Great Falls Tribune: Celebration marks start of clean-water project
A Friday event celebrating the Rocky Boy’s/North Central Montana Regional Water System marked the first step in a project expected to serve clean drinking water to about 50,000 people in northern Montana.
The “Turning on the Spigot” celebration in Havre commemorated the opening of the North Havre County Water District, which will deliver clean water to homes in an area that had to rely on bottled drinking water for two years.
Great Falls Tribune: Homeland Security Secretary plans visit to Havre, Great Falls
Department of Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano will travel to Great Falls, Sunburst and Havre next week to visit with Montana senators and law enforcement officials about Homeland Security’s efforts to secure the northern border.
Specific details of the trip haven’t been finalized, but a department news release said Napolitano will be in Montana Tuesday and Wednesday before flying to Chicago.
New York Times: The Well-Grounded Senator
Every 15 minutes of a senator’s waking life in Washington is fully scheduled with meetings, hearings and votes, and much of the rest is devoted to a frantic search for money to fuel the next campaign. “Of any free time you have, I would say 50 percent, maybe even more,” is spent on fund-raising, Senator Tom Harkin of Iowa told the New Yorker recently in a scathing portrait of an overstressed and utterly ineffective legislative body, one that measures acts of real significance in the single digits per term.
Great Falls Tribune: Great Falls legislator speaks at Senate session on levee requirements
WASHINGTON, D.C. — A Montana state lawmaker, Rep. Bob Mehlhoff of Great Falls, spoke Wednesday to the U.S. Senate Homeland Security Committee at the request of Sen. Jon Tester, D-Mont.
Mehlhoff, a Democrat, expressed alarm at the prospect of communities being forced to foot the bill for expensive certification of flood levees or face dramatic increases in flood insurance rates.
Billings Gazette: Guest opinion: Why hunters, anglers support Tester’s clean-energy bill
With national media dominated by BP’s cleanup effort in the Gulf Coast and images of dead fish and oil-fouled birds and beaches, advocates of a new domestic energy future have had little to cheer in recent months.
Outside of the hullabaloo of the BP fiasco, Sen. Jon Tester has found a bipartisan path forward for a clean-energy economy. The Clean Energy, Community Investment and Wildlife Conservation Act co-sponsored by Sen. Harry Reid, D-Nev., and Tester and in the House by Dean Heller, R-Nev., provides a road map for developing clean energy from the public lands that comprise nearly 30 percent of Montana.
Washington Post: Some senators expected to block Postal Service's proposal to limit mail delivery
Sen. Jon Tester (D-Mont.) said Wednesday that senators who oversee the U.S. Postal Service’s budget will block a proposal by the head of that agency to drop Saturday mail delivery.
Postmaster General John E. Potter has urged the change to five-day mail delivery, saying that the cash-strapped post office won’t survive without such a fundamental change to its operations.
Talk Radio News: Ex-Arlington National Cemetery Head Leaves Senate Panel Scratching Heads
Senate Homeland Security member Sen. Claire McCaskill (D-MO) had harsh words for former Arlington National Cemetery Superintendent John Metzler on Thursday, asking him if family members will be sure that they are “standing at the real grave site of [their] loved one.”
Metzler ran the historic military burial ground for almost two decades. A recent investigation by the Army revealed that as many as 6,600 graves had been mismarked.
Billings Gazzette: Signing of tribal law act welcomed
A U.S. senate panel approves $150,000 to establish a loan fund in Whitehall for ongoing recovery from a massive 2009 fire that destroyed several buildings in the business district.
Helena Independent Record: Letter to the Editor: Reform a success!
Republicans, Democrats, Independents — no matter your political leanings, the president works for all of us. President Obama has now done a great job reining in the shockingly bad practices of big Wall Street banks and financial houses.
Associated Press: Senator: Panel will block mail delivery cut
WASHINGTON — Sen. Jon Tester says the lawmakers who oversee the budget of the post office will block a proposal to reduce mail deliveries to five days a week.
The Montana Democrat said eliminating Saturday deliveries would be a hardship on people living in rural areas without producing major savings for the Postal Service.
