Montana Business

“We very much look forward to having Lance join the Board of the Better Business Bureau. He brings a wealth of tech startup and online business experience to the Board. Building trust and accountability in online businesses is a significant part of the BBB’s focus,” said Jan Quintrall, CEO of the Better Business Bureau.

You’ll be pleased to discover this e-mail is not from a man in Nigeria whose rich father passed away and with your help can retrieve his family fortune from the national bank. Nor is it an e-mail appearing to be from Microsoft that actually links to a Canadian drug outlet looking to cure you of a medical condition you don’t have.

A firm called Beartooth Capital http://www.beartoothcap.com/ brokered the Sun Ranch http://www.papoosecreek.com/ carbon credits as a pilot project, but a nonprofit organization called the National Carbon Offset Coalition http://www.ncoc.us/ now manages the ranch’s contract with the Chicago Climate Exchange.

Indeed, Livingston now boasts multiple art galleries and coffee shops where the new class of mobile knowledge workers pitch their laptops.

"Without some level of accountability and competence, you can’t have economic development here."

Colstrip worked with the Montana Cooperative Development Center to create a cooperative. Got Socks! opened in June 2005.

“It’s the best job in town,” said the stepmother to five children. “Everyone here is thankful for their job, and nobody wants to let it go.”

Just a few of the many excellent stories from this month’s edition. Good advice on many fronts.

Snow has landed on the ski runs above Tom Maclay’s proposed Bitterroot Resort, but a blizzard of paperwork has yet to materialize.

At least 33 individuals tied to a Montana-based investment business lost at least $18 million in the Bernard L. Madoff Ponzi scheme.