"We're closing at the end of the month, so that's how it's effecting us," said Carol Hoffnagle, who opened Studio 12 Art Gallery on Broadway and Pattee Street with her husband in downtown Missoula a little over a year ago.

"In September we felt we were just getting going," Hoffnagle added.

Over the past decade art galleries flourished and multiplied in the Mountain West, as flush tourists and new and moneyed residents in the region snatched up artwork to hang on the region's new wall space. Estimates by longtime gallery owners is that the number of galleries selling original artwork in towns like Missoula and Bozeman has roughly doubled or tripled since the late 1990s.

The abrupt collapse of the real estate industry and the national recession has brought hard times to the art galleries.  

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The Tour de France might come to seem less grueling -- and certainly less murky -- than Greg LeMond's two-year legal fight against the Yellowstone Club, which he resumed this week when he asked a Montana judge to order club owner Edra Blixseth to pay him the final $13.5 million of a $21.5 million settlement, a Bloomberg story says.

The judge granted LeMond's request, but the cycling great, who won the world's top cycling race in 1986, 1989 and 1990, will have to get in line for his money. The Yellowstone Club, which Edra Blixseth only won control of in August after a long and bitter public divorce with former timber executive Tim, filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy on Nov. 10.

In her filing in U.S. Bankruptcy Court in Butte, Montana, Blixseth tallied the club's debts at about $350 million. The biggest liability is $307 million, not including interest, to Credit Suisse Group. The Zurich-based bank loaned the club $375 million in 2005. 

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By Robert Struckman, 11-21-08 | comments (1) | email story | print story

VISITATION DECLINES SPREAD FROM NATIONAL PARKS TO FORESTS

As noted several times in this column, visitation to our national parks has been declining for years, partly because of steep increases in entrance fees and annual passes. While reading these stories, we suffered under the misperception that the problem was confined to the national parks while visitor use of our national forests continued to increase.

Now we know the truth. The wild proliferation of new and increased recreation fees has contributed to a similar if not steeper decline in the public use of public forests. With this aggressive, if not abusive, fee-charging policy, Forest Service bosses have done a stellar job of discouraging people from using their own land, the national forests. 

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Buy Local Blog

The American Independent Business Alliance is urging everyone to "unchain" themselves this Saturday, Nov. 22, by shopping and doing business only with locally owned merchants. More than 200 community groups around the country are participating in the sixth annual event, says the AMIBA, which is based in Bozeman.

There is lots of evidence that spending money at locally owned stores is good for the local economy, because the cash remains in the community to be re-spent rather than being shipped back to headquarters. 

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New West Blog

Writer Lisa Selin Davis asks on Grist this week: “… if McDonald’s is seeing record profits due to inexpensive food, will green housing be the equivalent of a biodynamic, $8 a pound plum?”

Industry leaders say not so much:

“Certainly green building is not a fad, rather, it’s a trend,” James Brew, an architect with the Rocky Mountain Institute’s Built Environment Team, wrote to me. “And while this current economic situation has stalled some projects and limited the availability of capital, the trend is still there.”

Read Davis’ story here.

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Guest Commentary

The Montana Supreme Court finally handed down its long awaited ruling on the so-called “Mitchell Slough case.” Brought by the Bitterroot River Protective Association (BRPA), the appeal challenged the right of “rich out-of-state landowners” to limit public access to the Mitchell Slough. The plaintiffs argued that the Mitchell is a “natural, perennial-flowing stream” and as such is open to access by the public under Montana’s Stream Access Law (SAL). The state supreme court bought BRPA’s argument and reversed a lower court ruling denying public access.

The fact that the lower court found the Mitchell to be man-made while the supreme court found the opposite illustrates the slippery nature of the definition. Like so many legal battles, however, the technical legal sparring in the Mitchell case missed two truly important implications of the decision. 

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