Daily Digest
Ty's Take Most towns measure their summer by when the beer gardens open and the tourists show up. Billings measures it by ZooMontana events—when you know the whole city's about to tear itself loose for a few hours and remember why living here beats about
Daily Digest
Ty's Take Three high schools walking their seniors across the stage this week, and you see it every year—the relief on parents' faces, the kids grinning like they've already figured out what comes next. But the real story's quieter. It's
Daily Digest
Ty's Take TJ Comstock built seven hardware stores across Montana, but he's closing the Billings location where it all started—and that's worth thinking about. You can read it as a business story, sure, another Main Street shift as retail changes shape. But it&
Daily Digest
Ty's Take When a man pleads guilty to meth charges after being swept up in a controversial police raid, when two scientists from one of the region's most sensitive research facilities face federal charges, and when the county sheriff's office is searching for interim
Daily Digest
Ty's Take A doctor from the Blackfeet reservation blowing the whistle on a clinic dispensing tens of thousands of pain pills—that's the kind of story that sits heavy on you, because you know the math by now. Those pills don't disappear. They get
Daily Digest
Ty's Take The cardboard recycling program gets the axe while a tribal health clinic faces hard questions about opioid distribution—two stories that show how every decision, even the small ones about what we throw away, ripples through a region that's still learning to take care
Daily Digest
Ty's Take There's something worth sitting with in the Scare Ladies nonprofit paying off lunch debt for kids graduating out of Helena schools. Not the feel-good angle—though that's real enough—but what it says about who we are out here. A bunch
Daily Digest
Ty's Take Lockwood sent 112 kids out into the world on Sunday, which means 112 families sat in folding chairs squinting into the sun, wondering where the time went. That's the math of a graduating class in a town that's mostly known as a
Daily Digest
Ty's Take Chris Kukulski's goodbye to Billings is the kind of thing that sticks with you in a town this size—a man who helped build something here deciding it's time to build something smaller, somewhere quieter. You don't hear that story
Daily Digest
Ty's Take There's something worth noticing when a new coffee shop opens downtown in the same week the water's running mean and high across the region—it's the difference between what we're building and what we're bracing for.
Daily Digest
Ty's Take Zoning fights usually bore people senseless until they can't afford their rent anymore. The city council's pushback on duplexes in N3 neighborhoods says something true about how we're thinking—or not thinking—about growth in Billings. We've got
Daily Digest
Ty's Take The city's move to stand up an airport authority is the kind of structural housekeeping that doesn't make anybody's blood pump faster, but it matters more than the headline suggests. Billings-Logan is already the busiest airport between Denver and