Building a City-State in Missoula

It started when Chuck Kaparich, the cabinet maker, dragged a wooden horse into the mayor’s office. There were four others back at the shop, and now Kaparich only had one question: If he built a carousel--a glittering, organ-thumping carousel--would the city accept it?

Daniel Kemmis remembers looking at the woodcarver and feeling--how to put the best face on it?--annoyed. He wondered how he was going to get Kaparich, no less the horse, out of his office. “Sit down and tell me about yourself,” he said instead.

Kemmis talked to Kaparich for an hour. Then the city created a foundation and found a place to lay out a carousel. The high school opened its wood shop, and hundreds of people signed up for classes. For three years, volunteers poured into Kaparich’s garage to sand and carve and paint.

Restaurants dedicated proceeds. Buttons were sold for $2. Students folded laundry and washed cars. In the end, they sponsored four horses with a donation of 1 million pennies--6,000 pounds of copper.

“You have no concept of what a million pennies is until you see it transformed into horses,” says Kaparich, whose carousel opened last year. “Some people say this is the most rewarding thing they’ve ever done in their lives. But I don’t think people know yet what’s happened to them in Missoula--that they’re a little more civil. . . . that you build communities by building bridges between people, and from that comes a richer place to live.”

For Kemmis, it was an illustration of how living cities work, from the roots up. It was a small example of what it means when people act like citizens, instead of taxpayers.

As a mayor from a state known for its tax protesters and anti-government radicals, Kemmis has become a hot ticket on the municipal speaking circuit--a visionary to a generation of leaders seeking to rebuild the foundations of civil society in their communities and, in the process, reshape the national political discourse.

These communitarians--advocates can be found on library boards in West Virginia, redevelopment agencies in Texas and city councils across the country--foresee a future in which real political power is concentrated less in states and nations and more in “city-states”--regional entities that become economic powerhouses by way of a shared vision and harmonious development plan.

“It’s nothing less than a reclaiming of the human capacity for cooperation,” says Kemmis, a Democrat who left his mayoral job last month for a new platform as director of the University of Montana’s Center for the Rocky Mountain West. From there, Missoula’s philosopher-king hopes to take his healing message to the debates over property rights, the environment, growth and public lands that are fracturing the American West.

The message: With globalization in the world economy, the idea of the nation must make way for more organic forms of government; in America, cities that ally themselves with suburbs and surrounding rural communities can seize a place on the world stage; governments can no longer afford to act as the brokers of uneasy compromise among divergent interest groups; decision-making must spring, like the carousel, from citizen alliances.

“We have too much of a tendency to define how we’re doing politically by how we feel about the presidency or about the national government,” Kemmis said in a recent interview at the Missoula coffeehouse where he has become a morning fixture.

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“What’s most interesting to me is that those places where strength is being nurtured within the body politic . . . tend to be at this point small and local,” Kemmis says. “The key to it seems to be that strength returns when people start learning the meaning of citizenship. You start taking responsibility for making things work.”

In Missoula, for the most part, things do work. The city took its share of hits with the decade’s decline of the wood products industry but has rebounded with big job growth in retail, services and a host of small new entrepreneurships.

Now, Missoulians’ biggest fear is that the city’s idyllic lifestyle will attract floods of wealthy immigrants, driving out those who can no longer afford to live there.

Kemmis’ message has been that Missoula can avert such a future if everyone claims a shared stake. Some have doubts about his municipal dream-building. He has been nicknamed “Mayor Moonbeam” and criticized for spending too much time talking and planning and not enough time doing.

Not long after he announced his resignation, Kemmis recalls, he was walking downtown when a man on a motorcycle yelled: “Boy, am I glad we’re getting rid of you.”

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But interest in renewing the foundations of community and civil society has caught fire in intellectual circles nationwide in recent years, this at a time when declining voter turnout, increasing mistrust of government, reduced ties to churches and civic organizations seem to be the order of the day.

What is unique in the stream of intellectuals calling for civic revival is that Kemmis had a city in his hands for six years. In talks across the country, he uses his two books, “Community and the Politics of Place” and “The Good City and the Good Life,” as vehicles for inspiring urban renewal.

His story of what happened in Missoula starts with a carousel and goes on from there to a mountain, a health clinic, a park and a river.

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Missoula seems an unlikely epicenter for the rise of the city-state. But that Kemmis had a sizable estimation of Missoula’s importance was always clear from the satellite map of western Montana that he kept on his wall at City Hall, with Missoula as its hub.

It is an idyllic university town, nestled in a bowl of the Rocky Mountain foothills, a gracious old downtown giving way to tree-lined neighborhoods filtering out to a suburban mall, fast-food outlets and then a sea of cattle ranches.

The town has 60,000 residents, but Kemmis figured that didn’t tell the whole story. He had the planning department sketch maps of where the local newspaper circulates, who comes in to shop, where Missoula’s banks have extended house loans and ranch financing and small-business start-ups. On that map, Missoula is a Rocky Mountain powerhouse, presiding over an economic empire of perhaps 200,000, stretching up the Clark Fork River and down the Bitterroot River.

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What if you could figure out a good place in all that territory to build factories for all the newcomers to work in and find a way to preserve the open mountainsides that are one of the region’s most striking beauties? What if you could agree with the ranchers up at the top of the Clark Fork River to give up a share of their irrigation rights so everyone downstream would have plenty of fish and clean water?

Kemmis and his supporters started in Missoula. When he was elected mayor in 1989, he already was starting to build a regional reputation for his ideas on communitarianism and pledged to make Missoula “a world-class city.” He built his platform on concrete problems--large unincorporated areas that were using city services but not paying taxes; a busy intersection in a residential area--and ways that stakeholders in these long-running disputes could fashion constructive resolutions.

The carousel, he came to realize, blazed a path of cooperation that could be traveled again. A coalition set its sights on Mt. Jumbo, the grassy ridge that looms above the city, home to a herd of 70 wintering elk. Mt. Jumbo, its owners had announced, was zoned for 360 new houses and soon would have them.

In Montana--home of the “freemen,” a conservative Legislature and Republican governor--simply rezoning the Mt. Jumbo land as open space would be politically unthinkable. So a group of government and civic organizations set out to find the $3.3 million it would take to buy the property.

Last fall, Missoula residents voted 66% in favor of a $5-million open space bond issue that allowed the purchase of Mt. Jumbo and a number of future sites. Individual fund-raising has since raised $1.1 million.

Similar cooperative efforts have rejuvenated much of the Clark Fork riverfront, which has been transformed from a trash dump at downtown’s backdoor into scenic trails and parks. Some of the land the city bought. But many trail easements were donated by businesses and landowners.

Botanist John Pierce and volunteers labored for four years to reintroduce native grasses and shrubs at the new park along the river.

“The problem was, there was no money, so the whole thing had to be done for free,” Pierce recalls. “Basically, this way, it becomes the community’s. It’s the community that builds it, and the community takes possession of it. People got their fingernails dirty. They did it. They made it happen.”

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Downtown Missoula, virtually boarded up when Southgate Mall opened in the 1970s, is a bustling urban core again. Many of the mainstream retail shops are gone, but in their place are artfully restored coffeehouses, restaurants, galleries and specialty shops. The city rejected the idea of federal urban renewal programs and instead encouraged the downtown merchants’ association to design its own revitalization plan in cooperation with the city. Five hundred trees were planted along the sidewalks and riverfront.

The redevelopment agency director, Geoff Badenoch, has been a key partner of Kemmis’ in engineering the transformation.

“I didn’t really get to know [Kemmis] very well until one time I heard him make an address at a law school,” Badenoch recalls.

“He was talking about politics as if it was something that really mattered, that politics was more than something you just used to entrench your position on an issue, to take a stand. He was talking about politics in the sense of its original meaning, as the polis, about how every citizen was an individual, but every citizen had a vested part in where they lived, and indeed, the fulfillment of themselves as citizens came about only through their participation in the community.”

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As the national debate over health care reform unfolded, Missoula turned its attention to what had long been one of its most troubling dilemmas.

In a 1992 national survey, Missoula’s level of medical indigence--more than 20% of the population couldn’t afford health care--was the 45th worst among large rural communities. That news prompted an unprecedented meeting among city officials, doctors, hospitals and welfare administrators.

Early meetings broke down along the same lines that have plagued the national debate: Government didn’t have money to pay for indigent health care, and medical providers feared they quickly would be overwhelmed once they opened the floodgates to the poor.

The result was Missoula’s Partnership Health Center, in which a downtown clinic staffed with volunteer doctors and paid physician assistants oversees health care for 9,000 people a year--most near the poverty level.

The city’s two hospitals provide inpatient, diagnostic and laboratory services, while physicians see those patients requiring more in-depth care for a nominal fee. The program has been expanded to include dental and mental health care.

“It clearly became a community’s response to what the community perceived as its problem,” said program administrator Jeanne Sheils Twohig. “What we found was that the medical community wanted to help the indigent, but no one of them felt they could take on the problem themselves. This gave the doctors an organized, sane way to be generous.”

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In the same spirit, a committee of adversaries sat down recently to discuss the future of the Clark Fork River, a lifeline for agriculture in the upland valleys, a drinking water source for communities along its banks, a repository of toxic mining deposits from upstream and a living river whose continued flow is crucial to the survival of the region’s fishing, tourism and recreation industries.

There were no elected officials on the committee. They weren’t even officially appointed to talk. And with no party willing to give up its stake in the river, saving it from summer dry spells seemed a hopeless enterprise.

But the group in the end fashioned an innovative management plan that allows irrigators with senior water rights to lease them out in years when flows must be augmented to keep the fish alive--a solution that avoids the contentious issue of flow guarantees or the expensive option of buying out water rights.

“When these folks got their heads together, they came up with a remarkably simple, workable resolution that probably individually they never would have come up with,” said Don Snow, director of the Northern Lights Research and Education Institute, a Missoula think tank.

“This isn’t necessarily about compromise. What it may be about is innovation. Because when you bring disparate people to the table, one of the first things you do is you maximize the creativity of the group,” Snow said. “What Kemmis was talking about from the beginning was how politics would be different and much more palatable and much more humane if instead of dividing ourselves into rival camps, we would set our swords down and agree that we really are all in this together.”

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However, the mayor does have his detractors.

“Dan . . . sits back and thinks about things,” said Mark Helean, a restaurant owner who ran against Kemmis in 1993, when he was seeking reelection to a four-year term. “It starts a dialogue in the community, and that’s good.”

But Helean argued that most communities cannot afford such visionaries because the end result divides residents along socioeconomic lines.

“The greenbelts are a wonderful thing, but it drives up the values of properties to the point where it prevents individuals from living there anymore,” Helean said. “Dan’s vision is to create this little utopia, and in doing so, the cost of living there becomes beyond the means of the very community that he purports to serve.”

Don’t get economist John Crocker started on the carousel: With everything else the city needs, he wants to know, why is it spending money on wooden horses?

“You know, I was walking by the carousel one night just last week, and here’s this beautiful carousel, all lit up, and right next to it, here are these two drunks, asking for money,” he said. “Very interesting juxtaposition, don’t you think?”

Kemmis concedes the point, but returns to the fact that the carousel was the city’s idea, not his. “I guess what I learned from that is I don’t think there is any science to predicting what’s really going to capture a community’s imagination.

“Beyond any doubt, there are more people in Missoula who now believe themselves capable of doing more than they thought they were capable of doing, and who believe the community is capable of more than they would have thought it was capable of. I think that may be the test of the health of a democracy: that sense of capacity to do difficult tasks.”

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Profile: Daniel Kemmis

* Age: 50

* Education: Graduated from Harvard University with a bachelor’s in political science in 1968. Enrolled in University of Montana law school after his first legislative term and graduated in 1978.

* Career highlights: Served in Montana House of Representatives, 1975-76 and 1979-84. Ran unsuccessfully for chief justice of the state Supreme Court in 1984. Elected to Missoula City Council in 1987, elected mayor in 1989 and reelected in 1993. Took post as director of the Center for the Rocky Mountain West on Sept. 4.

* Personal: Raised by homesteading parents on a small farm outside Richey, population 600, in eastern Montana. Is married with four children, ages 25, 23, 16 and 12.