MISSOULA - City Club Missoula hosted a mayoral debate between Missoula's two mayoral candidates on Tuesday at the Missoula Public Library.
Shawn Knopp, who has no political background and currently works at Montana Glass, is running against incumbent mayor Andrea Davis.
The two candidates started the debate by laying out their top priorities they seek to address, with Davis speaking first.
Watch to learn more from Missoula's mayoral candidates:
“We know that we have businesses here whose employees find it difficult to be able to find a place to live in order to go to work. And we know that we have businesses here who cannot expand or relocate here as a result of the housing pressures that we have in Missoula and Western Montana,” said Davis.
“We have to have fire, we have to have police, we have to have roads. Those are going to be the top three priorities on any budget that I'm a part of. Anything else after that is going to be on a need-to-have basis,” said Missoula mayoral candidate Shawn Knopp.
The debate then began when moderator Rob Chaney, a long-time Montana journalist, asked Knopp what he would do to restructure the city government in line with what he has said about being fiscally conscious with the budget.
“It's not about getting rid of anybody, it's about moving them to departments that need more help and departments that maybe don't need as much help. The time to get a permit to build in this town is exceeding nine months. We need to get some money, you know, if we can't get permits passed and get buildings built, it just raises the price of everything. So, you know, maybe you take a staff from another office and you put them in that office to help out, so [it would] be more of a restructuring, not eliminating jobs,” answered Knopp.
Chaney then asked Davis to define the boundaries of the office of the mayor, asking what the mayor can and cannot do in relation to the private sector.
“We're working on some of the most challenging issues of our time. And so how I decide that is I think often about do I actually have a decision-making role here? Is it in the charter? Is it within state law? And if it's not, then I think about how it is that we as a city can partner with the private sector,” answered Davis.
Half of the debate was also open to the public, with each table at the event being allowed one question. Many of the questions revolved around what each candidate would do to address Missoula’s affordable housing crisis.
Knopp answered first.
“Answer to that is that we need to build, build, build. Until we have enough housing for everybody, prices will never come down. We need to collaborate with builders, with spaces that we have, the 45 acres. We need to get it developed into some affordable housing. There's some programs that the tenant unions are talking about where we can do a bond, where we could pay for housing separate from our taxes. And then the rents or payments that you would pay back on those things would pay for the housing, and so I'd like to see more of that,” responded Knopp.
“What we've been doing since I have been mayor is that we have broken ground, and it was mentioned in the introduction on over 100 deed-restricted affordable homes. So we're doing, let me just start by saying, we're starting with the foundational work. We've got a forward-looking land use plan adopted by city council in 2024 — December of 2024. We're now taking that vision, we're putting that vision into work by updating all of our development codes into a unified development code so the private sector can act more quickly to develop different home types in all parts of Missoula,” answered Davis.
Ballots are being mailed out this week for the Nov. 4, 2025, election.
