In his recent inaugural speech, Montana Gov. Greg Gianforte spoke about how we have what the rest of the nation wants, saying: “The American dream lives in Montana and it’s here where we are proving what is possible when the government gets out of the way and empowers the people.”

If anything, his words reflect a relative newcomer’s poor understanding of Montana history — and what can happen when you “get government out of the way.”  But long-time Montanans remember.  We lived through and still suffer from the era when government was indeed “out of the way” and the rapacious appetites of the railroad, cattle, timber and mining barons ran rampant, leaving a trail of destruction in their wake. 

The record is clear, and while many scars yet remain, the benefits of regulating formerly unrestricted greed and destruction are evident all across this vast state.  

Anyone who knew those who lived in Montana 100 years ago can easily recall their stories of hunters basically wiping out the wildlife populations.  The most distinct example of human-caused destruction of wildlife was the decimation of the buffalo that once wandered our plains in the millions.  

But the slaughter was stopped — not by individuals, but by the government.  While buffalo continue to recover, Montana now boasts healthy populations of deer, elk, antelope and moose — all of which would have been hunted to extirpation were it not for the institution of regulations to prevent their demise.  

Hunting seasons were established to protect the time when existing wildlife carried the next generation to replenish the herds.  Regulatory limits on how many animals one individual could kill were instituted not to crush freedom, as the governor insinuated government has done, but to provide continuing opportunities for Montanans and generations yet to come. 

While our clean rivers and abundant fisheries are the envy of the nation, that’s not by accident.  Plenty of Montanans still remember when the Clark Fork was a dead river that ran red with mining and smelting wastes, which we will continue to wrestle with for decades to come.  

The timber barons ran huge rafts of logs down the Blackfoot, destroying the banks and scouring the riverbed on their way to the mills and leaving behind clearcuts leaching sediment into once-healthy tributaries.  Half a century later, the Blackfoot was again decimated when the Mike Horse mine tailings pond failed, flooding the river with toxic metals that wiped out the fishery.

And of course not all that long ago there was no such thing as the catch-and-release fishing ethic pioneered and promoted by iconic conservationists like Bud Lilly, who would willingly tell friends that in his youth it was “catch and release in bacon grease.”

While the governor lauds “unleashing freedom,” the undeniable reality of Montana’s past is that there must be sidebars on that “freedom” because there are those who will pillage the state’s wealth to get it while they can with no concern for the consequences.

The legislature’s GOP leaders, echoing the governor, have the regulatory laws that restored past damages and now protect Montanans and their environment in their crosshairs.  But laws such as the Montana Environmental Policy Act protect all Montanans — and rest assured Republicans need clean air, water, and soil, too, as well as healthy populations of fish and wildlife.

Montanans continue to suffer from past deregulatory mistakes, which took our electricity rates from the lowest in the region to the highest.  The lesson?  Beware “unleashing freedom” if the result is actually unleashing rapacious corporations to once again plunder and pollute this great state. 

HELENA — Four days into the Montana Legislature’s 69^th session, a split in the majority Republican party is lingering.

Senate leadership spent much of Thursday trying to get their caucus to unite behind a new rules package, but in the end, it was a group of nine Republicans voting alongside Democrats to keep temporary rules in place – just as they did on Monday.

Just after the start of the session, 27 of 50 senators voted to change the proposed initial rules the session would operate under. The biggest changes dealt with senators’ assignments to committees – the smaller groups that hear and debate bills on specific topics.

The first rules proposal, recommended by the Senate Rules Committee last month, had created a new “Executive Branch Review Committee,” which leaders said would handle legislation from the governor’s office and other state agencies. However, Democrats and Sen. Jason Ellsworth, R-Hamilton – the Republican named to chair the committee – questioned whether it was necessary. The revised temporary rules greatly limited what the Executive Branch Review Committee would take on and reassigned its members to other influential committees.

On Wednesday, GOP-led committees sought to address the holdouts’ concerns. The Senate Rules Committee amended the permanent rules proposal to eliminate the Executive Review Committee entirely, and the Senate Committee on Committees – which recommends committee assignments – proposed new assignments similar, but not identical, to the ones in the temporary rules.

The Senate was scheduled to vote on the rules resolution at 1 p.m. Thursday. When the Senate convened, Republicans broke off into what became a highly charged caucus meeting.

Jonathon Ambarian

Senate President Sen. Matt Regier, R-Kalispell, and Majority Leader Sen. Tom McGillvray, R-Billings, urged their members to support the new rules proposal. They said they had heard what Regier called “angst” about the new committee, and that the changes should have addressed that issue.

“We gave you everything you asked for – what do you want?” said Sen. Barry Usher, R-Yellowstone County. “If we go out there again and we continue to fight over these rules, the Republican Party will be hurt.”

Sen. Becky Beard, R-Elliston, said the Republican split had distracted senators from their work.

“We have frittered away now four days dealing with this, when we should be serving the state of Montana and our voters,” she said. “This is not getting to the goal.”

Jonathon Ambarian

Holdout Republican senators said they felt some members hadn’t been treated fairly when committees were assigned. Sen. Wendy McKamey, R-Great Falls, was critical of the Executive Review Committee.

“It was, someone said, a parking place for people, to kind of keep them out of the way,” she said. “I don’t know whether it was or whether it wasn’t; what I do know is it was kind of an affront to the governor. I do not want to see us fighting the governor, I want to see us making good legislation, I want to see us getting to work, I want to see us getting stuff done.”

Conservative groups like the Montana Freedom Caucus sharply criticized the nine Republicans who broke with their party on the rules, accusing them of essentially handing power in the chamber to Democrats. Sen. Denley Loge, R-St. Regis, one of the holdouts, defended himself in the Thursday caucus, saying he had acted independently, not joined with Democrats.

“I’m the kind of person that if I got treated fairly, I still want to watch out for the ones that didn’t,” he said. “And so that’s why I’ve been in on this, as one of the ‘dirty nine,’ I guess you want to say, but I am a Republican.”

McGillvray responded to Loge.

“You’re not ‘dirty nine,’” he said. “You are a Republican.”

Regier ended the caucus meeting with a final appeal for unity.

“My resolve is to never stop fighting for the 32 of you,” he said. “I will not let the Democrat minority run the floor – that is my line.”

After the meeting, leaders delayed the vote, saying they planned to return to negotiations, including potentially further updating the committee assignments to satisfy the holdouts. However, the Committee on Committees was set to meet at 3 p.m., recessed until 5 p.m., and then chair Sen. Carl Glimm, R-Kila, announced they would adjourn without considering new assignments.

The Senate then returned to the floor at 6 p.m. Without debate, they voted down the rules resolution – again on a 27-23 vote, including the same nine Republicans.

“I’m going to keep pushing forward with what Montanans have sent us here to do,” Regier told reporters after the vote. “I would love it if those nine would join the caucus that they ran on, that they won in and stop this procedure.”

John Riley

Regier said the Senate has to move forward with its work, and committee meetings will be getting underway. MTN asked him if the chamber’s business would be getting back to normal.

“We’re going to get back to business, but it won’t be as normal,” he said. “Fifteen minutes into the entire legislative session, to have a vote like we did on Monday, like I said, that really jars the confidence from the rest of your peers in your caucus.”

Friday will be the fifth day of the legislative session, with 85 still to go.

Montana’s property tax system is a complicated thing, involving mind-boggling math and a bewildering array of rules aimed at fairly dividing the bill for public services like schools and police departments between hundreds of thousands of properties.

It’s a tricky task, of course, to agree on what exactly fair means when it comes to taxes — and a trickier one for lawmakers to write a tax code that implements a fair framework without loopholes. Earlier this week, Montana Free Press and High Country News published a lengthy investigation into a facet of the state’s tax code that has been a perennial concern on the loophole front for decades: whether a property tax break intended for farms and ranches is being abused by people who own luxury homes on rural parcels.

Our full story, which you can read here, runs more than 3,400 words. If you’re looking for something briefer, here are some of the key takeaways:

1. Agricultural tax status offers farm and ranch properties a discount relative to residential properties by marking down the value of the underlying land.

If you own a Montana home in an urban or suburban neighborhood, it’s almost certainly classified as a residential property. For those, both the house structure and the home lot beneath it are valued and taxed based on their market value — how much the Montana Department of Revenue thinks they would sell for.

Structures on agricultural properties are also valued and taxed based on their market value, but the underlying land is not. Instead, agricultural land is valued for tax purposes based on its production value — how much money the revenue department thinks its owner could make growing crops or grazing livestock.

That’s a significant difference. Home lot prices vary from place to place across Montana, but the average residential property had a land value of about $127,000 in 2023. Production values are much, much lower. Some of the properties we looked at, for example, had grazing land valued at less than $50 an acre.

2. The agricultural discount can translate into hundreds or thousands of dollars in annual tax savings.

One example we looked at was a property on the Flathead River near Kalispell, described in a Zillow listing as a “gorgeous Montana river estate” with a putting green and orchard. Classified as agricultural land, the 10-acre property paid about $7,000 in property taxes in 2023, all but $20 of that based on the value of the property’s structures, according to our analysis.

A 10-acre residential property next door, including a slightly less valuable home, paid about $9,100 in taxes in 2023, including about $3,300 in land taxes.

That sort of disparity is typical. For parcels smaller than 20 acres, we found that residential properties paid a median effective land tax of $1,609 an acre in 2023, compared to only $6.61 for agricultural parcels.

3. Critics worry that it’s too easy for high-end real estate to qualify for agricultural tax benefits.

Unlike most western states, larger Montana properties automatically qualify for agricultural tax treatment without being required to document that the land is being used for agriculture. Properties of 160 acres or more are automatically granted a full agricultural designation, while properties bigger than 20 acres automatically qualify for a partial agricultural designation that offers slightly reduced tax benefits regardless of whether the land is being put to significant agricultural use.

Smaller properties can qualify for the full designation by reporting at least $1,500 a year in agricultural income. Critics say that threshold, which hasn’t been updated since 1986, is low enough that savvy property owners can reach it with relatively little effort.

4. Thousands of million-dollar Montana homes are benefiting from the ag tax treatment. Gov. Greg Gianforte’s Bozeman home is one of them.

Looking at state property data for 2023, MTFP and HCN found more than 3,000 properties with million-dollar structure values that qualify for the full or partial agricultural tax benefit. In some cases, like the Flathead River example, those properties are adjacent to otherwise comparable residential properties, resulting in stark tax disparities.

Another example is Gianforte’s home on an 11-acre parcel with an agricultural designation on the outskirts of Bozeman. According to our calculations, the governor and his wife, Susan, paid about $5.75 an acre in land taxes on it in 2023 while a neighbor with a residential parcel across the street paid $826 per acre. (The governor’s office said that the Gianfortes’ property, which also includes additional parcels, is used for barley and alfalfa production and is also used to board horses and mules.)

The governor’s $66 land tax bill for the 11-acre parcel is also less than what the vast majority of urban homeowners in Montana pay each year for the lots beneath their homes.

5. Lawmakers could change the tax code as the Montana Legislature meets this year.

As the session opened in early January, there were two bills under consideration that would tighten qualification standards for the agricultural designations (House Bill 27) and increase taxes on homesite portions of high-value ag properties (Senate Bill 4).

Similar measures have floundered in the past, in part because of opposition from people who would face higher tax bills. The sponsors of both measures told MTFP this week that they are working on revisions to their proposals in an effort to make the bills politically viable.

READ MORE: Montana’s agricultural tax rules slash bills for thousands of million-dollar homes.