The Missoula City Council will hear arguments later this month on a proposal to completely ban camping in city parks — just three and a half months after council, responding to growing homelessness amid an affordability crisis, passed controversial rules regulating where and when urban camping is allowed.

The council is slated to take up the proposal during its October 23 meeting followed by a vote on November 18, Council President Amber Sherrill told the Missoulian. The proposal comes from council members Bob Campbell and Sandra Vasecka, who comprise the council’s comparatively conservative wing.

“Frankly, we are allowing camping in the parks when we don’t have to,” Vasecka told the Missoulian.

Vasecka and her council colleagues previously had to allow it to some degree because the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals, in 2018 and again in 2022, had deemed outright bans unconstitutional, preventing cities around the West from enforcing such laws. One of those cases, out of Grants Pass, Ore., was appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court, and the court’s pending ruling loomed as Missoula City Council, after weeks of contentious debate and late-night hearings, passed its urban camping law in June.

Just three days later, on June 28, SCOTUS reversed the 9th Circuit, allowing municipalities to penalize people for sleeping outside, even when no shelters are available. Campbell told the Missoulian that banning camping in city parks would, paradoxically, make it easier for the city to authorize a designated area where houseless individuals can camp.

The current ordinance bans camping on city land from 8 a.m. to 8 p.m. and restricts people from camping within certain distances of schools, businesses, shelters and waterways. The rules were opposed by most members of the public who commented during the city’s hearings as well as by city homeless services providers and two members of the council.

But the most vocal supporters of restricting so-called urban camping have said the new law is insufficient and poorly enforced. Some of those people have formed a group, No Camp Missoula, that is advocating for a total camping ban. They’re fundraising, distributing yard signs and petitioning via Change.org.

“We are a rapidly growing volunteer group of residents, park users, park neighbors and business owners in Missoula that recognize there is a houseless sheltering situation that requires a creative and compassionate solution,” the group says on its website. “However, we have very serious concerns about the impacts of a new ordinance the city passed on June 25, 2024 that currently allows overnight houseless camping in 10 residential parks (and potentially numerous others).”

Backers of a ban say the presence of people camping in parks creates a public safety risk and threatens property values — and they post to No Camp Missoula’s private Facebook group photos of campers’ belongings strewn across basketball courts and lived-in vehicles parked near bus stops, for example, as evidence.

In April, the Missoula Economic Partnership released a report on the economic impact of homelessness in Missoula that concluded that the population that bears the brunt of the impacts — on physical and mental health, economic stability and so on — are the homeless themselves. The study further concluded that most of the city’s homeless residents are from Missoula — not in-migrants attracted by lax regulations.

“While there is a common misperception that people experiencing homelessness come from elsewhere (and thus are not members of the community), this is largely untrue,” the study reads. “The vast majority of a community’s homeless population was last housed in the community where they are homeless. Studies regularly find that roughly 90 percent of people experiencing homelessness live in the state where they became homeless, and roughly 75 percent were last housed in their current community. Missoula data suggest a similar pattern here.”

The city of Bozeman this week passed its own measure to ban urban camping in city limits. Some restrictions will begin immediately, while the full ban takes effect in November of 2025. Billings and Helena have also taken up similar measures since the SCOTUS ruling.

Cat shootings’ connective tissue

Sean Carter is a self-professed map geek. He’s also a research scientist in the University of Montana’s conservation department and a resident of the Rattlesnake. And, almost two years ago, he thinks his cat Hobbes was shot.

Hobbes survived, albeit losing a leg in the process. And Carter heard different opinions from different veterinarians about the genesis of the cat’s injuries. But at least one vet said the cat had been shot. The X-rays, which show almost complete obliteration of one of Hobbes’ hinge joints — what we might call an elbow or knee — seem to support that conclusion.

A few months later, in May 2023, Hannah McCray, another Rattlesnake resident, found that her cat had also been apparently shot. Her husband found the cat stumbling back into the house, visibly injured and aggressive. When the couple took the cat to the emergency vet, imaging showed a clear entry and exit wound and shrapnel in the cat’s abdomen. The creature was lucky to be alive.

“There was a very small percentage chance of it not hitting a vital organ,” she told The Pulp.

McCray and her husband canvassed the neighborhood for information. In their efforts, they met someone whose cat had faced similar injuries not long before — Carter.

These incidents add some connective tissue to a strange saga of cat shooting in Missoula’s Lower Rattlesnake. In September, neighborhood posters and news reports revealed that two cats had been shot in strikingly similar incidents, both seemingly involving a specific brand of .22 caliber air pellet. One cat survived. And Missoulian archives show that the neighborhood saw several cat shootings in 2008 in roughly the same area as the two shootings this year. In both cases, the cats were struck by pellets.

The suspected shootings very well might not be related. Carter and McCray live farther up the creek, while the residents from this year’s shootings live closer to the interstate. And one might wonder how much attention the shootings would get outside of the cloistered Rattlesnake.

But there’s enough commonality between the apparent shootings for Carter, at least, to be interested in using his geospatial analytics skills to begin figuring out what connects the incidents, beginning by tracking the wanderings of Hobbes.

“I was having a science geek moment and I was like, ‘Huh, I could, with my skills, do this. And that would be just kind of a fun story. And the reward would be great if I got it.”

His investigation is in its fledgling stages. The Pulp, for our part, is inclined to help Carter dig. Either way, we figure we’ll tell the story of a serial cat-shooter or of the particular neuroses of Missoula’s upper tax brackets. Feel free to reach out if you have information. (For the record, this reporter lives in the Lower Rattlesnake).

MRA transparency measure stalls

The Missoula City Council this week made good on an earlier committee vote and blocked a proposal to require council approval of expenditures by the Missoula Redevelopment Authority in excess of $50,000.

The proposal, brought by councilmembers Daniel Carlino, Kristen Jordan, Bob Campbell and Sandra Vasecka — a coalition that includes both the council’s most strident progressives and most visible conservatives — was designed to create more accountability and transparency for the body that oversees urban renewal in the city with tax increment financing dollars. The ordinance failed by a vote of 7 to 4.

“Right now we have an unelected board that is spending millions of dollars a year of people in Missoula’s tax money, and Missoulians can’t vote them in or out,” Carlino said at the meeting. “They have no say in how that money is going to be spent.”

But the majority of the council voted against the proposal, which had previously failed to garner majority support in a budget committee meeting earlier this month.

Opponents said subjecting redevelopment projects to the whims of an elected political body would threaten investment and create instability for developers.

“I don’t think we’re the most predictable force out there when someone is making a huge investment in something,” Councilmember Gwen Jones said during the budget committee meeting.

The ledger #️⃣

65%

Proportion of Missoula’s homeless population that is “chronically” homeless, according to a Missoula Economic Partnership report from earlier this year.

The week ahead 🗓️

Three Missoula-area legislative candidates — incumbents Ellie Hill and Mark Thane and newcomer Devin Jackson, all Democrats — are attending a candidate forum at the Missoula Public Library on Friday at 4 p.m.