Julia Crain, On City Planning & Superfund

Photo Credit: Montana Standard

Oral History Interview of Julia Crain

Interviewers: Aubrey Jaap & Clark Grant
Interview Date: October 9th, 2020
Location: Butte-Silver Bow Public Archives
Transcribed: October 2022 by Adrian Kien

Aubrey Jaap: Alright. It's October 9th, 2020. We're here with Julia Crain. Julia, I would like you first to talk about exactly what we said we wouldn't talk about - your family for me, a little bit. Your family's background, please.

Julia Crain: Okay, so we'll do a reverse family tree.

Jaap: Perfect.

Crain: What do people usually say? Do they start with themselves or do they talk about their family?

Jaap: Julia, whatever way you're most comfortable with is perfect.

Crain: Okay. So, well, I'm Julia Crain. I am the daughter of Gordon Crain and Ellen Shannon Crain. And I have a younger sister, Sarah Crain, and a younger brother, Patrick Crain.  I guess I would say that I'm a very typical oldest child in the family dynamic.  My family is so precious to me that it's just my favorite thing ever.  I have a husband Risik Rask. He and I got married last year in 2019 and we have a three and a half year old daughter Thea who is actual magic. I had no idea - one of my dad's best friends said to me when I had my daughter, “Now, you know how much your parents love you.” And it was an immediately easy way for me to grasp exactly how much my parents love me, because I love her so much. And she is becoming this personality and herself and really coming into who she is. And I think that I've really noticed that really in the last couple months, she just has kind of made a shift in a little bit of a way to - where she's this very fully formed person that is a personality and has opinions about things and is excited about things and is curious about things. And so that's been  a really fun part of motherhood for me.

[00:02:15]

And then similar to my immediate family, I was really close with my grandparents growing up and really my entire family, my mom's parents, Kevin and Joan Shannon, and my dad's parents Rusty and Verl Crain. They were really instrumental in our family's dynamic. They took a lot of care of us when we were kids and we spent a lot of time with them. We also spent a lot of time with my Aunt Margaret, my mom's sister, Margaret Harrington, who was sort of  your quintessential cool aunt. She would always have us do craft projects and we'd get to go be at her house, which was always really cool. Because she had cool art and fun stuff for us to play with.  So yeah, no, my family's pretty great, pretty fantastic. And I think sort of foundational to who I am and who I've become in my life.

I think in the family dynamic, I talked about being the quintessential oldest child, very driven, I would say. And opinionated myself about how what I believe and what direction I thought. I think that that belief pushes me to move in. It's very values driven, I guess. And I think in that vein, very much tied to the place where I am at the time, very rooted in my surroundings. And I think that that is a thread that extends through our family. I think on my mom's side, on my maternal side, that commitment to community is goes back generations and the influence that they have placed upon public service and commitment to the people that you, if you have a capacity to make things better, you should commit your time to doing that because it makes the whole stronger. So there have been things I think that my grandparents committed themselves to in their lives that are very inspirational to me. And I think sort of shaped what I saw growing up and how you can commit yourself to things. I think that that's something that my mom has picked up and I think shared with all of her children.

And on the same side, I think, or on my dad's side, on my paternal side, I think I have this very rich understanding of what I think it means to be sort of the true American experience, which is, I have that on my mother's side, but much more on my dad's side. Sort of these experiences, of what experiences of what it meant to be sort of an American in the west. So my grandfather, he grew up on a homestead in Idaho, in Salmon, Idaho just over the mountains from the Big Hole Valley and his father and his father's family homesteaded there.

[00:05:35]

And his story is really compelling to me because he grew up with his grandparents, his father and mother had him in, I believe, 1915. And his mother died in the flu of 1918. And so he was orphaned and was left with a single father in 1918, 1919. I mean, I can't even imagine what that dynamic must have been and so my grandfather was raised by his grandparents and his father ended up marrying and having eight other children. And so he had a very large sibling base that were younger than he was. And he was a cowboy, right? So he actually was a cowboy. He worked on ranches and in that area and he became a miner. And I don't know how old my grandfather was when he met my grandmother. But he told this story to me once that he met my grandmother when she was working on a ranch as well. I don't know if it was her ranch or another family's ranch, but my grandmother was raised also by her father and her older sister. So it's very interesting sort of role reversal for the early 20th century.

And I think very indicative of the hardships that were experienced by people at that point in time in America, because it was so shaped by the depression. And it was so shaped by this sort of chaos of this post World War. I. 1920s era. So my grandmother was born and she was raised by her dad, but my grandmother told this story that she was getting water from a well, and he rode up to her on a horse. And that was how they met. And I am like, oh my God, this is the most Western American romance I can ever imagine. And they were young and they were in love and they were supposed to get married on Christmas day and they ran away and got married the day before on Christmas Eve. So I really love that.

I think that that's a very rooted American story. So my grandfather was a miner and they mined all over Idaho and then they traveled. I can't remember, I think they were in Wallace before, but then my grandfather moved his family here, I think right around 1952, 53 to work in the mines in Butte.

[00:08:12]

And they moved into a house in McGlone Heights and that's where they lived until for my whole time, really for their whole lives basically.  And so, of course, you're experiencing these family stories and all of the lessons and the experiences of their life in this place. That's very Butte and very rooted and…Butte. And so, I don't know, it's hard for me to separate any of those things. But I think because of that, I feel this kinship and this connection to true stories of American success and America, I don't know, Montana and Butteness because it's grit and hardship, but you make so much goodness out of it. You commit yourself to something greater than yourself. You work hard, you love the people you love. So yeah, I definitely love my family story. I love my family a lot.

Jaap: Would you talk a little bit more about, you mentioned on your maternal side, their commitment to community, and do you have some specific examples of that that you could go into more?

Crain: Sure. So how do I start? Okay. So I love my mom's parents so much.  And we spent a lot of time with them growing up in their house on Park Street. And I mean, it was almost this refuge for us, and you don't wanna be at home and you're like, where do you go? You go, well, we went to our grandparents' house and they gave us a lot of independence in their home. It was just a safe place where we had anything we could ever want. And I remember we would be able to, go play dress up and we could go through, all of my grandmother's fantastic accessories and makeup and shoes. And we'd get into drawers and we'd find long, satin gloves and fancy purses. And things were very glamorous or you'd, find cufflinks, some cover buns and you'd be like, what the heck is this? And why do you have these things? And then you'd start, we'd dig deep. We were nosy kids and we'd get into old photos and old photo books. And they took tons of photographs. And because we had this very open relationship with them where we could ask them anything, we would get into a photo book and it'd be, we don't know any of these people tell us these stories. And so you would find photos that were from the fifties. And I remember the day I found the photo of my grandparents with JFK and I was like, well, this is an interesting moment.

And there would be photos of my grandfather in the newspaper, whether it be for his work in the insurance industry, or it would be his work on the school board here in Butte. Then there were all of these photographs of my grandmother meeting with other people in the community and their advocacy work for people with intellectual and developmental disabilities.

And it sort of wasn't ever this overt thing, you do this thing or you commit yourself to these things. And they, I guess, I kind of regret that. I can't speak to it in a - that we ever had a formal conversation about it. But seeing these things indicated to me that there was something more going on as far as what they were doing in their lives, very different than this environment that I was growing up in, which was two retirees taking care of their grandchildren.

[00:12:14]

So as I understand it, so my grandfather went to World War II when he was 19 years old. And I have to tell the story about the time I met one of his war friends, but he was 19 and he went to war and there were photographs of him. And then he came back and he was working for the Butte, Anaconda & Pacific Railroad. And there were articles or you'd find little snippets about, you know, John & Lenore’s son was deployed or came home and all of that. And then really it was learning that my grandmother and my grandfather, through their own motivations of life experience had started to form coalitions with their neighbors and their friends in the community to create organizations that would advocate for people with disabilities and intellectual disabilities and physical disabilities.

And I think that that was driven by the experience they had with their own children and to make sure that those people who are different and have more needs were given the resources that they needed and could be, would be able to have a life of dignity because they could find access to resources to educate their children and that they could access employment opportunities because they would be able to live lives that would generate an income and would allow them to be contributing members of society.

I think it was painful for them, and I think it was difficult for them, but I think that what that illustrated to their children was that this is hard and it's challenging. And we have to confront a lot of different things in that effort. But the outcome of this is for the better of all, not just our children, but all children similar to them. And I don't exactly know how my grandfather got involved with running for the school board, but I know that he did that and that he served as the chairman. I think one of his accomplishments that he was really proud of is that he had the big Butte school named after John F. Kennedy. He really was a - Kennedy was his president. And I think he felt a great kinship to him. And just, they were, I think they were of a similar era and commitment to the greater good, a philanthropy almost, of people. And so that was one of the things that they did. And then my grandfather started a scholarship program at Montana Tech through sort of the early phase crowdfunding platform of can everybody contribute $5 so that we can help some Butte kids get some books or get a small scholarship to make it accessible for them to go to school.

And that was very rooted in my grandfather only had an eighth grade education. But he knew that it was important for kids to get higher education and he made education a priority. And I think that that commitment to education was something that was very foundational to all of us. And I think that that really contributed to my own drive to be a educated person. And so that was inspiring. I think it was probably a reason why he committed himself to the school board of what the potential is through education and the foundations of education. And two of his daughters are teachers. And so I think that that was this tremendous commitment to community. And then on the other hand, one of the things that was very joyful in their home. So Nana would make us soup that we could come and enjoy after school. And then my grandparents would sit with us at the table and we'd have soup every day after school. And then my grandfather would sing to us.

And so my grandfather was this very talented - Papa was so talented at folklore and had this mind that knew every song ever. And he would re-craft the lyrics to songs so that they used our names instead of whatever the names were supposed to be. Song just played - and the celebration of song played such a critical role in sort of the joy of my childhood. And I mean, I hear those songs still, and I think that they were quintessentially connected to the experience he had as a kid in Butte, growing up in Dublin Gulch and hearing these songs from people who had immigrated here and that wanted a taste of their home that became his experience of home. And he shared that with us and I sing those songs to Thea now.

[00:17:04]

And it's unfortunate because my voice is not nearly as nice as his and can't carry a tune at all, but I sing them to her anyway, because they were so important to us. And I think that it was just, I think that's such a cool thing. It was just a really cool thing to have that connection to so many generations of my family, especially through the sort of heritage of being Irish and the folklore of where we're from and yeah.

Jaap: Really special. Thank you for sharing all that, Julia. So shall we start talking about Julia now? Can we talk about you? So why don't we just get started?  Let's just start as a kid, just talk about kind of growing up. Where'd you go to school?

Crain: We grew up in Walkerville, 613 West Daly. It was kind of a cool little neighborhood to grow up in with free range over the whole neighborhood and all of its nooks and crannies.  I went to Butte Central, so I started kindergarten at Butte Central in 1989. I think this was the first year that they had a kindergarten class after the schools closed. After the big decline in the population. And after mining had ceased, I don't know that that's the truth or the facts, but that's what I've heard. And so I did elementary at Butte Central, and then I went to Butte Central Junior High, and I went to Butte Central High school really the same 35 kids from kindergarten until our senior year.

And a lot of those kids that I went to school with at Central - their parents went to school with my mom at Central, or their parents, people know each other, but so it was, we all kind of grew up together, which was great. So that's where I did elementary through high school.  And in high school, I wasn't crazy about sticking around here. And I kind of aimed high and was, well, we're gonna get outta here and we're not just gonna get outta here. We're gonna go somewhere. And I decided at the end of my sophomore year, maybe my junior year, that I really wanted to go to Seattle University and I started doing all of the things to prepare to go.

They had this scholarship program that was a four year full ride scholarship. I did not get it, but it was called the Sullivan scholarship. And I remember you had to go in the fall for a day long intensive competition. And you competed with 150 kids from all over the country, the world, really for this fluoride scholarship, actually it might have been just people in the west. I can't remember. But anyway, I went and it had snowed - a foot of snow from Butte to Seattle. I'm not even joking with you. and my grandfather, Kevin drove my sister, my mother, my grandmother and I in their Ford Explorer to Seattle. It was literally the most harrowing experience I have ever had in my entire life.

We were driving in foot deep ruts basically that semis were creating all the way to Seattle. None of us had slept in two days. It was the worst. So we get there and we compete in this scholarship. And it was really crazy, highly intense sort of rigorous questions on a theoretical level that I had never grappled with before. I think they were talking, they wanted us to write an essay about the fairness of war. And I was like, whoa - we are 17. And we don't really know what's going on here at all, but we'll try. And I feel like that was such an awesome experience, even though I wasn't successful. I think it really set me up for the level of curiosity I really wanted to encounter as I went through my education experience.

And so I moved to Seattle, I was admitted and I got in and I moved there, I guess it would've been the fall of 2002. And I loved literally every minute of being at Seattle U. So Seattle U is a Jesuit school, pretty small for a college. It was 3000 students including a law school.  They had an education school, but they were really firmly grounded in the Jesuit tradition of the humanities. And they structured all of their education around the humanities. And that had really rich underpinnings in philosophy and in religion, but not just Catholic faith. You could do any faith, it was really multidisciplinary.

[00:22:26]

And so I remember how diverse my experiences were and how much I learned because it was coming from small town Montana to literally being exposed to the entire world in a large city that had people from all over the world. And I was interacting with people from all of these different backgrounds and it was one of the richest cultural and one of the richest intellectual experiences. Because I mean, when you start out with a scholarship competition asking you about the equity of war, and then you start talking about philosophy and talking not just about ethics and morals, but how does that come to play in how you formulate a person?

The mission of the school was that you connect the mind to what matters and doing community service was a big part of that. And so one of the things I got really curious about, I started out in political science and I realized very quickly that I was not into political science. I always thought I was gonna be a lawyer. I was like, I'm gonna do this. And then I realized I'm not excited when I'm talking about this. And so at the same time I was taking all these poly sci classes. I was in this class called housing design in this sustainable community. And the professor of that class was this woman, Dr. Marie Wong. And she was an urban planning professor who had gotten her PhD in Iowa, at Iowa State and then she may have done her PhD at the University of Washington after that actually. But she was an Asian American woman who had this entire class structured around housing design. And so we started looking at the underpinnings of housing in America, dating back to colonial days and how housing in the American system changed over time and how that was connected to neighborhood.

And she has to write all these papers and I decided that I was gonna do two subjects. So the first subject that I did was a paper on the efficiency and effectiveness of the Foursquare worker cottage in a mining community, which led me to do all of this research on the Foursquare worker cottages in Centerville.

And all of these things led me to call my mother and say - I need some research to do blah, blah, blah, and write this paper. And she would start sending me all of this research. And I became completely transfixed because all of the things that we were learning about in our theory level classes and all of the things we were learning about how housing design sort of formulated neighborhoods and how people used their homes and what the structure of the home meant for the overall success of the person living within it, or the structure of their neighborhood, creating a framework for their own capacity to succeed became very interesting to me.

And then I had these little microcosm neighborhoods at home that I understood very in depth, because I had lived there. I had gone to daycare there. I could put all of these theories to practice. And so I did this thing about Centerville and about the housing design. And then now I know how those have changed over time and how people have adapted them to make them more comfortable on a 20th, late 20th or 21st century use style. But the other subject that was really interesting was because  Dr. Wong was so committed to Asian America. She was taking us into the international district in Seattle pretty frequently to look at sort of the vernacular architecture of Asian America and how Asian Americans shaped Chinatown and shaped the places where immigrants were settling.

We went through a couple of the buildings near the U called the ID. And I was like, this is crazy. The idea of those mezzanine levels, the cheater story was - oh, that's on Mercury Street in Butte. That's on Main Street in Butte. I have been in buildings like this. This is so fascinating. These inner connections between these two places. So then, because I was fascinated and because I had this great example, I started doing a little bit of research on families from the Chinn family from Butte and Rose Hum Lee and all of these stories of Butte people and how they were making inroads in Montana. And the curiosity led me to get an internship at the Wing Luke Asian Museum in Seattle. And the Wing Luke is this incredible Asian museum that talks about the Asian American experience, particularly the experience of Asian communities in the west. And I got to research communities all over, sort of mining neighborhoods or mining cities all through Idaho and Oregon and Washington.

And I just remember being so excited that there were actual discoveries made during that research project, that the people who had started, and I can't remember the name of the building, but it's the building that the Wing Luke Asian museum is currently located in. And I wanna say it's the Kong Yick building - had been built by the same family that had built the Mai Wah here.

And I was like, this is incredible. This connection of this city, this huge city where Asian immigrants are coming from China and Japan and the Philippines and Southeast Asia, and I thought - this is so cool. And then this is happening in Butte. And this again, sort of said to me, Butte had this significance that you don't understand when you're here, but when you start to bring it into focus in this broader perspective - whoa.

And I think those fascinations led me to be, okay, I'm firmly not going to law school. I'm an urban planner at my core. And I love these experiences. I love this experience of people and how they shape the place they live so much. And that led me to just start following down this path of public administration and understanding that for better or worse, I think the way you make change in communities, if you're going to go, there are two ways you can go, you can be sort of the Solinsky community organizer and sort of follow in those footsteps of sort of radical organizing in your communities, which I am, I very much think is at the heart of sort of some of the most pivotal social movements here in Butte and across the country. Or you can be sort of the non-risk taking very comfortable with understanding systems and being a little more - I need structure and go with the public administration route and become sort of a bureaucrat.

And for all of the bad with bureaucracy, there's so much good too, because it's this policy that - this policy level that can respond to the work that's being done by advocates and to the needs of actors that make change. And I started looking at things from that perspective. And I was like, oh, this is so fascinating. And I love this. And I'm like, oh my God, I'm an urban planner and this is cool. And I decided I was gonna go, well, I didn't decide that right away. I graduated in 2006 and obviously the first thing I needed was revenue stream. And so I didn't have a job and I didn't have any money. I mean, literally had no money and I got a job working in a finance firm, but not just any finance firm, I got a job working at a hedge fund.

[00:30:30]

So this is fascinating because a lot of funky stuff was happening in the mid 2000's. A lot of funky financial stuff. A lot of securities were being sold in the United States that were backed by mortgages. And because of my undergraduate curiosity in housing, I had this weird sort of super nerdy understanding of how you could read an article about a large bank or a large securities firm and how they were structuring debt and how they were looking at their debt and securitizing it. So basically when you borrow some money, you have to have something behind it that they can say, you owe me that if you can't pay this loan, right. Well, the entire framework of our country was on the back of a housing market and all of these loans that were coming due. So I'm in this job and I worked in their corporate library and my job was to read the news abstract, daily articles to keep track of the holdings of different firms and where they were trying to make positions.

And I did it across what they call long, short investing. So that's where you go long on something and you go short on another and you hope that the long thing fails, the short thing's gonna succeed and you're gonna make a bunch of money or you do things arbitrate, mergers. So you want people to be taking over companies and arguing for those things because you can make money. If you have a stake in that company, that's trying to take that, they're trying to take over, because it's gonna make a bunch of money. I learned all of this - I didn't know anything about this. Then I learned a lot about this. And then the whole damn thing failed. One day I went to work in November and the freaking housing market went up.

[00:32:37]

All of the housing market defaulted. It was a catastrophe. Major banks in this country were failing. Morgan Stanley failed. Big banks were failing and where I was positioned in the company in this humble archival sort of role in the library was watching the quant analytics team 20 feet away. I mean, I can't even imagine what it must have been like in 1929 because I was watching the news and I was watching all of them pulling their hair out, taking baseball bats and hitting computers. They were throwing things. People were ripping newspapers. They were ripping paper. The chaos that unfolded in front of my eyes was one of the most visceral experiences I have ever had in my entire life. I don't think I will ever witness anything similar to it ever again.  And to be in that moment and to be watching these banks failing and to be watching these men losing billions of dollars was unbelievable. And to know how it all worked and the risks associated with it. Well, it didn't take more than two months for that to sort of manifest itself.

I took the GRE on a Thursday for graduate school and I was laid off the following Monday.  It was chaos when they laid everyone off. It was craziness. So that was 2008 that I was laid off. So that was a long time ago, but still it was 2008. Well, I was like, I'm not getting another job. First of all, there's no jobs and I'm going to grad school. Because I got into graduate school. I decided that I was gonna become an urban planner and I applied to programs all over the country. And in all of my personal statements, I wrote about ye old Butte and I realized how awesome it would be to become a planner and how much I believed in the potential of that discipline.

And I don't think I really knew what kind of planner I wanted to be. I don't think you know enough from doing research on the internet. So I moved to Portland, Oregon in 2009 and I started planning school at Portland State University in the fall of 2009. And I started in community development. And when you start in community development, they immediately start having you read a lot of social theory and community development is all about neighborhoods. There are other areas of planning, there's land use planning. You do a lot of development review. You do a lot of how to zone areas so that you can have spatial outcomes. You have environmental planners. I don't think they teach you how to do what I do now, but you learn about NEPA and the environmental protection of our communities and that's all happening. And then you have people doing transportation planning, because they wanna learn how to make streets work for people who ride bicycles and drive cars and walk. And because I was in Portland and in the Northwest, it was very multimodal instead of car, car, car, which was fantastic. And so anyway, I get into these classes and I'm doing all this social theory stuff and I'm like, this is really interesting, but it's a little much for me actually. I don't know if I love this social theory stuff so much.

And I decided that I was really struggling between that and land use planning, which is very regulatory and it's very difficult because it's so regulatory, you're learning codes and policies and it can get real unwieldy real quick. So I took this seminar taught by a professor Lisa Bates and her colleague whose name I am spacing right now that I don't want to because I really respected the work that she did, but I'll remember it eventually. But Lisa and this professor were teaching a class on Detroit. And I was like, gotta take that because I immediately was - working class city, working class, I always was striving to understand things because I knew I could. And I knew that, I think at my core, I am curious about people - my people - I'm curious about people like my dad who was a boiler maker for the Anaconda company. And I was curious about how people who really relied on unions were living their lives. But I was curious about how all of that same stuff was having a de-industrializing effect in Detroit. And what could we learn from that to do good work in Butte? And how could we learn from what they're doing there to change where we are here. And so much of what happened in Detroit is the story of race and racial inequity, which is maybe not so much a corollary for Butte because so we're so non - we're diverse, but not diverse, like other places, right? We have diversity, but it's, we're very majority white here and you have this huge racial inequity that's happening in Detroit. And I wanted to learn about that and why they were so divided. And that was what the course was called Detroit Divided.

[00:38:26]

And you learned a lot about how housing policy segregated neighborhoods and how you had - major gentrification occurred. Well, not gentrification. You had major diaspora because this term that I absolutely despise, the inner city, it's just a city. And then there are suburbs of a city. And it's just this negative connotation that they give to this place and they're giving it because there are people there that are unlike them, whatever that may be. And that concept of the other, which I'm also not okay with - you don't create good by setting people apart. It's all the place where you are. And so you have the suburbs that are developing in Detroit and that's where they're giving loans to people who have access to equity. And they're sending people to live these flourishing lives and they're leaving other populations of people who have less access to equity to wither in what they deem the inner city, which is so F'd anyway, if you guys wanna, I don't know if you're allowed to say stuff like this at all.

Jaap: We don't care. We do not care. Say anything you want.

Crain: But I learned a lot about that and I started asking questions about - what was going on with neighborhoods in Butte. And then I sort of was noticing you had that same thing happening here. You had the flats developing and what was happening on the flats. And so that was a great entry. And then I decided that Lisa Bates was the greatest thing ever, because she had exposed me to this new concept. She had just come from the University of Illinois Champagne. She was a professional planner. She had done a ton of housing work in New Orleans, post Katrina. She knew stuff that I didn't know. And I wanted to know all of the things that she knew, and she did a seminar. And the first article that she had us read in this seminar, which was all about neighborhood change, it was a seminar on neighborhood change, was an article from the Atlantic about the positions that finance companies took in 2008. And those that succeeded by going short on the housing market, because they were betting on people defaulting on their mortgages.

Now I said before American homes and their neighborhoods are the places that set people up for success. Right? And if you are banking on people defaulting on their mortgages, you are banking on the very foundation of American success defaulting. And what is the outcome of that? And that was the entire thesis of the class. And it was – so, to be thinking about neighborhoods and how the place where you live and the way that you have access to affordable housing and the way that you have access to affordable utilities and the way that you have access to the internet. And the way that you get to school or you get to work is something that is going to contribute to your long term outcomes as a person and the success that you realize in your life. And I was like, okay, boom, we're going in, we're going deep. And we're going now.

And I got so excited and started doing everything that I possibly could to understand how these concepts could all be sort of woven together into sort of who I could be and what I could do anywhere that I went to make people's lives better because I understood this sort of framework of community organizing and how you take information from those people and how you then use that information to formulate policy solutions. Because you have to have policy that is shaping these things, or you aren't gonna have success, right. Because, and it's as simple as how do you zone a neighborhood so that you can have a house there, but also a grocery store. So you don't have to walk 25 minutes to go get a gallon of milk, but you can walk three and get home and make breakfast. So it's as simple as that, right? So, that is the story of why I became an urban planner.

And I remember we did this, my workshop project, I did it with three individuals who I respected a great deal.  A really skilled set of people who were really wonderful and from all over the country. We did this project in a neighborhood, sort of an underserved neighborhood of Portland.

And it was all about amplifying community voices and how you could do community scale planning in a DIY fashion, and then bring those workbooks back to the bureaucrats or public administrators. And they could take that information, weave it into whatever policy work they were doing. And it was really, it was arduous and it was tough and it was challenging. And grad school is hard. It is really hard. And emotional and difficult, especially when you are trying to engage the public in helping you formulate something like that, because they're looking at you, you are going to help them gain something.

[00:43:41]

And I think one of the things, if you talk about how exciting it is to be a planner on a theoretical level, I mean - you love what you do. You love the potential of that work. What I have learned though, is that people are looking to you to provide them safety. And that can be an incredibly vulnerable place to be because they're looking at you for leadership and they are looking at you for solutions because they can't do it themselves. And I think I say that in hindsight, because of what I have not learned in 10 years as a planner and having people express their emotions to you and not knowing the perfect way to resolve their problem because it's never perfect. And if you make one person happy, you're making two people unhappy. And how do you merge those things together?

So I moved, so I graduated, I spent, I got this really cool graphic design job where I was doing quality control on - I had a friend whose dad had a company and I needed a job quickly and I was doing quality control and editing on labels for a juice product that is known around the world. I'm not gonna say what it was, anyway.  And then I was doing the editing for all of their labels internationally. So I did that job and I also wasn't making very much money and I called my mother three days before Thanksgiving. And I was like, "Hey, guess what?" And she's like, "What?" And I'm like, "I need to move home." And she's like, "Okeydoke." And then she got off the phone and made a couple calls and cleaned out a bedroom. And I packed 10 years of my life into a storage pod and packed two suitcases. And I moved home to Montana in time for, I think I got home 10 days later, on the sixth. I had Thanksgiving in Portland and then I was at the Christmas stroll.

So it was one week. And it was sort of like my days as a rock star had closed, I had had a very fun summer, but I was, it was not great for my bank account anyway, and I came home and I started doing an internship in the planning department here. And they say the rest is history, but really I started doing work on zoning stuff. And I started doing this rezoning of all of the land in Butte that was not zoned because it had been industrial -AKA Superfund sites - and also some of our parks that weren't zoned. And so we started doing open space zoning. That was an interesting experience because there was a conspiracy theory at the time that was associated with United Nations called Agenda 21, which I'm still not clear what that was, but I somehow had stepped into a very controversial thing, which should have been an indicator to me to run. But it wasn't, I was doubling down, come on, this is kind of it this fun. So we'd have meetings. And then people would be like, why are you zoning it this way? And we'd try to explain it to 'em. And I was like, this is kind of cool. You get to explain what you're doing with people. And we went through the whole process and we had one of those big meetings at the council where there was 60 opponents and 70 proponents. It was a big thing.

[00:47:53]

It was a big thing. And I feel I was having a dissociative experience because I did not understand why this was controversial because I'm the idealistic recent planning graduate who thinks planning decisions are just the best decisions. Obviously this is what you should do, but I'm like, wait a minute, How they don't train, they don't prepare you for this. They don't prepare you for the disagreements or how, or they try, but you don't have any context. So that happened. And then I just sort of started to get more responsibilities doing grant writing or grant administration, and all of it sort of connected to this open space concept.

And that became this understanding of how the Natural Resource Damage Program works and how Superfund was working. And I started to get more responsibilities in those two areas. And I started to understand the relationship between those things and how we could maybe start dovetailing those things and how we could create better systems for managing data and how we could use that with our spacial system and how we could link that through databases, which really calls back to my days at the corporate library at BlackRock, where I was working in this library, reading articles and archiving them.

I kind of know how data works. And so, and I kind of like that stuff and I love using data to make solutions. And so that's a very data lead planning kind of thing. But if you have data, you can explain things. Right. And so really, I think starting in about 2014 or 15, that's when the consent decree had reemerged. For the first couple years I was here, everyone was asking questions - when are you guys gonna get back to the table? And I had been gone. So I was not tracking on any of this stuff for a decade. I had left in 2002, Butte looked real bad. And then when I came back, there was grass everywhere, which I was like - this is cool.

And then I didn't, but I didn't know any of, sort of the other sort of stuff that was going on from a policy or decision making perspective until I was kind of into the frying pan. Right. And so those questions started to become very - I started to understand more about what was going on and it was - there had been negotiations. They had fallen apart. Then I started to learn through sort of being at the meetings, why, and starting to work more in Superfund was a big curve ball for me because I'm not a scientist. Right. I'm a planner. I have this humanities background. I am sort of more of a people type person than I am a science person, even though I love science and I'm okay with it. But I like data. So I kind of got it. But they were talking about water and hydrology and it was - I feel like I have a DIY PhD in this stuff because I now understand what they're talking about and with a certain level of comfort. But it took five years for me to get caught up. And that's when we started really negotiating the consent decree and all of the details inherent to not only this legal framework, but coming to consensus as a group of people with different interests.

And I think being involved in that process was really, it wasn't relying on any sort of scientific background or any sort of knowledge I had of the technical side of things. It was understanding that at the core of all of these discussions and why we needed to get to consensus was for two reasons, it was for Butte and the people who live there. And I think that the outcome of all of that year's long negotiation, whether it be parties advocating for their interests, we as the county making sure that as those decisions and those concessions and those grants were being negotiated, we had to look out for our public. And that was my number one focus.  And I don't know if maybe I always like saying that out loud, but when it became time to start talking about how to engage with the public, that's when I was like, oh my gosh, it makes me so excited. It was the part of the experience that just made me feel like – oh, we can really do well here to make sure that the public feels like they have some agency in this.

[00:52:54]

But it's never as easy as you think it's gonna be. And I think that that was one of the lessons that kind of helped inform how we moved through this thing. So that was 10 years of my life, 12 years of the last - 12 years or so that has really formed, has been an outcome of, created sort of this career trajectory that I'm on.

Jaap: So we've talked a lot about the foreboding name of PRP, very scary, but that maybe it was a real advantage in the end because you guys were able to be in the room and maybe have a little more, you know, a little more hand in the decision planning. Can you add to that?

Crain: Yeah. I mean it's not, it's my opinion, right? So, being a PRP I think was a variable that was really difficult for people to figure out how to deal with. I really truly think it was a challenge because it is very rare. It's very rare for a city or a county to be named a PRP, I think. I don't know a lot about other Superfund sites in the country, but I think the majority of them are corporations that have done their thing and they may have been completely at the right to do that.

But because of the way, regulations change over time, similar story in Butte, once regulations change and you see these impacts happening, you have to fix it because we have an environment that has to sustain us and we have people that need to be protected. And so you have a lot of corporations that get named, and I think it's very sort of, maybe not easy. I mean, it's challenging to take on corporations when you're the government, but here you had a state government and a federal government that were basically saying you, corporation, and you, city, are responsible for this mess and you have to clean it up and that's bonkers.  And I think one of the things that I think is a challenge is, I don't know if you could ask an uninvolved person, a person who is not really tracking Superfund, if they know that their county is responsible. Do you know we're a PRP? Do you know that the reason that this is so controversial is because we are partially responsible? We have liabilities. I mean, that starts pushing into this realm of - why does that matter to me? And then the number one answer to that is you pay taxes, you are the fund generator for this place. So you are inextricably tied to that.

And I think because of that, because this cleanup, because the industrial impacts of a century of mining occurred in the heart of our neighborhoods, you have a people that are inextricably woven into the complexity of that.  I mean, that's fascinating, that leads to things - if you have 600 acres interwoven between worker cottages in Centerville and mansions on Broadway, I mean, this, isn't something you can just fence off. You can't just clean it up and say, "Don't go in there. It's dangerous." We have to go there because it's the place we live. This is our neighborhood. This is this framework for our ultimate success in life. So if you have a government that is kind of divorced from your place, so you have a state government, or you have a federal government, they're never gonna be able to drill down into the inner workings of a neighborhood, the way that people who live in those neighborhoods can. Right? So by being the people, living in these neighborhoods who have experienced life in these neighborhoods who have this perspective, not only of their experience there, but that of their neighbors and their families and friends, you can sit at a table and say, that's not a solution that's gonna work for us.

And I think because of that, there was a tremendous advantage to Butte, silver bow being named a PRP I don't think who would ever wanna be named a PRP ever again, because of the innate complexities that it contains. But do I think that there was an advantage to that? Absolutely. And I think it was crucial and critical to giving our public agency a say in how this work was done and how it will be done in the future.

[00:58:30]

Jaap: So now with this consent decree being signed, what do you hope will be the outcome of it? And also having a daughter here and what do you hope that maybe she could have growing up here that maybe you and I wouldn't have had growing up here?

Crain: Right. So I presented at a conference this last week and one of the questions that came up and they had asked to some of my colleagues, they said what was it about Butte that made you fall in love and made you fascinated and wanna stay here and make this the heart of your work. And both of those individuals talked about the people and sort of, I thought that was really fantastic that you know, they're scientists, their leaders in their field and they were really concerned about, they just found the people to be really special. And because I was from here, the same question didn't really have relevance. And they talked a lot about the landscape's change over time and how when they had moved here, Butte was just dotted with mine waste dumps. And I mean, not just dotted, I mean, the entire hill was desecrated. I mean, if you look at those photos, it was completely desecrated when our parents were children, that was what they lived amidst.

You go to other towns in Montana, you go to other cities and towns in America, you see wheat fields, you see beautiful, large green sodded areas. You see these just gorgeous treelined streets. None of that is here because mining in one way or another impacted all of that. And now to see all of that mine waste to have been recontoured, and kept in place, whether or not you agree with that strategy, to wake up every day and see a landscape that is vegetated, that has plants growing on it that has life somewhat in it instead of a desecrated landscape. I think that that has a pivotal psychological impact, right? So we are the last generation that knew both. I feel like we're the generation that knew life before the internet. And we are the last generation that knew that the Butte hill looked like that.

I presented to a bunch of high school students a couple of years ago, and I was doing this before and after presentation and I was showing them images and I realized that I left out all of this contextual information in the presentation, because they asked, they were basically like, so what? For kids that were born after 2002, who are the kid? I mean, I have that thing going on where I feel like everybody was born in the eighties, but they weren't, they were born in the 2000's after all of the cleanup has taken place. They have no actual, real contextualizing knowledge that that was ever anything but what it is today. Their impression of mining, maybe that it all happened underground because they didn't know that the waste was on the surface because it's not there anymore. And so their understandings of how mining maybe took place, it's completely different. And I think because of that, I actually think that there's a tremendous potential amidst this younger population because they live afresh, right?

They live on a renewed landscape and so much more is coming. So it's not just how the cleanup took place early on and the transformations that we have witnessed in our lifetimes, but it's gonna look a lot less dramatic in terms of taking an unsewn dump and turning it into a landscaped field. It's gonna be taking land that just sort of looks normal and turning it into something truly spectacular. And I think that when you look at the history of this cleanup, the first levels of cleanup that happened in Butte were the first cleanups that happened anywhere because Superfund was so new, right, in the eighties and nineties, but we have 35 years of experience, lived experience, applied experience. And we are seeing that these philosophies in our community of end-land use and committing to creating benefits for our public have grown so much in their scope. And I think the thing that I am excited about is watching  the change in that scope and how it is being sort of envisioned, I think, is going to have tremendous potential for how people for how people, I don't know how to say this, how, what people per the success people perceive in any investments they may make in the future. The cleanup isn't a question now, it's a when and a how instead of a, is it, or is it not? And I think that that provides a tremendous level of security in making decisions to make investments here. And if we, as decision makers and as settling defendants can make this project work, it now provides an opportunity to all of the other change makers that are in our community that are trying to do economic development to do land use planning, to do financial planning, to really set our community up and propel us toward a really great future.

That's what I think. I mean, I really think that this is a pivotal moment for our community, and I think we're seeing this growth already happening, really. Maybe because of the pandemic we're living in right now, and that people are choosing places like this because they seem safer. But does that mean that - we have maybe some critical mass happening at the same time as these big projects? And we have these people that have been working at this diligently for the last decade. I'm ready for it all to sort of Venn diagram together and become the thing that is going to really set us on the path to be, I think exactly who we are at our core, which is this really incredible city in the mountains that has an infrastructure and a framework that is ready for density and urban living.

Again, that you can have everything that you love about living in a city like Boise or Coeur D'Alene or Spokane, but you can also have it here. Because it's already set up for it. It's a readymade opportunity. And I think that that is the part of, I mean, stepping away from the environmental outcomes, I'm so excited for what this is gonna set our community up.

And I think it's setting us up to return to sort of the roots of who we are, which is this metropolitan place in the middle of nowhere.

Jaap: Clark, do you wanna go?

[01:06:06]

Grant: Can we go back to the beginning? You hear a lot about Kevin Shannon. I've only lived in Butte six years, but I know who Kevin Shannon is.  But I've never heard much about Joan Shannon.

Crain: Oh my Nana.

Grant: So I want to hear more about Joan, I guess.

Crain: Okay. Joan is fabulous. She's truly fabulous. And I think that as a person, she would adore being described as fabulous. Nana's mother is my namesake, Julia, Redman. Julia Redman's family came to Butte.  She came to Butte by way of sort of labor organizing miners.  The upper peninsula of Michigan to Colorado, Leadville, Colorado to Butte and Julia was sort of fantastic because she was a college educated woman and a teacher at a time when women didn't go to college and they didn't teach.

And she married a man named Nolan. No, that's wrong. Julia Rafferty. So that was Nolan Rafferty - was her dad. She married Jack Redman, my mom's dad or my mom's grandfather. And he was an electrician with the Montana Power Company. And they grew up over on Alabama Street, right behind Scown Field. And they had three kids - my grandma, Joan who's the oldest, my uncle Jack who's the middle child, and then a baby, Terry Redman. And Joan went to school at Butte Central. And she, along with a troop of girlfriends who were so tightly knit that I knew that her friends were her complete architecture of her life growing up. They all went to nursing school at Carroll College and Nana graduated from Carroll and came back to Butte and she started working as a nurse. And then she became a school nurse. She was a school nurse, I think, at Emerson. And I remember her telling me a lot of stories about being a school nurse.

So she took care of everyone's kids. Right. And she would tell stories about having to take kids home when they were sick or having to visit their homes and stuff. And she would go to people's apartments to sort of do sort of, I don't know what, if it was a check or not. So Nana was a school nurse and when we were growing up as kids, she was always sort of being a nurse for us. She would do hearing tests and seeing tests and do all this stuff. But she was always kind of tracking on our health and wellbeing.

She was very much my grandfather's wife. Right. So my grandfather had all of this sort of notable stuff happening. He was a personality and he was well known. And so they were sort of socialites, right? They were part of this sort of society of Butte that was always, I mean, what my grandfather did was I think very common of men in his time. They would go to events. And so hence the fancy long gloves and the fancy purses and all of this makeup and stuff that she really, she was sort of this very put together, pulled together glamorous woman even for being a school nurse.

And when I think about my grandmother, I think that there was an intense, I think she had a really intense experience in her.  She was the mother of five kids and two of those kids had an intellectual disability. And I think that that was very heartbreaking for her.  But also I think in that heartbreak, she sought out support from people. She knew that there were other people that were probably struggling with the same things and she sought them out and she relied a lot on her friends to take care of her through and to be vulnerable and to really navigate through, I think the difficulties of that experience. And while I think my grandfather got a lot of the accolades for doing the work that he did in the community. I think that their work in advocating for people with disabilities was really driven by my grandmother's need to feel some agency for changing the circumstances that she experienced.

She couldn't change the experience for her kids, but she could change the experience for other kids and through her work and it was pretty significant legislative work. And I'm not clear exactly on the details of how this happened, but she through legislative work advocated for early childhood. And when, I mean, testing newborns for iodine. I think it's called a PKU test when they're born, that they would be able to in newborn babies intervene before things could happen to them, that would set them on a course of disability in their life. And she shaped the capacity for Butte to start things like the Butte Shelter Workshop, where people who had disabilities could go and find work to build things, to make things, and to have a life of dignity, because they had in common that they could have money to spend and they could interact in the world. And I think that that interplays really well with something that I appreciate about this community at least historically, and I think today is this incredible level of, it's not, I wouldn't say it's compassion, but this ability of people in our community to appreciate who people are and to treat them the same. And that was always a value that my grandmother really instructed in us to not be judgmental about the challenges that people encounter in their life.  To be sensitive to the battles that people are waging and the ways that that impacts who they are and how they project themselves onto the world.

Sometimes it's easier for you to be a person who starts a movement or organizes people. And sometimes it's easier for you at a point in time to be really angry about it and to maybe not be constructive. And that it's your obligation to understand that you have to meet people where they are. And that is very much at the core of who I think my grandmother is. I think that she, I think she lived in her life with a lot of pressure. She was an oldest girl. She had this mother that was, I think maybe a little overbearing over her and wanted her kids to be perfect. I mean, that was the thirties and we wanted to be the picture of happiness and perfection, but I think, I think that these are legacies of who the women in my family are also because I just think of them as being so strong.

So I say that she did all of this stuff I have literally in my life, never met anyone stronger than her. And she, I remember her saying to me, I think one of the things, I think this kind of ties to sort of her life experience. And I can't remember what the decision I was making was in my life, but she, I was talking to her on the phone and I remember her saying to me, this is what you do. You make the decision, you make it right now and you never, ever change your mind. Don't think about it again. You make the decision and that's the decision and it's done. And I think about that and how absolutely terrifying it is to do something like that. You make the decision and you never confront it again.

And I think that being a decisive person is about being really brave and being really strong and being able to stand behind what you've done. And you don't have to explain it to anybody, but that's your, that's your life. And I think that that has whether she was that whether she was that overt with her own kids. I mean, I see that, that decisiveness and that just staunchness in my aunt and my mom. And I think that, that I don't see it in me as much as maybe I wish that I did - that bravery and that commitment to your - and I think that that's just, there's certain things that scare me a little bit more. I see it in my sister. I mean, just absolute assuredness and assurance in who you are and what you decide. And I think that that is - that is Joan's legacy, if there ever was one. I mean, Estee Lauder makeup, fancy and glamorous, Dooney & Bourke bags, and making a decision and sticking to it. I mean, she's really quite marvelous.

[01:16:31]

Grant: Thanks. I also wanted to follow up on Kevin's combat experience, or you'd said you talked with a war buddy of his later in life.

Crain: So when I was little, my grandfather - I would say that he was prone to bouts of nostalgia, every Irish person is - nd I think that those bouts of nostalgia maybe are the way that people who didn't know how to process a war experience dealt with it. My grandfather met, I think, it was a group of four men when he deployed and they stayed lifelong friends. But my grandfather would lay in his chair. He always laid in a reclining chair in the back porch of their house. And he had this red book. It was this five by eight book. And it was a scrap book. It was red and it had a gold emblem on the front of it. And he kept it in the bottom drawer of this chest of drawers in the front hall of the house. And he'd go through it every once in a while and you'd see him going through it and I'd never go through it with him. And I don't know that he didn't let me, but I definitely didn't go through it with him, but he'd go through it occasionally.  And then he would talk about this man, Murray Bronstein.

So in, I wanna say 2005, four or five, my girlfriend Anne from college was working for the Children's Defense Fund in Washington, DC. And I went to visit her and it was the first time I'd ever been to the east coast and really traveled anywhere by myself. And Ann's brother, John, was a lighting designer and was doing a play, On Golden Pond. He was lighting On Golden Pond in New York. Anne and I decided we were gonna go to New York and meet her parents there who had come from Bellingham, Washington. And before her parents got there, we were staying with John in Enwood and I was corresponding with Murray Bronstein and his wife, Rita Bronstein, who lived on Central Park West. And I don't know why, but every time my mom and my aunts and my grandmother and my grandfather would go to New York, they would always have dinner with Murray and Rita. And it just seemed like I had to do the same thing when I was there. So I called them and I made an appointment and they asked if they could take Anne and I to dinner. So Anne and I go to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, which is on the east side of Central Park and they lived on the west side of Central Park. Central Park is pretty big, I will let you know. And we got out of the MET and it was pouring rain. I mean, I have never seen rain like this and we are, soaking wet. And it's maybe an hour and 15 minutes before we're supposed to be at their apartment. And they lived in this fabulous post-war apartment. I mean, oh my God, New York city is incredible. And I was like, Anne, we gotta get outta this rain. And the only way we can do that is by going into this deli and hanging out. Why can I not remember the name of this place? It's a Jewish grocery store that I will remember the name of eventually, but we hung out in there and we ordered stuff to make little charcuterie boards. And I remember Anne and I soaking wet sitting in the front windows, on a heater like this because we didn't, there were no chairs. And I was like - we got 45 minutes to wait before we can go to their apartments.

We go, finally get there. We walk up, Rita looks at us like, oh my God. So we're 20. And she's like, oh, I need to dry your clothes. So we have to take all our clothes off. And she goes and puts 'em in the dryer. And we're wrapped in blankets. And we're sitting in this wonderful apartment of Murray and Rita's, and this is how I'm meeting my grandfather's closest friend, who he went through war with, while I am literally sitting naked under a blanket. And there is fantastic artwork on the walls. And we kind of ask questions and Murray and Rita both worked at Juilliard. He was a teacher and she was an administrator and they started telling us these fantastic stories about growing up in New York on the lower east side and having this experience to hear firsthand account of being a Jewish American in New York City and the experience of living in those neighborhoods. And just the entire cadence of the conversation was the most magical experience.

And then Murray talks about being with my grandfather and meeting him, the very first day he meets him. He tells me, he looks at my grandfather, who at the time, I think was probably about 5'10", 5'11", skinny as can be. And he said, Wound like a spring. So tight, like a spring. And I swear to God, I thought he was fresh from Ireland. His brogue was so thick. I could hardly understand him." And my grandfather, when you hear him talk from the seventies, he definitely had a brogue, but I can only imagine how thick it was when he was 19 years old, working on a railroad with all of these Irishmen and doing all of his interactions with them as a kid. So he talked about him being wound like a spring, and he'd never seen anyone as strong. That he relied on him every day for humor and that he'd sing and that he would share these experiences. And it was just so special. And I think shortly after that trip I came home and I went and found the red book at my grandfather's chest of drawers, in the bottom drawer next to all of the spent bulbs from the Polaroid cameras, which I took at the same time, the Polaroid cameras, not the bulbs. And I opened it and it was completely falling apart. And inside these photographs were the most heartbreaking things I have ever seen.

[01:23:27]

And it made me understand why my grandfather couldn’t sleep. So my grandfather was fighting and he was in the Battle of the Bulge and he was run over by a tank and they found him and he was put in the hospital and he was in a body cast. I can't even believe that this is an actual lived experience that we will, I hope, never know.  And I remember him telling me this story, it must have been - he got out of the cast on Easter Sunday, or he got woken up on Easter Sunday by a doctor named Mally who cracked an egg open on his forehead. And the doctor, I think he was in England or he was in France, one or the other, was from Anaconda and he got to come home. And I think he lived with who knows what kind of traumatic experiences. I mean, if that book and the photographs I saw are any indication of the experience he had living there and being there, I wish I would've talked to him about it. I wish I would've been brave enough to ask him those questions, but I think that I was scared because I didn't want to make him go through it but he got a purple heart. He got the purple heart from, I feel like there's something having to do with the queen mother and my grandfather did not care for English people, as most Irishmen do not of his generation. And I mean, the stories of my grandfather's family's persecution were big parts of our life, but it was really, I mean, those medals that he had were part of  the work of our lives. And I just, I think very foundational to who he was as a person and his commitments. I mean, he just really was, he was a veteran and he really believed very much in the care of veterans, just seeing how he would be if we would let a little plastic flag be on the ground. I mean, he'd make us pick it up. And it was never, it was just the most genuine patriotism in a way. I think only someone who had witnessed what he had witnessed, well, who had experienced what he had witnessed and there was just a gentleness to it that I think that I think is very, I wanna see more of it.

Grant: Yeah. Hmm. Thanks, Julia. I wanted to ask you to define de-industrialization - on another topic entirely.

Crain: So de-industrialization is - it's kind of interesting, right? So you have this big gangbusters operation happening in your community. Butte, the Butte hill, the Butte hill forever, I tried to imagine what Butte must have sounded like when you have trains after trains, after trains going by at all hours of the day and night. You have bells and whistles going when you have shift changes, when there's an accident, when something's going on on the hill. I try to think about the chaos of constant dumping and clanging and clashing and screaming and what the cadence and the rhythm of the community must have been like. And then you have this raucous shit going on down here in the central business district. And you got people at all hours of the day and night drinking and partying and trying to get a meal and trying to just find whatever it is people are trying to find. And I think that that interplay between those things is so cool, because it is this rhythm and just, I just love the way cities sound. I love seeing steam coming out of the grates and the way it looks and the way it feels and that it's dirty and it's clean and it's just unabashedly itself. And then I try to imagine what it is like when all of that sound is gone, right? So that's what happened here. I mean, it had to have been what happened here.

[01:27:09]

I can't even imagine how deafeningly quiet it must have been for people who had listened to that for their entire lives. And when that happens and then you see all of it stop moving. The grease is dripping off of things not because it's moving, but because it hasn't moved. When you see the very architecture of industry being physically dismantled around you, that is an act of de-industrializing. When you see the contraction of an industry happening, while all of this sort of very evidence stuff is happening. The jobs aren't there and the administrative jobs aren't there and the doors aren't opening and closing every day and the interchange of money is not happening every day. And that starts affecting your small businesses and it starts affecting your banks and it starts affecting whether or not you have cash revenues coming in to fix problems like your sewer infrastructure, your water system. That is de-industrialization. It is the physical and commerce level changes that are caused by industrial shifts. It is a thing, but it's not really a thing. It's a thing I say to describe what happens here. What happened in the auto industry, that happened to the steel industry, things that happened in the rust belt, we're all sort of that same ilk. And to understand how to fix it, you have to understand how it happened and what you have to replace.

Grant: Is there any fixing it here?

Crain: Yeah. You can fix it anywhere, whether you do it on the same scale is a completely different thing. Right? So, if we can figure out how to get 11,000 workers back here to do something crazy awesome. That would be incredible, right? We'd be 70,000 people overnight. If we could figure that out, whether or not that's gonna happen, but it means that we have all of these people here who are accustomed to craft labor, or, I mean, I just think of this as such a maker's place. There are people here who are so skilled in making and crafting and forging and building that if we can start using, identifying these sectors, and I'm not saying it's not happening, it is happening finding these workforces here that we can then match with employers and making sure that they have a workforce here to employ you start building it up. And that's actually better because you're building diversity into your economy. And if we can start building that level of diversity into our economy, all of the little tangential and a pertinent businesses are gonna come back.

Right now I just want one department store that's really good. Yeah. But, in all seriousness, when you have businesses that help people do manufacturing or they help to do computer engineering or they do fiber industry and I mean, fiber, the textile industry, there are all of these opportunities for people to be making things from that or doing things that help make that. And I think that that's really what we have to figure out and whether or not it's just that, it's also how do maybe we need to look at how we educate the people who live here.  What could we be doing to develop really innovative, very specialized Butte education curriculums that are creating a workforce when they are super young, doing coding or doing things that rely on sort of the thinking about it as building an apprenticeship program, but, what are the things that - I could have an apprentice learn or you could have an apprentice learn or you could have an apprentice learn that we could start doing in our elementary and junior high and high school so that we are creating this crazy skilled student set that maybe wants to go be brilliant and then come back and build their company here because they know all the kids that come after them are gonna be there to hire. I think that's part of it too. It was just being really innovative about how we tackle problems, not to get an immediate outcome, which is great, but how do we go for the long term too?

Grant: Of the industrial architecture that does remain here, the hoist houses and head frames, what do you hope to see in the future for those sites?

Crain: Okay. So I divert from my colleagues in the historic preservation commission somewhat because I believe very strongly in adaptive reuse. And I think that I don't know that they have to stay completely true to being what they were.  I think occupancy is vibrance and I think having things happening in those places is really cool. And so I would love to see museums. I would love to see interpretation happening in there. I would love to see restaurants inside of them. I would love to see, I don't know, businesses being engaged in there.

Grant: Less fencing?

Crain: Way less fencing. Oh my God, Clark. I hate fencing. I deplore chain link fencing more than anything. And one of the first things I ever remember ever saying in a Superfund meeting was when this work is done, there better not be chain link fences. Our community is not a prison. We don't need them. We have to figure out better ways to manage things that don't require keeping people out because people get curious. And if you keep them from being curious, it's gonna lead to the same outcome as people just wanting to damage things. Is that easy? No. Is it complicated? Yes. And do I have the answer to how to do that? No, but no, I do not. I hate fences.

Jaap: Also when you're using something, the more you use something, the more you care for it. But if you put a fence behind it and never have to look at it. It's not the case.

Crain: Yeah, it does. It totally does. I look at pictures of what - especially the historic American building survey photos from the seventies. And you look at the Original, what a transformation, those buildings were all boarded up doing nothing. And now look at what they do. I love that. I love seeing things transformed and used. I love when lights come on. I am gonna be having my own personal party at the corner of Alaska and Quartz Street. The day that the lights turn on in this O'Rourke building over here. Oh, sure. I am gonna be there cheering. When the lights came on in the Stevens Hotel, I cried. Those lights hadn't been on in five decades. I mean, it makes a difference. I just love that so much.

Grant: Where do occupancy and reuse - where does that actually meet preservation and why do they seem to be antithetical almost?

Crain: I don't know that they actually are antithetical. I think that there is more tension when it comes to the industrial infrastructure than with the historic building infrastructure. Because I think occupancy and reuse in something like a historic building that was traditionally a multipurpose facility, and that is very much in the nature of what it should be is less problematic than trying to revision how to use something that was historically meant to be just a hoisting engineering space. And trying to keep true to the nature of that thing, than it is to have maybe apartments on the second floor being turned into offices and then apartments on the upper floors being apartments as opposed to . . .

Grant: A hoist house being a restaurant.

Crain: Right. Absolutely. Do I like that? Yes, because I spend a lot of time in the industrial district in Portland and they did that there, and it was cool. And I just love, I love industrial things, but I think, I think that there's more of this true to the actual intent and purpose of the thing that I think is trying to be encouraged. Which is the key to redevelopment.

Grant: I want to ask you about redevelopment, but first I want to ask you, if you have a summary of the CD for the BPSOU.

Crain: The consent decree is the legal instrument to implement the record of decision, which is basically the to-do list for getting this cleanup done. The consent decree is a lot of legal lingo that talks about when payments will be made and when things should be done so that we can start measuring compliance. But other than that, the rubber meets the road in the to-do list of the record of decision.

Grant: Do you feel like retroactive liability is just?

Crain: [pause] I do.

Grant: Even though ARCO didn't make this mess, they have to clean it up.

Crain: I think to a certain degree when you acquire . . . Let's use an example of a building. When you acquire a building, you acquire it as is. For instance, you're acquiring the responsibility to take care of the problems inside of it. You knew going in, if you had an inspection done that there were problems there, you knew that if you wanted to bring it back into profitable use that you had to make it habitable. And that includes fixing the roof, rehabilitating the foundation. Now saying that, do I think that the responsibility for retroactive liability lies solely with a corporation? Not always. And I'm going to qualify what I said in that the regulatory system in place at the time of damage also bears responsibility. And I think that in order for solutions to be granted through that mechanism, you have to understand that both of those things play a part. And I think that that is at its nature why Superfund should in theory work. I don't - I'm not an expert in Superfund, but do I think that maybe that system of taxation to create a Superfund should be reinstated so that the federal government who regulated those industries or the state governments that regulated those industries have a pool of money to draw from to share that responsibility. I think that that's appropriate because - let's just leave it at that.

Grant: More than appropriate, I think. Speaking of Superfund, I was just curious if you could tell us about the team at Butte-Silver Bow, the Superfund team.

Crain: My team is so awesome. I have an incredible level of respect for the people that I work with and I will bear so much success in my career because of the mentorship and the leadership that they have shown and the experience that they have. I come onto this team with probably the least amount of experience of anyone on my team. John Sesso has 30 years of experience. Mollie Maffei has 25 years of experience. Eric Hassler has 20 years of experience. Dave Palmer has been a commissioner since the beginning and lived on the Butte hill when this cleanup started. Karen Sullivan has this really deep knowledge and understanding of how public health interplays with all of this. I just have to say that I respect all of them so much and have watched them advocate for this community in a way that has been utterly inspiring because not one of those people ever compromised when it mattered. And this outcome of this decision was better because of the work and the experience that they have had implementing this program over the last three decades. John, I have an absolute, utter respect for him.  And I have a deep level of gratitude for him giving me the opportunity to work on this project. 

He created an opportunity for me to be exposed to this. He checked in with me so regularly to make sure that it was aligning my value system and how I wanted to grow professionally. And he deeply cared about that, which I always want to be that kind of leader that makes sure that the work is aligning with the person doing it. Mollie and I have, I've known Mollie my whole life and I babysat her children. She has grown to be not only a colleague of mine, but to be an absolutely close friend through this process of navigating Superfund. I have witnessed her really, truly strive to provide absolutely excellent legal advice to our team, to understand the complexities and the breadth of this document, which was not easy to work with some of the most skilled and talented corporate attorneys in the country specializing in environmental cleanup. And she was never bested. I really respect and admire the work that she did on this effort.

And I think one of the things that I really appreciated about her is her ability to provide room to not talk about Superfund and for us to find room, to be light and have levity and to talk about things that she and I are both passionate about, like art and music and traveling and our families, and to be able to really step out of the realm of what we do every day and all of the controversies and the really difficult days. And remember that we're people too.  I think with Eric, I think the thing I'm really impressed by the level of knowledge that he has. I don't think that there's anything he's more passionate about than the residential metals abatement program. And you can just tell this level of commitment he has to its success. And it's his belief in it as a system that I respect so much. He really started working in that program when it was brand new. And he created its successes by being a leader to people, to making sure it was being implemented correctly, to being able to adapt. It's been really amazing for me to watch that. And I am really excited to continue to work with Eric into the future and to see how we together with our team are going to continue to make this program, everything that it can be. I think it's kind of fun and kind of awesome to have something to look forward to and to know the people that you're gonna get to do it with.

[01:46:12]

Jaap: Everyone we've talked to involved with Superfund, at least with Butte-Silver Bow side has been passionate about it completely. And so kind of with that in mind, do you find it very frustrating sometimes at the public's perception of how all of this has taken place, super fund and negotiations and work isn't being done?  Because speaking with you all, I get it just, you are putting all of your energy into it and I would like you to talk about that.

Crain: I remember October of 2019, when we set the pens down, it was the most . . . we were so tired. You almost didn't even know what to do. You felt - I thought I was gonna have this exhilarating rush of adrenaline. The second the pens were down and it's just have more work to do, you know - and I think the thing that I've been really surprised with is that every time I'm expecting to have that exhilarating experience, well, I had it stolen from me by this damn pandemic and not being able to do anything in person. Yeah. That being said, I'm really proud of the work that we did. And I don't want my pride to be tempered by some misunderstandings that I think people have about all of the commitment that we gave to this. Hours of my daughter's childhood were given to this. There were a lot of days where I didn't see her in the morning and I didn't see her at night. Days when I couldn't leave meetings to go and breastfeed her at daycare like I did every other day, because I had to stay for this meeting.  Days when I anguished about decisions that were made and how they would be perceived by the public.

Because I said earlier, nothing is perfect. Right? You can't make one person happy at the expense of everyone else. Right? And you can't make everyone up. You are going to make a lot of people sort of happy, but also disappoint them to a degree. And that's been hard for me. I mean, the reality of this work is, has been hard for me because I want everyone to feel the sense of celebration and pride that I feel. I also want them to know how hard I worked for them. And I have to temper that and acknowledge that public service is really hard and that you are not ever going to get the accolades and the appreciation that you think you are due, but the service has to be the accolade. You just have to work through your mind that it's not about being patted on the back. It's about knowing that you did the best you could for the place that you are. And believe me, that has been hard, especially this year.

But I'm feeling better about it. I'm feeling good about it. I think that there are gonna be people who aren't happy, but I think for the most part, we have a majority of people that are really freaking stoked to move forward. And I think that that is the reward. People that are colleagues that are excited to keep doing their work because they know that there's this certainty on the horizon. People that are super excited to get involved in designing this completely innovative remedy. What we get to show the world as far as our accomplishments and unraveling the challenges of 30 years and solving them together. I can't wait for whoever is gonna write this book to write this book because it's going to be very interesting and very cool. And I will not read it, but I'm just kidding.

Jaap: You'll have it on your shelf for sure.

Grant: I just had two more questions. And then that's all I got, but I wanted to just at least mention SARTA and your role there. How important do you think that fund is for Butte's redevelopment?

Crain: Oh my gosh. I am the luckiest person ever to be able to staff the Superfund Advisory and Redevelopment Trust Authority. I am consistently inspired by that work. I don't know if when the allocation agreement was negotiated and the redevelopment trust fund was established, if the decision makers that did that had any idea its potential to inspire. Because what happens when we make a call for those proposals is we typically get around 40 proposals of some of the coolest ideas ever to make a marked and lasting impact on the community because those people have been given a source of funding to believe in the power of their idea to change their place. I mean, people dream of working for entities that do this kind of work. And now I often say we are not the MacArthur genius grant, but I think we are well in its caliber because we are giving everyday people that live here, access to resources to do projects that are not average or every day. They're extraordinary.

I think about work that has inspired me through this project, through being staffed to the redevelopment trust fund, that just makes my skin tingle - the Mai Wah society came for this very modest grant, very modest amount of money, just in the realm of $20,000. They did a preliminary architectural review of this building that was over 110 years old. And they figured out all of the improvements that they needed to make to that building to make sure that it stands for another 110. Quality of the work that they had, they were able to leverage up into $150,000 to make improvements to that building. They have completely rehabilitated the facade. They have reinforced the brick. They have put new transoms in, they've put in new skylights. They have sealed this building off from the elements where on earth does $20,000 beget $150,000? That is amazing.

And if we have projects like that happening in our community, where we can take 15 million and turn it into a hundred million dollars - imagine the amazing stuff that will happen here, it is absolutely essential that we have that for our community to grow and to become what it is. Because if we don't have it, then how else is a place like Butte going to get the resources to do that work? We are so lucky. Oh my God, we're so lucky to have it. And I am the luckiest person ever that I get to work with the people who do these projects. You have no idea. Oh my God.

Grant: I have some idea.

Crain: You both worked on SARTA funded projects. And I think you both know that they probably have been inspiring projects for you to work on too.

Grant: I'm glad you're there. My final question. Do you have political aspirations?

[01:54:27]

Crain: Not today. I will say Wednesday night's vice presidential debate between Kamala Harris and Mike Pence was one of the single most inspiring political moments I have ever had in my entire life.

Grant: Really? Because of the fly?

Crain: Not the fly. I feel like Kamala Harris was every woman on Wednesday. She was so powerful and prepared and charismatic and charming and funny and professional and feminist and passionate. And she believed so holy in the foundation of America that I couldn't help, but be inspired. She made me feel the way I wished that I felt four years ago. She made me feel like I felt when Barack Obama was running for president. And I will tell you, I had never seen her speak really before Wednesday night. I was an Elizabeth Warren fan because I really believe in her platform. But, oh God, just the feeling of that moment and watching her, God, I just, and there were - I literally I just slapped my husband and he's like, what? And I was like - her, because she was just communicating just exactly how I felt. And I can't wait for the day when we don't have to temper our communication to make - to be careful about how we communicate.

I also had a conversation with my dad. I was definitely driving on the interstate the other day and I definitely said to him what had happened. First of all, I can't get internet at my house. Right, right. I live in the mountains, 20 miles from here. I can't get internet. I have to use a Verizon hotspot to get internet at my house. Luckily it works for me to stream TV. And I also am frustrated that the state of Montana cannot get rapid COVID 19 testing. And I think it's bullshit. And I think it's because we live in a rural state and I am totally annoyed that there are people in the middle of this country who are being left. Bigger cities have bigger populations and people are going there and responding to those issues, which I'm not saying they aren't there, but we are being forgotten.

And I am a very progressive Democrat. And I am telling you, I go crazy when I am trying to explain to people that I can't get internet and I can't get rapid testing. And I think that this is the reason that the politics are the way they are in this country, that there is no one who is advocating for people in rural parts of this country to give them parity and equity with urban centers in our country. And if we could get parity, we would not be having the political problem we are having in this country. Where you are, I think, trying to divide people into urban and rural and thus liberal and conservative. And if I ever run for an office, that's gonna be my platform. And I am going to be a nightmare about it because this is very real. This is very real. You would see a lot of progress in this country and you would see a very progressive movement in this country, if  the problems and the struggles and the challenges that are faced by people in rural America were being handled. And it's as simple, it is literally as simple as could you just make internet come to my house?

[01:58:50]

Because I'm gonna tell you what, the lack of internet in rural America is challenging our education systems. It is hyper filtering, what people have access to. And when you narrow access to information, you narrow minds. And if you broaden access to information, you broaden minds. And that is what I think is important right now.

Jaap: And during a time when education now more than ever is relying on the internet. My first grader has to do a math every night on the internet. And I think it's a shame that people assume everyone has access to the internet.

Crain: Native people don't have access to the internet. And they're trying to solve that problem. What about people that live in rural parts of Montana? What kind of access to education do they have right now? That is a constitutional requirement to provide equal education to all. So frustrating. So that's it, right there.

Grant: That does it for my questions.

Jaap: I don't know if I have any more questions, Julia. Thank you so much.

Crain: You're welcome.

[END OF RECORDING]