Blog
Build for the Kids...Not the Next Election
By Teasha Cable
Economic Gardening: Putting roots down in Bozeman, Montana
I have a habit of asking my Dynamic Decisions Podcast guests about their decision-making DNA. I give them four styles, and ask them to split 100 points across all four. It tells me a lot about how someone actually operates versus how they think they should operate.
When I asked Brit Fontenot, Director of Economic Development for Bozeman, Montana, his decision making persona came back:
- 25% Feeler
- 40% Planner
- 15% Counter
- 20% Data driver
His breakdown explains everything about how Bozeman grew.
Brit has been building on his city's economy for nearly 20 years, taking it from a sleepy college and tourist town, to one of the most talked-about tech hubs in the Mountain West.
Photonics. Quantum Computing. Advanced manufacturing. Clean tech. Oracle, Aurora, Workiva. And the MonArk Quantum Foundry, a joint venture between Montana State University-Bozeman and the University of Arkansas pushing next-generation computing.
None of it came from tax incentives. None of it came from recruiting.
Read that again.
That's not how Brit's team operates. They practice something called economic gardening: grow companies from within your community. Case in point. Brit's team uses the university's tech transfer office to turn MSU research into local startups.
They keep the talent in town by making Bozeman a place people want to live.
His logic is airtight. The companies you grow yourself have a loyalty you can't buy.
Loyalty is what keeps employers here through the hard years, not a tax break that expires.
But here's what Brit said that made me smile.
His customers aren't the taxpayers. They're the kids of the taxpayers.
Boom.
That is a 20-year planning horizon stated in one sentence. And it explains why his team championed Yellowstone Fiber, an open-access nonprofit fiber network, when the business case wasn't obvious and potholes were a more immediate political problem.
Infrastructure that pays off in a decade is a hard sell to an elected official facing reelection in two years. But if your frame is the next generation, not the next vote, the calculus changes completely.
The open-access model is worth understanding too. Yellowstone Fiber owns the cables. Multiple internet service providers compete on top of that infrastructure to serve end users.
No one company owns the customer by owning the road.
It's a highway model applied to broadband. And it keeps prices down, service quality up, and revenue circulating locally instead of flowing to a national provider. That's a structural decision with compounding benefits. Classic planner thinking.
Brit's time at the UN Compensation Commission in Geneva shaped him in ways he didn't expect. He told me about learning to value a square meter of Kuwaiti desert, something that meant nothing to him as an American until he understood what it meant to the people who lived with it.
He came away with a practice:
Listen for understanding before you start telling people how it's supposed to go.
That's not soft. That's strategy. Understanding your community's values before you start pushing a development agenda is what gets projects across the finish line. Brit doesn't believe it's a zero sum game. When Belgrade, the small fast-growing city just outside Bozeman, does well, Bozeman does well.
Brit's phrasing is "basking in the glow of" not "living in the shadow of."
'Abundance mindset as operating principle.'
Read that again too.
Here's my "So what?" for anyone in economic development or building anything at community scale. You can measure jobs and tax revenue. You cannot easily measure whether existing residents still have a pathway to prosperity or whether the place you're building still feels like theirs.
Brit is honest about that tension. He doesn't claim to have solved the housing crisis. He talks about data, vacancy rates, new units, filtering effects, and he talks about values, and asks "Who is growth actually for."
...It's for the kid's of the taxpayers. That's the long view.
That decision making combination, where the planner and the feeler are working together, is what makes Brit's approach durable.
Listen to our conversation.