Montana
Group kicks off signature gathering efforts for Montana abortion access ballot petition • Daily Montanan
The group behind a ballot petition to enshrine abortion access in Montana’s constitution formally kicked off its signature gathering campaign Tuesday, telling supporters it is critical the initiative pass in November if Montanans want to avoid restrictions being imposed like those in Texas and other Republican-led states.
Montanans Securing Reproductive Rights had already started gathering signatures to try to get Constitutional Initiative 128 onto November’s ballot last week in some of the state’s most populous cities, but Tuesday’s event at Mt. Ascension Brewing Company in Helena marked its official start to its effort to gather more than 60,000 valid signatures from Montana voters by the June 21 deadline.
“Abortion is a topic that’s become politicized and stigmatized, but in reality, we all love someone or are someone who’s had an abortion,” said Martha Fuller, the CEO and president of Planned Parenthood Advocates of Montana, one of the organizations that makes up Montanans Securing Reproductive Rights. “We can no longer let politicians threaten access to the lifesaving, essential care that thousands of Montanans need and deserve. Montanans must act now to proactively secure our right to abortion and CI-128 will protect the rights that we currently have for good.”
Speaking to several dozen supporters, members of the group, which also includes the ACLU of Montana and Forward Montana, said they believe Republican lawmakers in Montana will continue to push the bounds of the 1999 Armstrong v. Montana Supreme Court decision that found Montanans’ right to privacy includes a right to abortion access.
They said passing the initiative in November would ensure the legislators do not continue creating laws restricting that access after the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade and put decisions about abortion access back into the hands of the states.
Dr. Sam Dickman, an abortion provider and physician who is the chief medical officer of Planned Parenthood of Montana, was nearly brought to tears as he recounted working in Texas when its abortion ban took effect and seeing patients have to travel to other states for care, and others who were pregnant after being sexually assaulted being forced to carry the pregnancy to term.
He said while the current court precedent has upheld abortion access in Montana, passing the constitutional amendment would ensure that lawmakers or courts couldn’t take that access away overnight. He cited the Arizona Supreme Court’s recent decision upholding a law passed before Arizona became a state as an example of how quickly the landscape can change for patients and providers.
“Montanans deserve dignity; they deserve the right to make medical decisions for themselves and their families, and no politicians should interfere with those decisions,” Dickman said. “I’ve seen what those abortion bans lead to, and we don’t want to see those consequences here in Montana.”
Fuller said the group already had at least 400 volunteers signed up to help gather signatures and promote the campaign. Akilah Deernose, the executive director of the ACLU of Montana, said she believed efforts by the attorney general to keep the group from moving their initiative forward reinforced the group’s stance that abortion access is still under threat, and that has invigorated supporters.
Mikayla Pitts, the voter engagement and reproductive rights organizer for Forward Montana, said in the months the group has been doing voter registration drives on college campuses this year, she’s heard from many students interested in supporting the initiative.
Emma Foster, a Montana State University student, and Lily Madison, a high school junior, both said that younger people they had spoken with were energized by the campaign because it could have a large say in whether they want to stay in Montana for college or their careers.
“Attacks on our fundamental rights are bad for Montana. They cost us students, workers, doctors and businesses, and they make young people like myself feel like the state doesn’t value our rights and who we are,” Foster said.
The group said the signature gathering effort would be focused in Montana’s larger population centers, but that they have volunteers ready to go in more rural parts of the state as well since they have to gather signatures from 10% of the voters in 40 different state House districts.
“I think it’s going to be a volunteer effort like you don’t see with a lot of ballot measures,” Fuller said. “People are really engaged.”
She said the group will not be participating in Thursday’s Law and Justice Committee hearing on the initiative. Republican lawmakers decided to hold the hearing in order to give the measure an up-or-down vote despite the Montana Supreme Court already ruling that the initiative did not need to go through the committee hearing because of the way the law is written and that the committee’s vote will not be recorded on the ballot petition.
“I think that we’ve seen a lot of theater so far around this ballot measure and we are just ready to get to work and leave the theater up to politicians,” Fuller said.
The group said it was prepared to fight any other possible legal battles surrounding the initiative and the validity of the signatures it gathers should they arise, but their hope is to put the matter of abortion access to rest through a citizen-approved amendment to the constitution that legislators cannot change through lawmaking.
“Some legislators come into this town to rip our rights away instead of defending our constitutional rights and embracing freedom,” Pitts said. “Legislative session after legislative session, they push more extreme bans, and we’re tired of it. And we’re going to tell them at the ballot box.”
ci-128
Montana
Montana Lottery Mega Millions, Big Sky Bonus results for May 8, 2026
The Montana Lottery offers multiple draw games for those aiming to win big.
Here’s a look at May 8, 2026, results for each game:
Winning Mega Millions numbers from May 8 drawing
37-47-49-51-58, Mega Ball: 16
Check Mega Millions payouts and previous drawings here.
Winning Big Sky Bonus numbers from May 8 drawing
09-14-18-20, Bonus: 16
Check Big Sky Bonus payouts and previous drawings here.
Winning Millionaire for Life numbers from May 8 drawing
14-16-21-43-51, Bonus: 03
Check Millionaire for Life payouts and previous drawings here.
Feeling lucky? Explore the latest lottery news & results
When are the Montana Lottery drawings held?
- Powerball: 8:59 p.m. MT on Monday, Wednesday, and Saturday.
- Mega Millions: 9 p.m. MT on Tuesday and Friday.
- Lucky For Life: 8:38 p.m. MT daily.
- Lotto America: 9 p.m. MT on Monday, Wednesday and Saturday.
- Big Sky Bonus: 7:30 p.m. MT daily.
- Powerball Double Play: 8:59 p.m. MT on Monday, Wednesday, and Saturday.
- Montana Cash: 8 p.m. MT on Wednesday and Saturday.
- Millionaire for Life: 9:15 p.m. MT daily.
Missed a draw? Peek at the past week’s winning numbers.
This results page was generated automatically using information from TinBu and a template written and reviewed by a Great Falls Tribune editor. You can send feedback using this form.
Montana
“It’s Life Alert or rent”: Montana trailer park tenants are on rent strike
Mobile home residents in Bozeman, Montana, say they’re being forced to choose between paying rent and paying medical costs.Courtesy of Jered McCafferty
35-year-old Benjamin Moore has lived in Mountain Meadows Mobile Home Park, outside Bozeman, Montana, since he was 17. This month, for the first time, he’s withholding his rent.
On May 1, Moore received a rent bill for $947, up 11 percent from the month before, and the second hike in nine months—the product of the park’s sale to an undisclosed buyer.
Moore hung a sign on his trailer that says “RENT STRIKE.” He and his neighbors in Mountain Meadows and nearby King Arthur Park, organized with the citywide group Bozeman Tenants United, are collectively withholding over $50,000 a month from their landlord.
Historically, trailer parks have been a relatively affordable housing option—a third of trailer park residents in America live below the poverty line. But on average, their cost of living has risen 45 percent over the past decade. By unionizing, the Bozeman trailer park tenants believe they might be able to fight the most recent rent hike—especially given the state of their housing.
For years, tenants say, the maintenance hasn’t been attended to: tree limbs hang perilously over trailers, and water shutoffs are a regular occurrence. “I cannot recall a time in the past 20 years where we had three straight months of water and power working all day, every day,” Moore said.
Shauna Thompson, another resident, calls the water “atrocious…like a Milky Way, like you’re drinking skim milk. It’s very nasty and turned off all the time, without any notice.” And tenants allege that they’ve experienced retribution for maintenance requests, punitive eviction attempts, and unsafe conditions.
“It’s really hard on people here,” Moore said. Some residents are “already paying their entire Social Security check for rent. It’s a very poor neighborhood. We’ve got old folks. We’ve got young families. We’ve got working-class people who can’t afford anything else.”
For the past four decades, a group called Oakland Properties has owned both trailer parks. When they learned about the sale, tenants were scared that their parks would be bulldozed, or that their rent would be increased even further, forcing them to move.
The tenants attempted to buy the parks themselves, but were decisively outbid. The winning bidder demanded an NDA. The transaction should be finalized next month, park owner Gary Oakland said, but residents still don’t know who’s going to own the land they live on.
This month’s rent hike, Oakland acknowledged, was “part and parcel” of the sale. But for tenants, it’s a catastrophe. On top of the $947 lot rent—more than double the national average—many residents also pay off home loans on their trailers, as well as insurance and utilities costs.
Oakland calls claims of broken utilities “nonsense”: “If it was such a bad place to live, why would the homes be selling for such high dollars?” he said. The rent strike, Oakland points out, is “just a group of people not paying their rent.”
Some people are rationing their medication to make ends meet, Moore said. “There’s one person who canceled Life Alert. It’s either Life Alert or rent, and if you don’t pay rent, they evict you and throw you in the streets.”
Tenant organizers across the nation have found a foothold in recent years organizing against individual landlords, and Bozeman’s tenant union, situated in one of the fastest-growing communities in the state, is no exception. Tenant unions from Los Angeles to Kansas City to New York have organized to win rent freezes, maintenance, and security in their homes.
Mobile home parks—increasingly private-equity-owned and uniquely at-risk in the face of climate disasters—are organizing, too: a group of trailer park residents in Columbia, Missouri, unionized in February. In Montana, as Rebecca Burns recently wrote for In These Times, mobile homes were already once a site of tenant organizing: buoyed by the state’s miners unions, the first Bozeman-area mobile home tenants’ union won an agreement with their landlord in 1978.
Oakland says park residents “have been terrorized by the union,” and plans to evict the strikers. The strikers say they’ve retained a lawyer and will fight to stay in their homes.
“I wish none of this was happening,” Moore said. “Your utilities should work. Your place should be safe. You should be able to get in and out of it. These are the absolute basics, and they just haven’t kept them up. And if you call them on it, they threaten you.”
Montana
Montana’s fastest man who started as a walk on
MISSOULA, Mt. — Karsen Beitz arrived at Montana with no scholarship offers, one remaining walk-on spot and no guarantee that his track career would last.
Now, the former Sentinel High School standout is one of the fastest athletes in Montana history.
Beitz, a Missoula native and junior sprinter for the Grizzlies, has turned an unlikely college opportunity into a record-setting career. He owns Montana’s 100-meter and 200-meter program records and enters next week’s Big Sky Conference Outdoor Championships as one of the top sprinters in the league.
Coming out of high school, Beitz was a football and track athlete without a Division I offer.
“I was upset about it,” Beitz said. “But at the same time, I was fine with just going to college and living a normal college life.”
That changed after conversations between Sentinel coach Dylan Reynolds and Montana coach Doug Fraley.
“You may not think he’s a D-I prospect based on his times,” Reynolds told Fraley, “but I’m just telling you, if he gets in the right program, he’s going to be a D-I runner.”
Fraley had one walk-on spot left on his roster. He brought Beitz into his office, talked with him and decided to take a chance.
“I liked him. We had a good conversation, so I decided to give him the last walk-on spot,” Fraley said. “I’m sure glad I did.”
Beitz became a Division I athlete in his hometown, but his first goal was modest. He wanted to prove he belonged and earn a scholarship.
He did that quickly.
As a freshman, Beitz placed at the Big Sky Outdoor Championships and helped Montana’s 4×100-meter relay reach the podium with a school-record performance.
“There was no doubt he earned that scholarship,” Fraley said.
Beitz continued to climb in 2025. He placed second in the 200 meters at the Big Sky indoor meet, but a hamstring injury kept him out of the outdoor championships.
“It sucked to deal with,” Beitz said. “But I’m young and still had two years left, so I shifted my mindset to how I could come out these next two years.”
He has not looked back.
Beitz won the 200 meters at the 2026 Big Sky indoor championships, the first individual conference title of his track career. His time of 21.09 seconds edged Idaho State’s Alex Conner by one-hundredth of a second.
“I think the best part about it was seeing how happy Doug was,” Beitz said. “He was jumping up and down, gave me a big hug. After last year, I knew what I was capable of, so to go out there and do it was amazing.”
Then came the outdoor season.
In April, Beitz broke Montana’s 58-year-old 200-meter record, running 20.55 seconds at the Pacific Coast Intercollegiate in Long Beach, California. The previous record had stood since 1968.
Two weeks later, he added the school’s wind-legal 100-meter record, running 10.25 seconds at the Bengal Invitational in Pocatello, Idaho. Which broke a 44-year-old program record and gave Beitz both sprint marks.
“He’s a really competitive guy, and he wants to be the best in the Big Sky,” Fraley said.
The records have not left Beitz satisfied. They have made him hungrier.
“You have all these goals and numbers in your mind,” Beitz said. “Then once you hit those numbers, you’re not satisfied. There’s just more numbers to chase.”
The next chase begins at the Big Sky Conference Outdoor Championships, scheduled for May 13-16 in Portland, Oregon.
After college, Beitz hopes to follow his mother’s footsteps and become a pharmacist. Maybe even the world’s fastest pharmacist.
“If I’m running around the hospital talking to doctors,” Beitz said, “I’ll do it pretty fast.”
From a walk-on few people noticed to a conference champion and school-record holder, Beitz has become Montana’s fastest man — and he is not done running.
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