With the City propaganda, and the well funded anti-WARD scare mail flying around out there I thought it might be valuable to hear from a different source. I think what people crave most is transparency. Here is my in-depth explanation of WARD. Thanks for taking the time to read it. I will be voting yes, but you get a vote too, so see what you think before deciding. May cool heads prevail.
The History
A lot of people are frustrated with the City's continued insistence that all we need to do for housing is build build build and the price will come down. In fact the City insists we need to give developers money and public resources (parking and height) in order to keep building, no matter what the product is. We have also been told for the last decade that we’re running out of water. City staff have given several presentations emphasizing this. Our water bill always reflects a drought surcharge, and watering restrictions are now permanent
Almost 2 years ago I was asked to join a group that had been meeting to discuss how the City could require affordability in development, in exchange for access to our publicly owned water supply.
Our City's original affordable housing ordinance, in place from 2017 to 2021, was a mandate used in other places, called inclusionary zoning. Through inclusionary zoning a municipality requires a certain number of units in a development to be affordable. No "incentives" given, just a requirement. The affordability is set differently in every community.
In 2021 the State legislature took away the right of municipalities in Montana to use inclusionary zoning at the behest of development lobbyists. As a result our City started giving away “incentives.”
Since 2021 Mayor Cunningham and others from the City have testified in the State Legislature asking for this tool of inclusionary zoning back.
In the spring of 2024 our group submitted a version of the WARD ballot initiative for legal review to start gathering signatures. There are very strict requirements in state law for how ballot initiatives must be written. They must be worded a certain way, and only address a single issue. Our first 2 or 3 attempts were actually rejected. When a ballot initiative is submitted for legal review it is examined by the County Clerk and Recorder, who also sends it to the City Attorney, and City Manager for their legal review.
This means City staff has been aware, since about March of 2024, that a group of residents were working on a ballot initiative that would require affordability in development in exchange for the ability to pay Cash-In-Lieu of Water Rights (CILWR).
On May 23rd, 2024, a version of the WARD ballot initiative was finally cleared for signature gathering by the City Attorney and the County Clerk and Recorder. The ballot initiative regulating single use plastics was also approved around this time. Some of the same people worked on both initiatives. We were told we would need to gather 25% of voter signatures, rather than 15% because it was not a municipal election year. We decided to withdraw the WARD initiative for signature gathering because we knew we wouldn't be able to get 7,128 signatures for each initiative. If you get 10 signatures per hour, you're doing really well. It takes a lot of time. So the plastics went ahead.
I did not help collect signatures for plastics because my work season was starting and I needed to concentrate on both making and selling jewelry, as well as running my neighborhood association, and the Better Bozeman Coalition.
At this time Dan Carty and I met with newly appointed Commissioner Douglas Fischer to discuss the initiative and he said very little, but understood the tool we had created. John Meyer independently met with Mayor Cunningham. I met with folks from the Tenants Union to see if they wanted to get involved, but they declined because they were concentrating their efforts on urban camping and tenants' right to counsel. I also discussed the initiative with newly elected Deputy Mayor Morrison, but he dismissed our group somewhat disparagingly.
In hind sight, something that WARD has reinforced for me is that I would like to change the relationship between the organization that is the City, and the residents it’s meant to serve. Residents are viewed and treated like a pain in butt, like something that needs to be managed or dealt with, in order to achieve the grand vision of a high density big city our current Growth Policy suggests we want.
About Christmas time last year the WARD group started meeting again We set the AMI percentage for ownership to 120% and kept the AMI for rental at 60% because these are the targets the City agreed to in their updated Affordable Housing Ordinance. We wanted this initiative to work seamlessly with the City’s existing ordinance.
The Housing Needs Assessment the City paid consultants to write said the actual need in the community was for 60% of the units coming online to be affordable to those making 60% of AMI for-rent. We knew that would not be possible and no affordable units would be built. We settled on 33% because all the affordable housing in the “pipeline” would still be possible at that unit count. We didn't want to obstruct programs that were already creating affordable housing.
We settled on requiring affordability for projects proposing 3 units or more. Building of a duplex or a single family home will not be subject to the provisions of WARD. This was largely to prevent gentrification of existing neighborhoods from redevelopment. We are currently seeing a lot of redevelopment of existing housing into multi-unit luxury products. This is eroding the economic diversity of our core neighborhoods because most of the housing being demolished for this type of redevelopment is currently being rented affordably. If a developer was going to tear down an older home to build more expensive apartments they would need to provide some of them affordably in order to keep the economic diversity intact.
The State legislature was in session again and some representatives from Big Sky proposed a bill to get the tool of inclusionary zoning back. Mayor Cunningham testified via zoom that since the state took away inclusionary zoning Bozeman hadn't been able to produce any affordable units, could we please have this tool back. It failed again.
This new version of the ballot initiative was cleared for signature gathering by the City Attorney on March 25th of 2025.
I did gather signatures before my mother's health took a turn for the worse, and my show season was starting again for 2025. I've spent 12 years building my business into a successful career, and I do need to work. I had filed to run for office, and I wanted to keep running my neighborhood association, and the Better Bozeman Coalition. Something had to give, what was it going to be? There was a whole crew working on WARD, so I decided to walk away from the initiative.
Since then the City has allocated $50,000 from the general fund, but also $50,000 from the CILWR fund (for a total of $100,000) to fight WARD. This does not include over 300 hours of staff time spent trying to defeat the initiative. Southwest Montana Building Industry Association (SWMBIA) has formed a PAC called Affordable Bozeman Coalition (a PAC doesn’t have to have a name that describes what it actually does). Other groups have donated to the PAC so there is close to $300,000 to fight this initiative. That is a lot of money to pay for a lot of fear-mongering. The opponents are outspending the proponents 40 to 1!
The City now insists that we aren’t running out of water and we’re actually doing a great job conserving water. I don’t dispute that. Bozeman residents are amazing, when you tell them to do something they generally do it… until they find out you’ve been crying wolf.
As it turns out we aren't conserving water for birds or wildlife or maintaining agriculture, we're conserving water so that we can keep building. Now that the City thinks WARD will stop or slow development, they have changed their tune. “Oh we have plenty of water.”
We are in a closed basin, at the headwaters of the headwaters, which means that water is finite. Whether it is in 5 years, 10 years, or 30 years we will someday meet the limits of our water supply. And then what? Is this why the City proposed a pipeline from Canyon Ferry? Inter basin water transfer hasn't worked well in other places and I hate to think what a financial burden that would be on those of us who live here to fund. The City is currently using a lot of the CILWR funding to drill exploratory wells looking for 1,500 additional acre feet of water. They have only found 50 acre feet, which is not a developable resource, meaning it doesn't pencil to build the well infrastructure to extract only 50 acre feet. If we want to be truly sustainable we need to recognize the carrying capacity of the land and water resources, and we need to acknowledge that we are not the only land and water users.
The City is rewriting the Integrated Water Resources Plan, so maybe in 2 years we will have some better numbers about our supply and usage and options etc. We'll see.
But voters are being asked to vote on WARD now.
What WARD is and isn't:
Ward is NOT a moratorium. It's what's known as a linkage program. The current affordable housing ordinance is also a linkage program. The City gives developers one thing, in exchange for another. Under WARD developers would be given the expedited review awarded through the use of paying Cash-In-Lieu of Water Rights (CILWR) in exchange for affordable housing.
Remember this can be modified in two years by the City Commission. So if it needs to be adapted to a changing market, it can be amended.
In our municipal code a developer is required to offset the predicted water usage of their development. There are currently several options for doing that.
They can bring water rights to the city to offset the predicted water usage.
They can implement on site efficiency measures (shower heads, toilettes, appliances, landscape irrigation etc)
or off site efficiency measures (they could fix a leaky supply line in the city that would save water equal to the amount their development is predicted to use).
The other option is to pay Cash-In-Lieu
Nearly every developer pays Cash-In-Lieu because we only charge $6,000/acre foot of water. We are drastically undervaluing a finite resource, and since the price hasn't been adjusted since 2008, it is not taking into account the rising cost of a resource as it diminishes.
So the way the ballot initiative is written, if a developer wants to pay Cash-In-Lieu of bringing water rights to offset the demand of their development, they need to provide 33% of the units in the development affordable to folks making 60% AMI for rent, and 120% AMI for sale. 60% AMI means about $46,000/year for a one person household (teachers make about this, so teachers could afford rent). 120% AMI means $91,000/year for a one person household. If a two person household its about $105,000.
The AMI numbers actually went up in 2025, though the City website has numbers for 2024. "Affordable" means paying no more than 30% of your income on rent. That housing needs assessment I mentioned earlier says Bozeman actually needs 60% of the units coming online to be affordable at this level, so even WARD doesn't get us what we need, but it's closer.
One thing that confuses people is the lottery. The housing will be awarded through a random lottery. The reason this was written into the initiative was to avoid employee housing like the Guthrie. Homebase Partners would be given public resources like additional height and reduced parking to build the Guthrie, but the affordable housing was not going to be for the public, it was going to be for Homebase workers. Homebase was planning to put two workers in each unit and then harvest their wages back through exorbitant rent. It’s a return to the company store in the coal town. Arlo Guthrie would be rolling in his grave!
The Lottery system will need to be created by the City through writing an ordinance. Since a ballot initiative can only address a single issue, it can't create a fully formed city regulatory program. The City Attorney has alluded to this type of regulation being possible in the recent Chronicle article WARD for dummies.
In my opinion it would be a much better use of taxpayer money and staff time, to figure out how to regulate WARD should it pass, rather than trying so hard to defeat it.
Another thing that is often misunderstood is what the affordability actually applies to. WARD was written with the affordability requirements regulating the for-sale or for-rent price, not the applicant's income. After watching the public forum on October 9th between SWMBIA and the WARD working group, I don’t think the spokesperson for SWMBIA understands this.
The idea is that if you award housing to people who can only just barely afford it, they will always be rent burdened. When the City creates the lottery they have the ability to say that you can enter the lottery pool if you make say between 60-80% AMI for rent, and between 120-150% AMI for the for-sale units. Or some variation of that. The idea behind doing it this way is that if someone making 70-80% AMI is awarded a rental unit priced affordably at 60% AMI, they will be able to save money for one day purchasing a home. Eventual home ownership should be a goal of any affordable housing program. Ownership creates truly stable communities.
The affordability of 120% AMI means a townhouse would need to be sold for $500,000. A rental unit affordable to someone making 60% AMI would be $1600 for a 2 bedroom apartment. If we can't build housing for this price, who are we building housing for exactly? And should we continue allocating a finite resource to it?
The City will need to write legislation describing the deed restriction as well. For example, how much can an ownership unit increase in value per year. Maybe at the rate of inflation would be good so that the owners maintain the value of their investment. Over the last decade the price of housing has increased at more than 10 times the rate of inflation, which is why it's now unaffordable to the people we need living here.
If a developer can't do the affordability, they can bring the water rights. If they can't do either of those there are still options. Water adequacy in our code comes in at the site-plan stage. We did ask City staff this question in the spring of 2024 and it was confirmed at that time. If a developer purchases say a 100 acre farm and annexes into the city and gets zoning, but can't get water rights, and can't make the affordability pencil (some development models can) then they can take their 100 acre parcel through final platt and sell off individual lots to local builders (for single family homes or duplexes), or affordable housing developers who can make larger projects pencil. This is not crazy, we did development this way until about 20-25 years ago.
This is how the core of Bozeman was built. The lots were small so that folks with less money could purchase one and build a small structure. Folks with more money could buy multiple lots and build bigger. They were called piano key lots because they were about 25 ft wide and 120 feet deep or so. It's why we have such great diversity both in the built environment, but also economic diversity in our older neighborhoods.
Nowadays development in Bozeman is largely a vertical monopoly. One entity purchases land from a farmer and takes it all the way through the whole process to build-out, and finally selling each home. This locks out our local builders because they can't access the financing required to do a project this large. That's why we see a lot of out-of-state corporate developer landlords bringing in their own workforce to build here. I think WARD has the potential to be a monopoly buster.
If we return to selling individual small lots, someone could purchase one and put a manufactured home on it, or a tiny house on it. Both of those housing types are allowed in every zoning district in our code. The financing needed to do these small projects IS available to our local builders, from our local banks (I've met with both). Corporate developer landlords are not interested in this type of development because there isn't a large enough profit in it, so they may choose to move on to a different city where they find conditions more amenable to their model of development. I think WARD has the potential to re-localize our building industry.
I don't believe WARD will crash the economy, or shut down the building industry. It is NOT a moratorium. My husband is a roofer! But the status quo is unsustainable. We will run out of water before we have housing stock affordable to the people we need living in our town. And then what?
The most important thing to remember about WARD is that it's a ballot initiative, so the voters decide.
As far as the "policy" or idea of WARD goes, I do believe we need to leverage our community assets and resources for things we need. No more giveaways to developers to build housing nobody wants or can afford. Trickle down housing hasn't worked. It's time to try other things.
One thing you will hear from opponents is that EVERYONE hates WARD, but that's not true. The conservation community is divided about it, the economists are divided on it, builders are divided on it, the tenant’s union are divided on it. In fact some members of the tenants union helped gather signatures. I do believe money biases the democratic process. Whoever has the most money has the loudest megaphone. And at spending levels of 40 to 1, I think it’s safe to say we’re being biased.
Thank you for reading this far in good faith. Knowledge is power. And transparency is paramount!