This year started for me, as it did for the rest of the MTFP newsroom, with a hectic winter in the Capitol, covering this year’s session of the Montana Legislature — especially the various ideas lawmakers had for the state’s $2.5 billion budget surplus. Republican lawmakers and Gov. Greg Gianforte spent the biggest chunk of that surplus, about $899 million in total, on income and property tax rebates, fending off efforts by minority-party Democrats to channel massive spending into efforts to tackle the state’s housing affordability crunch. (The Legislature did pass a compromise bill that spent $225 million on housing, as well as a slew of regulatory reform measures intended to ease housing pain by reining in municipal zoning requirements.)
The budget surplus also triggered one of the wildest legislative moments I’ve witnessed in three sessions covering the Capitol when a bipartisan group on the Senate’s Finance and Claims Committee packed a must-pass infrastructure bill full of line items for projects in their districts, short-circuiting a regimented funding process intended to prevent precisely that sort of political horse-trading. (A subsequent Senate floor tirade by Senate Majority Leader Steve Fitzpatrick, R-Great Falls, was largely unsuccessful at persuading the full Senate to vote those projects back out of the bill, though most of the extra spending was eventually subjected to line-item vetos by the governor.)
Once the Legislature adjourned for the year, much of my attention ended up consumed by another government money issue: property taxes. Reappraisal notices sent by the Montana Department of Revenue in early summer indicated that many homeowners would see eye-popping valuation increases, with residential properties up by roughly 40% on median. Those reappraisal notices also indicated, incorrectly, that property tax bills would rise proportionally.
Looming tax increases triggered another lively debate, as a coalition of Montana counties interpreted Montana’s tax code as precluding full collection of a state-level “95 mills” property tax which is used to equalize funding between tax-base-rich and tax-base-poor school districts. (After months of back-and-forth that saw 49 of 56 counties mail reduced tax bills reflecting the difference, the Montana Supreme Court ruled that those counties were incorrect.)
Toward the end of the year, I was able to get my hands on an exhaustive collection of property data from the revenue department, using it to put specific numbers to this year’s seismic tax shift (including the fact that NorthWestern Energy’s property tax bill is down by $36 million this year).
I got to have a bit of fun along the way too: touring a mostly automated firearm factory in Stevensville, visualizing the state’s busiest highways and stumbling across a small-town newspaper headline for the ages while spending a weekend in Ekalaka.
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