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Residents press city on housing design and surveillance transparency during public comment
Summary
Public commentators urged the council to prioritize neighborhood-oriented housing and to improve transparency around data and surveillance systems. Suzette Dusso urged rethinking a parcel plan with a 260-space parking lot in favor of neighborhood-style affordable housing; Matt Larson raised accessibility and privacy concerns about agenda transparency and the Verkada camera system.
At the start of the July 6 Missoula City Council meeting, neighborhood leader Pete Lehi and public commenter Suzette Dusso urged council attention to neighborhood issues; Dusso urged the city to prioritize affordable housing tools such as tax-increment financing and land trusts and criticized a recently proposed parcel that includes a 260-car parking lot as feeling "more like a shopping mall" than a neighborhood.
"We know that trees mitigate urban heat," Dusso told the council, urging adherence to the city's parks guidance and asking staff to return to the drawing board on the parcel's design to reduce heat-island effects and integrate the site with surrounding neighborhoods.
Multiple public comments from Matt Larson focused on transparency and privacy. During the public hearing on dispensary licensing and again in the second public-comment period Larson criticized how the city posts agenda attachments and vendor claims on the public portal, saying those files and the city's agenda interface impede access for assistive-technology users and that the city has not enabled API access that would allow machine-readable, accessible formats. "There's basically no reason to do this except to obfuscate and provide non transparent access," Larson said.
Larson also raised concerns about deployment of a Verkada camera system on the University of Montana campus and the possibility of similar systems in city parks, citing Montana Code Annotated sections referenced in his remarks and urging publicly accessible camera policies before widening deployment. He said that the police commission had repeatedly tabled those issues and asked for fuller public disclosure about interagency practices he described as opaque.
Council members and staff thanked speakers for input. The meeting produced no immediate policy changes on the topics raised; several items (land-use work on Prescott School, RFP planning, and accessibility requests for agenda materials) were identified for follow-up by staff.
