Well, here we are again. A year ago, the county hired a new Historic Preservation Officer or HPO. Hopes were high on this fellow. He has a Masters Degree in Historic Preservation. He has some sort of experience with one of the more historic towns in southwest Montana. A year later however, and those hopes are dashed.

He's obviously arrogant. He obviously liked telling a couple of the members of the Historic Preservation Commission that we'd not had a really professional HPO till he arrived. He must have, since he did it several times in the period of about a month back in this winter. He actually seems to believe that the city-county employed him because they actually support Historic Preservation. Yeah, right. A couple members of the HPC sorted that out with him. He has the job because for now, they have to have an HPO. If the need for that disappeared tomorrow, so would he. His list of stupid moves since arriving, just seems to get longer and longer.

He proposed to the HPC that historic buildings or structures could be demolished because of "compelling new developments". Oh really? He could not however, tell them how he would define that, and which of the hundreds of historic buildings and structures in the largest Historic Landmark District in the US (Butte) he would sacrifice for some "compelling new development." That did not go over.

He apparently has some trouble understanding how one makes a determination of whether or not a building retains enough historical integrity to be eligible for National Register of Historic Places listing. He wants to confuse the physical condition of the building with NRHP integrity. Ah no, that aint how it is done. A member of the HPC has had to point that out to him as well.

Early on in his first year, he even proposed to demolish a building that was actually not the building being proposed for demolition at that time. Oops. What, he not know how to find and read a map?

More recently, a member of the HPC had to point out to him how to actually do research of another historic building. He also had to be corrected that the particular building under consideration in that case was not any sort of "safety hazard", as he had proposed. He also proposed that it would be an economic hardship on the owner of that building, to keep it around and try and restore it. Never mind that he had no real evidence or anything but his own opinion on that one. Of course, he is always convinced that his opinion out weighs any others, whether he as the facts or not. No effort had been made to properly assess the possibilities, including perhaps someone who was willing to purchase the building and relocate it. Oops.

The HPC has requested him to actually perform the tasks assigned to him under the local law, and he either never seems to get around to it, or instead just rolls over when the boys at 155 West Granite Street (the address of the local seat of government) don't want him to..in the words of the local law to be actually.."provding assistance to the HPC"..in pursuit of it's responsibilities under the same law that includes his job description. Of course, he usually is not too busy really, more like the boys in the courthouse don't want him to do whatever it is the HPC has asked. He most recently rolled-over again, failing to complete a document the HPC asked him to do, because his supervisor did not want him to do it. Even though local law vests the HPC with reponsibility for completing those forms, the boys in the courthouse want the HPC to ask their permission first. Good luck with that one.

Instead, he seems to piddle away his time, working on projects that are not even Historic Preservation. One is a proposal to turn what is left of a wood-stave water tank into an intepretive center. Now the deal here is that a local guy claims to have ownership of this tank, but cannot apparently produce and actual deed or even a quitclaim. It was moved back inthe 1990s from it's historic location to a new location, on a different historic property, with which it has no association at all. They've wanted to turn this orphaned mining artifact into an interpretive center, since oh, about 1996. In the years since however, they've never been able to convince enough of the public to actually donate money to the project. Now along comes this new HPO and bingo--we are supposed to shell out $10,000.00 to see if the thing can even be saved, but if not, then guy that claims to own it, wants to salvage the redwood planking in it for himself. Of that $10,000.00, our new HPO wants to shell out $5,000 from a state grant originally secured for conserving actual historic buildings and structures on publically-owned historic properties administered by the local government. If that works, then he wants to chuck out some unspecified part of an estimated $35,0000 needed, from a trust fund established for historic preservation. I'll remind you that this is not an historic preservation project, since the poor old tank involved, no longer meets National Register criteria for historic properties. Might be fine for Disney World, but not for real Historic Presevation. Oops.

One has to think he could be as bad at this as one of his predecessors. That one, put up metal cut-out figures of miners and ladies of the evening, supposedly as interpretation of the town's old Red Light District. He once even proposed putting kiosks on just about every street corner in uptown Butte. Those would also have had metal-cut out figures of what looked like beer-bellied, Keystone Cops, leaning on a lamp post, holding a baton, which passersby could actually spin! Woohoo--that would be soo much fun huh? Then, to literally top this off, he wanted to put street lights on each of these, with a red globe over them! Oh yeah, just what we needed up town, making the whole uptown into a red-light district! Fortunately, that idea got canned. Meanwhile, as that one fiddled with that sort of nonsense, a signficant neigherhood in Butte was stripped of probably the majorty of historic homes along one street, so that the local hospital could create what many refer to as the "Great Green Way" leading up to their new entrance. There was no mitigation even required for that to happen. I guess that was one of those "compelling new developments" the current occupant of the HPO position refers to in using that phrase. So, back to the current occupant of the HPO position.

His most current little endeavor appears to be providing support to a local amateur that wants to take a portion of what is left of an historic mine yard, and turn it into a French-Style garden. Now why would one do that, when no such garden ever existed there before? Well, according to the amateur, the last fellow to live on the site, happened to have the last name of Renoir, so he must have been of French-descent. Also, the proposal would have some unspecified interpretive signs on it, about folks from Butte of French-descent, even though the originator of this idea says most of those folks actually lived not in Butte, but in Walkerville. Uh yeah, okay, right. He also wants to replace existing, historical features of the area with his latest creation of garish, obviously-amateurish decorative walls. This fellow is also the creator of a place he calls Lexington Gardens. At that spot in uptown Butte, he created huge displays of annual flowers, accompanied by two intepretive signs about Butte, and further accompanied by more orphaned mining artifacts. They sit atop the little hill on which it is located. They are out-of-context with each other in terms of scaling. At least Disney's folks usually tend to get proportions right, don't they?

Where do we come up with these folks anyway? Maybe we need to look a little longer and harder next time, which some of us are coming to hope is as soon as possible.