Week #1 of the 2025 Legislative Session is complete!
What has happened and what is top-of-mind for the 2025 Session?
House Committees heard over 80 bills and the Senate practically none as a majority of Senators duked it out with their leaders over committee assignments, changes to Senate rules, and other issues.
The State holds its breath as health care for 80,000 Montanans, thousands of jobs, dozens of health care facilities, especially in rural communities, and small businesses await legislative action to reauthorize Montana’s Medicaid program adopted in 2015.
Montanans are looking for property tax fairness, and reforms to help homeowners are on many legislators’ plates. Some ideas are more palatable than others.
The Governor is proposing another massive income tax primarily benefiting Montanans who earn over $500,000 who will each see close to $10,000 in tax breaks. The rest of the state worries about whether things that are important to our communities, our businesses, and our children’s future may not all be funded down the road.
Educators worry about an expansion of tuition vouchers that would subsidize private and sectarian schools and further erode and threaten funding of Montana’s public education system. Montana teachers already earn the lowest pay in the region and the state doesn’t even provide Pre-K for our youngest students.
Affordable housing, the independence and impartiality of our courts, and culture wars are all queued up to be heard and debated in the next 90 days!
We look forward to sharing this journey with our 55+ cohort of Montanans! May the “force be with you” as you talk to your neighbors, friends, and lawmakers about things that matter for our current and future generations.
Big Sky 55+ is committed to help you on the journey to make an impact for our beloved Montana.
We will send timely action alerts as bills are heard in committees or face important floor action.
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Tax Credit Bill (HB 21) is a Game Changer for Affordable Housing
HB 21 is one of the most important bills in this session to help rapidly transform the market for workforce affordable housing. This is also housing that older adults on fixed incomes, disabled veterans, or young families in low wage, frontline essential jobs can afford to live in.
HB 21, short title “Establish a Montana workforce housing tax credit,” is carried by Billings Republican Rep. Larry Brewster.
According to the National Association of Realtors, Montana’s housing market is the least affordable in the nation! (Measured by comparing average home prices to average income.)
According to Zillow’s housing index, average home prices in Montana have nearly doubled since 2020.
It is a simple reality that, in today’s economic conditions, a developer cannot build a house that a front line worker, or a retiree on a fixed income could afford to live in. Low income housing tax credits are one of the only tools that can bridge the gap between construction/development costs and the economic realities of a vast number of Montanans.
HB 21 puts forward a relatively small amount of state dollars which would then enable developers and banks to attract much larger amounts of private capital. This would facilitate the construction of housing dedicated to households that make, on average, 60% of the Average Median Income in their area, and would keep this housing affordable for the next 30-40 years.
This is a game changer. Had a bill with the same parameters passed in 2019, Montanans would have over 2,200 affordable housing units in place at the end of 2025.
Big Sky 55+ strongly supports HB 21, and it was strongly endorsed by a broad group of interests led by the Montana Housing Coalition at a hearing Friday in the House Taxation Committee. Please click here to contact your legislators and ask them to support HB 21.
Montana’s Judicial branch is under attack
There are dozens of bills in the pipeline to erode the independence of the Montana judicial branch.
Our judicial branch is a constitutional check on the powers of the Legislature and the Executive branches. Checks and balances are one of the keys to the success of American democracy over the last (almost) 250 years. Montana’s Republicans are teeing up bills to weaken both the separation of powers in Montana and our prized, extraordinary 1972 constitution.
Below is testimony presented by Bruce Spencer and Patrick Yawakie this week, on one of the many bills aimed at the judiciary and its independence and impartiality, HB 39 (Rep. Tom Millett, R-Marion), a bill to make judicial elections more partisan.
Patrick Yawakie, representing the Blackfeet Tribe and the Rocky Boy Tribe, called the bill a “direct attack on the sanctity of the judicial branch.”
As of 2024, there are only eight states in the country who have implemented partisan politician donations into their elections. They have seen major problems arise when parties put their weight on the scale of their preferred candidate,” Yawakie said. “When states implement these partisan elections, floods of money flow into the state from interests who are not from Montana, influencing Montana electors from true Montana values. The biggest risk we have to partisan judicial elections is when decisions are made not on the basis of the Montana constitution or law, but on the opinion of party lines.
Representing the Montana State Bar, attorney Bruce Spencer expressed his reservations to increasing any appearance of partisanship among judges.
If you allow political parties to contribute to judges, you automatically and necessarily tag that judge with a political label … if you do so, you impede the partiality of the judge,” Spencer said. “Even when judges are elected, as they are here in Montana, a judge plays a different role than a legislator or an executive branch official. They don’t make decisions based on the express views of the majority.
Spencer referenced the American Bar Association’s Code of Judicial Conduct, which sets narrowly tailored restrictions on political activities of judges and judicial candidates.
“Even when judges are elected, as they are here in Montana, a judge plays a different role than a legislator or an executive branch official. They don’t make decisions based on the express views of the majority,” Spencer said. “They can’t. It’s improper. They make decisions based on the law and the facts of the case before them only.
“If you pass this bill, you’re disagreeing … that judges should be free from political pressure,” he added.
Click here to read the full article in the Daily Montanan.
What’s Up as the Montana Senate Ground to a Halt in Week One?
Historically the Montana Senate has often been a check within the Legislative branch on its more raucous and dramatic counterpart, the House of Representatives. Will 2025 flip that script?
As the 69th session convened, all eyes were on the Senate which ground to a halt when nine Republicans – both conservative and moderate – and the entire minority caucus of Democrats found common cause in challenging Senate leadership: President Matt Regier (Kalispell), Majority Leader Tom McGilvray (Billings), and the all-Republican Committee on Committees.
The point of contention was an attempt to marginalize senior, seasoned Senators by appointing them to a newly resurrected but anachronistic Committee on Governors Appointments and strip them of their historical substantive policy committees.
Democrats were chafing at the imbalance of their appointments which did not proportionately reflect their numbers in the body. And some freshmen, newly elected, also felt they had been cut out of a full load of assignments.
By withholding their votes on the Rules which govern the body, the 27 aggrieved members effectively demonstrated that the Senate’s leadership would be wise not to abuse its power and overplay its hand. After a week of few hearings and little business in the Senate while the drama unfolded, Committees were reconstituted and business began in earnest.
It is too early to tell if the Senate has moved past the challenges and closer to an agreement, or whether this coalition could recur in the future.
While partisans are denouncing the nine Republicans on Montana airwaves and press, the standoff was not about any particular philosophy or issue, but more about fairness, traditions, norms of conduct and respect for every member of the body.
Please reach out to thank the lawmakers who took a stand against the arbitrary abuse of power by Senate leadership.
These lawmakers are: the Minority Leader Pat Flowers and the entire Democratic caucus, and the following Republicans: Sen. Jason Ellsworth (Hamilton), Sen. Butch Gillespie (Ethridge), Sen. Gregg Hunter (Glasgow), Sen. Josh Kassmier (Ft. Benton), Sen. Gayle Lammers (Hardin), Sen. Denley Loge, (St. Regis), Sen Wendy McKamey (Great Falls), Sen. Russ Tempel (Chester), and Sen. Shelley Vance (Bozeman).