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The Branson Statesman, Branson, MO (2025)

02/09/2022

*February Alderman Report

The Branson Board of Alderman held two city meetings per state statute on January 25th and February 8th. It tends to become thematic that populist messages begin these alderman reports because the public comment section kicks off each meeting. And therefore, to give an adequate report of the meetings, these activist messages that are presented often become at the forefront when they are just part of the story. There continues to be an active mission to fight for the interests of the neighbors of Country Bluff and yet any action seems to be at an impasse where the board will not act on this for fear of legal action against them. But while these are challenging conversations, Mayor Milton has conducted the meetings with control and professionalism. This respectful and competent manner from the Mayor’s seat was what this town desperately needed. A few weeks ago, the Mayor asked the citizens to limit their comments to things the Board could address. It took a few weeks for a couple of the usual speakers to accommodate the new decorum of the meeting but ultimately Mayor Milton got his meetings under control. That is a very respectable accomplishment in direct contrast to the combative nature of many of last year’s alderman meetings under the previous administration.

At the January 25th meeting a presentation was given by Jonas Arjes of the Taney County partnership. The partnership acts as the development promotions arm of the Branson chamber encouraging new businesses in all sectors to be established in the city. Mr. Arjes gave a thorough report and had some unique ideas to expand the Branson economy. The discussion is often embarked upon to increase business activity in January and February but Arjes spoke about expanding the business sector into night hours as well. In other words, there are more than one way to expand an economy. The presentation also talked about the work shortage that Branson faced mostly during the pandemic and how the foreign based students did not visit on the work visa programs quite in a way that they had done in the past. Arjes mentioned that perhaps the city should go after American students as well to come and take part in our work opportunities. This is a very large discussion that probably involves some sort of tech sector jobs for this area but for now this report was positive and informative.

At the February 8th meeting a new city department was discussed that involved a restructuring of the planning department. This is in part due to the exit of the former Planning Director Joel Hornickel and a change in the structure of leadership in general. Mayor Milton and Alderman Cooper questioned the process of this change and expressed that they were not as informed on this move as they wanted to have been. The City Administrator challenged this assertion but it became clear that he was speaking to changes he envisioned from conversations with the aldermen as opposed to actually planning this large restructuring with the council’s direct guidance, In both Alderman meetings on the 25th and the 8th, the way the City Administrator has consulted with the Aldermen came into question by citizens. The Administrator himself admits to a scenario where he lays out an overall vision to the alderman drafted by city staff instead of soliciting their rightful input up front. The citizens elect the Aldermen, they don’t elect the Administrator.

The Mayor also brought up big picture items with the approval of the chamber’s marketing budget. He expressed a desire to see the Board of Alderman having more of a direct impact on the chamber’s marketing budget which is generated by city tax dollars in the first place. This is not a topic that began in the recent past and certainly won’t be one that will ever go away. The way this city markets itself is one of the most salient local political issues year in and year out. Therefore, this is a good time for the city to continue to look at these issues.

01/13/2022

*Alderman Meeting Report - January 11, 2022

As per state statute, the Branson Board of Aldermen met on Tuesday January 11th, 2022 for their biweekly meeting. Through this publication, it is important to create a concise yet editorialized report of that meeting to convey a concordance of events that occurred during the quorum.

The public comments section began the meeting and the two speakers were ones well known to the board. The first speaker was Gary Groman, a long time columnist in the local paper, and he refuted comments made at the last meeting about his column’s criticisms of Branson’s finance director. The other speaker was neighborhood activist Cherry Webster who spoke about the waiving of fees for certain development projects which she has implied were done in a biased manner. She pressed the City Administrator to reiterate how he made the decision to waive the fees associated with the project next to Country Bluff estates, the neighborhood which Ms. Webster represents. She called out Alderman Skains specifically for his assertion that he did not direct the City Administrator to waive any fees. Essentially, the City Administrator admitted that he presents his decision to waive the fees to the Aldermen and asks if they have any objections as opposed to soliciting their input up front. Ms. Webster concluded that she believes any fee wavers over $1,000 should go before the board in a public meeting and transparency surely calls for that.

The next major issue that came up for discussion was the proposed pet ordinance overhaul. There was discussion before the meeting about continuing to postpone this issue and “kicking the can down the road” so to speak, perhaps to avoid voting on this before the upcoming municipal election. However, this has been before the public countless times and while it still contains quite a bit of legislation that goes against public sentiment, nevertheless it deserves an up or down vote.

The rest of the items on the agenda were essentially pro forma and went ahead without much objection. The City of Branson now faces a crossroads as the City Attorney will soon be replaced and there is a crucial election upcoming on April 5th in which three of the 6 incumbents are facing challengers. If the recently elected Mayor wants a chance to move his desired legislation forward it seems there will need to be changes to the makeup of the board. Until then, the Branson Statesman will continue to cover each and every alderman meeting at City Hall.

01/10/2022

Article #003 written by Marshall Howden
"Crime"

“Darkness cannot drive out darkness, only light can do that” Dr. King.

The world is changing. We all understand that and don’t expect everywhere to be Mayberry for the rest of our lives. However, Branson has always been different and set apart from the rest of the country. Crime has gone in waves in this culture over the generations and some of the excesses of the 1970s that haunted major cities like New York seem to be re-emerging. The co***ne epidemic of a previous era has given way to an opioid crisis of today. And while drugs can be a major cause of crime, it isn’t the only factor by any means.

So let’s focus on Branson specifically. There has been quite a bit of discussion in our community over the past few years on what some have called “magnets”. That term is meant to speak about a dynamic that is created by the prevalence of drug rehabilitation facilities in our town and how they attract participants from the surrounding Ozarks. In even the most successful of these programs, they still have a rate of sobriety of only about a quarter of their participants. Therefore, people come to our community to participate in these programs then fail out but remain in the area. They also find a natural home in the extended stay hotels around Branson.

Compassion has always been a bed rock of who we are but protecting our families comes first. Furthermore, we are simply not a big enough city to have the infrastructure to care for an influx of citizens who need this kind of care that we simply cannot provide.

So having said all of that, substantial examples of crime are needed to fully illustrate the point. Last year, Branson’s parks department created a temporary program called the 20 in 20 challenge where they encouraged citizens to hike 20 miles of our trails in the year 2020. Being an avid outdoorsman myself, I participated in this challenge at the first opportunity I had. After I finished the few hikes it took to reach that many miles logged and promoted this venture on my social media sites, a number of car break ins occurred at the very sites and parking lots adjacent to our trails.

Needless to say, I felt a natural guilt about leading the lambs to slaughter so to speak. This wasn’t the first time we had break ins at cars within this proximity, but opportunistic criminals seemed to take advantage of the increased activity. I began to share my concerns with the public during my last campaign and got pushback from a tiny minority saying that I was only using this as a political issue.

I find that assertion to be an absurd claim. Within the last year or so, in my neighborhood behind Dolly’s Stampede, there has been a murder that took the lives of 2 people, a home invasion, property damage from a vehicle being driven into the side of an apartment complex and those break ins at the trail right across the street. To say that this activity is not genuinely concerning to me is highly disingenuous.

The real question is what we do about it! I think you must begin addressing those magnets that were discussed above. Another aspect of this fight is to ensure our police have the proper resources to handle the problem.

We are often given crime statistics that I feel can be misleading and that can affect how citizens view this issue. If you have 2 murders in one year and 1 murder the next, that is a decrease in the murder rate of 50% when the reality is a community like Branson shouldn’t have any lives taken in this fashion at all. Too frequently, we have reports at City Hall that highlight the rosy picture as opposed to the underlying reality. Our police are short staffed and that is an ongoing issue, but that doesn’t mean that we can’t place more emphasis on areas such as robbery and violent crime within our tourism districts that have been afterthoughts in the past.

We cannot stop the world from turning, but we can be vigilant. To say that Branson doesn’t have growing crime challenges makes that messenger part of the problem. We shouldn’t point fingers but we should hold our elected officials accountable to keeping us safe. Safety is a state of mind and we need to return to the “peace” of mind that citizens of Branson once cherished.

07/03/2021

Article #002 written by Marshall Howden
"Government Transparency"

Government transparency

As I begin writing this article I am sitting in the City Council Chambers beneath two cameras designed to live stream the meetings to the public. However, before last year those cameras didn’t exist. In fact, their instillation all began with the Covid-19 situation.

When the virus first hit the shores of the United States, there was a lot of uncertainty to say the least. And all of that uncertainty was met with just as must passion. As the year played out we found out that the majority of that passion was against the closure of our business and compelling of the wearing of masks.

Therefore, because of the interest in this topic, the city council meetings addressing the issue had many more people in attendance than the normal handful of staples that you see at every meeting. This meeting, the chamber was full to the point that we opened a spillover room where the meeting could be listened in on. And yet, there were still citizens who either felt intimidated by the fact that the audience was to be limited in size or had health concerns which kept them from attending. So, I decided as a communitarian to live stream the meetings on my page.

Now, my personal page is something that I cultivated politically for over a decade. Over those years, many individuals would ask me to post things to the page because they understood the reach it had. But I don’t think that I myself even knew the full extent of that reach until I did that live stream.

Because of Facebook time limitations I had to make that first meeting into two separate video streams. And each of those streams received over 12,000 views each (24,000 in total). Now, keep in mind that the population of Branson is about that original number, just over 10,000. Therefore, it is safe to say that the majority of our citizens were tuning in as well as a few outsiders.

Now, I have skipped over an important part of the story so as to follow a chronological timeline of my efforts. Because after the first stream I did, the city installed those cameras I mentioned in the first paragraph of this article and instituted a YouTube page to do exactly what I had been doing.

Just as the streams were my most notable act of public service, the installation of the cameras in response to those actions was one of my biggest accomplishments. And I say that because of how crucial communication with the public can be.

For years before this, the meetings could be listened to on the city’s website but communication entails much more than just placing a link somewhere within the World Wide Web.

Another important aspect of government transparency is the public comments section of the board meetings. Suffice it to say that the administration before the current one made it as challenging as it possibly could for citizens to express their thoughts. The former Mayor even went as far as arbitrarily limiting the time individuals could speak or be asked questions of by our council members. And the definition of tyrannical rule is that it is arbitrary.

So therefore, over the past few years there has been progress made including the instillation of cameras and the change of perspective in city leadership but we can always go further. Frederick Douglass once said that “power concedes nothing without a demand”. So as a populist public servant, I crave those demands and look forward to every opportunity I get to hear them.

06/23/2021

Announcement of the title of our second article:

“Government Transparency”

05/15/2021

Article #001 written by Marshall Howden
"Protecting our Neighborhoods"

“Even if you live in a big city, everybody lives in a small town. We identify ourselves by our neighborhoods” Karin Slaughter. There is a lot of truth in that quote. Our neighborhoods provide the backdrop for our morning coffee and the images of beginning of each day.
Therefore, from the beginning of my service on the Planning & Zoning Commission, I have fought for our local neighborhoods. In fact, every vote I take follows two principles. The first being a free market, pro-business philosophy and the second being a simple concept “protecting our neighborhoods”.
To provide a little color to that titular phrase of this article. “Protecting our neighborhoods” means that if a project irreparably changes one of our communities, then we should proceed with the utmost caution if at all. And if that is the case, then I vote my second principle over my first.
In fact, I don’t just pay lip service to these principles but instead they guide the entirety of my service. At the very first meeting I ever served, I was faced with a vote of this very nature. I was asked to vote on an amendment to a development resolution which would have reduced the required landscape buffer. In laymen’s terms, the development project that wanted to build cabins in the Branson Heights neighborhood tried to get even closer to the other houses then they were already allowed to be. The proposed cabins were nice, but I still felt this exceeded my standard of irreparably changing this neighborhood.
The reason I felt that way was because they had proposed a golf cart path system as a means to transport their patrons to the various cabins. So, the amenity that was moving closer to the neighbor’s houses wasn’t the aesthetically pleasing cabins, but instead the noisy and invasive golf cart paths.
Even so, I didn’t simply bring up this objective on my own accord. That night we heard some impassioned pleas from the neighbors who were concerned with the proposed change. Therefore, after toggling back and forth between the two images of the potential maps of the project under both scenarios, I led discussion to vote the change down.
It was my first vote ever, and so voting against something that city staff brought to us was a strong move. And although I was confident I was right, it wasn’t until a few days after the meeting that I became sure of it. One of the neighbors wrote me a letter thanking me after she just had to find out who the young new commissioner was who in her words “turned the rest of the board” toward preserving Branson Heights.
So, after I felt that we preserved this neighborhood, I started to feel a calling to do that again if I ever saw neighbors being treated unfairly or disadvantaged by a particular project. And a few years later we all witnessed the Country Bluff fiasco. I first started hearing of a development project next door to this subdivision that my grandmother lived in for many years. And when I first went by to see the progress for myself, it looked like a bomb went off.
Every single tree in the large property buffering Country Bluff Estates had been cut down and were laying like destroyed matchsticks everywhere in the valley. And don’t get me wrong, even though this drastically changed the makeup, property values, and privacy of the subdivision. Every land owner has the right to tend to their property as they wish after going through the proper zoning process.
So ultimately the frustrating thing was, that this project had followed the proper government zoning channels to move forward. But the elephant in the room was the relationship between the City of Branson and Taney County when it came to Planning & Zoning and the vast chasm of differences between what is allowed in the county vs what is allowed in the city. Within the city limits, for example, there is a fee meant to deter property owners from completely stripping their land of all trees, but the county has no such regulation. So in this case, the developer of the property followed a sadly all too common practice in this area and stripped all trees while in the county only to turn around and immediately ask for annexation into the city afterwards. And the neighbors became vocal about their opinions of the situation.
But, at this time there was a transition of leadership in this city, and the neighbors felt they were unheard at City Hall. They kept getting told that their time to speak would come only to have the can kicked down the road or be “postponed” to use government jargon.
Ultimately however, the homeowners and residents of Country Bluff remembered how they felt they were ignored and played a big role in electing a new Mayor, Larry Milton and alderwoman to that district.
So finally, we get to Friendly Hills. Friendly Hills is unique within the neighborhoods I will describe in this article in that it actually sits right outside city limits itself. It is on those beautiful hilly bluffs above Table Rock Lake near the Chateau. And recently, their scenic hill has been completely transformed into what I mockingly call “condo mountain”. High rises dot just about every piece of those hills now.
The part that gives this neighborhood credence to be upset is that the proposal of the project that is going to finally encroach all the way onto their territory violates their community covenants. The complication, or some would say deflection point, is that the Board of Aldermen elected to represent the citizens has no authority to enforce neighbor covenants.
This came up a number of times before our Aldermen to be zoned high density residential and to allow something that was not within the original design of the neighborhood. At first, they voted it down 6-0 in the fall of 2020. However, there is always persistence on behalf of progress. And the project marched forward as if they just knew they would be given the green light eventually. Lo and behold, at the last meeting, they were.
The saddest part is that one of the reasons given to earn the Aldermen’s approval was that so much had already been done out there. So, the moral of the story is, start building and the more you complete, the harder it becomes for anyone to stop you. And this isn’t to single out any one alderman or group but this has been going on for far too long in Branson, and it has to change.
The citizens are now well aware of the dynamics between the city and the county. But let’s not just speak about bridging those divides, let's instead develop an action plan to address them. Every business in Branson deserves to be heard and every homeowner deserves to be able to maintain the value of their home.
Today it was Friendly Hills and tomorrow it could be your neighborhood. We all want to see Branson grow together. But in a family, you have to reach a consensus and I believe that is what Branson is. So if we are a family, then our neighborhoods are our home.

05/13/2021

Announcement of the title of our first article:

“Protecting our Neighborhoods”

04/27/2021

Thank you for your interest in The Branson Statesman! Our editor-in-chief Marshall Howden will be going live to his Facebook this evening following the City Council meeting and our first article will be released tomorrow, stay tuned!

The Branson Statesman

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