Prior to my Bozeman friends’ hiking the Swan Range this past weekend we agreed to meet for coffee at the Hungry Bear Bar and Grill in Condon.
Awaiting their arrival, I struck up a conversation with the morning’s first customer at the tavern, as luck would have it, Swan Valley Community Council member Ted Morgan.
By the time my cohorts walked through the front door, Ted and I were immersed in an interview justifying the Seeley-Swan corridor’s proposed secession from Missoula County.
As for Ted’s role in this singular effort?
“Well, I was originally the formal leader, but we have a group of about ten dedicated citizens, from Potomac to Seeley [Lake] to Condon, that are working on this,” he states. “We just released our feasibility report that shows exactly our taxable value, mill rating, all the things that people want to know.
“Some of the more interesting things in the report revolve around existing infrastructure inside the area we’re shading out [to secede], which is already filled with multiple fire departments and school districts that are independent—elementary to middle, and we have a regional high school.
“And we have local government buildings throughout our community and council halls,” the councilman continues, “things like that that could be easily switched over to run a more rural, fiscally responsible county.”
Missoula County, as Ted explains it, collects 259 mills from its 125,000 or so residents (one mill equals $1 of tax for every $1,000 of assessed property value).
“At our [proposed] taxable value,” he estimates, a newly formed county “would only have to take in, if we want to be lean, 110 mills. And if we want a little extra coverage, things that could be upstart costs, such as transforming county buildings, we could run a 170-mill levy model where we’re actually still lowering property taxes for residents: between 30 and 60 percent between those two models.”
According to the feasibility study, “rural” property owners outside Missoula city limits are forking over hard-earned dollars “to support extensive urban bureaucracy, transit, shared departments with the city of Missoula, and multi-tier regional services.”
Thus the renewed interest to undock from the mother ship.
“Oh man, this has been waiting for a long time,” Ted says, recalling a previous Seeley-Swan secession effort a dozen or so years ago led by some local log-home builders who “unfortunately didn’t go to the legislature for help.
“They pretty much ended it,” he says, “because they saw the current law where if you want to secede from a county—whether you’re joining a new county or you’re creating your own—the whole county you’re leaving gets to vote.
“So that means urban voters in the city of Missoula would essentially be allowed to veto our vote to create our own new county or join another one.”
So in this latest call for civic independence, Ted and his fellow community members are soliciting support from the state capitol.
“We’re working with Senator [Forrest] Mandeville, Senator [Becky] Beard, as well as a House [candidate] who will win her election, Trish Schreiber,” he reveals of the three Republicans.
And what from a legislative standpoint would have to be accomplished in Helena to emancipate from Zootown?
“Overall, it’s pretty much changing two sentences in current law,” Ted educates. “Which would give the voting power to the [population] base that is leaving, rather than the whole county.”
I ask him if the devastating closure in 2024 of the Pyramid Mountain Lumber sawmill, Seeley Lake’s largest employer for 75 years and impacting some 100 employees, helped to bolster the secession movement.
“I think that it is helping drive it,” Ted replies. “I think obviously we could potentially put people to work through full-time [government] employment in a new county. Even though we’re lowering property taxes, we will need full-time employees: we’re scoping between 25 and 35 full-time employees.
“But the mill effect, it resonates not only in these communities, but all of Western Montana,” he stresses. “And I think that a rural-driven county could go and recruit [myriad] businesses and potentially … bring economic empowerment to our rural areas.”
By separating from Missoula County’s “urban tax structure” and operating under a targeted “lean governance model,” the feasibility report predicts that a smaller, more community-focused government could “dramatically lower the county-level property tax burden for local residents while maintaining full, above-efficient service levels.”
“And include our PILT money,” Ted adds, referring to regular Interior Department payments in lieu of taxes that would be “a huge asset to us as a rural county because of the [tremendous] amount of federal forest lands that we have.”
As for a ballpark population figure for the proposed county, which would obviously need a name?
“We’re in between 4,000 and 4,500 [year-round residents], so about 4,300,” Ted guesses. “And it would be up to the voters themselves to pick the name at this point. Right now in our feasibility report we’re ‘Seeley-Swan County,’ but I’ve heard names such as ‘Wilderness County,’ ‘Freedom County,’ a bunch of different names. So it’ll be up to the voters, which it should be.”
The breakaway county, the report states, would encompass approximately 6,435 private parcels and stretch from the Highway 200 corridor of Potomac, Greenough and Clearwater; north along the Highway 83 corridor of Seeley Lake and Condon; and have among its anchors the Blackfoot River corridor to the south and pine forests up north.
If you ask me, Ted and company can make a good argument for secession through Missoula County’s history alone.
As the feasibility study points out, the “proposed formation of Seeley-Swan County is not an anomaly, but rather the continuation of a well-established legislative pattern in Montana governance.”
Described historically as the “Mother of Counties,” consider that Missoula County was originally organized by the Washington Territorial Legislature in 1860, then re-established by Montana’s territorial organization in 1864-65—at its peak spanning an enormous swath of Western Montana.
But Missoula County would go on the chopping block, giving rise to Deer Lodge, Ravalli, Sanders and Mineral counties, among others.
In fact, in 1893 the entire northern half of Missoula County was carved off to create our own Flathead County (and later Lincoln County to the west).
As for its most recent boundary adjustment, that came in 1923 when Lake County was formed from portions of both Missoula and Flathead counties.
John McCaslin is a longtime journalist and author who lives in Bigfork.