Montana’s State Land Board likes to give lip service to their concern for public input, when making big decisions about managing state lands. The truth is, as Montanans have learned too often, the official public comment period at Land Board meetings tends to be simply an opportunity for Board members to go through the motions of hearing from the public, before voting the way they’d planned to all along.
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The Land Board cancelled their July public meeting, which was supposed to be on July 18th. So that day, Montanans concerned about the Board majority’s tendency to side with Big Coal at the expense of communities came together to hold the Land Board meeting we hope the real Board will one day hold. Check it out on video:
At a mock Land Board meeting in front of the Capitol, “Land Board members” began by following their usual pattern of promoting Big Coal’s interests, but were soon interrupted by clean energy activists demanding decisions about the public’s land be grounded in the public interest – which doesn’t include toxic coal trains or climate change.
The mock Land Board soon came to realize that the best way to achieve a healthy future and a stable economy is to invest in the clean energy technologies of the 21st century – not the boom-and-bust extraction cycles of the past. Here’s hoping the real Land Board soon comes to the same realization!
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