Ray Ring

Senior Editor

Carlotta Grandstaff, age 53, has scratched out a living as a local journalist for decades, based in the Bitterroot Valley south of Missoula.

She has a husband who got busted for pot (because he’s a disabled Vietnam War vet who needs medical marijuana). She’s been spotted riding a bicycle! And she has a dog named Ole Butts.

She decided to run for a seat on the Ravalli County Commission, as an independent write-in, at first. Talk about a long-shot: The county has been a conservative Republican stronghold for decades.

She based her campaign on a single issue: The county’s population has shot up since 1990, from 25,000 to more than 41,000, as subdivisions sprawl over farmland, and the Republican leadership has laid down for developers.

She took daring positions, calling for government actions to shape developments and the pace of growth, including zoning and impact fees.

The politics got ugly, as she ran head-to-head against a Republican incumbent who was accused of threatening the county’s floodplain administrator. Opposition radio ads lumped her in with “tree huggers and abortionists” and pot-smokers.

And guess what? I take it as another sign of the times in Western politics. In a special election a few days ago, most of the voters went for smarter growth. Grandstaff — and two actual Democrats — won three seats, to form a new majority on the Ravalli County Commission!

The Ravalli Republic says playfully that it was such an upset, they “stole (the race) from the GOP.” The Missoulian calls it “a stunning surprise.”

Now Grandstaff will switch careers, no longer getting by on a few cents per word, taking the county commissioner job that pays nearly $50,000 a year.

For more info, Grandstaff expresses some of her views and qualifications here (with a photo) and here, and all the candidates including her opponent do the same in brief here. A sample from Grandstaff:

The problems resulting from a growing county with no significant land use policies are well known to Bitterrooters: thoughtless development that is incompatible with the surrounding neighborhood, angry neighbors and lawsuits that are becoming more numerous and more muscular.

Being a reporter means having to get the facts straight and listening to all sides of a story. It’s also made me acutely aware of the issues facing Ravalli County, and it’s brought into sharp focus the influence that special interest groups have on county government.

There are three initiatives before the community that together will help put the county’s future on a more solid foundation. They are zoning, impact fees and a streamside setback ordinance. They won’t solve all our problems, of course, because we still need to adopt an air quality protection plan and a water quality district.

A story on the attack ads — which voters clearly dismissed (another kind of tipping point?) — is here.

And if you’d like to see some of Grandstaff’s writing, here are her HCN stories on anxiety about an expanding bio-terror lab, game-farm politics, and the U.S. Forest Service acting like an oppressive Big Brother.

Grandstaff tells the Ravalli Republic that she’s “thrilled” that all three smart-growth candidates won this time:

“Running together on a slate was a political gamble, but I think the voters disregarded partisan politics and chose the candidates they thought best represented their desire for positive change. The voters put their faith in us and now we have to go to work for them.”

And she tells the Missoulian that her county — where she’s lived for 31 years — will be “a very different place from now on.” … Well, considering our area of interest stretches from Washington state to New Mexico, that’s one county apparently switching to a plus column politically, and dozens or hundreds more to go.