It was good to be back after the long break. Things went well on our first day with the new crew. The morning started with a discussion in public safety about pollution from the rail yard. The first presentation related to the emission reduction devices that were installed a couple of years ago. At a cost of about $1.2 million public dollars MRL installed what amount to block heaters into the engines. This way they don’t have to idle the engines 24/7 to keep them warm.  It turns out the savings from the upgrade was nearly 1,000,000 gallons of diesel fuel in the first year. That’s right, one million gallons.

I don’t know what they pay for fuel but I would imagine that works out to something like a four month return on investment and an ongoing savings of about $3,000,000 per year. Why did they need to wait for the tax payers to pick up the tab to buy these things for them?  Why didn’t they just do it themselves considering the nearly instant payback? Why didn’t the EPA just require them to install the units considering it cleans our air and saves them millions?

I find that part baffling. It also pushes my corporate welfare hypocrisy button. Even more so considering our afternoon meeting where we approved this year’s HOME and CDBG grants. The CDBG budget was cut something like 35%. Missoula Aging Services was denied their meager funding request while we gave an amount twice our entire CDBG allotment to a company that clearly had the means to do the project without the grant.

Of course, Montana Rail Link is an important contributor to our state and local economy. They employ 950 people, 350 of them in Missoula with an average wage of $62,000. In a way, they are also a green industry when you consider pound of freight per gallon of fuel.  I actually think they are a really great company and I’m glad we have them based in Missoula. But the corporate welfare public money inequity thing just burns me up. It’s our own local example of the 1% and the 99%.

[see MRL response to these comments]

Speaking of which, I heard the county commissioners banned camping on County land today at their meeting. I thought banning camping on all county land was a bit of overkill if they were just tired of looking at the Occupy Missoula camp. They had the authority to remove the occupiers on health and safety grounds without outlawing homelessness.  I hate to jump to conclusions on things like this before having all the facts so I sent a letter with a number of questions. I didn’t get a response.

In other business today we made a little progress on the zoning code update in PAZ. We reduced the required road width on local streets from something like 35’ to 32’. Of course this is still much wider than the existing rule which is something like 28’.  The fire department has been pushing really hard for wider streets.  We removed the requirement for boulevard sidewalks on local streets rated for less than 250 trips per day. We reduced the minimum lane width on the bigger streets from 11 feet to 10 feet.  There are still a few more issues to work through before we send this on to the council.