Montana Governor Gianforte Promotes Apprenticeship, More Housing
Montana Governor Greg Gianforte and his wife Susan dropped by our studios on Thursday, August 4, 2022, as part of a whirlwind tour of media outlets promoting his apprenticeship program, the affordable housing initiative, and the recently formed Montana Housing Task Force.
“Well, we're highlighting our apprenticeship program,” said Gianforte. "We've made trades education a real priority and I'll be visiting later this morning with a firm that's just added a whole bunch of apprentices and I just I think this is phenomenal. In the first half of this year, we added over 500 apprenticeships in the state with 40 new employers. This is more in the first half of this year than in any prior entire year, so this is a big deal.”
Gianforte said the most important challenge in providing affordable housing is addressing the lack of supply in order to meet the burgeoning demand.
“We have a supply problem,” he said simply. “I think affordable housing is probably the number one issue facing working families in Montana. It's an integral part of the American dream, and we’ve got to fix it. So I've asked them (The Housing Task Force) to come up with a bunch of ideas, how do we get more trades folks? How do we reduce the impact of regulations? What should we change in zoning? Any other good ideas they have and they're going to get the report back by October, and then we'll look at implementing that stuff in the next legislative session so we can make home ownership more attainable for more hardworking Montanans.”
Gianforte also took calls from listeners while he was in the studio.
One caller specifically asked how he was going to address the possibility of Communist China purchasing land near Montana’s nuclear facilities to possibly hinder their response in an emergency.
“On the Chinese issue let me just be really clear,” he said. “The Chinese are not our friends. If they are buying land in Montana near our military bases that is a national security issue, and we'll be working with the federal government to make sure that just does not continue.”
One other topic Gianforte recently addressed was an effort to keep ‘woke’ policies from affecting boys' and girls' athletics in Montana.
“These are the ‘woke’ policies coming out of Washington,” he said. “I don't think it's that complicated. Boys should play on boys’ sports teams and girls should play on girls’ sports teams. So, the Biden administration is attempting to pull federal money back from our schools. They actually want to penalize children if we don't follow their ‘woke’ policies out of Washington, and we're just not going to stand for it.”