Serving Southern Jefferson County in the Great State of Montana

Articles written by Ken Toole


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  • Op-Ed: Here We Go Again

    KEN TOOLER, Former Public Service Commission|Aug 13, 2025

    What is it about top executives in monopoly utilities that makes them want to play cowboy capitalists? Case in point is NorthWestern Energy’s plan to provide power to gigantic data centers. With great ballyhoo across the state, NorthWestern Energy announced it signed a “letter of intent” to provide as much as 1,000 megawatts of electricity to Quantica Infrastructure for its proposed data center. That’s more than their current total electric load of 760 megawatts. That amount of power would use all of NorthWestern’s existing generatio...

  • Op-Ed: Think Carefully About Supporting Ranked Choice Voting

    KEN TOOLE, Montana Democratic Party|Oct 2, 2024

    There are two initiatives on the ballot which will change how elections are conducted in Montana. These initiatives change our constitution. They are promoting a relatively untested “ranked choice” system which has only been adopted by two other states. Constitutional Initiative 125 replaces Montana’s open party primaries with a primary that puts all candidates on the same ballot. The top four vote getters then advance to the general election. Constitutional Initiative 126 requires whoever wins the general election to have 50% + 1 of votes in o...

  • Op Ed: NorthWestern Rate Increase Unfair

    Ken Toole, Big Sky 55|Jun 7, 2023

    NorthWestern Energy customers are about to get shocked with a huge increase in their electric rates if the Public Service Commission grants NorthWestern Energy’s request to increase residential rates. The public hearings are over and final legal briefs are being submitted. But, like a cancer waiting to metastasize, it has not gone away and it will wreak havoc on the very people who can least afford it. Don’t be fooled by efforts to minimize the impact of this rate case. Residential customers are facing a 28% increase in their utility bills com...

  • Op-Ed: Beware Republican Deregulation

    KEN TOOLE, Big Sky 55|Jan 11, 2023

    If the government would just get out of the way and free the power of the competitive market, we would have a much better economy.” It’s good political rhetoric. The current Republican administration and their pals in the Republican legislature are repeating it over and over as a part of Governor Gianforte’s “Red Tape Reduction Initiative.” The problem is, what Republicans get when they push to eliminate regulations is often not what anybody wants. The last time we heard this kind of rhetoric was during the 1997 legislature and passage o...