In 2023, an avalanche of out-of-state money drove home values through the roof. When the dust settled, roughly $270 million in property-tax burden had shifted onto regular Montana homeowners. A three-bedroom house in Billings was suddenly carrying a heavier relative load than the $30 million mansions in the Yellowstone Club.
The seasonal jet-setting owners of these mansions take full advantage of our plowed roads, search and rescue operations, fire services, and hospitals while avoiding the Montana income taxes that pay for them. At the same time, huge corporations with out-of-state headquarters like BNSF, NorthWestern Energy, and the Billings’ refineries saw their property taxes drop by millions.
The 2025 Legislature fixed it. More than 375,000 Montana households—nearly 90 percent of primary residences – saw their 2025 tax bills stay flat or drop. Lawmakers simply moved part of the load back onto the giant out-of-state refineries, the utility monopoly, the railroad conglomerate, and the luxury second-home owners. That is textbook conservative governance: protect working families, make everyone pay their fair share, and keep Montana the only debt-free state in America.
The backlash was immediate, ferocious, and perfectly coordinated by the Montana Freedom Caucus and its allies – the Virginia-based, Koch-linked Americans for Prosperity and the “we don’t disclose our donors” Frontier Institute. Their targets aren’t liberals. It’s the Republican legislators who had the nerve to think independently and put Montanans ahead of out-of-state billionaires and corporate boardrooms.
Leading the charge is the Freedom Caucus’ hand-picked enforcer: Montana Republican Party Chairman Art “Florida Man” Wittich. More than a decade ago, back in 2012, Wittich wrote in an email that was later leaked and published statewide: “We must help the purge along … Hopefully, a new phoenix will rise from the ashes.” That wasn’t a joke. It was a mission statement. Shortly after, he became the face of a bare-knuckle effort to cleanse the party of Republicans who wouldn’t toe the most extreme line.
Then came the consequences. Wittich was found liable for illegally coordinating with corporate-funded groups and paid what was, at the time, the largest dark-money coordination fine ever levied against a sitting Montana politician – $68,232. A fine that was unanimously upheld by the Montana Supreme Court. For most people, that would be the end of the story. For the Freedom Caucus, violating Montana’s campaign laws was a resume builder.
Twelve years later, the phoenix has risen. Fresh off that dark-money judgment and now reportedly spending much of his time in Florida, Art Wittich has been recruited back, handed the party gavel, and put in charge of finishing the purge he promised in 2012. He personally runs a secret “Conservative Governance Committee” – no minutes, no membership list – whose entire purpose is to threaten, punish, and, if necessary, primary any Republican legislator who won’t vote the way the big donors and party bosses demand. Ask around Helena how much time Chairman Wittich actually spends in Montana and you’ll get mostly eye-rolls and shrugs. Yet he now decides who is a “real” Republican.
The billionaire donors and corporate boardrooms behind this project are furious for three very specific reasons. First, their sweetheart property-tax windfall disappeared when the Legislature made them pay closer to their fair share. When you’ve been the recipient of an enormous tax discount for years, basic fairness suddenly feels like persecution. Second, legislators invested surplus dollars in bridges, dams, levees, and rural water systems instead of mailing giant rebates to out-of-state ZIP codes. Rather than blow the surplus on one-time sugar highs and kick the can to our kids, the 2025 legislature did the responsible things that keep small towns alive. Third, those same legislators blocked the Freedom Caucus push to turn Montana Supreme Court races into partisan auctions where billionaire money could buy gavels the same way it currently buys attack ads and seats in our elected bodies.
That’s why AFP is flooding your mailbox with “budget on fire” lies trying to convince you that investing in infrastructure is reckless. That’s why the Frontier Institute, a mouthpiece for billionaire oligarchs with no donor transparency, keeps insisting your tax cut never happened and that shifting the burden back onto corporate monopolies and luxury second homes is somehow dangerous “social engineering.”
This isn’t left versus right. This is Montana versus wealthy out-of-state interests. Real Montana conservatives believe families in places like Havre, Billings, Libby, and Miles City should not be forced to subsidize part-time billionaires who use our services but never pay our income tax. We believe judges should apply the law, not run as partisan politicians whose courtrooms are campaign events. We believe a homeowner who lives here twelve months a year deserves at least as much respect as a jet owner who drops in for twelve days.
Montana is under siege – not by liberals, but by the Freedom Caucus and its dark-money allies, using Republican Party machinery to price regular families out of their own state. Back in 2012, Art Wittich wrote, “We must help the purge along … Hopefully, a new phoenix will rise from the ashes.” The phoenix has risen, all right – but it is acting a lot more like a buzzard positioning itself to feed on the carcass of Montana’s homeowners.
Do you stand with the people who live here year-round – or with the buzzard the Freedom Caucus is trying to drag from the ashes and convince us is a phoenix?
Ross Fitgerald is a retired legislator and current chair of the Teton County Republicans.