Get an insider’s look into what’s happening in and around the halls of power with expert reporting, analysis and insight from the editors and reporters of Montana Free Press. Sign up to get the free Capitolized newsletter delivered to your inbox every Thursday.

---

January 25, 2024

Democratic gubernatorial candidate Ryan Busse held the first major press conference of his campaign this week, laying out some basic legislative priorities and directing astringent criticism at incumbent Republican Gov. Greg Gianforte.

Busse, a critic of the firearms industry in which he once worked as an executive, spent part of his roughly 40-minute remarks laying out his ambitions to retool the state’s property tax rates to help homeowners, streamline the state’s health department to help people at risk of losing their Medicaid eligibility through bureaucratic churn, and renew Montana’s expanded Medicaid program in 2025. 

“I pledge to you to do everything possible to make sure that our Medicaid expansion sticks,” he told a crowd of a few dozen in the state Capitol rotunda on Tuesday. “If we don’t, you can look forward to massive closures and restrictions on health care coverage, especially across rural Montana.” 

But Busse, a Kansas native who has lived in Kalispell since the 1990s, directed the majority of his speech toward Gianforte and the Republican legislative supermajority, accusing the state’s ruling political party of facilitating an upwards transfer of wealth that benefits corporate interests and well-heeled transplants over longtime working-class residents. 

“Gianforte just said a couple days ago, he said Montana’s easy to sell,” Busse said, referencing remarks Gianforte delivered earlier this month at a state Chamber of Commerce event framing recent corporate relocations as the result of lowered business taxes in Montana. “Everything to him, I guess, is a dollar sign.” 

What was most striking about Busse’s speech, though, was his deployment of the word “fascism,” a term that even the most strident public critics of the state’s conservative power structure have — with limited exceptions — avoided. 

“Greg Gianforte wants to replace our hard-fought and hard-won democracy in Montana with a dangerous brand of fascism and authoritarianism,” Busse said, referencing legislative efforts to restrict abortion, beef up obscenity laws and limit access to the ballot box. “He wants Montana to be a place where there are fewer freedoms, especially for women. He wants bureaucrats to have the power. He wants to invade your privacy. He wants to tell you what books you can and can’t read.” 

Busse repeatedly referred to what he called Gianforte’s “weird pseudo-morality,” “weird religious morality” and “strange addiction to ideology.” (Gianforte’s philanthropic family foundation has helped fund a variety of conservative religious projects in Montana, including the Montana Family Foundation and the Glendive Dinosaur and Fossil Museum, which hosts paleontological exhibits ostensibly supporting young-earth creationism). 

From his first campaign ad, which featured Busse and his kids shooting clay pigeons, the Democratic hopeful and political novice has repeatedly presented himself as tough-talking, rough-and-ready candidate who espouses progressive values while still fitting the established mold of a successful Montana Democrat — that is, white, masculine, gun-owning, charming yet occasionally vulgar — set by people like former Gov. Brian Schweitzer. 

Busse said he’s a candidate who can court Republican and independent voters who are disenchanted with the party’s Christian conservatism and the Legislature’s handling of housing affordability. He’ll have to if he intends to win office in a state that lent overwhelming support to Donald Trump in the past two presidential elections. 

On Wednesday, Busse fielded a question from a reporter attempting to unpack that dynamic: Can he win over conservatives while calling the state’s top Republican a practitioner of fascism? 

“I think that there are thousands, hundreds of thousands, of good, common-sense, well-meaning people in this state who call themselves Republicans,” Busse responded. “I meet them all the time. I don’t think they’re OK with this small sliver of Republican leadership that has become radicalized, that is speaking for them and giving the state a bad name.

“This idea that a single person, especially a governor, can be in a woman’s doctor’s office and tell her or her daughter or her mom or her aunt what they can and can’t do with their body, that’s fascist,” Busse continued. “Republican women may not say this every day at the dinner table, but their rights are just as important to them as to anyone else.” 

—Arren Kimbel-Sannit

---

Busse Talks Housing

Ryan Busse, the only Democrat currently mounting a challenge to Republican Gov. Greg Gianforte this election cycle, devoted much of his press conference this week to one of the state’s most pressing issues: housing affordability.

If elected, Busse said, he will push for a “housing for heroes” program that “coordinates with state agencies and municipalities” to “build, provide and even subsidize housing” for firefighters, police officers and other first responders who he said can’t afford to buy a home in their home community. Busse regularly hears stories, he said, of people driving 50 or more miles into Bozeman and other Montana cities for work because they can’t find housing in town.

“If we have to fund this by increasing taxes on out-of-state, second, third, fourth trophy homes, so be it,” Busse said 

(A report presented to a legislative interim committee Wednesday indicated that affordable housing projects funded through the Montana of Commerce in 2023 required an average public subsidy of about $153,000 per unit.) 

For his part, Gianforte has also sought to make housing a signature issue. He formed a housing task force in 2022 and threw his bully pulpit behind a bipartisan coalition of lawmakers and housing stakeholders that last year passed a number of laws intended to make it easier to build new homes. Many of those laws rein in local government zoning powers that some affordability advocates accuse of stifling the new development necessary to house Montana’s growing population.

While it’s too early to tell if those laws will successfully lower prices by boosting supply, the coalition’s legislative success has attracted national press attention as a so-called Montana Miracle. The new pro-construction housing laws have also drawn a court challenge from a Bozeman-based homeowners group, Montanans Against Irresponsible Densification, which argues that building higher-density housing will harm its members’ neighborhoods without easing the affordability crunch.

In response to a question about Gianforte’s pro-construction housing agenda Tuesday, Busse said encouraging high-density housing is “part of the answer, for sure.” But he also said Gianforte is too focused on market-oriented solutions that will help developers make money but may not aid struggling residents. Busse then pivoted to blaming the governor for allowing property taxes to increase.

“We have to have a state governor, and government, who cares about doing all the small things that make it easier on working people,” Busse said.

— Eric Dietrich

---

Brown Pushes Back on PSC Audit

Public Service Commission president (and state auditor hopeful) James Brown stood before the Legislative Audit Committee for the third time in as many years Wednesday to discuss a legislative audit of the financial and organizational performance of the PSC, which regulates monopoly utilities in Montana.

The mood at Wednesday’s meeting was markedly different from that of June 2021, when lawmakers, troubled by an audit that documented falsified records and wasted state resources, took a sharp tone toward the commission, which Brown had joined just six months prior. During the 2021 meeting, Brown acknowledged that the state’s utility board “clearly has work to do” and outlined what he and fellow commission newcomer Jennifer Fielder planned to do about it, including an organizational restructuring, implementation of internal controls, and shifting the “tone and tenor at the top.”

This go-around, Brown spent more time on offense. He issued an 11-page response to the January 2024 performance audit’s findings — a highly unusual move — and defended several items it had flagged for improvement.

One of the audit’s findings was that 14 staffers — nearly a third of the agency — left in 2021, a year that followed intense turmoil among commissioners and a handful of PSC staff. That turmoil, which involved allegations of illegal spying and the firing of a senior agency staffer who tried to report it, resulted in two lawsuits against the agency.  

Brown argued that the turnover was healthy, and represented the effects of new management and necessary housecleaning.

“Frankly, I don’t have any concern about that, because if you get new management and you look at the performance of people who were in the agency at that time — we wanted to turn over some folks, and we did,” he said.

One of the positions that’s seen considerable turnover is the PSC’s non-elected executive director, a job three people have held in the two and a half years since the position was created. Late last week, the PSC announced that David Sanders, who formerly worked for the U.S. House of Representatives and the U.S. Department of Transportation, is stepping into the position former Republican state lawmaker Brad Tschida vacated in September. 

Auditors also suggested that filling key positions in the agency with politically appointed exempt state employees discourages frank reporting of commissioner or management misconduct. Brown pushed back against that idea, arguing that the commission’s ability to appoint exempt staff — who aren’t subject to the same hiring and firing scrutiny as non-exempt staff — helps commissioners do the job voters expect them to do.

Legislative Audit Division Director Angus Maciver, who generally remained quiet throughout Wednesday’s hearing, weighed in on that debate in particular.

“We don’t have a misunderstanding with the Public Service Commission. We have a disagreement. We didn’t misunderstand how you see this — we just see it differently,” Maciver said. “We think those division-level equivalent positions should not be exempt, appointed positions. They should be permanent, classified positions.”

Brown also took up, glancingly, the issue of accountability for questionable commissioner conduct, arguing that commissioners are granted unique protections under the Constitution by virtue of their status as elected officials. In the report, auditors flagged instances where commissioners experienced “difficulty separating campaign and political activity from their official position,” including an apparent reference to a 2022 statement that commissioners Randy Pinocci and Tony O’Donnell sent on PSC letterhead championing coal-fired power and warning of imminent energy blackouts for Montana Dakota Utilities customers — a threat MDU disputed.

“It is way more difficult, for constitutional reasons, to enforce conduct against elected officials,” Brown said. “I have no power, under current Montana law, to somehow punish an elected official within my agency.”

He argued before Legislative Audit Committee members that adopting a “single code of ethics,” one of the audit report’s suggestions, would be inadequate, and noted that he and Fielder had spearheaded the adoption of 17 new PSC policies covering everything from budgeting and telework to delegation.  

The committee also dove into vacancy savings, pay plans and the commission’s legislatively established budget during its 1.5-hour exploration of the audit.

— Amanda Eggert

---

By the Numbers

Total combined recreational and medical marijuana sales from the opening of adult-use marijuana dispensaries in January 2022 to the end of 2023, according to the Montana Department of Revenue. Those sales have generated about $100 million in tax revenue. But the fate of that pot of gold is still somewhat up in the air. Last week, Lewis and Clark County District Court Judge Mike Menahan ruled that the Legislature must have an opportunity to override Gov. Greg Gianforte’s veto of Senate Bill 442, bipartisan legislation that would allocate marijuana tax revenues to conservation efforts, county infrastructure, veterans’ services and more. (Gianforte’s veto meant the tax revenue allocation scheme set up by the Legislature in the 2021 session remains law.) But Menahan has yet to sign an entry of judgment in the case, at which point the state could, in theory, file a motion to stay the judgment and appeal Menahan’s ruling. Either way, lawmakers have not yet gotten their chance to override Gianforte’s veto via mail poll, and so the future of SB 442 remains in limbo. 

— Arren Kimbel-Sannit

---

On Background

Gov. Gianforte announces run for second term: Gianforte formally announced his intent to run for re-election last week, as MTFP reported, touting job growth, tax cuts and a slate of conservative legislative accomplishments. 

Democrat Ryan Busse launches 2024 campaign for governor: MTFP’s initial story about Ryan Busse’s entry into the governor’s race has more on the former firearm executive’s background. 

Audit reports some progress at troubled state utility board: James Brown may be looking for a way out of the PSC, but that doesn’t mean he was fully on board with the Legislature’s most recent audit of the troubled utility board, despite the apparent progress recognized by auditors, as MTFP reported this week.

The post Busse flings the “F” word appeared first on Montana Free Press.