Meet Don Nicholson, Ward 2

AGE: 73
MARITAL OR PARTNERSHIP STATUS: Wife, Ardice, and combined family of eight children and 14 grandchildren
EDUCATION: University of Montana, bachelor’s degree in chemistry
OCCUPATION: Retired from construction and management of paper mills, owner of Mountain States Collision Repair Inc.
MILITARY EXPERIENCE: Two years in the Army, stationed in Korea from 1956-1958
PUBLIC SERVICE: Lions Club, Sentinel Kiwanis, UM Alumni Association, UM Hall of Fame Committee, seven and a half years on the Missoula City Council, including a term in the late 1960s
PARTY AFFILIATION: Independent
ENDORSEMENTS: Ward 6 primary candidate Dave Huerta; Missoula Chamber of Commere rating: 2.8 out of 3.0.

Questions and answers

What qualifies you to be on the City Council?

“I think my business experience and my previous experience on the council; my practical management. (I’m a) fiscally responsible person.”

What are the best and worst things the City Council has done in recent years?

“This gridlock we've got going on now between members, talking about trivial things, is the worst. (An) example I guess is the chicken ordinance, needing to vote on whether the city should be in Iraq or not … That's a federal issue, and unfortunately at the federal level it's a partisan issue, but it's not a city issue. We should deal with issues such as sidewalks, potholes, that sort of thing. That's the worst. The best efforts, I would guess are, we have really three awful good departments in this city. Cemetery is far and away – it’s very inconspicuous – but it’s far and away the best run. The fire department is next, and the police department is next. And those are really well run.”

What one thing would you most like to accomplish as a member of the City Council?

“I think we need to be more fiscally responsible in looking at the spending side of our budget. Currently, we spend lots of time on how to get more money, finding new taxes, but almost no money, no time, on how to spend less and how to be more efficient. (There’s a) thing called ROI – return on investment. We do almost no ROI justification. In business you don't even look at a project unless it had a good ROI that would pay out in two or three years.”

What can the city do to attract better-paying jobs?

“The thing we should build on is the medical community. The medical community is as good as it gets in any part of Montana -- or Idaho, or Wyoming or whatever. You see, good doctors like to hunt and fish. So they come here. Two ingredients that most people want are good hospitals and good doctors, and we've got those two done. So we should encourage the hospitals and the doctors, say ‘OK, what more do you need, what service, what technology, what locally can we help you do?’ The thing we should not do is go out and find some brand new thing to come to town. We should take the local businesses that want to expand and need help, that are growing …We could become the Mayo Clinic of the West. Rochester, Minnesota, is a little rinky-dink town in southern Minnesota. But the Mayo Clinic is there because the Mayo brothers were there. Missoula could be like that.”

What should the city do to encourage the development of more affordable housing?

“You're not going to develop affordable housing without good paying jobs. That's the only answer that makes any sense. Other than that is subsidizing. ... If we had fifty thousand bucks to hand out to the thousands that need homes in this town, we could subsidize them. But the subsidy issue is kind of where we all veer into the ground because we don't have that kind of money – federal government-wise, state-wise, or whatever. Here we go talking about affordable housing like it’s a warm fuzzy feeling people would really like to have. But the practicality of it is that in order to have an house you can afford, you have to have a job.”

Should Missoula endorse a troop withdrawal from Iraq? Why or why not?

“That's not a city issue and we should not be endorsing or whatever. It's a national issue. That certainly is an individual, partisan-type question. It should not be a question that city council members are talking about or the city should be voting on.”

What is Missoula’s most pressing traffic problem, and where should the city turn for the money to solve it?

“We have the worst intersection in the state at Mullan and North Reserve. While those are complications of our traffic systems, a good many of the roads in Missoula are state and or federally owned; we don't spend city money on fixing a state road. The state's money is what's needed here. There are some minor things we could to Mullan/Reserve. The most obvious one is a second left-hand lane turning into Wal-Mart. Wal-Mart is a huge nightmare at that traffic light. So we put that second left hand lane in. For the first time we could learn how to time traffic lights … so it will go green, green, green, green, right through Mullan/Reserve, so we wouldn't have this terrible backup. And we could come the other way the same way.”

Should the city encourage or discourage more housing in existing city neighborhoods? Why or why not?

“There are a few pieces of property that really should have more houses on it. This is the infill question. If there's a vacant lot and you already have a sidewalk and a street and a sewer, then obviously you should put a house on it. But where it falls apart is that the neighbors of those places … have expectations of what their neighbors are going to look like. These pieces of property are vacant for a reason: they're not very buildable. They're steep, they're tiny, they're whatever. So they're not built on. So the infill question was kind of rampant around here four years ago. People were taking their two lots, changing boundaries. ... That may change your alleys into main streets. Follow that progression (and) every house has an alley house. Pretty soon you've got kids playing in allies that aren't wide enough, they have no curbs, no sidewalks. That's a bad idea. I think much of the stuff we tend to stuff inside the town is going to be bad job construction. ... But the growth of Missoula is – and I think the whole council's united in this – we want it to stay the way it is in terms of character and feel, and neighborhoods, and accessibility to businesses. We're very fortunate to have small businesses downtown. We have the Southgate Mall, we have North Reserve.”

Should the city limit the number of unrelated people who may share a house?

“I'm not too familiar with the arguments that went on. Ultimately, it was in front of the City Council about six years ago. I think it was voted down. It was sort of an artificial situation when you couldn't find a place to rent so people were cramming into houses and living there. So I think the answer is no but ... there was some legal problems, there was a suit that came up. People were sued because they were doing that. So it's not festering very much right now. … I'd rather there not be a requirement. I think it was an artificial situation when it was there and it was there because of traffic. It was there because of all the darned cars that were parked there, as much as anything.”

What specific problems in your ward would you like to see solved?

“Let me talk about my ward first. It's Ward 2, which includes the Northside-Westside, which is kind of a wealthy person's area. It includes Grant Creek, which is a management person area. It includes the Mullan Road area out by Costco. So it's easily the most complicated ward in town … But that Mullan/Reserve traffic situation, as we all know, is a pretty high priority. Northside-Westside, there's the concern about housing and the affordability of housing ... So those kinds of ongoing things need to happen. Better paying jobs. St. Pat's hospital, which is in my ward, could be helpful to the people in residences over there if they could qualify for the jobs. ... There's nothing wrong with the talent of the people in Missoula to do these jobs. It's just that the jobs aren't there. ... We go in circles a lot. Billings decides to build a new bank building and they build a building. The guy that runs the bank over there, he's a get-with-it guy. We don't have many get-with-it people in this town.”