Hello faithful readers! Today is Wednesday, July 19, 2023, and here are the topics I am providing commentary about today:
- More Taxes
- All Your Fault
- Abortion, HIPAA & Attorney Generals
MORE TAXES:
According to The Electric and other sources, the Great Falls City Commission voted 4-0 (with Mayor Kelly being absent) “…on their intent to increase property taxes.”
It was also reported that commissioners will finalize property taxes, and other assessments, in August after the city receives its certified taxable values from the Montana Department of Revenue.
There are a lot of people, me included, who feel the city has gone too far in increasing taxes and fees. We can fight back by voting “No” on the safety and bond levies in November. We can also elect two new people and a new mayor to the commission who will not be a rubber stamp for the city officials.
City Commissioner Rick Tryon, who is up for reelection this November, gave a lecture about the budget and raising taxes saying, “If you want to cut things out, you gotta understand you’re going to also be cutting services so you gotta tell me what services you wanna cut.”
The city could cut 5-10% across the board to balance the budget. It’s not the citizens, but Tryon, who is getting paid to do the work and find places where the city can save money. He’s supposed to be the citizens’ advocate. He has failed. Tryon has become lazy and is afraid of upsetting city department heads and employees.
The city commission needs members who have a backbone.
Please read the full report from The Electric HERE.
ALL YOUR FAULT:
A faithful reader sent me THIS PHOTO of a vehicle in Great Falls with a sign on the passenger door that read:
If You Voted For Biden This is All your Fault
It’s pretty safe to display a sign like that in MAGA Montana. Donald Trump beat Biden in Montana by about 17 percentage points which was about 99,000 votes. In Cascade County, Trump beat Biden by about 20 percentage points.
There are several arguments I could present about “This” and the “All your Fault” claim but I will bring up just one. The greatest accomplishment by Joe Biden was beating Donald Trump. Some called it a landslide with an Electoral vote of 306-232. Historians will probably write that Biden saved our country.
By the way, I believe Biden and Trump are too old to be President.
ABORTION, HIPAA & ATTORNEY GENERALS:
Back in April, the Biden administration proposed new health privacy protections to prevent protected health information from being used to investigate or sue people who facilitate abortions.
According to the U.S. Department of Health & Human Services (HHS):
On April 12, 2023, the Office for Civil Rights (OCR) at the U.S. Department of Health & Human Services (HHS) issued a Notice of Proposed Rulemaking (NPRM) to modify the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) Privacy Rule to strengthen reproductive health care privacy. OCR administers and enforces the Privacy Rule, which establishes requirements with respect to the use, disclosure, and protection of protected health information (PHI) by HIPAA covered entities (health plans, health care clearinghouses, and most health care providers) and, where applicable, by their business associates.
Now Republican Attorney Generals (AGs) of 19 states (including Montana) have come out against this proposed rule change.
Probably the best explanation of why this is on the Republicans AGs radar was the following from Roger Severino, who served as the head of HHS’ Office for Civil Rights under former President Donald Trump and is now vice president of domestic policy at the Heritage Foundation.
Politico reported:
Yet Severino and other conservatives insist the proposed rule already oversteps federal authority, violating both the Administrative Procedures Act as well as the U.S. Constitution.
“If someone says, ‘I’m going to kill myself’ or ‘I’m going to kill somebody else,’ medical providers are allowed and in some cases required to disclose that information to law enforcement,” he said. “But if there’s an imminent threat to an unborn person in a pro-life state, this rule would prohibit the provider from disclosing that information to save that life. They’re creating an abortion exception to the HIPAA regime for the sake of pleasing the left base that Biden and Becerra (Xavier Becerra is the Secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services) answer to.”
I think we should all be terrified that an AG in our home state could request our health records from another state to see what kind of medical treatment we had there. That’s crazy.
After all this jockeying since the proposed rule has been released, I imagine this issue will make its way into the court system. As we have seen with Roe, anything can happen.
See the White House Fact Sheet HERE. See the proposed rule from HHS HERE.
Watch MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow talk about the issue HERE.
The Western Word 
It isn’t just the attorneys general who are acting like dictators. It’s the entire current GOP, in my view. Alarm bells should be ringing in everyone’s heads.
On the tax issue …
I had a question about the proposed public safety levy and properties in TIF districts, as to whether the additional tax those properties would have to pay would actually end up with the City general fund to pay for the new cops and firefighters, or end up in the TIF fund to benefit the TIF district and the businesses/properties in its border. So I asked via the new safetyinthefalls website, and manager Doyon responded.
The short answer is that for our five TIF districts none of their new tax money would be paying for the new cops, firemen, or fire stations. By state law all the money for new voted mills ends up in the TIF fund.
Kind of a disappointing answer as far as everyone paying their fair share for the new safety resources, especially considering that manager Doyon also made a statement during the June 24 town hall to the effect that business owners would be the biggest beneficiaries of the additional resources. But that’s state law. This also means the 103.75 mills they are asking us home owners for is necessarily higher than it would otherwise be if everyone was paying – the remaining taxpayers still have to cough up the $10.8 million somehow.
I guess having downtown Great Falls and the west bank rejuvenated are good things, and the industrial TIFs may be good at least for those developers, but this proposed new safety tax makes the true costs of TIFs glaringly apparent – higher taxes on you, me, and all non-TIF district property owners. On top of all the other property tax hikes we know we are going to see: State share increase, County safety, the new increases the commission just voted last night, Library, and who knows what other increases the County will find necessary. At least GFPS talks like they’re holding the line.
Great information. Thank you. -JmB
The idea that an AG can claim jurisdiction over your body and mind even when you’re out of state and doing something completely legal in that other state is frightening.
What’s next? Someone from Wyoming or North Dakota comes to Montana and smokes a joint or two over a weekend, and then goes home to find themself prosecuted because they did something that would have been illegal back home? A guy visits a legal brothel in Nevada and then comes home to Montana to find Austin Knudsen crawling all over him?
These AG’s want to be dictators of the entire USA over every aspect of your personal life and thought no matter where you are, just because you live here. All while screeching about Federal overreach.
Easier for Austie to get his name in the news by picking on pregnant women and trans people for what they do in other states than by doing anything about actual local Montana problems like fentanyl, apparently.
The term that you used to describe the AGs as “dictators of the entire USA” is spot on. Thanks, JmB