Hello

Why I am running

It is time for a change. I like the current mayor. He has always been a lesson for me in kindness and courtesy; there is much to emulate. Even so, there are some issues I care about, and I believe you care about, that I can help with: stop rising taxes while providing superior services, protect the character of our neighborhoods while providing affordable housing, make city government more transparent, while making City Council committee meetings a dialog with the public, and gather input and make hard decisions when the need arises. Please check out my letter to my fellow citizen by clicking here.

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Community Service — Doing what's needed when needed

A well-known wilderness activist once said Jim was the best grassroots organizer he had ever met. Jim Olsen has succeeded in advocacy campaigns that have changed his community and state for the better, working on the leading edge of movements that often do not have majority support and bringing them to a point where the community accepts them and sometimes embraces them. 

• I was asked to be Vice Chair of Supporters for an Abuse Free Environment (S.A.F.E.) just as it was about to transition from an all-volunteer, women-helping-women group. The organization grew to become the leading domestic abuse organization in the state, providing both crisis intervention and long-term transition services and housing. The mission is embraced by elected officials of all political parties and the local justice system. 

• Went on to provide the infrastructure for a home-like setting for forensic interviews of child victims of crime — the best in the state — Emma’s House.

• Working with a clinical social worker, developed a business plan and advocated a community-based mental health crisis center for the county, interacting with people with mental illness, their providers, and the justice system to create a humane, effective process for dealing with crisis events. Went on to develop an Internet Café that was a place for high-functioning people with mental illness to interact with members of the general community, staffed with high-functioning people with mental illness in a safe, HIPAA-compliant environment.

• A prime mover and spokesperson for promoting improved bio-safety and Rocky Mountain Laboratories, a BSL-4 lab of NIAID. Organized litigation and reached a settlement for enhanced safety, community engagement, and transparency.

• Had my company underwrite and produce the Hamilton Performing Arts Series for one season so as to transition the series from the Hamilton School District to a non-profit.

• Forest and Wildlands.Forest and Wildlands. Succeeded in bringing marginalized groups into controversial subjects for wildlands and endangered species protection to be seen as a necessary part of the dialogue. I was asked to be President of Friends of the Bitterroot in the 90’s, a group I am no longer associated with.

It was controversial. While politicians were saying we were using litigation to stop timber sales, there were zero timber sale lawsuits on my watch. Yes, the group was uniformly against timber sales in roadless areas (though supporting most controlled burns). Understanding the needs of the landscape and learning more about the timber business (I had worked in a lumber yard in my youth), the not-newsworthy handshakes with Forest Rangers were the normal outcomes. Participated in two Consensus Councils, set up local Forest Rangers. 

• Collaboration the hard way. After the fires of 2000, forest activists, a local logging outfit, and Pyramid Lumber went into the field to create a map that would get the logs needed for timber companies and protect roadless areas and sensitive landscapes. It was never presented because a massive Salvage Sale came right out of the Washington Beltway – not the local National Forest. While I was no longer President of Friends of the Bitterroot, I helped with a massive campaign and litigation, I found myself at a court-ordered mediation, which settled on, you guessed it, essentially what the locals were ready to agree upon three years earlier.

• Local Farming, Ranching, and Food Systems. Board Member and Treasurer, Hamilton Farmers Market. Organized a group and participated in others to analyze and promote local food systems.

• Subdivisions and planning. Participated in, and sometimes organized, local campaigns to question subdivisions, and water and septic permits. Serve with a state-level coalition to help craft and influence state legislation.

• Pesticides. A principal in a campaign to get the county to provide notice of roadside pesticide spraying and allow local landowners to opt-out if they do their own weed control.

• Highway expansion. A principle in a campaign that led to improvements in safety for the expansion of Highway 93 from two lanes to four lanes, improved public participation, and a valley-wide bike path. This led to a request for assistance by a group in Ketchum, Idaho, and an invitation to a regional tribal highway conference in Rapid City, South Dakota. 

• Housing Insecurity and Homelessness. Participated in the local housing insecurity coalition pre-Covid and now on occasion. Developed a concept for unsubsidized affordable housing based on well-designed tiny housing and shared common spaces and household economics.

 

The important thing in these campaigns is that Jim was never alone — he is a coalition builder, bringing in multiple organizations to work on a common interest. He works across political and ideological divides using non-violent activism practices inspired by and informed by Mahatma Mohandas Gandhi and Reverend Marin Luther King, Jr., and their writings. 

 

Though often labeled a liberal, he is a centrist. When he taught a course on grassroots activism at the Bitterroot College, the local Republican Central Committee paid the tuition for two of their members to attend.

 

Jim Olsen has always been a volunteer adovacate and has never been paid.

 

Making a living

I had already been working since I was 16 to put myself through college. There was no doubt where my duty to my country lay when my draft notice showed up, as expected. I am a twelve-year veteran of the United States Air Force, attaining the rank of Captain, and a recipient of a medal for Meritorious Service.

 

Shortly after starting flight school, the Flight Surgeon took a great dislike to my sinuses and washed me out. This turned out to be for the best for the Fourteenth Air Force, of Flying Tigers renown. Why? I had one of the first Computer Science degrees. I was launched into the High-Tech Cold War landscape. I served in operational non-flying squadrons in the Fourteenth Air Force, now Space Command. In a twist of fate, coming from a Navy family,  my final assignment was Deputy Program Manager and Test Director for the Cobra Judy Program hosted on the USNS Observation Island — an Air Force ship. We delivered a shipboard intelligence and imaging system, on time, on budget, to our customers, the intelligence agencies, who loved it. It operated well past its specified life time. 

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I went on to work for Raytheon to become one of the best program managers in the company. I loved running a development program for a system that is so complex that no single human being can understand every detail. I found that the secret sauce is not so much about the technologies, of which there are many in each program, but how to organize, empower, and lead people in group intellectual and task completion exercise to do what none of us could have done on our own.

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That Greenland base VP Vance went to was named Thule Air Force Base before they changed the name. It is near where Perry took off for the North Pole — four months of all day and four months the sun is absent from the sky. When people used to ask about the cold, which could dip from a normal of 30 or 40 below to 80 below in the winter, I said, "The cold is easy, it’s the dark that is hard." My boss came to me, “You just got divorced." How about taking this behind-schedule system, BMEWS Upgrade to Thule? BMEWS is an early warning radar that, while it does track satellites, its primary mission is to detect and track a soviet missile launch. I had done an Arctic remote in the Air Force at Shemya (it was not easy, but better than tromping through rice paddies like a lot of my peers and friends in Vietnam), so I knew what I was getting into.

 

Your mission, which you just accepted, is to take about seventy-five people and a C-5 plane load of electiconic equipment, install it into a building that has been built, get it up an running, find all the bugs left in the several hundred thousand lines of real time software, pass all acceptence tests, and turn it over to the Air Force squadron for operations. (Oh, by the way, there is a four-star general who wants this up and running before it gets traded away in the ongoing SALT negotiations with the Russians.) You have sixty days to plan it before wheels up.

 

And so we planned every detail, down to a checklist for our people from the moment they stepped off the plane to arriving to the sleeping quarters, with their badges and Arctic gear in hand, knowing how to get to the mess hall, catch the bus to their worksite, what shift they were assigned to and where their desk was. The movement of the gear into the C-5 was planned to the last detail, including, according to my logistics manager, a bottle of whiskey for the load master.

 

Now my boss is used to the slow-motion pace of Ballistic Missile Defense sensors on Kwajalein, where tracking the first target would be around six months, after all the contractors and customer helpers carefully simulated and examined every step. I said, we will track our first target 14 days after pulling the plug (to box the equipment) in Massachusetts. I could have gotten odds since he didn’t believe it, but he gave us our head. We tracked our first target in ten days. And no, everything didn’t go smoothly; there were mistakes, misjudgments, and surprises. But, I had learned that a team focused on the mission would find a way to get it done most of the time as long as they were consulted and bought in at the beginning. Of course, there was a tracking party — because we still had 15 months to go before that last bug and last test. 

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After running a program from start to finish, on-time, on-budget, I got promoted to Director of a $500,000,000 profit center. It was the directorate that every CEO of Raytheon had passed through. I could do it. But, it was not my first love, which was running programs. It was, instead, the strange world of Fortune 100 senior management.

 

Long story short, I fell in love with a woman who spent her adult life in the Bitterroots.

My daughter was in college. She agreed to come out to the East Coast for two years until my daughter graduated. We got married while she was there. Two years to the day, she woke up, turned to me, and called in my marker, “I am moving to Montana, where are you going to live?” And that is how I got to Hamilton in 1993. 

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When I told my boss, the President of one of the six outfits that made up Raytheon at the time, I needed to resign from Raytheon, they asked me to stay on half-time, based in Montana. Long story short, I ended up setting up a business in Hamilton. The long story is at https://www.jamesrolsen.com/resume.​