late-October City Council meeting<\/a>, officials in Laurel indicated that they had been approached by officials from the Board of Investments months ago about a possible site location. But responding to the state\u2019s request for proposals did not make sense for Laurel, city staff said, seeing as the town does not have a parcel of land within its limits that meets the state\u2019s needs.<\/p>\n\u201cFrom my understanding, they wanted an invitation from the community. And as a municipality, from the city of Laurel, we had no land that would have been able to meet it,\u201d said Kurt Markegard, the city\u2019s planning director, in an interview with MTFP.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Markegard added that the city has an annexation policy for parcels of land that border the city, allowing their owners to be linked to city water and sewer services if they so desire.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cThey approach the City Council. It doesn\u2019t go the other way,\u201d Markegard said, adding that the timeline to change any city ordinances or rules is much longer than the weekslong span that towns had for submitting site proposals to the governor\u2019s administration.<\/p>\n
In the October meeting with City Council members, Markegard hinted at some efforts to unify eastern Montana cities against the state\u2019s approach.<\/p>\n
\u201cI have a message from Bill Cole, and I\u2019d like to read that into the record,\u201d Markegard said. \u201c\u2018It\u2019s very simple. This means our best option is for all the potential eastern Montana communities \u2014 Billings, Laurel, Columbus, Hardin \u2014 to say none of them are going to submit an application on this timeline.\u2019 So that is from the mayor of Billings, Bill Cole.\u201d<\/p>\n
Cole did not respond to questions about that message from MTFP.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Markegard also declined to elaborate on Cole\u2019s message when asked about it by MTFP, saying he only wanted to ensure that City Council members were apprised of all the information he had. But Markegard said that, generally, Laurel and Billings have had similar experiences with the state\u2019s outreach so far.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe haven\u2019t been asked to participate. I think that\u2019s the issue,\u201d Markegard said. Cole, he added, \u201cwanted the same thing, which was a conversation.\u201d<\/p>\n
A spokesperson for Gianforte\u2019s office did not respond to a question Thursday about whether the state\u2019s search for potential sites would be limited to those that filed official proposals.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The Gianforte administration\u2019s monthslong effort to find an eastern Montana location for a new mental health facility drew…\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":381354,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[36],"tags":[157371,182640,182641,182642,179467,210,29753,517,182643,179468,67,132,68],"class_list":{"0":"post-381353","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-mental-health","8":"tag-billings","9":"tag-board-of-investments","10":"tag-eastern-montana","11":"tag-gianforte-administration","12":"tag-hardin","13":"tag-health","14":"tag-laurel","15":"tag-mental-health","16":"tag-mental-health-forensic-facility","17":"tag-miles-city","18":"tag-united-states","19":"tag-unitedstates","20":"tag-us"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@us\/115555342049266507","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/381353","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=381353"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/381353\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/381354"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=381353"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=381353"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=381353"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}