Officials praise impact of federal actions

The White House and community partners in Montana held a post-State of the Union speaking event that was streamed online at 1 p.m. Wednesday with local and state officials and organizations talking about their issues and what the Biden administration is doing to help.

Among the speakers was Montana Farmers’ Union President Walter Schweitzer, who praised the administration and its allies for their efforts to address consolidation in the food industry.

As a farmer, Schweitzer said, he’s been dealing with anticompetitive practices from all sides and in various sectors of the industry, but Biden has issued more than 70 executive orders addressing many of these issues, putting in the kind of effort that hasn’t been seen in many years.

“It brought me to tears,” he said, “Because this was the first time in decades, really, the first time since president Roosevelt that we’ve had a president willing to stand up to these corporate monopolies and tell them enough is enough.”

He said he’s excited about the new administrations efforts including the potential of more market reports from the U.S. Department of Agriculture and the Federal Trade Commission looking at rules that would restore the right to repair for ag workers.

He also talked about how the COVID-19 pandemic affected the outlook on the nation’s food systems over all.

“The COVID pandemic put a microscope over our food supply chain, and we found out it is broken,” Schweitzer said.

He said the difficulties the food supply chains faced in the past few years are a result of 60-year-old cheap food policies that were more about granting large corporations control over the industry than it was about efficiency and affordability, and this shift came at the cost of the system’s resiliency.

Liberty County Commissioner Maureen Wicks also spoke at the event, thanking the administration for its attention to rural areas like hers and making sure they have resources they need during this difficult time.

Wicks said the American Rescue Plan and the bipartisan infrastructure package will and are bringing money into the state for projects of all kinds, but especially water projects.

She said this is especially timely given the area’s ongoing drought.

She said these programs will help rehabilitate the St. Mary Diversion, and, on the more local level, help the county partner with the city of Chester on sewer projects and address water issues relevant to Rocky Boy’s Indian Reservation as well.

“It’s time that we look at these resources and invest in them,” Wicks said.

Montana State Director for Rural Development Kathleen Williams called into the event from Blaine County, where she said she’d spent the morning talking with local community leaders about ensuring fair access to rural development programs at the USDA.

Williams also praised ARPA and said Rural Development is helping distribute money across the state, as well as the infrastructure package for the billions it would bring to Montana.

“It’s really going to be a generational investment, the benefits of which will endure for a long time,” she said.

She said the administration is also working on addressing inflation and gas prices, bolstering child care, housing stabilization and helping to serve underserved communities and tribal colleges.

Another speaker at the event was Billings emergency room physician Dr. Sara Nyquist, who talked about her area’s increasingly severe addiction crisis.

She’s been practicing for 22 years and it is disheartening to see the problem getting worse, Nyquist said, a problem that is very much present in rural communities as well as the larger cities.

She said the administration is investing $41 million to bridge the gap between the need for addiction care and the resources the U.S. has to work with by increasing access, removing barriers and improving on-site care for overdoses.

Nyquist also talked about the ongoing mental health crisis that is overwhelming the area with a demand for psychiatric care, demand they just cannot meet.

She said the Biden administration is committed to addressing the crisis, spending $700 million to train and secure mental health experts in the wake of a pandemic that has significantly exacerbated the crisis, especially among children, some of whom are already coping with an overwhelmed foster care system.

She also praised recent efforts to bolster tele-health, services which she said will lower care costs, and the establishment of the national 988 suicide prevention hotline.