Proactive Planning: How Zoning Enables Efficiency & Sustainable Growth

This summer, Missoula County overhauled and updated its zoning code for the first time in nearly 50 years. But why does zoning matter and what kind of development does the new code enable?

This week, the commissioners spoke with Andrew Hagemeier, senior planner in the Department of Planning, Development and Sustainability, to answer some of these questions. Andrew also gives some history about the origins of the current housing crisis and how the new zoning code* incentivizes housing options while balancing valuable assets like our rivers and agricultural land.

*The County’s new zoning update applies to the Missoula urban area outside city limits, including Bonner, East Missoula and the Wye.

 Links mentioned in this episode:

• Missoula County Zoning Fact Sheet
• Zoning Districts Map
• Current Zoning Regulations
• 2019 Missoula Area Land Use Element

Thank you to Missoula Community Access Television for podcast recording support! 

Thank you to Missoula's Community Media Resource for podcast recording support!

Transcript

Juanita Vero: [00:00:11] [intro music plays] Well, welcome back to Tip of the Spear with your Missoula County Commissioners. I'm Juanita Vero and I'm here with my fellow commissioners, Josh Slotnick and Dave Strohmaier. We're joined today by Andrew Hagemeier, senior planner in the Department of Planning Development and Sustainability. Thanks for joining us. But real quick, over the summer, the new zoning regulations went into effect and it was the first update in 50 years. So start us off real quick, Andrew. Why does zoning exist and really paint the picture? What would our community look like if there weren't rules and regulations?

Andrew Hagemeier: [00:00:47] Yeah, definitely. Yeah. So thanks. Thanks for having me. I did wear this sweet sweatshirt for you guys, My holiday ugly Snoopy sweatshirt that our listeners can't...

Josh Slotnick: [00:00:57] "Ugly" is a stretch. That is a pretty it's an attractive sweatshirt.

Juanita Vero: [00:00:59] A brilliant Gresham blue with some fantastic greens and reds.

Josh Slotnick: [00:01:04] And Snoopy's got this kind of wistful, a little bit melancholy, but kind of profound look on his face.

Dave Strohmaier: [00:01:11] Does the zoning in this area allow such a sweatshirt?

Andrew Hagemeier: [00:01:15] I think so, yeah. You know, it is the holidays. So holiday sweaters are fair game right now. Like during the zoning code, we were working so hard at it. We saw you guys all the time and I hardly see you at all now, so I thought I would wear a fun sweater.

Josh Slotnick: [00:01:30] Nice. Yeah. I think we need to have a new project so we get to hang out. Yeah, that's the only way I spend time.

Andrew Hagemeier: [00:01:35] We're working on it. Well, I'm sure we got something in the wings here, but. Yeah, Missoula County, it was a huge milestone. It's a huge lift to update your zoning code. We completely rewrote the code that was originally adopted in 1976. It was long overdue. So at its core, zoning is an entitlement of property rights.

Josh Slotnick: [00:01:53] What does that mean, entitlement?

Andrew Hagemeier: [00:01:54] Well, there's an analogy that you learn in planning school and other people maybe have heard of it, too, but it's the bundle of sticks. When you own property, you own a bundle of sticks. And these sticks all have different purposes and different things. So your bundle of sticks might be a water, right? Or it might not be a water right property might have mineral rights or it might not have mineral rights. Those different.

Josh Slotnick: [00:02:15] Those rights being a stick.

Andrew Hagemeier: [00:02:15] Is the stick in this analogy. And what zoning does is it gives you a bunch more sticks to put in your bundle. So zoning might say you can have a house, you can have a duplex, you can have a townhome, it might say you can have an ice cream shop. And then if you meet all of the public health and safety standards that bulk and dimensional requirements like setbacks and building heights, then then you have the right to have your ice cream parlor on this property. So that's how it is an entitlement.

Josh Slotnick: [00:02:43] So an entitlement means if you have this stick, you are entitled to take action around creating an ice cream shop or a duplex. But if you don't have that stick, you aren't entitled to do that, right?

Andrew Hagemeier: [00:02:53] Right. Yeah, it's an entitlement. It provides people property rights. [00:02:58] The zoning was developed primarily as a tool to protect public health and safety, and it still has a very valuable role in protecting public health and safety. But it's also used to implement a community's vision. And that's probably the most important role of zoning in today's society in the United States. So if a community gets together and says we want to be this type of community, we want to manage development and growth in these ways, we want to grow that way, not grow in that way, protect farmland over here or have a downtown over here. How you implement that is zoning. [00:03:33] There are other tools that could get you partially there, but the main tool is zoning. It's an important, really important aspect of what local governments do in how we grow as a community over time. It allows you to proactively, you know, if we're getting a little bit more in the details on what zoning can do is it's pretty important for local governments to how we manage our services and how we connect people to those services. It allows us to proactively think about how we're connecting people to services.

Josh Slotnick: [00:04:05] So when you say proactive, I'm guessing you're imagining a future. So ten years from now, 15 years from now, right. Are things going to be like we want to make sure that in 15 years from now, people who live in a certain area don't have to drive 22 miles to get to a grocery store or get their prescriptions filled and we can attend to those needs on this side of those 15, 20 years through good zoning.

Andrew Hagemeier: [00:04:27] Yes, exactly. More directly in terms of what we as local government control, in terms of our budget, things like our infrastructure, that the community needs, like water, sewer, roads, but also goes to the sheriff, the fire departments, schools [00:04:42]. If you are proactive thinking about where growth is going to happen, then you can be ahead of the growth in how you plan for your services and budget for your services. So with the zoning, it allows you as a local government to be more efficient with your services, which saves taxpayers money. Without zoning, you're always reacting, you're not being proactive, you're guessing where growth is going to go. You're guessing at what level of services they're going to need. [00:05:10] It's inconsistent in the application. It creates problems that later have to be fixed. You know, all those things relate to end up planning a less efficient use of our tax dollars.

Juanita Vero: [00:05:20] But can you talk a little bit about how zoning has changed? Various zoning and philosophies have changed because people's needs or modes of of of transportation communication to but have changed? And how does zoning keep up with that?

Dave Strohmaier: [00:05:33] Yeah, well, yeah, if I can just add, what we need is bringing up here with anything we do, it's good to go into it with a fair amount of humility. And I suspect that 50 years ago folks thought that the zoning that we had in place enacted was probably a good idea at the time, but may have had unintended consequences over the decades.

Juanita Vero: [00:05:53] So yeah, exactly.

Andrew Hagemeier: [00:05:54] Yeah. So as I said, you know, a zoning is a tool to implement your vision. So our zoning, being 50 years old, was implementing a vision from 50 years ago. Whole generations of Missoulians had never gotten to weigh in on what their vision for the community was going to be, and that being translated into actual action.

Juanita Vero: [00:06:12] And in a nutshell, can you describe what that vision was?

Andrew Hagemeier: [00:06:15] Well, it's actually not too different from the way we think today. A lot of the values that we have a community are still here. There's just 50,000 more people and things that are important for Missoulians in 1974 were ag[ricultural] land conservation, wildlands, wildlife, economic development.

Josh Slotnick: [00:06:36] One big thing that wasn't the case in 1974 that is now is this housing crisis. Yeah, we weren't on a steep growth curve in 1974 and the cost of housing was pretty affordable when compared to wage level.

Andrew Hagemeier: [00:06:49] Yeah.

Josh Slotnick: [00:06:50] And that whole equation is completely different, right?

Andrew Hagemeier: [00:06:53] So yeah, in 1974, getting back to when Juanita's initial question on how zoning evolves and with the community at that point in time, one of the main purposes of zoning that was the separation of use. At that point in time, the philosophy was we needed to put all the single family homes in one spot in the community, all the industrial and another spot, all the commercial and another spot, all the apartments in another spot. We separated all these things and 1974, what we predominantly did was zoned most of the community for single family homes that worked at that point in time. But what has happened over the decades is we've built predominantly one housing type in our community, single family homes and in today's economy, for whatever reasons it might be, that's not the type of housing we need. And so we've got predominantly one housing type, but it doesn't match what the economic needs are our community. And so part of that was definitely the zoning planners now know that single family, primarily single family only zoning has had negative impacts over the decades of communities, and we're starting to find ways to get more types of housing into our codes, which will allow more housing types of housing to be built and better address the housing needs of our communities.

Josh Slotnick: [00:08:08] What time interval is our new zoning going to be revisited?

Andrew Hagemeier: [00:08:12] I mean, right now in the immediate near term, in the few months, we hope once a year we're coming back not with major revisions but with what we call maintenance updates. And so we're always learning how the code is applied. As people come in with projects, we learn what's working, what's not working. Things don't work out the way we intend them to all the time. Once a year, the hope is come back with maintenance updates and then generally speaking, what we'll do is we'll revisit our community vision once every five years, and that might trigger a more policy related update on a five year cycle. But at any point in time we might realize that, oh boy, there's something big going on that needs to evolve and change and and we need to make a tweak or a change. But zoning isn't supposed to be static. And I think some people think that like, well, my zoning is this and it will always be this. That's not the case. Zoning is supposed to evolve over time, and sometimes those changes for a neighborhood might be very, very small, even over a 50 year period. But sometimes it might change in more significant ways.

Josh Slotnick: [00:09:17] So there's a potentially a little bit of circularity here. 1974 set up a zoning based on segregated uses. If we look at what neighborhoods looked like coming out of the 1950s and sixties, see neighborhood schools, neighborhood bars, neighborhood cafes, neighborhood grocery stores were really common, and it seemed like there was a shift from the idea that a household would have one car and these necessities of life you should be able to walk to get changed in the 1970s. Do you know we're going to really segregate uses the assumption being that it's socially acceptable. It's totally fine that you would drive to commercial, drive to school, drive to all these places. And looking at this new zoning, I'm thinking specifically around this switch up cane area. It seems like we've circled back a bit to how can we make a neighborhood a place where a lot of the things you need you can walk to or get to on a bike or even very short order instead of driving across town and. The integration of uses as opposed to the segregation of uses. And does that feel accurate or am I just reading something into that?

Andrew Hagemeier: [00:10:18] Oh, that's what people in this community were looking for when we talked about the community vision, when we developed what do we want to be? We want more of those things, not less. And so that's why their zoning reflects that. When we were describing it, when we were going through the process and trying to visualize it for people, what are we talking about? When you're talking about mix of housing types, mix of uses, I would point to the area around Orange Street Food Farm that's a part of Missoula that developed largely prior to modern zoning codes. And just in the few blocks around Orange Street, you have apartments, you have single family homes, big single family homes, little single family homes. You have services, a grocery store. All of that in that neighborhood is arguably for a lot of people, one of the most desirable neighborhoods in the community.

Dave Strohmaier: [00:11:04] So, Andrew, by that token, in some respects, we, through our new zoning code, are encouraging a development pattern that evolved and sprung up when there was no zoning. So could that be a counterargument for why have zoning at all if what we're trying to get back to is a state that kind of sprung up organically without that regulatory mechanism?

Andrew Hagemeier: [00:11:29] Yeah, there was zoning when that area developed. It was just very, very simple. Much, much, much more simple zoning. But I mean, we've also changed dramatically as a community. I think the biggest difference is when that neighborhood developed, everyone didn't own a car and cheap land. The car enabled all the urban sprawl that we see today. And so it has changed the calculus quite a bit.

Dave Strohmaier: [00:11:52] So I want to come back to something that you hit on a little bit earlier in terms of this tendency in zoning from a bygone days, which bygone days were within this calendar year before we updated our zoning, where there has been this this tendency to try to segregate uses to exclude certain housing types in some areas and not in others. Can you speak to anything specific in our new zoning code that is encouraging higher density development, maybe more broadly than what we saw previously?

Andrew Hagemeier: [00:12:24] Yeah. And so in the code, the code doesn't necessarily look at it as like higher density. What it focuses more on housing types. If you compared our old code to our new code in terms of what types of housing were allowed, our old code only thought about single family home, a duplex and big apartment buildings. Those were the three housing types that were anticipated in our old code. But if you looked around Orange Street Food Farm, you're going to see tons of other... You're going to see townhomes row homes, you're going to see ADUs. Yeah, all those things.

Juanita Vero: [00:12:55] Accessory Dwelling Units. Can't forget the acronyms

Andrew Hagemeier: [00:12:58] The new code anticipates a huge spectrum of different housing types from ADUs, accessory dwelling units, to duplexes to small apartment buildings to courtyard developments to tiny homes, big apartment complexes, townhomes. My grandma owned a bar and lived on the flat top in Dubuque, Iowa. And so that's allowed in the code. Again, that wasn't allowed.

Juanita Vero: [00:13:24] Why wasn't that allowed?

Andrew Hagemeier: [00:13:25]  I don't know.

Juanita Vero: [00:13:25] What was the reasoning?

Andrew Hagemeier: [00:13:26] It's separation of uses. I think it was considered all the commercial should go over there. And yeah.

Josh Slotnick: [00:13:32] So part of the big change we alluded to is around housing and in our economy all across America and places where people want to live. We've seen over the last couple of years cost of housing just skyrocket, rental vacancies drop to near zero. The phrase housing crisis is used all over the place. It's not just Missoula, it's places like Savannah, Georgia, and Bend, Oregon and Missoula. What happened? How did we get here? Given that this isn't specific to one spot? It wasn't like, well, they just blew it in Bend. What happened that we ended up...?

Andrew Hagemeier: [00:14:01] Yeah, I mean, the housing market is incredibly, as you know, incredibly complex and it has local factors that influence and also global factors. And so lots of reasons why. But one story on how we got to where we are today is you actually go back to the Great Recession of 2008 and the housing crash, and we're still living the effects of that recession, not in terms of all recession, but it's still affecting our housing market today. And how that recession hit the housing market especially hard. In fact, it was the housing market kind of caused the recession and it decimated the the housing industry. So, you know, in some communities, 30 to 40% of the people who worked on construction lost their jobs and it decimated the whole system around housing. So wiped out, developers wiped out the construction companies, wiped out roofers, you know...

Juanita Vero: [00:14:52] Contractors.

Andrew Hagemeier: [00:14:54] Yeah, exactly. Local government was especially hit hard by the recession because you don't have development, You don't need parameters, you don't need people reviewing building permits and permitting subdivisions. And so planners got wiped out. It was a it decimated the system. Round housing. And then as we've recovered from that recession and we moved on, we're obviously no longer in the recession and we haven't been for a really long time that system that was built, because it's not just a industry, it's an entire system of industries that goes into building housing, never fully recovered. It never bounced back to the levels it was once before. The banking industry, which was hit hard, changed their lending practices. There's fewer developers out there. There's fewer contractors out there that are building houses. And after the recession, we never got back to building the number of homes that were actually required by demand. So we've been slowly over the last decade under building what was actually needed. It was a slow crawl to this point when boom, the COVID hit. And for some reason I don't know why, but COVID made the interest rates just fall to the floor, right? The mortgage interest rates were 1.8%.

Josh Slotnick: [00:16:08] As part of stimulating the economy. And the federal government wanted to make capital more readily available so people would invest in real estate and other businesses to keep our economy afloat, which seemed to make good sense at the time.

Andrew Hagemeier: [00:16:20] But it just created this massive surge in demand for housing.

Josh Slotnick: [00:16:24] And I think you mix that with the new virtue of remote work.

Andrew Hagemeier: [00:16:28] So it changed migration patterns. We're starting to see the data that says people are moving to Missoula, Montana, and different levels than we've seen before for different reasons than we see before. And Bryce Ward is sharing information that says those people that are moving here make over $250,000 a year. So they're not the teacher at Lowell Elementary School, are they, you know?

Josh Slotnick: [00:16:48] We really need to work on making sure people who do essential in-person work have places to live or will be importing those folks. And that basically means people drive a long way.

Andrew Hagemeier: [00:16:59] So we got this huge surge in demand because of COVID and migration and the low interest rates, yet factories shut down that made hangars. The transportation network that used to bring nails from China stopped bringing nails from China. They stopped making refrigerators and ovens and so got this huge demand and the system was maxed out. The system was smaller than it was before the 2008 recession, but the demand was massive and we could not build enough housing. And if you look at permit data nationally, even though we're record demand, record low interest rates, the number of permits across the country were flat. What that was showing is that the system was maxed from the boats, bring in hangers over and nails over to the concrete workers, to the framers, to the developers, to the people in the county office permitting development, Northwestern Energy, suppling power. Everyone was maxed.

Josh Slotnick: [00:17:57] Yeah. And this is happening nationally.

Andrew Hagemeier: [00:17:59] Yeah, it's happening everywhere. It's not just here. What's exasperating it here is that we're dealing with this COVID migration and this influx of people. Right. And high amenity, really high quality of life. Community attracts them. Yeah. Yeah.

Juanita Vero: [00:18:14] So how does zoning then address it?

Andrew Hagemeier: [00:18:16] That's awesome question. We we can't fix a lot of this through zoning. You know, obviously we...

Juanita Vero: [00:18:21] Aw, come on.

Andrew Hagemeier: [00:18:22] ...we can't address supply...

Juanita Vero: [00:18:23] Why are you here, Andrew?

Andrew Hagemeier: [00:18:23] ...and freight lines from China. But we, what we can do is we can allow our zoning to... For when the development community can start building more housing. We're opening up the market, we're allowing more opportunities to build more housing types and more locations. And so hopefully.

Juanita Vero: [00:18:41] And those opportunities look like?

Andrew Hagemeier: [00:18:43] Our old code would only allow single family homes in most districts. Our new code in any district that you can do a single family home, you can also do a duplex and you can also do an ADU, small change. But a duplex and a house, they're the same. They look exactly the same. There's really no difference in impact that accelerates as you go into higher density areas where we start to have infrastructure like sewer and water and sidewalks and roads. Then we start to allow Triplexes in for plex's and then we start to allow cottage courts and small apartment buildings, and then we start to allow large apartment buildings as you ramp up the ladder. Right. In terms of density in the different neighborhoods where density is appropriate. And it's going to allow more housing types and more places, it's not going to be a quick fix. It's not going to all of a sudden tomorrow we have thousands of more units, but it's going to allow this slow transition.

Dave Strohmaier: [00:19:32] Is there a way to have our cake and eat it, too? And by that, I mean oftentimes these discussions related to zoning and regulation and increasing our supply of housing stock is pitted against other values, other competing values like natural resource conservation or protecting prime agricultural soils. What can you talk about in this iteration of our zoning code? That might be an attempt on our part to to break down that duality and say we can come close to trying to achieve multiple goals?

Andrew Hagemeier: [00:20:07] Yeah, I'm really glad you brought that up because that's something that's. Really important. I think something that we've actually in Missoula County have set up very, very well. We've done a very, very good job about thinking about the different values. The 2019 Missoula Area Land Use Element, which is our vision for the Missoula Valley that we adopted. It engaged, I think it was close to 2000 different, like touches within the community. Like 2000 different pieces of comment were put together to create this vision and two years of outreach. And we what we did was we identified where these different values really are on the landscape. If you think about what the values would, how they would be reflected in the built or the natural environment. And then we built our zoning code around that. We have identified areas where development really makes sense and we've enabled with our zoning that for that development to occur, that in a way that I think will be of a high quality.

Juanita Vero: [00:21:01] What's an example of an area where development makes sense?

Andrew Hagemeier: [00:21:03] Yeah, the East Missoula area along the Highway 200 corridor, we have a vision of very nice, basically main street mixed-use area and we're going to follow that up with infrastructure and create, I think, a really livable, high quality place.

Josh Slotnick: [00:21:18] Are there examples of places where resource protection was really important and we also simultaneously recognized the need for housing and we're able to kind of blend the two things?

Andrew Hagemeier: [00:21:29] Yeah, So our rivers, right? During the outreach process, we identified our streams and river corridors as not only important to the community for protecting water quality and recreational values. The really high priority is for people that live here. But we also identified them as basically highways for wildlife, and people want to be able to look out their window and see elk on the side of the hill on Mount Jumbo. That's important. As I point. We're looking up there to see if we can see them right now.

Juanita Vero: [00:21:58] They haven't been very active today.

Andrew Hagemeier: [00:22:00] Yeah, they're usually out in the morning.

Dave Strohmaier: [00:22:01] What do you mean? I see a five point up on the crest.

Andrew Hagemeier: [00:22:05] So we created setbacks from our rivers to protect those the hydrological system, the water quality to the recreational values, but also to keep development off the riverbanks, to protect those areas. They're important as highways for wildlife. So that's one example. Another area that we did is out in the the Grass Valley area. That's what I was where we're the primary focus is agriculture. You know, there's whole areas that are primarily zoned for agriculture. It's intended to preserve those systems, agricultural systems in those areas. In those areas, if you if you wanted to develop, you have to preserve some agricultural land, but you get a bonus, you actually get an extra density to do so.

Dave Strohmaier: [00:22:50] Are there other places in the state that you've heard of or during something as forward thinking is that.

Andrew Hagemeier: [00:22:55] Yeah, there are other places in the, you know, the Flathead County uses PUD process to allow for densities...

Juanita Vero: [00:23:02] PUD means...?

Andrew Hagemeier: [00:23:02] Planned Unit Development. Thank you for acronyms again. But it's so directly linked to our county priorities, our community priorities that it's unique in that respect. Yeah. Where we've identified local agriculture as such a high importance that we were actually what we're doing is we're leveraging the development dollar to preserve agricultural land in a way that gives the development dollar a benefit.

Juanita Vero: [00:23:25] And so what sort of feedback have you received from the development community?

Andrew Hagemeier: [00:23:29] On the on the bigger code? Yeah, you know, it's we've only had a half a building and so we I would love to be able to point to some specific examples of buildings being constructed to be like "That's what it will look like under the new code." It's too early but it's too early for that. But you know, the first line of using a code and when it comes to larger projects is an architect. And so we've been getting feedback from the architects that have been using the code and they are happy. They feel like for an architect who knows how to read codes, they feel like it's really easy to understand and decipher. They understand what we're trying to accomplish, what the vision is, and that. So that's a really important thing. We are finding little things that need to be tweaked, which is actually was always the game plan that we would come back and and tweak it. But overall.

Juanita Vero: [00:24:12] What's the latest tweak. Or just to give listeners an idea of what's tweak-able?

Andrew Hagemeier: [00:24:16] Our our landscaping standards there's a couple catch 22s in there that we didn't quite identify until we started using it. Those types of things just cause headaches for the developer. They cause headaches for us, the people administering the code, they don't necessarily affect the outcome of the project, but it just makes it a little bit more complicated than it needs to be so we can fix those little problems and then it will be much more straightforward. You know, we'll still get the good outcomes that we're looking for. I could waste more way more time on this stuff.

Juanita Vero: [00:24:46] Can we brag about Andrew a little bit? Because you're kind of like nationally known and celebrated and I would love to be able to do that, but I don't have the right words.

Dave Strohmaier: [00:24:54] I think you just did.

Juanita Vero: [00:24:58] But I just want Tip of the Spear listeners to understand what a treasure we have. And Andrew Hagemeier, I don't even know all the letters that go after your name. So yeah, can you let folks know kind of where you've come from?

Andrew Hagemeier: [00:25:10] Oh, yeah, yeah. I'm originally from Missoula. I grew up here, but I did go away to go to graduate school and get a degree in planning. Moved back to Montana and I've been traveling around the state in different communities and Missoula can be a hard community to get back into. Once I finally had enough letters behind my name, I was able to get a job here and move back home. Yeah, I've worked in the public and nonprofit sector and private sector planning and across the state, and as a planner, I feel lucky to work here because the community values the importance of planning that we have. You know, you're giving me praise. I have to give you praise. You have the vision. The commissioners have the vision to to allow us to have such a cutting edge code where other communities might have been a little bit more nervous about it. Our code really is these aren't accolades for me. They're accolades for all of us, including the community members who participated. It really is, I think, right now the most cutting edge code in the state of Montana. And not that it's a competition, but right now I think we're at the top.

Dave Strohmaier: [00:26:10] We will take that.

Juanita Vero: [00:26:11] Not just Montana. I mean... Yeah, we'll take that. Also, the national recognition of these efforts and your work.

Dave Strohmaier: [00:26:19] We are lucky to have you, Andrew. And before we close, as we do with all of our guests, we would love it if you could maybe share with us some nugget of wisdom or a good book you've been reading or...?

Andrew Hagemeier: [00:26:33] Right now for fun, I'm reading The Immortal Irishman, which is a book about Thomas Meagher, and it is amazing and historic. People don't know who Thomas Meagher is.

Juanita Vero: [00:26:43] It's wild, wild, wild.

Andrew Hagemeier: [00:26:46] Yeah, but if you live in Montana, you have to read this book.

Juanita Vero: [00:26:49] I'm sorry, What was the title again?

Andrew Hagemeier: [00:26:51] The Immortal Irishman. Okay. I mean, there's a bar across the street from us right here named after him, the Thomas Meagher Bar.

Juanita Vero: [00:26:59] And there's a great exhibit at the Fort Missoula Historical Museum, too, on Thomas Meagher. Yeah.

Andrew Hagemeier: [00:27:03] When I lived in Helena, his house was just two houses down the street for Oh, of course he didn't live there at the time, but...

Dave Strohmaier: [00:27:11] Well, thanks, Andrew, for joining us today. This has been a great conversation.

Andrew Hagemeier: [00:27:15] Yeah, thanks for having me. I appreciate it.

Juanita Vero: [00:27:16] Thanks so much.

Josh Slotnick: [00:27:20] [outro music plays] Thanks for listening to the Tip of the Spear podcast. If you enjoy these conversations, it would mean a lot if you would rate and review the show on whichever podcast app you like. And if you know a friend who would like to keep up with what's happening in local government, be sure to recommend this podcast to them. The Tip of the Spear podcast is made possible with support from MCAT, better known as Missoula Community Access Television and our staff in the Missoula County Communications Division. If you have a question or topic you'd like us to address on a future episode, email it to communications@Missoulacounty.us and to find other ways to stay up to date with what's happening at Missoula County go to Missoula.co/countyupdates. And thanks for listening.