A Missoula City Council committee voted this week to approve an expenditure of $515,000 over five years for the police department to obtain 120 new TASERs — the so-called less-than-lethal energy weapon — and other services from Axon Technologies.

“The old models have to have two probes to make connection, so if you miss one or you have a clothing disconnect, it’s kind of useless,” Missoula Police Chief Mike Colyer said during a meeting of the council’s Public Safety, Health and Operations Committee Wednesday. “In the new one, you have two probes you can fire individually and the distance is twice as far.”

Axon is also offering the city use of Draft One, an AI-assisted police report writing software, which Colyer said the department is “testing and evaluating.”

“Draft One is a force multiplier for officers, leveraging generative AI and body-worn camera audio to produce high-quality draft report narratives in seconds,” Axon touts on its website.

While the program, which is based on the same technology as ChatGPT, “ensures human officers are responsible for decisions made and actions taken,” Axon says, it can generate “report narratives” based on audio from body camera recordings. A city staff note said the technology can generate about 80 percent of the ostensible first draft of a report.

The American Civil Liberties Union published a report last month raising “significant civil liberties and civil rights concerns” with the potential use of AI technology in writing police reports. Artificial intelligence is still a new and unwieldy technology, and large language models like the one in use here reflect the biases of their inputs, the ACLU says. Replacing an officer’s individual report with something that just rehashes what’s visible or audible in body camera footage also reduces the amount of evidence that can be used in a criminal case, regardless of whether you’re the prosecution or defense.

But “defendants, of course, are not this company’s customers,” the ACLU white paper continues. “This basic reality reveals a systematic problem with the legal system’s use of for-profit companies, whose customer base largely represents one side in our adversarial criminal justice system. As a result, those companies are inherently incentivized to design those products in a manner to benefit that side and to disadvantage a criminal defendant. This problem is only exacerbated when it comes to novel, difficult-to-analyze AI products, which are shrouded in ever more layers of complexity and secrecy.”

Colyer, the police chief, said the city hasn’t made any decisions on using the technology yet.

“I’m pretty cautious about AI and how that might look, but we will consider it,” Colyer said in the meeting.

Adopting a ‘shared vision for growth’

The city council is set to vote on the Our Missoula 2045 Land Use Plan — an expansive document that lays out an overarching philosophy for managing growth and building housing to accommodate that growth in the next 20 years — during its meeting on Dec. 16.

Approval of the plan, which generally calls for a denser Missoula with a greater variety of housing types in all neighborhoods, would then inform the city’s code reform process — the actual mechanism for changing how the city regulates growth and development.

The vote on Monday follows a protracted public engagement process, most recently in the form of a public hearing before the council on Dec. 9.

“This is all about the way in which our community is going to be built out, and to accommodate the needs we have for more attainable and accessible homes, how we address our street types, where we build certain types of homes or commercial development, and really how our community flows,” Mayor Andrea Davis told the council on Monday. “The shared vision for growth requires that Missoula evolve and change, and this plan helps lay out a plan just for that.”

Adoption of the revised development code is expected next spring, according to the city’s timeline. State law also requires that the city reevaluate the plan every five years subsequently.

As The Pulp has previously reported, public response to the plan has generally been supportive, at least in broad strokes. Missoula is in the throes of a well-recognized housing crisis, and the land-use plan calls for adding between 22,000 and 27,500 new housing units in the plan area by 2045. A key tenet of this plan is a prioritization of duplexes, triplexes and other “missing middle” housing that can be added to existing neighborhoods instead of spreading out toward open spaces or farmland.

Commenters at Monday’s meeting also demonstrated substantial support for the plan.

“I’m really excited to see the next steps go forward. Change is going to be hard, but the status quo is not really sustainable for anyone,” said Brett Boval, who described himself as a University District renter. “I’m pretty tired of friends having to leave so they can start families in places they can afford houses.”

The public still evinced some disagreement about things like reduced parking requirements, which can be an impediment to building housing, and emergency egress in places like the Rattlesnake, which will densify under the plan.

“Change is going to be hard, but the status quo is not really sustainable for anyone. I’m pretty tired of friends having to leave so they can start families in places they can afford houses.”

Some others are skeptical of the whole affair. Matts Larson, a Ward 3 resident, said he understands Missoula’s affordability crisis. But he said the plan is perhaps overambitious without considering certain practical realities: How will this development be financed? How will the city ensure a supply of affordable housing without utilizing something like inclusionary zoning, he asked. Will this just be a windfall for developers?

“I think this plan is very ambitious, this is a thing that obviously a lot of effort has gone into, and I applaud the city for doing something,” he said. “I think there are a lot of concerning aspects — first, the plan’s heavy resilience on infill development risks overburdening existing infrastructure. Upgrades to water, wastewater and transportation systems may not keep pace with the growth … and clear funding mechanisms for these upgrades are not well-defined.”

The land use planning process also provides an entree for development interests seeking an audience with the city. Earlier this week, the Missoulian’s Griffen Smith reported that the owners of the historic Old Post hospital in Fort Missoula and the city are at odds over plans for the hospital. The owners of the land, FAE-Wolf, had initially sought to build mixed-using housing adjacent to the hospital and then restore the building with the resulting revenue. The council nixed that plan because of concerns about compatibility with historic designation guidelines.

The ownership group then obtained a demolition permit for the hospital, but suggested to the Missoulian this week they’re concerned that the city might be slow-walking the process. (The city told the paper that it is still in the midst of an extensive review of the potential demolition).

The hospital land is designated as a civic place in the current draft of the land use plan. Max Wolf, one of the owners, told the council at the meeting this week that the hospital should be rezoned to urban mixed-use, low-density.

Doing so will “align the property with other private properties nearby, like Community Medical Center and TrailWest Bank, and enable redevelopment that meets critical needs,” Wolf said. “Workers at the fort have expressed a strong desire for daycare, community spaces and other services. This property can provide those amenities while contributing to Missoula’s broader goals of increasing housing availability and access. Fort Missoula’s history is important, but its history depends on adaptive growth.”

On Dec. 11, the council’s Land Use and Planning Committee considered several amendments to the plan. One significant change, proposed by council member Sandra Vasecka and approved in a split vote, increases the allowed density in parts of the Rattlesnake.

The ledger #️⃣

$1.1M

The possible increase to the Missoula County Public School District’s budget thanks to a 3 percent inflationary adjustment from the Legislature, according to the Montana Free Press’ Katie Fairbanks. Officials discussed the district budget during a Tuesday meeting of the Board of Trustees. The increase may help stabilize the district’s budget after several fluctuations, Fairbanks writes. In February, the district board approved staff reductions and other cuts in light of an $8 million shortfall.

The week ahead 🗓️

The Missoula City Council will vote on the Our Missoula 2045 Land Use Plan during its Dec. 16 meeting, which starts at 6 p.m.
Candidate filing for 2025 elections to the school board and special districts opened today, Dec. 13. Filing for city council seats opens in April.

Find a list of all upcoming city meetings here and county meetings here.