Viewpoint: The adult in the room is Jennifer Savage
Eric Gabster
To paraphrase H.D. Thoreau: it’s one thing to put castles in the air, another to build foundations under them.
Progressive viewpoints can be visionary, but effective politicians know how to negotiate those aspirations through calcified attitudes and suffocating bureaucracy.
Jennifer Savage makes visions happen by listening and working with others. That’s how a politician represents constituents, and a majority of Missoula’s Ward 3 primary voters cast their ballots for Savage’s ability and skill to represent them.
I helped put her opponent in office, and I’m very disappointed that he has yet to figure out how to make visions a reality by doing the hard work of politics, which, unless you’re an autocrat, involves working with other people. Anyone can spin aspirational visions; only leaders move ideas forward.
Ignoring this reality are recently published comments by Montana House Rep. Zooey Zephyr. She asserts very misleading suggestions in desperate attempts to hang Jennifer with generalities.
Rep. Zephyr suggests that individuals who provide housing services to Missoula visitors are somehow “greedy and self-serving” in “hoarding housing.” That attack ignores the fact that short-term rentals comprise only about 1.5% of the city’s housing stock, and are heavily regulated by city code. Plus — those visitors spend large sums that keep small businesses open and scores of service workers employed. To attack Jennifer’s support of visitors’ ability to select regulated housing options is to attack part of a major pillar of the city’s economy.
Further, it is tone deaf of Rep. Zephyr to attack the City Council as a whole and Jennifer by extension for supporting the preference of a vast majority of Missoula citizens to enjoy peaceful, safe parks and the riverfront by mitigating encampments. Parks and riverfronts are for everyone to enjoy in peace, they’re not recovery zones. Moreover, likening security in public parks to ICE raids is a gross overreach if you want to be honest about the focus and intent of each.
Finally, it is just bonkers for Rep. Zephyr to assert some evil intent by City Council and Jennifer specifically, to persecute the homeless.
Has the HD 95 Rep. ever attempted to balance a city budget when state and federal funds dry up? Does Rep. Zephyr acknowledge that Missoula continues to supports the state’s largest homeless shelter (Thanks, Poverello!)? Does she know that Mayor Davis’ Housing Sprint program already has housed 60 people from the Johnston Street shelter? And unlike Bozeman which just outlawed it, Missoula successfully enhanced its urban camping ordinance that allows permitted camping in RVs and cars.
Moreover, since 2020 Missoula supported construction of 33 units of transitional housing and nearly 500 units of permanently affordable housing, with a pipeline of new projects underway.
None of this ends homelessness. However, it demonstrates leadership in the trenches, working to improve desperate lives with available tools.
That’s how Jennifer Savage works: in the real world, putting foundations under visions.
There’s good reason seven of twelve City Council members, Mayor Davis, all three County Commissioners and I support Jennifer Savage for Ward 3 representative. She’s the adult in the room who will get the job done — for everybody.
Eric Gabster lives in Ward 3