When You and I Were Young, Whitefish*

By Bob Decker
January 31, 2009

* h/t Dorothy M. Johnson

On Friday, January 30, the House Tax Committee heard HB 312, sponsored by Rep. Bill Beck (R-Whitefish). Rep. Beck’s bill seeks to increase the maximum population for a town utilizing Montana’s resort tax from 5,500 to 10,000.

The resort tax was established in 1985. It allows communities that depend significantly on revenue from tourism to enact a sales tax on sales at hotels, restaurants, bars, ski areas, and other tourism-related retail sites. The tax requires ratification by local voters and has a 3 percent limit. It’s typically used to fund transportation projects, sidewalks, parks, and other urban improvement projects.

In Montana, the towns of Red Lodge, Virginia City, and West Yellowstone, along with Whitefish, utilize the resort tax to add revenue to their municipal budgets.

Rep. Beck said he introduced the bill because the population of Whitefish has grown rapidly in recent years and will soon surpass 5,500, making continued use of the tax impossible unless the law is changed. He said that the resort tax was popular in Whitefish because it provided property tax relief (taking 25 percent of the tax income) and built streets, sidewalks, and parks.

Several members of Whitefish’s political establishment, including the mayor, city manager, a local bank president, and a restaurant operator, made a good case for both the resort tax (it requires a tourism community’s out-of-town visitors to financially support the public services that tourists use) and Rep. Beck’s bill.

The sole person to testify against the bill was Don Huffman, a lobbyist for the Montana Tax Association. He said the Tax Association was concerned about raising the population ceiling and allowing additional Montana communities to take advantage of the tax. Yet, while Huffman spoke negatively about local option taxes, he said the Tax Association felt positively about the idea of a general sales tax.

The logic of the Montana Tax Association’s position wasn’t clear, but the end result of their preferred system is: they want a general sales tax, a regressive form of taxation that is particularly unfair to low-income people, but they oppose a more benign – and voter-endorsed – form of a sales tax that targets its payers, e.g., tourists placing significant demands on public facilities and services, with more fairness.

You can find a news story about the use of the resort tax in northwest Montana here, and you can see Montana’s current statutes on the resort tax here.

Coal, Cars, and Climate Change

The Montana Legislature will be taking up these very important and related issues in the next week.

Montana Environmental Information Center (MEIC) strongly encourages you to attend these hearings, whether just to listen and learn or, better yet, to speak your mind.

FRIDAY, JANUARY 30, 2009, at 3 PM, in State Capitol room 422
The Senate Natural Resources Committee will hear SB 180 (Sen. Ron Erickson, D-Missoula). This bill would direct the State to adopt the California clean car standard. The California law requires new cars to emit fewer greenhouse gas emissions. Just this week President Obama directed the U.S. EPA to review the Bush Administration’s denial of California’s right to establish vehicle emission standards that are more stringent than federal ones. If EPA allows the California standard to be imposed, 13 other states will adopt the standard as well. This bill would add Montana to the growing list of states that want motor vehicles to pollute less.

MONDAY, FEBRUARY 2, 2009, at Noon, in State Capitol room 303
Listen to Montana’s leading climate scientist and Nobel laureate, Dr. Steven Running, give a presentation to the public and legislators on the latest scientific information about global warming.

MONDAY, FEBRUARY 2, 2009, at 3 PM, in State Capitol room 472
The House Natural Resources Committee will hear HB 254 (Rep. Mike Phillips, D-Bozeman). This bill would direct the State to develop rules requiring the monitoring and reporting of greenhouse gas emissions. It is a critical first step in helping control greenhouse gas emissions statewide. Come support this effort.

TUESDAY, FEBRUARY 3, 2009, at 3 PM, in State Capitol room 317
The Senate will hold a hearing on coal development in Montana. MEIC’s Anne Hedges and Citizens for Clean Energy’s Rich Liebert will be among a panel of presenters discussing the impediments to coal development in Montana. Come learn about how coal emissions contribute to global warming. Starting at 4 PM, the Committee will take public comments. Tell them of your concerns about global warming and increased coal development in Montana.

Credit surplus? (Tax breaks galore)

By Bob Decker
January 22, 2009

“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way. In short, the period was so far like the present period, that some of its noisiest authorities insisted on its being received, for good or for evil, in the superlative degree of comparison only.”

Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities

(Pardon me for overkill on the catch-quote, but it’s a timeless opening paragraph of a book, right up there with Bulwer-Lytton’s “It was a dark and stormy night …”, but we’ll save that other one for later in the session, if needed.)

At a recent conference on the subject of energy, Richard Opper, Director of the Montana Department of Environmental Quality, observed that the United States once was a nation that built infrastructure, but was now a nation that sought tax cuts. Remaining alert to noisy assertions that the current times are unlike any other, I think Opper had a point. You can see it by the number of bills in the Legislature that seek to create or increase tax abatements, credits, exemptions, and deductions.

On the morning of January 19, before the opening gavel of the House Tax Committee, I spent an hour at one of the public computer stations in the Capitol to count the tax break bills. Turns out, there wasn't enough time to finish the job: in that hour, I jotted down more than 50 tax-cut bills, either already introduced or in draft stage, but didn't come close to listing all of them.

Tax credits and cuts for cell phone companies, college savings, movie production, long-term care, license plates, energy conservation, electric vehicles, volunteer firemen and EMTs, downtown residential development, developmentally disabled, hearing aids, payroll tax for tribal employees, neighborhood cleanup, preservation of historical buildings, and so forth.

The subject on Monday for the House Tax Committee was proposed tax breaks for military veterans. Most of the attention was given to HB 28, sponsored by Rep. Pat Ingraham (R-Thompson Falls), which would exempt from Montana taxation the retirement income received by retired military personnel who live in the state. According to testimony, Montana currently has about 8,300 military retirees, and the average pension received by them is around $30,000 per year. The cost to the state in lost tax revenue, if the bill were passed, is estimated at $6.5 million annually.

Many legislators and witnesses at the hearing spoke appreciatively of the service and sacrifice given by military veterans. However, most of the bill proponents, nearly all of them veterans, and many affiliated with organizations such as the VFW and American Legion, justified the bill as economic stimulus and a means of attracting veterans from elsewhere to settle in Montana by virtue of a tax break offered by the state. Proponents used booster phrases like “Win-Win-Win” and “Everybody Wins” to describe the positive economic impacts of bringing veterans to the state.

Touting the alleged economic benefits of a proposed tax break is a common tactic of the tax break seekers, all of whom are aware of the tight budget situation faced by legislators. But, faced with myriad proposals, most promoted in a good-for-the-economy context, how will legislators decide?

The usual factors of lobbying power, constituency strength, and partisan philosophy will enter in, of course, but one must hope that legislators also make tax-change decisions on the basis of need. Among movie producers, volunteer fireman, military retirees, the working poor, and the low-income elderly, who most needs shelter from the economic storm?

The Policy Institute isn’t above the fray. We’re queued up to request changes in tax policy, too, but our breaks, such as an earned income tax credit, will be focused on improving conditions for low-income Montanans.

There’s another question that should be raised about tax-break proposals: How will it be paid for? The Policy Institute will also be proposing ways to raise money to cover the revenue lost from our initiatives, such as ending the oil and gas tax holiday and increasing tax rates on Montana’s ultra-wealthy.

In 1999, the Montana Legislature cut taxes on the oil and gas industry that resulted in more than $500 million in lost revenue to the state from 2003-2007. In 2003, the Legislature passed an income tax relief bill (SB 407) that gave the 1,500 wealthiest households in Montana (those earning $500,000 or more annually) an average annual tax reduction of $30,499, which was greater than the average annual pay of Montana jobs ($29,150) at the time.

Sometimes, tax breaks are warranted. And sometimes, tax-break mistakes should be corrected.

Deregulation Sun Still Rises

By Bob Decker
January 18, 2009

"In modern Montana history, there is one defining moment, and that defining moment is deregulation."
- Cal Sweet, founder of Kalispell Electric, February 18, 2001

The "defining moment" occurred on May 2, 1997, when then-Governor Marc Racicot signed into law SB 390, the "Electric Utility Restructuring and Customer Choice Act," known otherwise and since as energy deregulation.

A sweeping statement like Mr. Sweet's would often be burnished by the passage of years into the hyperbole of a foregone era, but history has borne his judgment out. Deregulation was one of the worst, most harmful political decisions in Montana's history for most of the state’s people.

Many of the politicians - many of them Republicans, but some Democrats, too – who supported deregulation at the time have expressed regret for their support of the policy, but the decision holds and Montanans continue to pay for the mistake.

In dismantling a regulatory system that yielded some of the nation’s lowest energy prices to citizens, the corporate politicians who passed SB 390 offered one sop to Montanans: a program called Universal System Benefits (USB), a policy which obligated utilities to fund the "public purposes" of energy conservation, renewable energy development, and aid to low-income energy consumers. You can read a detailed description and history of the program here.

If you're a customer of Northwestern Energy in Montana, a small part of your monthly utility bill is dedicated to the USB program. Along with the customers of regulated utilities, the state's 26 rural electrical cooperatives and about 60 "large customers" (businesses and large institutions that consume significant amounts of energy) were required by the 1997 legislation to support the USB program. The USB statutes were constructed, however, to allow most cooperatives to provide little USB support and to allow large customers to direct their USB obligations internally, i.e., to projects that provide benefit for the company.

Making matters worse, the funding level required to support Montana's electrical USB program (there is a somewhat different USB program for natural gas) hasn't changed since its inception, meaning that inflationary forces have eroded about a fourth of its modest initial buying power. If the Legislature doesn't change USB funding requirements soon, inflation will sunset the program in spite of any permanence assured by statutory language offered in a bill now before the Legislature.

Progressive legislators in past sessions tried to strengthen the USB program, but the power of the utilities, cooperatives, and industrial users prevented change. In this session, so far, there has been no bill to overhaul the program, but HB 27 was introduced to simply drop the sunset provision in the enabling statute (USB is scheduled to end at the end of 2009) and to direct an interim legislative committee to provide oversight of the program.

Brady Wiseman (D-Bozeman), one of the Legislature's strongest proponents for state energy policy that puts public interest before corporate interest, introduced HB 27, not because he doesn't wish to prescribe stronger medicine for a sick program, but because the dropped sunset and a perfunctory oversight charge were all that the Energy and Telecommunications Interim Committee would go for.

The hearing for HB 27 occurred on January 14 in front of the House Committee on Federal Relations, Energy, and Telecommunications. Utility and cooperative lobbyists supported the bill, as did several environmental lobbyists.

On behalf of The Policy Institute, I testified in favor of the bill, endorsing the sunset provision, but suggested that the oversight provision of the bill be amended to direct a more aggressive approach to the USB program, including a study of alternative administrative structures, which have been used by Oregon and Vermont to establish much more effective programs.

Rep. Art Noonan (D-Butte) eventually decided that my testimony was not relevant to the bill and asked me to halt.

The committee took no action on the day of the hearing. Look for updates to this report to learn of committee actions and votes when they occur.

Taxes, Love and Logic

By Jim Elliott, Former State Senator, Trout Creek
January 13, 2009


One of the campaign promises made by Montana Republicans in the 2008 campaign was to eliminate the “Business Equipment” tax. It’s not the wisest thing to do, but that’s never stopped a politician.

The Business Equipment tax is applied to those items that are used daily by businesses both large and small in pursuit of profit. The equipment ranges from cash registers to bulldozers and includes everything that is not nailed down, and some that is, like all the plumbing of oil refineries. It has been around for a long, long time, and in the past twenty years has been cussed, lowered, limited, and gutshot. The rationale for getting rid of it is the same one that has always been used to lower it; business will thrive.

Let me dwell on the word “rationale” for a moment. Property taxes have been around since the dawn of civilization (which couldn’t have happened without taxes, by the way). There is a logical rationale for their existence, just as there is one for their demise. I am here to tell you that using a logical argument about taxes to convince unbelievers is as effective as using logic to talk a lover out of leaving when the bags are packed and the taxi’s waiting. Politics, like love, is not a fertile field for logical argument. The arguments may be logical, but the decisions are made on an emotional level.

We tax things because we use the money collectively to make our collective lives better. It doesn’t really matter what we tax, heck, we’re just trying to raise some money, but we do like to make a symmetrical connection between what’s taxed and what its spent on because its—well, logical. The gas tax goes for highways, the cigarette tax goes for healthcare, you get the picture; but when taxes are collected for more generalized services, like providing government, the symmetrical argument gets very murky indeed.

In the recent history of taxation, property taxes have been dedicated to local governments. When property taxes are cut by the legislature, local governments have to take one for the team. In the course of lowering the business equipment tax the legislature has made attempts to reimburse local governments for the loss of revenue; but then, under the assumption that the reduction in tax will lead to more business equipment being bought which will even things out by bringing in more property taxes, the legislature phases out the reimbursement. That increased growth in business equipment hasn’t happened yet, but hope springs eternal, doesn’t it?

There is a valid argument that lowering the tax on small businesses will make life better for them; but it won’t make life equally better for them because they don’t all have the same amount of taxable business equipment. A machine shop has lots of taxable stuff, a clothing store has a couple of computers, which used to be called cash registers. There is also an argument that big business will prosper, but it’s bunkum because taxes are a far, far smaller percentage of their cost of doing business. They do like to work the issue, though.

Cases in point; in 1989 the tax rate was cut about 25% to attract a canola oil company to Butte. They never came, but it has cost Montana taxpayers some $18 million a year since just to offer the subsidy. In 2005 the business equipment tax rate on wind generators was cut in half at the request of wind generation companies. The argument was that it would spur development in wind power, and lo, immediately after the tax was lowered giant wind farms sprang to life in Judith Gap and Glasgow! Unfortunately, cutting the tax had nothing to do with the creation of the wind farms because they were already a done deal with contracts signed, ground broken, you name it; and the Legislature knew it. They bought the argument that lower taxes would generate wind farms, when it was actually the other way around; the wind farms generated lower taxes.

When property tax rates are lowered the biggest beneficiaries have been large companies headquartered out of state, such as Louisiana Pacific, Conoco, and the BNSF railroad. Recently the voters in Frenchtown voted to increase their taxes to improve their school. By sheer coincidence the $19 million they agreed to tax themselves was almost the same dollar amount the Frenchtown School District lost from tax cuts enjoyed by the local Smurfit Stone linerboard plant.

Since 1989 the business equipment tax has been cut by close to 70% with no appreciable growth in the rate of purchase of new business equipment or demonstrable growth in jobs. If the Legislature wants to help somebody, help the little guy by eliminating the tax on a portion of their taxable equipment. At least small businesses know where the buck stops; but the big guys can take care of themselves, even if they can’t figure out how to do it without asking for taxpayer charity and bailouts.

Extra Credit

By Bob Decker
January 12, 2009

On Friday, January 9, Sen. Christine Kaufmann (D-Helena) presented a bill to change the state income tax credit for energy conservation investments in a building. Sen. Kaufmann introduced the bill on behalf of the Environmental Quality Council, a bipartisan committee that meets between regular legislative sessions and of which Sen. Kaufmann is a member.

Under current law, taxpayers are allowed a state tax credit of 25 percent of the cost of projects to conserve energy in buildings. Someone who spends $1,000 on an insulation project may receive a $250 credit in paying state taxes. The maximum credit allowed is $500, so energy investments over $2,000 are limited to a credit of $500.

Sen. Kaufmann’s bill seeks to:

• increase the maximum credit from $500 per taxpayer to $800 per taxpayer;


• allow partnerships and S corporations to claim the credit for energy investments in rental buildings;


• expands the credit to include refrigeration and lighting conservation in rental buildings;


• make the credit refundable for low-income taxpayers (i.e., if a conservation credit due is greater than the total tax due of the filer, the state would refund the difference to the filer).

Linda Gryczan, working as a lobbyist for the National Center for Appropriate Technology, did a fine job of organizing proponents for the bill. Representatives of a handful of environmental organizations (Montana Audubon, Alternative Energy Resources Organization, Montana Conservation Voters, and Northern Plains Resource Council) spoke in favor of the bill, as did a local contractor.

Dale Horton, representing the National Center for Appropriate Technology, addressed the potential energy saving impacts of the bill, as well as probable economic benefits from local investments made in building contractor firms and material suppliers (doors, windows, insulation, and other building products).

Chris Dorsi, a partner in Saturn Energy, a Helena-based firm specializing in construction training, conservation consulting, and the publication of technical manuals, offered an articulate statement on how sizable savings of both energy and money can be realized through the execution of relatively simple building improvements.

David Scrimm, a Helena attorney, made a strong case for the economic benefits of conservation measures, then offered some amendments to the bill that would increase the credit from $800 (in Sen. Kaufmann's bill) to $1,000, allow year-to-year carryover of the credit, and include the purchase of energy-efficient appliances to be claimed for credit.

There were no opponents to the bill.

Sen. Jeff Essmann (R-Billings), the committee's chairman, made reference to the daunting budget situation faced by the Legislature and suggested that the bill would probably not see committee action in the near future.

"The Ten Cannots"

By Bob Decker
January 11, 2009

“I cannot tell a lie. I did it with my hatchet.” – Abraham Lincoln

House Republican Leader Scott Sales (R-Bozeman) made news late last week when it was discovered that, in his opening speech to his colleagues, he mistakenly attributed a series of political maxims to Abraham Lincoln.

After the Lee Newspapers State Bureau investigated the quotations and informed Rep. Sales of his error, Sales apologized, then took steps to correct the record with his House colleagues.

“I was duped,” Rep. Sales said. “I got them off the Internet. It wasn’t my intention to mislead.”

I’m with Rep. Sales on all counts. First of all, like everyone else striving to prepare content for a speech, he looked elsewhere for material to bolster whatever original thought he might have scraped together. And Lincoln is certainly in the pantheon of go-to sources, below Shakespeare, of course, but right up there with Oscar Wilde, Dorothy Parker, Mark Twain, Yogi Berra, Woody Allen, and Calvin Coolidge (“If you don’t say anything, you won’t be called on to repeat it.”).

And who hasn’t been burned by relying on the Internet? If you can’t believe everything you read on hard copy, much of which has been written, edited, proofed, and printed at great trouble and expense, what is the veracity factor in a medium where authors are countless, fact-checkers are hen’s teeth, and the audience is a keyboard click away?

Finally, Rep. Sales doesn’t strike me as a politician who spends a lot of energy feigning his thoughts or feeling strongly both ways. However much I might disagree with his ideology, I appreciate not having to labor to know it.

Ideology is a key word here, as that is what Rep. Sales sought to communicate. For aphoristic help, he turned to “The Ten Cannots,” a pamphlet written (supposedly!) by William J.H. Boetcker, a Presbyterian minister and political conservative of the early twentieth century. Sometime after Boetcker’s pamphlet was published, his sayings were attributed to Lincoln.

In his speech, Rep. Sales cited eight of Boetcker’s Ten Cannots, but to give you full flavor, here’s the complete list:

• You cannot bring about prosperity by discouraging thrift.


• You cannot strengthen the weak by weakening the strong.


• You cannot help little men by tearing down big men.


• You cannot lift the wage earner by pulling down the wage payer.


• You cannot help the poor by destroying the rich.


• You cannot establish sound security on borrowed money.


• You cannot further the brotherhood of man by inciting class hatred.


• You cannot keep out of trouble by spending more than you earn.


• You cannot build character and courage by destroying men's initiative and independence.


• And you cannot help men permanently by doing for them what they can and should do for themselves.

As with many ideologies, especially as offered in gleaming nuggets, there is much to allure us, and Boetcker used particular care in his choice of verbs and his construction of, ahem, misleading choices. Most of us don’t think fondly of political objectives sought by destroying, weakening, or inciting, and who among us thinks of helping little men in terms of tearing down big men?

And do Boetcker’s Cannots apply to Montana’s current political and legislative challenges? If, for example, a bill is introduced to establish a state-based earned income tax credit for the working poor in Montana by repealing the section of SB 407 (passed by the Legislature in 2003) that gave $30,500 in average annual tax relief to the wealthiest 1,586 households in the state, would that constitute “destroying” the rich to help the poor?

Though Boetcker’s Cannots make useful ideological grist, each one presents rich opportunity for gaming, for juxtaposing words and unveiling contradiction. You cannot construct sound public policy through the use of truisms.

“The dogmas of the quiet past are inadequate to the stormy present. The occasion is piled high with difficulty, and we must rise with the occasion. As our case is new, so we must think anew and act anew.” (Abraham Lincoln. Really.)

Copper Tarnished, but Collar Holds

By Bob Decker
January 11, 2009

One of the linguistic misfortunes of Montana’s history is that the state’s infamous “copper collar” is not remembered by the more accurate – and still relevant – term, “corporate collar.” Copper, after all, was merely the medium through which elite, often out-of-state interests controlled Montana’s people, institutions, and landscapes during the time when the Richest Hill on Earth fueled the electrification of the world.

Corporate power is nimble, however, and has no particular allegiance to copper. That corporate nimbleness is not just in the marketed product: it has been developed to near perfection in the art of taxation, or, too frequently, non-taxation.

With the purpose of loosening the corporate collar in Montana, Sen. Ron Erickson (D-Missoula) introduced Senate Bill 36 to the Senate Tax Committee on January 8. His bill would alter Montana’s tax law to make it more difficult for corporations that earn income from various states and nations to use foreign-based subsidiaries to unfairly reduce their tax burdens in Montana.

Most people understand the general concept behind the “off-shore tax haven” and disapprove of its purpose, but the accounting and tax laws that have been developed in many states and countries to assure fair distribution of corporate tax payments among entities is complex. It requires a concerted and continuous effort for taxing jurisdictions to keep pace with the imaginative competence of corporate accountants and attorneys.

“What has happened,” said Sen. Erickson, “is they (corporate tax attorneys) have found a way to turn domestic income into foreign income.”

Sen. Erickson distributed news reports to make his case:

• In a Wall Street Journal article from November 2007, Wal-Mart was described as paying rent on its stores to a wholly owned subsidiary based in Florence, Italy. This allows Wal-Mart to write off rent payments in its stateside tax forms, but retain the same payments through its Italian office and avoid many corporate taxes in the U.S.


• In the same WSJ article, Burlington Northern Santa Fe is reported to have made interest payments to subsidiaries doing business in Canada. The railway deducted the interest but didn’t pay taxes on most of the income received by its subsidiaries.


• From Finfact Ireland (an Irish business and finance website), November 2005: “Earlier this month, The Wall Street Journal wrote that ‘a law firm's office on a quiet downtown street [in Dublin, Ireland ] houses an obscure subsidiary of Microsoft Corp. that helps the computer giant shave at least $500 million from its annual tax bill. The four-year-old subsidiary, Round Island One Ltd., has a thin roster of employees but controls more than $16 billion in Microsoft assets. Virtually unknown in Ireland, on paper it has quickly become one of the country's biggest companies, with gross profits of nearly $9 billion in 2004.’"

The fiscal note for Sen. Erickson’s bill estimates that the bill’s passage would increase tax revenue to Montana’s general fund by $2,400,000 annually. Not an earth-shaking number, but certainly large enough to deserve serious attention in a state budget environment where revenue estimates are dropping almost monthly.

At the hearing before the Senate Tax Committee, Mike Green, representing the Montana Taxpayers Association, opposed the bill as a “shotgun approach” that would increase tax compliance costs for corporations. When queried by a committee member about that assertion, Brian Staley, an attorney for the Montana Department of Revenue, said that, to the contrary, Sen. Erickson’s proposed change would make it easier to comply with state law by making it more closely resemble federal law.

The Senate Tax Committee took no action on the bill. We’ll report on future developments.

School Days and the Innocence of Youth

By Bob Decker
January 8, 2009

After the mass swear-in and other opening day ceremonies on Monday, January 5, the Legislature embarked on some instructional exercises, intended to introduce its members – especially, no doubt, the newcomers – to fundamental procedural concepts and the constitutional requirements of lawmaking.

On Tuesday morning, the House and Senate gathered in the House chambers to attend “Law School,” then in the afternoon heard a budget analysis from the Legislative Fiscal Division, which provides staff support for the Legislature. Both sessions were well executed by capable and experienced people.

The curriculum of the “Law School” leaned heavily on legislative obligations and expectations as defined by the Montana Constitution. Greg Petesch, Director of the Legal Services Office (also a staff adjunct of the Legislature) gave an engaging speech about the separation of powers between governmental branches. You can get a good taste of his interpretive skills on his summary of the subject of open party caucuses in the Legislature here.

The topic of how party caucuses, long the sacrosanct, cigar-smoked, and roped-off venues of partisan strategy that are now, thanks to the Montana constitution, government transparency advocates, and favorable judicial decisions, open to the public, was one of several subjects addressed by Helena attorney Mike Meloy, once a Speaker of the House (“before typewriters were invented,” he exaggerated as he surmised the illegality of text-messaging by legislators during committee meetings) and now a specialist on open government law.

Helena District Court Judge Jeffrey Sherlock and Supreme Court Justice Jim Rice partnered on the subject of judicial review. A revealing aspect of their presentation occurred in the Q/A session that followed their speeches. Five legislators, all Republicans, asked questions relating to the limits of judicial authority and access to and abuse of the court systems. It was clear that their party is jazzed about the issue of judicial authority (think “activism”), and they didn’t miss the opportunity to create conversation about one of their peeves (see my earlier post).

In the afternoon, the Legislative Fiscal staff reminded the legislators that the sole measure mandated by the constitution to be passed by the Legislature is a budget bill, then followed with news that it had – for the second time in a month - decreased its 2009-2011 revenue estimates by another $135 million, with more downsizing possible during the course of the four-month legislative session.

On Wednesday morning, several committees held their kick-off meetings, most dedicated to introductions and review of protocol, but few bill hearings. The House Tax Committee has dedicated most of the time during its daily meetings this week to briefings from the Department of Revenue on state tax structure, the department’s mission and activities, and the gnarly subject of property reappraisal. Department Director Dan Bucks led off the presentation, once again demonstrating his skill at describing tax policy with passion and making compelling connections between fair and just tax policy and an adequately funded and publicly supported government.

For the first couple of days of the legislation, the atmosphere was light and acrimony-free. Veteran legislators exchanged backslaps and hugs, committee leaders gaveled with olive branches (heaven, we must believe, will be bipartisan), and many legislators demonstrated the social skills and wit that aided them, no doubt, in their electoral success.

Of many clever quips and good jokes, the best may have been one told by Supreme Court Justice Jim Rice: Explaining to his House-Senate audience that he had served in the House during the 1990s, he recounted knocking on innumerable doors during one campaign season. At one stop, upon the opening of the door, a pet ferret raced from the house and up Rice’s pant leg. In immediate pursuit was a five-year-old boy, saying, “He bites! He bites!”

“Needless to say,” closed Rice, “I didn’t let that squirrel get to the top of the tree.”