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February 13, 2025
Senate: Pat Flowers don’t miss.
The Democratic minority leader brought some Republican senators to angry tears on Feb. 6 by mustering enough votes to deliver to the state Department of Justice a potential criminal case against former Senate leader Jason Ellsworth stemming from alleged cronyism in government contracting.
“We’ve had 71 bills come across this floor,” Flowers told lawmakers that day. “The House is at 178. How do you explain that? The only way I can explain it is this issue is getting in the way of our business, and it’s time to put it aside. Get back to work. The people in Montana did not send us here to fuss about ethics. These are serious issues. Absolutely. Why they sent us here was to figure out property tax. We haven’t heard a single property tax bill here yet.
We haven’t heard anything about health care, affordable housing, child care, the issues that people are staying up at night trying to figure out how to pay their bills. We haven’t heard about those here. It’s time that we get back to work.”
The vote was just the latest of several victories by Flowers, a Belgrade Democrat, who leads a caucus of just 18 lawmakers but has staged major upsets, each requiring at least 26 votes in the 50-member chamber.
His streak of big hits dates to May 2, 2023, when Flowers unexpectedly rose from his Senate desk to indefinitely adjourn the Senate, effectively ending that legislative session. The motion’s passage on a 26-24 vote sent Republican Senate leaders scrambling to find a loophole, while lawmakers packed up like kids on a snow day. Ellsworth was Senate president at the time.
“I just felt like we no longer had anything to gain for Montanans or for our constituents by being here any longer,” Flowers told Capitolized after the 2023 vote. “We’ve already been here longer than any session I’ve served in, and it was just time to go home. And obviously, a lot of Republicans felt the same way and voted with us on it.”
Fifteen minutes into the first Senate floor session of 2025, Flowers was at it again, leading all 18 Democrats and nine Republicans in a vote to reassign eight lawmakers, Flowers included, to better committees. The dissatisfied eight had been assigned to a never-before-used committee that kept five Republican moderates and three senior Democrats from major committees deciding big issues, like whether to continue extending Medicaid benefits to tens of thousands of low-income Montanans.
A week later, the same coalition of senators turned back an attempt to undo committee assignments made by Flowers and Co. on Day One.
Shortly thereafter, allegations concerning Ellsworth threw the Senate into chaos, again.
Enter Flowers, calling to hand off the Ellsworth matter to the Department of Justice — this after Republicans signaled they wanted Ellsworth removed from the Senate Finance and Claims Committee, where the Hamilton Republican could possibly be the deciding vote on a House-originated Medicaid bill now making its way to the Senate.
Ellsworth is accused of splitting a $170,100 government contract in two, in order to avoid the checks and balances normally applied to such large awards. The contractor was a longtime Ellsworth associate, who would have been paid to observe and report on government agencies as they put into practice new laws intended to limit the powers of Montana courts.
Clipping the wings of the judiciary is a priority of Republican leaders, who have seen several of the laws they passed in recent years declared unconstitutional. A key Republican ally, Attorney General Austin Knudsen, has also been found to have committed 41 counts of official misconduct, mostly for channeling the outrage of his legislative clients when dealing with the state Supreme Court.
Before last week’s vote, Flowers argued that an ethics committee investigation into Ellsworth was pointless because Republican peers had already concluded the Senate’s 2023 president was guilty. The investigation had turned into a time vampire, sucking precious hours from the Senate, Flowers said.
The directive to hand the case over to Knudsen passed 27-22, another big win. Republicans responded angrily. Sen. Theresa Manzella, R-Hamilton, vented frustration that with 32 Republican senators, her caucus kept failing to muster 26 votes in these big fights.
Sen. Daniel Emrich, R-Great Falls, called for Flowers’ expulsion from the Senate, which brought Flowers and all 18 Democrats to their feet. The senator from Great Falls made a false allegation about the minority leader. Democrats weren’t going to tolerate it.
Flowers’ face turned red at the allegation, a rarity for the retired Fish, Wildlife and Parks supervisor who friends say is pretty catch-and-release about political dust-ups.
He’s a Belgrade guy, a retired ranger who seems like a plausible fit for a bedroom community that has a Republican taxidermist for a state representative. But redistricting has pushed Flowers’ turf south. He was never urban Belgrade, and not wild and woolly Belgrade where Houston-esque planning rules allow tigers to be kept in a warehouse a few blocks from a public school.
Flowers was always more Chalet Market Belgrade, south of I-90, close to the Cameron Bridge fishing access and a few miles short of Four Corners, which, combined with Gallatin Gateway and Montana State University, comprise Senate District 31 in its current configuration.
The minority leader doesn’t win these big fights alone. Republicans who vote with Flowers say they aren’t lobbied by him; it’s a group of moderate Republican organizers who whip the vote.
On Feb. 6, as Senate Republicans and Democrats huddled to strategize, Flowers was surrounded by three of his party’s four attorneys serving in the Senate. There are no attorneys in the Republican caucus.
— Tom Lutey
No Senate mail for Knudsen
It’s been a week since Senate lawmakers voted to hand the state Department of Justice a potential criminal case against former Senate leader Jason Ellsworth, R-Hamilton, stemming from the senator splitting up a contract awarded to a friend to avoid scrutiny.
Senate GOP leadership, which opposed referring the charges to the attorney general, hasn’t passed the matter on.
Senate President Matt Regier, R-Kalispell, told the press Feb. 11 that he was waiting to hear from AG Austin Knudsen about whether the Justice Department could accept a criminal referral from the Legislature.
Knudsen had indicated earlier that his Division of Criminal Investigation might not be able to take the case.
The Department of Justice does accept referrals from state agencies, including the Department of Commerce concerning an alleged embezzlement from the Montana Heritage Commission.
— Tom Lutey
Forget the mattresses, search the leather couches
Following the discovery of a major embezzlement at the Montana Heritage and Preservation Commission, the Legislature is reviewing a proposal to reset the terms for managing Virginia City, Nevada City and Helena’s Reeder’s Alley.
Senate Bill 116, by Ennis Republican Sen. Tony Tezak, cuts the number of commissioners from 14 to nine and trims the list of professional requirements for appointees. The bill also eliminates the executive director’s job, which is at the core of the scandal unearthed by Department of Commerce staff in mid-2024.
Former Heritage Director Michael Elijah Allen has since been charged with alleged embezzlement and money laundering.
Back in May of 2024, Kate Steeley was settling into a new gig as interim director of the Montana Heritage and Preservation Commission when she learned of an agency-related eviction notice submitted from Stor-A-Way of Butte. The narrative comes from Department of Commerce documents obtained by Capitolized.
The government charge card of Steeley’s predecessor had been used to rent a shed from the Stor-A-Way, but payments had lapsed. Steeley was curious. The storage shed was 75 miles away from Heritage and Preservation Commission offices in Virginia City, Montana’s most intact mining city ghost town, which the state has owned for about 30 years.
Steeley drove to Butte to take a look. What she found when the storage shed’s metal door rolled up was a cache of new leather furniture, nearly $13,000 worth, purchased three miles up the street from Steele’s Furniture.
In the months that followed, Commerce discovered from $75,000 to $300,000 in potentially misappropriated spending on the charge card of former director Allen.
Former Commerce Director Paul Green, in the report, indicated that the department investigated charge card activity back to 2022. Montana Heritage and Preservation’s budget was roughly $2.66 million in fiscal year 2024 and it projected an $800,000 operating budget deficit, which is what prompted Green, who hired on in early 2024, to investigate. Green said Thursday he was leaving his position for a job in Billings to be closer to family.
The Legislative Audit Division, the investigative arm of the Montana Legislature, hasn’t audited Montana Heritage and Preservation since 2017, when it concluded the commission running the agency needed to be more engaged.
Voluntary and part-time, the commission was empowered to authorize spending. Its chair resigned following the Commerce investigation into Allen. She had authorized several reimbursement requests.
There was a charge card expense for “artifact cleaning and restoration,” which turned out to be for inkwork at a Bozeman tattoo parlor, and another for “Elk’s Lodge” membership, which turned out to be a $468 massage parlor bill.
The commission is no longer allowed to authorize reimbursement.
Earlier in the legislative session, current Heritage Director Kal Poole spoke of “miles of deferred maintenance” within the agency’s inventory of 250 buildings and 1.3 million historic artifacts.
— Tom Lutey