When SB 523, the Montana Senate’s attempt to limit tax-increment financing schemes, failed to pass during the last legislative session in Helena, the notoriety of Missoula was a big factor why.  It was much easier for Republicans to focus on Missoula’s Transsexual Representative, Zooey Zephyr, than it was other critical topics, like housing, which SB 523 would have indirectly impacted by limiting the use of Tax Increment Financing.  Maybe if the focus had been different, Republicans would have anticipated the utter failure of Governor Gianforte’s housing task force, where the subject of this article, sitting Montana Senator, Ellie Boldman (formerly Ellie Hill), got to wield her influence.

Before getting into the meat of this profile, you might be thinking to yourself why should I care about this person?  If you accept my premise that Missoula is a microcosm of American Liberalism gone amok, and if you’re morbidly curious how the Joe and Kamala train-wreck manages to keep chugging along, then this examination of what a Boise transplant has achieved in Missoula might be instructive.

I first met Ellie over a giant plate of nachos at the Iron Horse in 2008.  I had been placed at the Poverello Center, Western Montana’s largest emergency shelter and soup kitchen, as an Americorps VISTA. I wasn’t sure what to expect, so I didn’t have any context for the frantic figure I met that day, a future Time Magazine rising political star who left the plate of nachos virtually untouched.  A few months after I began working at the shelter, the implosion of the housing market kicked off when Lehman Brothers went kaput in September of 2008.  What a great time to start working at a homeless shelter!

Ellie arrived in Missoula in 2005 after failing to climb the influence-ladder in Idaho, something I got a hint of when an alleged peer from the Potato State contacted the shelter to make claims about what kind of person the Poverello Center was employing as Director.  Here is Wikipedia’s description of her pre-Missoula effort to combine a legal career with Democratic politics in Idaho:

Upon graduation, Boldman worked at the Ada County Prosecutor’s Office, and the Garden City, Idaho Attorney’s Office.  She also became active with the Idaho Democratic Party, where she worked for the campaigns for Keith Roark for Idaho Attorney General in 2002 and Dave Bieter for Boise Mayor in 2004.

Ellie Boldman. Wikipedia. Accessed June 26th, 2024.

Upon arriving in Missoula and getting a major non-profit influencer’s help to set her up (United Way of Missoula County Executive Director, Susan Hay Patrick), Ellie spent the next 5 ½ years building an ostensible non-profit career before going overtly political.  

Here’s how the July 11th, 2011 Missoulian article framed Ellie’s origin story after Ellie was pressured internally to resign from the Poverello Center (source: me, because I worked there at the time and was a part of that internal pressure):

“She [Ellie Boldman] has a true passion for the political process,” said Missoula United Way Director Susan Patrick, who partnered frequently with Hill on community projects.  “But trying to do both – serve in the Legislature and run the Pov – it would just require superhuman efforts.  Each of those is a superhuman job.”

Hill worked as an assistant district attorney in Boise, Idaho, before moving to Missoula in 2005.  While Hill was interviewing for a job with Missoula County Attorney Fred Van Valkenburg, Patrick approached her about the Poverello’s directorship.

“She felt my background as an attorney would be very helpful,” Hill said.  “She asked if I was interested in taking advocacy to another level.”

Ellie Hill Resigns as head of Poverello Center. Missoulian. July 11, 2011.

If by “advocacy” Ellie means the duplicitous exploitation of the non-profit sector to exert covert political influence, then I think Missoula’s current State Senator has been VERY successful in taking her “advocacy” to the next level, especially after moving from political advocacy for legal Cannabis to having a partner directly involved in the industry.

Actual success in business, on the other hand, has been a little more elusive, and, like many people, Ellie seemed to struggle when the pandemic hit.  Where was our intrepid advocate when the world shutdown? Curiously, Ellie was on a State Department-funded trip in South Africa where she was “advocating” for poor Africans and STEM education.  

Here is a quote from Ellie about STEM education, as reported by that “former” Montana Democrat spokesperson, Martin Kidston, at his “news” site, the Missoula Current:

“We know we have to improve on-the-ground engagement with girls in order to see progress,” said Hill Smith, a Montana state legislator.  “Girls need to meet women leaders, and be exposed to authentic understanding of STEM careers, and access to female role models.  The objective is to create future leaders among students.”

Missoula team wins State Department grant to teach STEM to South African girls. Missoula Current. December 11, 2019.

If Ellie is holding herself out to be a role model, then what kind of role model has she been since 2020?  Did she fear-monger about a semi-trailer being a freezer morgue?  Did she and her husband BOTH take emergency Covid money?  And, most recently, has Ellie Boldman blocked and attacked critics like myself with slanderous public declarations in order to stop further disclosures about her behavior from leaking out into the public sphere?  

The answer to these questions is, of course, YES, and yet despite what I’ve had to go through for my years of truth-telling, I continue to raise the alarm because if not me, then who?

After learning that my mugshot was posted at the Missoula Senior Center, I was confused.  I used to work at Missoula Aging Services, which is a larger, much more credible organization responsible for programs like Meals On Wheels, so why was there a CALL 911 IF SEEN note along with my mugshot posted at the Senior Center?

Last week, I ended that confusion when a local told me that Ellie Boldman was the new Director of the Senior Center.  This came as a big surprise to me.  Did I miss the announcement?  I looked, but couldn’t find, any local media sources about this new role for Ellie, which just further raises my eyebrows.  How could there be NO local media about this?  

While not seeking media attention is one way of staying under the radar, having different names is definitely another, which brings me to my attempt to confirm Ellie Boldman’s legal employment dates in Idaho earlier this week.  

When I called Ada County in Idaho and got the number for Human Resources, the helpful person I spoke with, Katie, gave me some new insights into Montana’s State Senator. Like the fact that Ellie was employed under the first name ELLEN, not Ellie.  This detail came as new information to me, and was confirmed by using ELLEN’s birthday, which is June 30th, 1975.  I was also surprised to find out the dates of employment went from May 7th, 2001, to October 8th, 2002, which means Ellie’s employment ended much earlier than I had originally assumed.  Interesting.

I thought I was taking a break from writing this post when I accepted an invitation from a friend to get breakfast. However, when I told him about the focus of this week’s article, he reminded me of his stay at The Valor House, a transitional program for homeless veterans in Missoula run partially by the Poverello Center. My friend, who asked me to withhold his name for now, saw firsthand the kind of female role models Ellie supported when he observed housing rights violations, such as the director of The Valor House program entering a tenant’s apartment without notice to collect evidence of alcohol use. This happened under Ellie’s watch.

The incident that really bothered him, however, was a political photo-op for a Democrat politician who was running for political office at the time.  Over pancakes and bacon my friend told me how upsetting it was to have a scheduled meeting for he and his fellow Veterans get co-opted by a politician so they could be used as political props.  

I asked my friend if I could add his “lived experience” to my profile.  “Sure,” he replied, “I told the Missoulian at the time, but they weren’t interested in the story.”  

As I probed my friend further, another curious connection emerged. The attorney who sat down with him and Ellie to do damage control after he raised concerns about what was going on was none other than Missoula’s new lead prosecutor, Keithi Worthington—at least that was my friend’s recollection when I showed him a picture of the person who was selected by Mayor Davis to make prosecutorial decisions for criminal matters on behalf of the city. With that in mind, isn’t it also curious that Mayor Davis referenced The Valor House during the City Council meeting on Monday evening, citing her involvement with its construction? I think it is.

I visited The Valor House on Tuesday hoping to get more information about the political photo-op, since my online search didn’t turn up anything specific. I ended up running into a former client who allowed me to take this picture with him outside the facility, where the Poverello Center is no longer involved in the programming. Thanks for the info, Robert!

To answer the question posed by the title of this post, yes, Missoula has a BIG Ellie Boldman problem, and that’s because America has a Democrat problem, which has been made exponentially worse by the co-existing problem of Republicans offering nothing substantive as an alternative, at least not in Montana.  For me, the problem presented by Ellie is one of zero accountability, and recently it got ugly when Missoula’s sitting State Senator said this about me on Facebook:

The opportunity here, if you can see beyond the vitriol of this desperate Democrat lashing out at a media critic, is for those of us who aren’t politicians to move beyond the reductive political labels of a broken two-party political system in order to do REAL grassroots networking.  That is what I’m doing, and with my Weapon of Mass Instruction, I’ve never had more fun talking with my neighbors about local corruption, and what we can do to expose and stop it.