The past president of the Montana Senate is walking away from a $170,000 contract he’s accused of wrongfully brokering with a business associate.
Hamilton Republican Sen. Jason Ellsworth said Monday the contract signed in late December has produced no services and that contractor wants out. Allegations of impropriety have swirled around Ellsworth since news broke Jan. 17 of the agreement he signed as the final days of his presidency ran out. The Montana State News Bureau broke the story.
In prepared remarks Monday, Ellsworth said “attacks on the contract are a thinly veiled political ploy” that derailed Senate work.
Monday, Senate Judiciary Chair Barry Usher, a Molt Republican, said he welcomed an ethics investigation or audit concerning the contract.
“Absolutely. I think we could do both,” Usher told reporters.
Senate President Matt Regier tells Montana Free Press the matter is being reviewed.
“We need to wait until the proper people have done the research and we get that report back,” Regier said. He expected the research to take a few days. Ellsworth told reporters he is ready to defend the contract.
“I have no issue going in front of anybody and explaining this,” Ellsworth said. “It’s a legitimate contract that was done at the best price I could get it done for.”
For eight months in 2024 during the interim between legislative sessions, Ellsworth and Usher served as chair and vice chair of a Senate select committee tasked with drafting bills targeting Montana courts. The Legislature’s Republican majority has lost several battles with the courts in recent years, some over bills ruled unconstitutional, others over lawmaker attempts to issue subpoenas to judges and court staff.
Ellsworth created the committee shortly after the Montana Supreme Court ruled that four voting laws passed by the 2021 Legislature were unconstitutional. Lawmakers on the committee drafted 27 bills targeting Montana courts, including bills to impeach judges and give the Legislature powers to override the state Supreme Court on interpreting constitutional matters.
At year’s end, Ellsworth proposed that the select committee use its unspent funds on analysis of how the bills that become law are put into practice. The former Senate president’s preferred contractor was Agile Analytics, owned by Bryce Eggleston, who worked at Ellsworth’s call center previously.
Select committee members declined, but Ellsworth authorized the contract anyway. Agile Analytics, which had been a licensed business for a couple of weeks before the contract was signed, according to state records, received the contract without going through a competitive bidding process.
When news of the contract broke last week, Ellsworth was already in a battle with Republican Senate leadership over committee assignments. Ellsworth and seven other members of a never-before-used Executive Branch Review Committee defied Republican leadership on the Senate floor and, with the help of minority Democrats, managed to give themselves better committee assignments by amending Senate rules.
Ellsworth, speaking to the press Monday, said Senate leadership created the Executive Branch Review Committee “to sideline certain senators, including himself, from meaningful roles in critical committees.” By voting themselves off Executive Branch Review, committee members “disrupted plans to use stacked committees to advance specific agendas, such as potentially rolling back Medicaid continuation and hindering effective oversight of the executive branch.”
Republican leaders halted bill work for a week as they retooled committees to accommodate the committee assignments Ellsworth and the other Executive Branch Review members secured for themselves.
Ellsworth said Monday that there’s no reason the contract, nor the committee reassignments, should be keeping the Senate from its work.
“We’ve been here for two weeks. The facts are the facts. I mean, we’ve passed one bill,” Ellsworth said. “This time last session, I believe there were 10 times this amount of bills that had gone up to the stage.”
LATEST STORIES
Flint, Forstag in dead heat for House seat
Aaron Flint and Sam Forstag appear to be in a dead heat for Montana’s Western District House race, according to a Montana Free Press-Rutgers Eagleton poll.
Train derails in Shelby, authorities say ‘no immediate danger’
The Toole County Sheriff’s Office said on social media that the office received reports of a multi-car derailment on tracks close to town.
Major Forest Service policies could be changing. Here’s what’s at stake.
The U.S. Forest Service is proposing changes to the Roadless Rule and Travel Management Rule that could alter how roads, motorized travel and recreation are managed across millions of acres of national forest land. The changes could have significant implications for public access, conservation and land management.
