HELENA — On Friday, representatives with the U.S. Department of Agriculture were in Helena, getting a firsthand look at an effort bringing together federal, state and local partners to make sure children are getting meals through the summer months.

They visited Memorial Park and the Lewis and Clark Library, two sites where Helena’s summer meal program hands out free meal bags to any families with children. Each child received six meals to take home for Friday and the weekend.

It’s part of the national “SUN Meals to Go” program, one of three summer nutrition programs the USDA is highlighting.

“The piece that’s most impressive, and what we see in places like Montana, is how incredibly adaptable the programs are when you have these big geographic expanses and a lot of varied need, the programs finding ways to operate very creatively,” said Mario Ramos, acting regional administrator for the USDA’s Food and Nutrition Service.

The SUN Meals program serves meals at neighborhood locations like parks, schools and community centers. They’re free to all children under age 18, who eat on site. The Meals to Go program is available in some rural areas and allows for pickups and deliveries – ideas that developed out of the changes made to meal programs during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Helena Public Schools and Sodexo sponsor the program in Helena. Robert Worthy, the school district’s food service director, says the area narrowly qualifies as rural because of its population, allowing them to use a “to go” option. He says that’s made a huge difference for them.

“Having the multi-meals allowed people to come, and it was worth their time, and all of a sudden people started showing up,” he said. “We were doubling the numbers.”

Worthy says they handed out 64,000 meals in Helena alone last summer, and they’ve already provided more than 20,000 this year.

“It’s really good when people show up with their families – even though you don’t have to have the kids with you present, a lot of them do come to help carry the food off, and to see the kids’ faces when they pick up the meals,” he said.

Overall, the Montana Office of Public Instruction says summer meal programs served more than 950,000 meals statewide last year – up by 27% from 2022 – at more than 250 sites. You can find a site near you on the USDA website.

Worthy says they’ll sign people up for the program at meal sites on distribution days, but he encourages families to sign up in advance. That lets them get the meals ready before they’re picked up and prepare if kids have any specific dietary needs.

Jonathon Ambarian

Montana is also one of 30 states participating in “SUN Bucks,” the new summer EBT program that provides $120 per eligible child for families to buy groceries. It evolved out of the P-EBT program that provided similar benefits during the pandemic.

SUN Bucks will be automatically available to families enrolled in programs like SNAP and TANF, as well as those eligible for free and reduced-price school meals. Other families can apply directly if they meet income limits and other requirements. You can find more information on the program here.

State leaders estimate about 70,000 children in Montana will be eligible for the summer EBT program this year.

Montana’s participation in P-EBT was uncertain the last two years. State leaders originally opted out in 2022 before getting back in when the federal government provided more flexibility. They then opted out again in 2023, citing administrative hurdles.

Ramos said USDA is working to support state partners as they introduce SUN Bucks.

“I think part of what really makes us a little bit more administratively manageable is knowing that this isn’t specific to pandemic-era benefits, but this is something that we’re committed to long-term in support of food security through the summer months – and in turn being able to build longer-term infrastructure and administrative apparatus to help support program implementation,” he said.

The Montana Department of Public Health and Human Services says families will receive their allotments in late summer or early fall. A spokesperson said they had to switch from one EBT vendor to another, but they were committed to getting the program launched in 2024 as planned.

A Montana-based abortion rights group is reaching out to neighboring states announcing abortion and contraception are legal and available there.

South Dakota has a near total abortion ban, which extends to pregnancies caused by rape or incest. Health care professionals say the state’s current abortion exception is unclear.

“Minnesota and Colorado are being so inundated with volume from other states that they might have wait times,” said Nicole Smith, executive director of Montanans for Choice.

Smith said the number of South Dakota women travelling to Montana is quite small. That’s why the group is raising awareness that the state is an option to procure the procedure, which includes a billboard campaign that welcomes those seeking the procedure.

 “In Montana, we can see people same day that they get here, pretty much,” Smith said. “We just want folks to know that we do have a lot of availability and if they don’t want to wait and they can get into Montana—we can probably see them pretty quickly.”

Since September last year, 280 South Dakotans travelled to Minnesota for an abortion and 170 travelled to Colorado for the procedure. That’s according to the Guttmacher Institute, a sexual and reproductive health group.

The closest abortion facilities to South Dakota in Montana are located in Billings. Smith says clinics also offer abortion medication through telemedicine.

Smith said Montana’s constitution has strong health care privacy rights.

“We have almost unfettered access to abortion in Montana,” Smith added. “There’s no mandatory waiting periods. There’s no mandatory counselling. We have telehealth for medication abortion. We’re very grateful that our constitution has protected those rights—that doctors and providers are able to give best practice medicine to us without politicians interfering in that way.”

South Dakota voters are set to vote on whether to enshrine abortion access in the state constitution this November. Constitutional Amendment G grants South Dakota women access to abortion in the first two trimesters of pregnancy. It allows the state to restrict the procedure in the third trimester, with exceptions for health and life of the mother.

Planned Parenthood North Central States believe the measure will not “adequately reinstate” abortion access in the state. Abortion opponents call the measure extreme.

A great recent article by Chris D’Angelo reports on the connection between Tim Sheehy, the Republican challenging Jon Tester for his senate seat, and PERC, the Bozeman-based Property and Environment Research Center that promotes what it calls “free market environmentalism.”  

While Montanans might wonder about Sheehy’s background and policy positions given the shifting sands in his explanations, the fact that he was on the board of PERC is not in question — despite his failure to disclose that fact as required by Senate rules which his campaign says is an “omission” that’s being “amended.”   

For those who have long been in the conservation, environmental, and public lands policy arena, PERC is a very well-known entity. As noted on its IRS 990 non-profit reporting form, the center is “dedicated to advancing conservation through markets, incentives, property rights and partnerships” which “applies economic thinking to environmental problems.” 

But to put it somewhat more simply, PERC believes that private land ownership results in better conservation of those lands under the theory — and it is a disputable theory — that if you own the land and resources, you take better care of it due to its investment value.  This has long been their across the board approach to land, water, endangered species and resource extraction.

If one wanted to dispute that theory, it certainly wouldn’t be difficult to do, particularly in Montana where checking the list of Superfund sites left behind by private industries and owners bears indisputable evidence of the myth that private ownership means better conservation of those resources.

In fact, the theory falls on its face since, when “using economic thinking” the all-too-often result is to exploit the resources to maximize profit as quickly as possible.  And again, this example is applicable across a wide spectrum of resources.  In Montana, that can mean anything from degrading rangeland by putting more livestock on it than it can sustain to, as in Plum Creek’s sad history, leaving behind stumpfields filled with noxious weeds on their vast private — once public — land holdings. 

None of this is particularly a mystery, yet PERC has sucked down enormous amounts of funding from anti-conservation sources for more than four decades as it tries mightily to put lipstick on the pig of the all-too-obvious results of runaway private lands resource extraction.

Running one of the most high-stakes senate campaigns in the nation, however, produces a lot of tap-dancing around the truth in an effort to convince voters that you’re for whatever position will garner the most votes come Election Day. 

In that regard, both Sheehy and PERC are scuttling sideways in their positions.  Given the overwhelming support for “keeping public lands in public hands” in Montana, PERC now claims it “firmly believes that public lands should stay in public hands. We do not advocate for nor support privatization or divestiture.”  

Funny that, given its previous and very long-held position that private ownership of lands and waters is the key to conservation.  Likewise, Sheehy’s position, “that “public lands must stay in public hands” is completely the opposite from the one he held only a year ago, and parrots PERC not only in its verbiage, but in its realization of which way public sentiment and the electoral winds are blowing.

Since what’s at stake is nothing less than the future of public lands in the Big Sky State, it behooves us to demand specific policy positions in writing from all candidates for public office — including the race for Montana’s Senate seat.