lake Tentacle

And then there is the part of the water conversation that is harder to see. Flathead Lake Biological Station has been watching this for decades. Since 1977, researchers have maintained a rigorous long-term monitoring program measuring things like nutrients, algae, water clarity, and oxygen. That record tells us something important: Flathead Lake is still in remarkably good shape, but that did not happen by accident.

Earlier monitoring found signs of declining water quality, including increased algal growth and blooms and declining oxygen in the lake’s bottom waters. Human sources of nutrients and sediment were part of the problem. Those findings helped drive some pretty significant changes, including phosphorus-detergent restrictions and upgrades to wastewater treatment. FLBS’s more recent data show that those efforts worked. Nutrient concentrations in the lake remain low, and there is no consistent long-term trend showing deterioration in the lake’s water quality.

That history matters when we talk about growth. We have already learned that what happens on the land and in the wastewater system can eventually show up in the lake. We also know that the lake does not necessarily tell us immediately when we are creating a problem. The things we change on the landscape today can take time to show up in the water.

That is why the question isn’t whether Flathead Lake is in crisis today. It isn’t. The Flathead Lake Biological Station’s long-term monitoring shows the lake remains exceptionally clear and low in nutrients. But that does not mean we can stop paying attention to what is happening upstream.We are actually having that conversation right now.

The proposed expansion of the Lakeside County Water and Sewer District has put wastewater, groundwater, nutrients, treatment technology, and Flathead Lake in the middle of a very public fight. The project has grown from an estimated $24–29 million to roughly $58 million, while residents, scientists, and local organizations have raised concerns about the location of the discharge and its potential effects on the lake and surrounding groundwater.

Then, this summer, the Flathead Lake Biological Station reported detecting PFAS, pharmaceuticals, and personal-care products in initial testing of the Flathead Basin. The concentrations were low, and that is important. But FLBS’s response was essentially that this is something we need to keep watching. That is what makes the growth conversation so important. The lake is telling us that what we have done so far has worked. The question is whether we can keep it that way as the watershed grows.

Flathead County is planning for roughly 20,000 more residents over the next 20 years. That means more homes, more wastewater, more roads, more stormwater, and more pressure on the watershed. And Flathead Lake is not just scenery. It is part of the recreation and tourism economy and one of the reasons people want to live, work, and invest here. We are a tourism economy built in large part around a resource we cannot replace.

People are coming. Growth is happening. The question is how we accommodate it without degrading the resources that make the Valley valuable in the first place. We already know the lake responds when we get this wrong. We also know that prevention and investment work.

The Open-Space Tentacle

This is why open space belongs in the growth conversation too. And open space does not just mean public land. Right now, people across the Flathead are having a very local conversation about what happens to privately owned farms and ranches, forests, wildlife habitat, recreation areas, drinking-water sources, and shorelines as development continues. The upcoming Save the Flathead forum is even looking at a county open-space bond that could voluntarily purchase conservation easements from private landowners while keeping that land in private ownership.

The scale of what we have already lost is significant. The county has lost more than 49,000 acres of open space to development since 2000. And in a recent countywide poll, protecting drinking-water sources was the top priority among respondents, followed by quality of life, farms and forests, wildlife habitat, and rivers and lake shorelines.

That tells us something. People care about these places. They care about public lands, but they also care about farms and ranches, water, wildlife, and the landscape around the communities they live in. The problem is that caring about those things and having a land-use system that actually protects them are not the same thing.

Open space is doing work. It holds water. It absorbs stormwater. It supports agriculture and wildlife. It provides recreation. And it keeps some land from becoming another place where we eventually have to build roads, utilities, drainage, and other infrastructure. Conservation can be infrastructure planning too.

That does not mean every acre should be protected or that growth should stop. It means we should be honest about what happens when we turn open land into developed land. We are making a decision not just about that property, but about the infrastructure, services, and land-use pattern that follows it. Because once we build it, we don’t get the landscape back very easily.

The Roadless Rule Tentacle

That brings us to the Roadless Rule. It is not a transportation policy, but it is a policy about where roads can go. And roads are one of the most consequential ways we change a landscape.

A road does more than move people from one place to another. It creates access. Research has consistently found that roads can increase human access to previously remote areas and bring development and other intensive uses with them. On public lands, that can fragment habitat, disrupt wildlife movement, and make it easier to push other infrastructure farther into places that were previously difficult to reach.

That matters here because people in the Flathead say they care about public lands, wildlife, and open space. But those values are affected by the decisions we make about access. A landscape can remain technically public while becoming increasingly fragmented by roads, energy development, recreation, and other uses. The Roadless Rule is one way of drawing a line before that happens.

And it connects directly back to the larger growth conversation. Where we put roads affects where development and other infrastructure become possible. Where we extend infrastructure affects how much land we have to maintain and how much pressure we put on the surrounding landscape. We keep treating land use, transportation, infrastructure, and conservation as separate decisions. They aren’t. A road changes access. Access changes what becomes possible. And once we build out a landscape, we cannot simply put it back the way it was.

The Climate-Action Tentacle

Transportation is also climate policy, even when we don’t call it that. Every trip uses energy. The farther people have to travel and the fewer options they have, the more they have to drive. But we can change that by giving people practical alternatives: better transit, more frequent service, electric buses, charging infrastructure, safe walking and biking routes, and housing closer to jobs and services.

That is the carrot. It is not about telling people they cannot drive. It is about giving them more flexibility so driving is not the only option. If someone can take the bus twice a week, walk to the grocery store, bike to an appointment, or carpool to work, they drive fewer miles. Maybe that tank of gas lasts longer. Maybe the car needs less maintenance. Maybe a household can get by with one vehicle instead of two. Those are climate benefits, but they are also affordability benefits.

We don’t have to convince everyone to become an environmentalist to talk about this. We can talk about what kind of transportation system will cost less to operate, give people more choices, and still work as the Valley grows. The choices we make about land use and transportation today shape the energy we will need tomorrow.

And Then We Come Back to Downtown. This is where I think the parking conversation connects back to everything else. If a business owner says, “I need customers to be able to get here,” I agree. But access downtown does not have to mean every customer arrives by car and gets a parking space immediately in front of the business. Parking is one way to provide access. It is not the same thing as access.

If people can arrive by bus, walk from nearby housing, bike from a connected neighborhood, carpool, or park once and walk between several destinations, we reduce some of the pressure on parking without eliminating it. That is why the camera debate gives us a chance to step back and look at the actual problem. Now that the cameras are off the table, we can focus on making better use of the parking we already have through clearer signage, time limits, employee parking, better information, and more consistent enforcement.

And we can work on the other side of the equation too. Better transit, more housing near jobs, and connected walking and biking routes can reduce how many people need to drive downtown in the first place. Before we build more infrastructure to manage parking demand, we should look at what would happen if we gave people more ways to get there. That is the carrot: not less access, but more ways to access downtown.

We Cannot Plan Four Separate Flatheads

We keep talking about Whitefish, Kalispell, Columbia Falls, Evergreen, and the county as if they are separate places with separate problems. They are separate jurisdictions. They are not separate valleys. We are one Valley, one transportation network, one economy, one watershed, and one emergency environment. That matters because the tentacles are attached to the same body. A housing decision in one community changes commuting in another. A road closure in one jurisdiction changes traffic somewhere else. A wildfire does not stop at a city boundary. Neither does a hospital trip, a commute, a watershed, or a workforce.

From an emergency-management perspective, this should be obvious. You do not build a response plan around the assumption that a disaster will politely stay inside one jurisdiction. You plan for the incident, the people affected, the resources available, the routes in and out, and the agencies that will have to work together. Our everyday planning should work more like that.

Instead, organizations often study the same underlying problem from different angles, collect their own data, hold their own meetings, apply for their own funding, and try to solve their own piece. Meanwhile, the person experiencing the problem experiences all of it at once. A worker does not care whether their commute crosses three jurisdictions. A family trying to get to the hospital does not care which agency operates the road. Someone evacuating a wildfire does not care who owns the pavement underneath them. They just need the network to work. That is where we are wasting time. We don’t need every organization to do the same job. We need them to recognize that they are working on different parts of the same system and plan accordingly.

Transportation planning needs to know where housing is going. Housing planning needs to know what transportation can support it. Emergency management needs to know how those development patterns affect evacuation and response. Water planning needs to know where growth is occurring. Conservation planning needs to understand where infrastructure is being extended. Economic development needs to understand how workers and customers actually move through the Valley. The tentacles can have different jobs. They still have to work together because they are attached to the same body.

That is what regional planning should mean here. Not creating one giant bureaucracy or pretending every community needs the same policies. It means sharing information, coordinating investments, and making decisions with an understanding of what happens across the boundary. Because when one part of the Valley solves a problem by pushing it somewhere else, we have not actually solved the problem. We have just made another tentacle deal with it. And the body still has to pay for it.

At Forward Montana, we believe people should have the power to shape the communities they live in. But you cannot participate if you cannot get there. Transportation affects whether you can get to work, the doctor, a community meeting, the polls, your kid’s event, a local business, or the people and places that make the Valley feel like home.

That brings us to the legislative session and a pretty basic question: Who are we sending to Helena, and do they understand what it actually takes to live here?

Can they talk about transportation without assuming everyone has a reliable car? Can they talk about housing without asking only how many homes we need, but whether people can afford to keep living here? Can they talk about workforce shortages without asking how workers are supposed to get to jobs they cannot afford to live near? Can they talk about growth without looking at the roads, water, sewer, energy, emergency services, and other infrastructure needed to support it? Can they talk about wildfire readiness without asking whether people can actually get out and responders can get in? By now, we’ve gathered enough scientific evidence to establish one important finding: the tentacles are attached. These are not separate problems. They are different ways of experiencing the same Valley. 

The people we send to Helena will make decisions about the rules, funding, and resources our communities have to work with. So we should be asking whether they understand the connections before they ask us for our votes. Whitefish, Kalispell, Columbia Falls, Evergreen, and the county are different jurisdictions. They are still one Valley. What happens in one community affects the others. Our representatives should understand that, and we should expect them to plan accordingly.

People Power: Let’s Make Some Ruckus

That is people power. You do not have to know everything. You just have to care about something and be willing to do something about it. Tell us what you give a shit about. Housing. Transportation. Public lands. Water. Wildfire. Energy. Accessibility. Small businesses. Voter protection. Whatever your thing is, there is a place for you here.

Come volunteer. Help register voters. Help protect access to the ballot. Show up to a meeting. Talk to your neighbors. Bring what you know, learn what you do not, and help us connect the dots. The Valley belongs to all of us. Let’s act like it. Come volunteer. Help register voters. Help protect access to the ballot. Show up to a meeting. Talk to your neighbors. Bring what you know, learn what you do not, and help us connect the dots. So we thought, if we’re going to connect the dots, we might as well make a game of it. 

That brings us to the Amazing Race.

From September 18 to 26, the Amazing Race Flathead Edition will send teams of two across the Valley on a week-long transportation adventure. Your mission is to get around without relying on a personal vehicle. Walk, bike, run, roll, take the bus, carpool, or get creative. Along the way, you’ll hit local businesses, community organizations, trails, events, and other pit stops while completing challenges that make you actually think about how people move through the Flathead.

Think Roadblocks, Detours, Speed Bumps, Fast Forwards, and Pit Stops, but with a distinctly Flathead twist. One challenge might have you figure out how to get from Point A to Point B using Mountain Climber. Another might ask you to walk a route and spot accessibility barriers. You might have to choose between moving a certain distance or figuring out the fastest or most accessible way to get somewhere. And if you absolutely have to use your car, we’re going to make you tell us why.

At each pit stop, you’ll sign in, complete a challenge, answer a quick question about how you got there, and collect your next clue. Along the way, we’re collecting real information about what it actually takes to move around our community.

The goal isn’t to make everyone give up their car for a week. It’s to make you notice the choices people make every day because of the transportation options they have or don’t have.

Maybe the bus works great for one trip but not the trip home. Maybe a trail gets you almost all the way there and then disappears. Maybe you discover a business you have driven past a hundred times. Maybe a three-mile trip feels completely different depending on whether you’re driving, biking, or walking. That’s the fun of it. You get to play the game, but you also get to see the Flathead a little differently. So bring a friend, pick your route, and get ready for some Roadblocks, Detours, Pit Stops, and probably at least one moment where you wonder why you thought this was a good idea.

The Amazing Race Flathead Edition starts September 18. Come see how far you can get. Can’t wait until then? Come help us make it happen. We’ll be getting volunteers together for our National Day of Service meeting on September 11 from 5 to 6:30 PM. \

And save October 2, too. We’re bringing candidates together for a forum focused on the PSC 5 race, energy, affordability, technology, and growth, including some of the bigger questions coming out of NorthWestern Energy’s next 20-year planning process.

Because these things are connected. The Flathead’s transportation problem is not just a parking problem. It is about whether people can afford to live here and get to work. Whether businesses can reach customers and employees. Whether we can get people where they need to go during an emergency. Whether we can afford to build and maintain the infrastructure growth requires. And whether the people making these decisions are actually planning for the same Valley.

We don’t need four separate communities coming up with four separate answers to problems that cross every boundary we have.

We need people paying attention, asking better questions, and making sure the people we elect are thinking about the whole Valley.

Sources (The Gauntlet: Prove Me Wrong, I Got Receipts)

 Transportation, Streets, Sidewalks & Trails

·       Mountain Climber & Public Transportation

·       Growth, Land Use & Sprawl

·       Housing, Workforce & Affordability

  • City of Whitefish, 2025 Housing Needs Assessment
     2025 Housing Needs Assessment: Useful for housing affordability, workforce, demographics, senior/accessibility housing, and the relationship between housing and the local economy.
  • City of Whitefish, Community Housing: Community Housing
  • City of Whitefish, February 9, 2026 City Council Packet, Housing & Transportation February 9, 2026 City Council Packet
     Includes the City’s analysis of workers living outside the 59937 area and the relationship between housing and commuting.
  • City of Whitefish, Transportation and Land Use
     Transportation and Land Use

·       Wildfire, Emergency Management & Readiness

·       Flathead Lake, Water Quality & Wastewater

  • Flathead Lake Biological Station, 2025 State of the Lake: The 2025 State of the Lake FLBS reports that Flathead Lake remained in excellent condition in 2025, with no consistent signs of long-term deterioration. The report also documents the long-term monitoring record dating to 1977 and identifies phosphorus as the key nutrient limiting algae growth.
  • Flathead Lake Biological Station, Flathead Lake Monitoring: Flathead Lake Monitoring and Research includes current monitoring of the lake and watershed, including emerging contaminants.
  • Flathead Lake Biological Station, Statement on Wastewater: Phosphorus, Wastewater Treatment, and FLBS Explains why stringent wastewater treatment and phosphorus reduction matter to Flathead Lake.
  • Flathead Lake Biological Station, 2026 Open House
     FLBS Hosts Successful Open House Discusses emerging watershed concerns including increasing development around Flathead Lake, PFAS, pharmaceuticals, personal-care products, pesticides, and microplastics.
  • Daily Inter Lake, Lakeside Wastewater Project: Court sides with state in Lakeside wastewater project dispute Useful for the current wastewater controversy and the distinction between community concerns and what state environmental review has found.

·       Open Space, Conservation & Public Lands: These are the current discussions of an open-space bond, conservation easements, agricultural lands, wildlife habitat, water quality, recreation, and the amount of open space lost to development.

·       Roadless Lands, Roads, Public Lands & Wildlife: the 2001 rule is important background, but for the article’s current 2026 discussion, the federal proposal to rescind it should be treated as the current policy fight happening now

·   U.S. Forest Service, Roadless Area Conservation
 U.S. Forest Service Roadless Area Conservation

·   Federal Register, 2001 Roadless Area Conservation Rule
 Roadless Area Conservation Rule, 2001

·   U.S. Geological Survey, Road Ecology
 USGS Road Ecology
 Useful for the relationship between road networks, habitat fragmentation, human access, wildlife, and development.

·   U.S. Geological Survey, Wildlife Friendly Roads
 Wildlife Friendly Roads

·   U.S. Geological Survey, Roads and Wildlife Habitat Connectivity
 Restoring Habitat Permeability to Roaded Landscapes

·   U.S. Geological Survey, Road Permeability and Wildlife Movement
 Permeability of Roads to Wildlife Movement

·   U.S. Geological Survey, Reptile and Amphibian Road Ecology
 Reptile and Amphibian Road Ecology

Energy, Technology & Growth

 Health Care & Transportation Access

·       Parking, Downtown Access & Behavioral Policy

·   City of Kalispell, FY2027 Budget
 FY2027 Budget

·   City of Kalispell, Special Street Maintenance Fund
 Special Street Maintenance Fund

·   City of Kalispell, 50/50 Sidewalk Replacement Program
 50/50 Sidewalk Replacement Program

·   Daily Inter Lake, “Increasing costs straining Kalispell’s road maintenance funds, officials say”
 Road maintenance costs

·   Daily Inter Lake, “Flathead County’s $209M budget means slight decrease in taxes for some”
 Flathead County $209M budget
 Useful for the county’s FY2027 budget, capital projects, public safety facility, roads, emergency services, and the fiscal consequences of growth.

·   Daily Inter Lake, 2025 Mountain Climber Operating Assistance
 2025 Mountain Climber funding notice

·   Daily Inter Lake, 2026 Mountain Climber Operating Assistance
 2026 Mountain Climber funding notice

·   Daily Inter Lake, 2026 Mountain Climber Capital Assistance
 2026 Mountain Climber capital funding notice

·   City of Whitefish, May 6, 2024 City Council Minutes
 Mountain Climber funding and commuter service

  Kalispell City Council, Planning & Current Policy

 Additional Public-Record Sources