A nurse or construction worker needing a little help purchasing a small home in resort-destination Flathead might as well look to buy in another place, that’s the message from those running the county.
Flathead thumbed its nose at $4.5 million in state economic assistance and rejected another $4.5 million in private money intended to help working people purchase a home in one of the fastest growing and most expensive counties in Montana, so politicians could “stand on principle.”
$9 million worth of wicked ideology poked a finger directly into the working person’s eye. It doesn’t matter if you’re a firefighter, police officer, teacher, home builder, or laborer at the local pizza shop, the county won’t help you accept state or federal dollars to assist buying a home anywhere near the place you work.
No one actually knows what “stand on principle” means to Flathead as the county previously accepted over $20 million of federal financial aid and partially used the cash for a regional treatment and biosolids plant that faces continued opposition by local landowners.
For the county “stand on principle” with federal or state dollars means that septic money is good but housing money is bad. It makes no sense. Not intended to make sense, I remind myself. Stop using reason to explain ideology, as if I might remember one day.
Before warped principles told the county to reject $9 million for Flathead housing, our leaders were busy bashing the homeless in the editorial section of local newspapers and sponsored book banners at the public library.
Still, there’s good services for lucky McMansion part-timers and money-rich tourists flocking to the state. All that never-ending growth that’s bolstered the county tax base over the past decades has done little to nothing to bring down the cost of valleywide housing and property taxes just keep increasing. Everyone knows that each job needs housing.
More growth, more tourists, and more unaffordable houses are planned for the state. “I’ll meet you in Bozeman, Montana!” hollered Alexandra at the season 1 finale of “1923” as a shackled Spencer Dutton is forced ashore from the ocean liner. The people are coming. Good God, why wouldn’t you live here if you could afford anywhere America.
Those housing dollars provided by the 2023 Legislature, a supermajority of staunchly ultra-conservative citizen lawmakers, will now go to another Montana county to build housing for workers. For the Flathead, the supermajority wasn’t conservative enough, an assertion that should make you gasp, beg for mercy as we await what 2025 has in store.
The 2025 Legislature is now in Helena, traveled on hundreds of miles of snow-covered roads from across the big state. By now lawmakers have gotten a taste of the catered events hosted by capitol lobbyist as the first weeks of politics are filled with celebration, hand wrangling, and backslapping. There’s a measurable uptick in economic activity at the pubs and eateries of Helena as establishments eagerly await the revenue that 150 citizen lawmakers usher into town during their four-month work stint.
Montana should repeal the sunset that previous lawmakers put onto Medicaid and allow tens of thousands of locals to keep their healthcare. Thousands of Flathead kids are insured by Medicaid. Allowing Medicaid to expire in Montana hurts kids, veterans, seniors, workers, and local business owners. State lawmakers serve themselves with two years of free health insurance for their 90 days of work, a threshold any worker would find generous.
State healthcare advocates recently said that keeping Medicaid alive in Montana retains up to 8,000 jobs statewide, a half-billion dollars of taxable wages, and another three quarters of a billion dollars in Montana economic activity. Healthcare is important and sure affects a lot of people in the Flathead.
Lawmakers should give back the $500 million in overtax that Montana suddenly extracts from homeowners and small business owners via state property tax revaluations. The governor’s budget contains $200 million in surplus revenues from the 2023 state reappraisal of property, $300 million in ongoing state property tax increases for homes and small businesses due to built-in effect of the 2023 and now 2025 reappraisals, and $27 million in homestead exemptions masked as property tax relief for select homes.
I get it. Montana leaders want to give upper wage earners another income tax cut, but funding it with an ongoing state property tax increase and targeting middle class homes and small business owners with such massive bills is just plain wrongheaded.
There are big issues facing citizens living in the Flathead. Immense challenges from childcare to public school funding to the housing crisis plaguing working Montanans. Who knows who the dreadfully ineffective politicians we pay with our tax dollars listens to on these cold winter days, but it doesn’t sound like its many regular folks.
Any reasonable look at the continued expenses facing working locals in the Flathead paint a worrisome picture of how well everything is going for the locals who live, work and raise families in the valley. Not that Flathead listens.