About this campaign

The committee

Who we are

This site is published by Who Elected Them, a ballot issue committee registered with the Montana Commissioner of Political Practices. The treasurer is Mark Egge, of Bozeman.

The committee name shown throughout this site is a placeholder. It is not final, and it will be replaced everywhere with the registered name before the site is promoted.

Montana law requires a paid-for attribution on political material. Ours is in the footer of every page, and it stays there.

The argument

What we are saying

One sentence: the 2026 draft charter would oblige your elected commission to answer a body no voter elects, and the ballot gives you no way to take the rest of the charter without it.

First, what we are not claiming. The Inter-Neighborhood Council is not new. It has been in Bozeman’s charter since 2006, at §4.06(d): “There is hereby established an InterNeighborhood Council to be composed of representatives selected by each recognized neighborhood association.” So has a city staff liaison to it (§4.06(e)), its forum role, its recommendations to the commission, its bylaws, and commission-set recognition standards. We are not asking anyone to abolish the INC, and voting for the existing charter keeps it exactly where it has been for twenty years. What Article VIII does structurally is an elevation within the charter, not an entry into it, and the draft does the same for the Municipal Court, which sat one section earlier in the same 2006 article. We count the court’s promotion as an improvement and say so plainly.

What is new is four duties it never had. Article VIII adds them: mandatory consultation “during the formative stages” of citywide planning, policy and budget efforts (§8.04(d)(7)); a mandatory written response from the commission and city manager to its recommendations, “including an explanation of how such input was considered and the reasons for divergence” (§8.04(d)(8)); an exemption from the code of ethics, which representatives “are not bound by, but are expected to observe” (§8.04(d)(2)); and the upgrade of the existing liaison from “a staff member” to a “full-time, fully dedicated” one (§8.04(c)). Meanwhile §8.05(b) says of every other board: “Unless otherwise required by law, city boards are advisory only.”

The rest of the argument is arithmetic and statute. Neighborhood associations cover about 33% of Bozeman’s population, and the powers in question run against a commission elected by all of it: the numbers, with methodology. And under MCA 7-3-103(2)(b), echoed by Bozeman’s current charter at §8.01(2) and by the draft’s own §10.01(2), the City Commission may propose a single charter amendment by ordinance. Voters may also propose one by petition, and a study commission question returns on a roughly ten-year cycle. So rejecting the package leaves the good reforms free to be considered one at a time rather than killing them. We list those reforms in full.

What we will not tell you is when. MCA 7-3-155 bars conducting a charter election “again for 3 years,” and whether that reaches a later, different amendment question is unresolved in Montana law: no Attorney General opinion, no case law. If it applies, the earliest a follow-up question could reach voters is November 2029. We think that uncertainty argues our way rather than against us: a charter adopted with a flaw in it may be just as hard to fix as a good reform is to revive. We set the whole question out in the open →

Just as important

What we are not saying

A narrow objection stops being credible the moment it is stretched. These are the things we will not claim, and if you see us slip, tell us.

1. 01

   We are not against neighborhood associations

   They are a reasonable way for neighbours to organise, and the people who run them are doing unpaid civic work. We do not want them abolished, defunded or weakened. Our objection is to one body holding standing procedural power over the City Commission, not to neighbours meeting and speaking up.

2. 02

   We are not defending the 2006 charter

   The 2006 charter has real flaws. It makes the person elected mayor serve two years as deputy mayor first. It has no judicial article. It says almost nothing about how a commission vacancy gets filled. The 2026 draft fixes all three, and we say so plainly on the page about what the draft gets right. Voting for the existing charter on this ballot is the only mechanism available to decline the replacement. It is not a compliment to 2006.

3. 03

   We are not impugning anyone’s motives

   The five study commissioners worked for two years and adopted their final report 5–0. INC delegates and neighborhood association officers who testified did so under their own names, in public, on the record. We disagree with the result. We are not going to characterise anyone’s intentions, and we do not name private individuals in order to criticise them.

4. 04

   We are not saying INC delegates are unaccountable to anyone

   They are not appointed by themselves. Each recognised neighborhood association selects its own representative, and the charter requires “[a]dherence to established by-laws to ensure democratic voting procedures” as a condition of recognition (§8.04(b)(4)). Current city code says the same: INC delegates “shall be selected by the neighborhood association membership in accordance with neighborhood association bylaws” (BMC 2.05.1190.E). The charter also provides that “only residents of the neighborhood may serve as the neighborhood association’s Inter-Neighborhood Council representative” (§8.04(b)(3)). Our point is about representativeness (how much of the city these associations cover), not about how delegates are chosen.

5. 05

   We are not resolving how open-meeting law applies to the INC

   Whether Montana’s open-meeting and right-to-know provisions reach the Inter-Neighborhood Council as constituted under the draft charter is a genuinely unsettled question. We looked at it and could not resolve it, so we do not assert it in either direction. If a court or the city attorney settles it, we will say so.

6. 06

   We take no position on the sub-options

   Commission size, ward residency, and ward-only versus citywide voting are three separate questions on the same ballot. They are legitimate, Bozeman residents disagree about them in good faith, and they only take effect if the amended charter is adopted. We are not going to use this campaign to advance a preference on any of them. The sub-options, explained neutrally →

The standard we hold ourselves toPrefer quoting the charter over describing it. Give the section number with every quote. Attribute contested characterisations to whoever made them. If a claim cannot be verified against a primary document, leave it out. Nothing goes on this site that we would have to retract.

Sources

The primary documents

Everything on this site traces to one of these. We link to the official source wherever the link resolves; where a document sits behind a host that blocks automated access, we link to the page that carries it rather than to a URL we cannot verify.

Two notes, in the openMontana law is also a source here, and we cite it by section: MCA 7-3-103 (how a charter is amended), 7-3-149 (the election that follows), 7-3-155 (the three-year moratorium) and 7-3-173 (the study commission cycle). Separately, the 2006 charter as scanned is an image PDF, so we paraphrase it and give the section number rather than quoting it verbatim; every verbatim quotation on this site is from the 2026 draft, the municipal code or the statute.

Corrections

We publish corrections. We do not quietly edit.

This campaign’s whole argument is that the text of the charter says something specific. A campaign that makes that argument and then fudges its own facts has forfeited it.

So, the policy:

1. If we get something wrong, we fix it and we say so. Corrections are noted on the page where the error appeared, with what the page previously said and the date of the change. We do not silently rewrite.
2. Typos and formatting are not corrections. Fixing a broken link or a misspelling does not get a notice. Changing a fact, a number, a quotation or a date does.
3. Official sources win. If anything here conflicts with Gallatin County on an election date, deadline or location, the county is right. Tell us and we will correct it the same day.
4. We will not remove a correction later. The record of what we got wrong stays up.

Corrections issued so far: none.