Empty chair ‘debate’ at state GOP event highlights property tax rift
Jordan Hansen
GREAT FALLS (Daily Montanan) — In a visual representation of a deep split among conservatives in Montana, four chairs were laid out on the stage at the Montana GOP kickoff event in Great Falls for a scheduled debate over property taxes.
Only two of those were filled, and with state GOP chair Art Wittich acting as moderator, Sen. Greg Hertz, representing Polson, and Rep. Terry Falk, representing part of Kalispell, outlined many of the things they feel are wrong with the property tax package passed last session.
Two chairs were empty, with Wittich saying he’d asked a number of supporters of the legislation to come and defend it. The question, he said, was whether the property tax changes were good Republican policy.
“This property tax bill that passed the session has been highly debated,” Wittich said during the Feb. 7 event. “I don’t think it was debated in the session as much as it’s been debated after the session.”
Wittich said he invited all nine of the Montana senators who backed Senate Bill 542 and are essentially persona non grata with the state Republican party. Some Republican House representatives were also invited, including Llew Jones, Courtenay Sprunger, David Bedey, John Fitzpatrick and a number of other Republicans who voted for SB 542.
SB 542 has three parts — a $90 million tax rebate, a permanent restructuring of property tax rates, and, last, a fix to the so-called “Billings problem.” That fix essentially opened the ability for the state to, “reimburse each taxing entity as provided in this section for the revenue loss resulting from the tax rate reductions,” the bill says.
Montana legislators were under pressure during the 2025 Legislative session to pass some sort of property tax relief, and SB 542 became controversial because of how it went through the system and what rate changes it made to different property tax classes.
Now, with an election cycle looming and the 2027 Legislative session less than a year away, a pending lawsuit challenges whether the bill was Constitutional, with Hertz as one of the plaintiffs.
That lawsuit essentially said the bill was misleading and pointed to how quickly the language inside it shifted as the 2025 session wound down.
“You don’t even know what was in your damn bill that you voted for, and that’s the problem,” Hertz said, recalling a conversation with a legislator while responding to a question posed by an audience member. “You shoved the bill down people’s throats in two days who wanted to go home.”
‘You’re not welcome here’
Jones said on Wednesday that he didn’t think it would be a fair debate, and they were asked to pay to come.
Wittich did say during the event they would have hired a third-party moderator if proponents of the bill had come to Great Falls.
“They just booted nine folks out and effectively said, ‘You’re not welcome here,’” Jones said in an interview Wednesday. “And now they wanted us to pay for the right to sit on the stage and talk about a topic where we know the only sound bites they would release would be favorable to them.”
Jones added that the state GOP has been largely “censoring” rural Republicans.
“So as long as we are deciding that if you’re a rural Republican and you don’t kiss an urban party boss’s ring, you’re not a Republican, then I’m not going to pay to come to your house,” Jones said.
Sen. Josh Kassmier, representing Fort Benton and one of the nine senators ousted by the state GOP, said that if they have a better plan, they should present it. Wittich read or paraphrased responses sent back to him by legislators regarding coming to the debate, including Kassmier.
“He suggested that if the party is going to be attacking his property tax bill, that there be a special session to fix it,” Wittich said at the Kickoff event. “And I found that interesting, because special sessions are very expensive.”
Kassmier reiterated his thoughts on that this week. SB 542 was originally a bill from Sen. Wylie Galt to keep property values at their 2024 assessed rate for 2025 and 2026. It was amended in committees and the final version was pushed through by most Democrats, and some Republicans, including Kassmier.
“If you have a plan, show us, and we’ll happily debate it in a special session,” Kassmier said in an interview with the Daily Montanan. “If you have a better fix, show us your plan.”
Toward the end of the empty chair debate, Falk and Hertz were asked how they would fix SB 542, saying it was harming business owners and costing the state more in goods and services, pointing to electrical costs as an example.
Hertz said he’d change how the homestead exemption works slightly, basing it on a dollar amount, go back to a single rate for all properties in a taxation class, and bring in another revenue source, possibly from the general fund.
Sunsetting Tax Increment Funding mechanisms was also discussed, and Hertz also mentioned that Republican Gov. Greg Gianforte wanted a flat tax rate, something he said he was supportive of.
There are also mutterings about sales tax, something Kendall Cotton, the CEO of the Frontier Institute, a conservative think tank, wrote about this week. Hertz said any attempt at a sales tax would likely come through a voter referendum.
“I know there’s people out there talking about sales tax,” Hertz said during the empty chair debate. “But if we’re going to have sales tax, we need to put in the Constitution that a percentage of it, like 80 or 90 percent of it, is used to reduce property taxes.”
‘Someone else in your tax jurisdiction’
Much of the discussion at the Feb. 7 event dealt with the shift in tax burden from one class of property tax payers to another.
The legislation that Jones and others ran was supported by Gianforte, who made mention many times of the homestead exemption, which is supposed to shift some of the tax burden to out-of-state second home owners. That goes into effect this year.
Some resident Montanans will also be subject to that rate and there is no carve out for cabins, which is part of the lawsuit Hertz is a plaintiff in.
According to the Governor’s Office, the legislation cut property taxes for 80% of Montana homeowners. The average savings among homeowners who saw a tax cut was about $500, the office has said.
“If your taxes went down $500, somebody else’s taxes in your school district, your city, your county, went up $500 because this is just a shift,” Hertz said in the debate. “It’s not somebody up in the Yellowstone Club or somebody up in Flathead Lake or Whitefish Lake … it is someone else in your tax jurisdiction, and most likely it’s another Montana full-time resident like myself. It’s a Main Street business owner.”
Jones said that commercial property values — and therefore their taxes — did not see quite as fast of a rise as residential values during the last few years.
Prior to the changes stemming from SB 542, residential property taxpayers held about 59% of the property tax burden, a stark comparison to residential property owners shouldering 38% of the burden in 1994.
“We tried to balance this the best we could, while recognizing that we had to push some taxes back off of the residential because so much has shifted on to them,” Jones said.
There’s also huge differences around the state in how much property values have skyrocketed, and with vastly different situations in the eastern and western halves of the state. And even inside those two regions, there’s different political winds, voter priorities and economic factors impacting taxation.
“We are taking what is not a statewide problem and trying to apply a statewide solution,” Falk said during the event.
Local government spending was also brought up as an issue during the “empty chair debate.” The debate zeroed in on Senate Bill 117, which was passed by the Legislature also in 2025. SB 117 sought to limit local government spending. Helena’s large school levy and Missoula’s “amenities” were pointed to as examples of this by Hertz and Falk.
“Maybe they don’t want these nice, manicured parks. Maybe they want law enforcement or their roads fixed. That’s a voter’s choice,” Hertz said. “We get a little upset with some of the local government officials trying to be everything in their community. The taxpayers don’t know what they need.”
Energy companies still have a major impact both politically and economically in the state, and taxes on those were discussed as well.
That said, massive changes in what drives Montana’s economy are one of few places where both those for and against the property tax legislation last year are in agreement.
“We do not have a natural resource economy,” Falk said. “We have a tourism economy. We’re trying to respond and react to that, but we need to find ways to improve the revenue as well as a responsible budget.”
As resource extraction in the state has contracted since the mid-20th Century, the economy shifted more heavily toward tourism and the state’s full-time population has grown as well.
“We were selling oil wells and gold mines,” Jones said. “We’re still selling the land. It’s kind of like a scenery mine, right? Scenery is what we’re selling. It’s still a resource economy. We’re selling hiking and scenery and beautiful places you build your homes.”