Owens proves herself unfit for public office

Click the video link on the City of Whitefish website and watch Catherine Owens’ public comments to City Council on Sept. 21 at time stamps 7:35, 32:34, and 55:32. (https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=city+of+whitefish)

Rising in opposition to the Whitefish Sustainable Tourism Management Plan to promote safe and responsible tourism (which she hadn’t read) and emergency ordinance to conduct Council meetings remotely (because she and her companions refuse to wear masks at City Council meetings – see her sans mask at 1:16), Owens said this:

“But basically, if this [pandemic] were really bad, we would be talking about the dying. We’re not. We’re talking about whether we should have Zoom meetings at home or not. If we were all dying, I would be the first one to mask up, and pack masks, and give them to the kids and the families that don’t have them. ‘Here, put a mask on, everybody in my family is dying. Everybody in my neighborhood’s dying.’ They’re not. That’s why we get to have these conversations. That’s why we get to argue, because we’re not dying. I have lived in three different states, traveled the world, I don’t know anybody who’s died.”

If Owens doesn’t know you, to her, your problems don’t exist. This isn’t what a fellow mask-opponent described at 1:02:55 as “what freedom sounds like.”

It’s the sound of Owens disqualifying herself as unfit to hold public office.  If she’s elected to replace incumbent Democrat Rep. Dave Fern in HD 5, during a committee hearing or floor debate, Owens’ contributions would consist of magical thinking errors.

I don’t know Owens, but like most of us, I do know someone who’s died. The losses in this community aren’t limited to 11 deaths at the Whitefish Care and Rehabilitation Center. 

Owens’ bullying failure to wear a mask has made reopening our economy more, not less difficult. It shut down in-person Council meetings, endangered families and children in our schools, and caused this surge of new COVID cases locally.

I agree with Councilor Andy Feury (1:37:27): “…when someone says … ‘nobody’s dying, I don’t know a single person that has died, do you?’ … that’s an absolutely horrible thing to say.”

Scott C. Wurster is the Political Director for the Flathead County Democratic Central Committee working with the Montana Democratic Legislative Campaign Committee on Dave Fern’s campaign.