GEORGETOWN LAKE

Neighbors Blue About Montana Governor’s New Neighborhood

By Headwaters News, 7-31-07

Gov. Brian Schweitzer’s new home on Georgetown Lake must be a sight to behold. Gwen Florio’s article in Monday’s Great Falls Tribune paints an inviting picture of the 4,000-square-foot cedar and sandstone house that juts out into a picturesque bay on Montana’s Georgetown Lake with the Pintler Mountains towering in the distance.

Schweitzer paid $2 million just for the land, buying two lots in industrialist Dennis Washington’s Badger Bay subdivision, where the Schweitzer’s four-bedroom, six bath home is the first to be built.

The governor says he’s glad to be making his home among the blue-collar folk of the state--people who herald from Butte, Anaconda and Phillipsburg.

But longtime residents of the area say the governor’s new neighborhood is anything but blue-collar. The Badger Bay subdivision will have 51 homes an lots that range in size from two acres to nine acres, and some of the new homeowners in the subdivision are from areas a little outside the state’s borders, with at least one from China.

And as disgruntled as those longtime residents were about the Badger Bay subdivision, the planned Lakeside at Georgetown subdivision, a high-density development, really irks them. That subdivision on Denton Point, across the lake from the Badger Bay subdivision, calls for lots three-eighths an acre in size, and one septic tank--located just yards away from the lake--will serve the entire subdivision.

Schweitzer agrees with critics’ concern about sewage from the Denton Point subdivision, but remains assured that people will approve of the Badger Bay subdivision.

And if the house becomes a campaign issue for the popular Democratic governor when he runs for re-election in 2008, he can simply remind voters that Franklin Delano Roosevelt, John F. Kennedy and Nelson Rockefeller, all multi-millionaires—were quite popular with blue-collar voters.

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