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My Page: Marjorie Smith

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destination brides

My friend Teresa has figured out how she can pay off the mortgage on her new home on ten gorgeous acres smack in the middle of the Bozeman/Gallatin Valley building boom. She’s borrowing an additional quarter of a million and she’s turning the property into a wedding center.

Welcome to the new economy in the New West! Our farmland’s mostly gobbled up for subdivisions, lumber-milling is long past, and mining was never worth much hereabouts. But apparently there is an unlimited supply of well-heeled brides.
[more]

What are we going to eat when the New West gets filled up?

Two weeks ago the Bozeman City Commission annexed the “Mr. Clean Farm” to the city with initial zoning ranging from single-household low density to residential high density and offices. This vote may have rung the most symbolic death knell in the past 20 years for the Gallatin Valley as the richest agricultural land in the state (or in the Rocky Mountains, take your pick – at one time about 100 years ago, Bozeman boosters billed the valley as “The Egypt of America.”)

I have one question: What are we going to eat when we've finished transforming all the best agricultural land in the country into subdivisions?
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Affordable housing is new commissioner's primary goal

It’s a problem besetting almost all of the boom towns in the New West – as well as many other communities in the nation: how to keep housing affordable to the working/middle class. On February 13, at its annual goals setting meeting, the Bozeman City Commission decided that dealing with affordable housing is its top priority. [more]

J. M. Huber Withdraws from Bozeman Pass

I’ve been a little surprised at the lack of excitement in response to the Bozeman Chronicle’s front page story this weekreporting that the J.M. Huber Corporation has given up its mineral leases in the Bozeman Pass area where they had proposed drilling for coalbed methane. Am I the only one in the whole valley exulting? “Aha! I knew it! I knew we could lick ‘em!�? [more]

Is the New West Going to the Dogs?

One of the main reasons folks settle down in Rocky Mountain towns like Bozeman is for easy access to outdoor recreation. And in Bozeman, it appears, a majority of those folks choose to recreate in the company of their best friends, their faithful companions, their dogs. [more]

Isn't this show a rerun?

Developer Dick Clotfelter – who announced in 2003 that he could create the performing arts center Bozeman has been lusting after for two decades AND locate it in the city’s historic downtown – has announced that he’s giving up on the project. [more]

Let's cut to the chase: Marvin Granger is coming back

I don't know about you, but I am extremely dependent upon my favorite radio station. I wake up to Yellowstone Public Radio and it follows me through the day until -- maybe -- something on public television causes me to shift channels, as it were.

I am bereft when the occasional weather events between Bozeman and Billings knock YPR off the air, forcing me to get my morning news fix from another station. (Although a sizeable portion of YPR's listener/supporters are in the Gallatin Valley, the station broadcasts from Billings where it is connected to MSU-Billings. In recent years, a satellite studio has been added at the Bozeman Public Library to allow for some Bozeman-based programs.)

Because YPR is such a big part of my life, I am disconcerted by sudden changes in its programming. If you are an NPR listener, perhaps you remember feeling a little lost without Bob Edward's wonderful voice on "Morning Edition" a few years back. You'll understand how bereft I felt at the sudden disappearance of the comforting, slightly strained and often unable to suffer fools gladly tones of Marvin Granger. [more]

All the fuss this year about the secular hi-jacking of Christmas has a touch of déjà vu for me. Several years ago I wrote a column for the Bozeman
Chronicle in which I asserted that any holiday dedicated to proclaiming “Peace on earth, good will to men,�? belonged to everyone, regardless of
their religious persuasion – or lack thereof.

Not only did I get in trouble with my feminist friends who wanted me to change the quote to “good will to humans,�? but some religious fanatic (or so
I have to assume) came and tore down my outdoor Christmas decorations. [more]

Traffic

Population increase indefinitely begets traffic woes for our Western towns and one of the options some cities are batting around is the the ever-controversial roundabout idea. Bozeman is one of those cities.

For a few hours last week I felt we might be living in Camelot where everything has a happy ending. We didn't have a Round Table, but it looked like we might get a roundabout and that it would be the best of all possible solutions to one of the most vexing traffic problems created by our prosperity-inducing growth. [more]

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