Daily Digest
Ty's Take The Yellowstone County sheriff's office is asking for more money again, and this time the numbers actually add up—they're hiring, not padding. That's the kind of budget request worth taking seriously in a county that's grown as
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Ty's Take A woman out in western Montana got taken by people who knew exactly how to sound trustworthy over a screen, and now she's doing the hard work of telling other people what to watch for—which is the kind of thing that matters more
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Ty's Take There's something about a thin news day in early July that reminds you what actually holds a town together. The obituaries tell you who built this place—the ones who came here to work in the refineries, who ran businesses on Minnesota Avenue, who
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Ty's Take When a man with means decides to bet on the survival of local newspapers, it's worth asking why—and worth listening to the answer. David Hoffmann's millions flowing back into the papers that serve towns like ours isn't charity so
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Ty's Take A former militia leader admitting to child sex abuse, closing arguments in a nursing home case that left families angry and grieving, and the kind of slow summer news cycle that usually means people are too busy living their lives to read much—that's
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Ty's Take The state fine landing on the animal shelter for that meth lab mess isn't just about one building or one bad decision—it's a reminder that repeated warnings only work if somebody actually listens, and that we all pay the price when
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Ty's Take The state education board's approval of MAST as Montana's new statewide assessment comes with conditions attached, which is the only way these things ever work in a state as divided as ours on what kids ought to know and how we measure
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Ty's Take Montana's water picture is getting harder to ignore, and the state's decision to expand its Mesonet stations—those automated weather and soil monitors scattered across the landscape—is the kind of quiet preparation that usually means someone's worried about what&
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Ty's Take We're heading into the Fourth of July with the nation's 250th birthday on the horizon next year, which means someone in town is already thinking about what Billings does when we mark a quarter-millennium. That's the kind of thing a
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Ty's Take Randy Hafer's electric bills run about thirty bucks a month, which tells you something worth knowing about how this region's going to have to think about energy in the years ahead—not as an either-or fight between the old economy and the
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Ty's Take A hundred fifty years is long enough that most of us think we've settled the hard questions, but the Little Bighorn centennial coverage this week reminds you that some ground—literal and moral—stays contested in Montana. The photographs, the tribal reflections, the careful
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Ty's Take The museum funding cut stings because it always does—we trim the things that make a place worth living in, then wonder why our kids leave. But there's something worth watching in how the county's threading this needle: they're not