Viewpoint: Should Montana homeowners subsidize billionaires?
Beth Taylor-Wilson
Should Warren Buffett pay a lower property tax rate than cash-strapped Montana homeowners? The Montana Legislature is considering such a scheme, through HB 424 sponsored by Katie Zolnikov.
Buffett is worth $150 billion and is one of the richest men in the world, but he has a number of Montana connections. Among his many investments is a 20-year-old coal plant north of Hardin. The plant currently pays a property tax rate of 6%. Montana homeowners pay a 1.35% property tax rate. However, the legislature is considering lowering the tax rate for the plant from 6% to a measly 0.9% just because the plant sells power to a data center that operates a cryptocurrency enterprise behind the facility.
Amazon, Google, Meta and other corporate behemoths are racing to locate data centers across the country, including in Montana. These data centers require enormous amounts of energy to power hundreds of computers that complete complex processes to make the owners bundles of cash.
Data centers provide few jobs beyond what little they pay in initial construction costs. What they will do is put pressure on the energy system that could easily lead to power shortages and drive up the power bills of homeowners and small businesses, making life even more expensive for Montanans. Importantly, in an arid state like Montana, data centers can consume millions of gallons of water a year to cool the machines.
In 2017, lobbyists for cryptocurrency and data centers convinced the legislature to give these billionaires the lowest property tax rate in the state: 0.9%. In-state, hard-working Montanans pay more (1.35%), and most don’t operate high-paying businesses out of their homes. Now the industry wants to extend that tax break to a power plant that provides power to a data center.
While it’s a good idea to encourage energy-gobbling billionaire-owned companies to build clean new power to meet their data center energy demands and decrease their potential devastating impact on the energy system, it is plain wrong to give an old coal power plant a lower tax rate than our own industrious Montanans, especially when it hasn’t even asked for it. (That’s right – no lobbyists for the Hardin plant have publicly requested this tax decrease, yet legislators are handing it out.)
So I pose the question again: should hard-working Montanans subsidize tech billionaires even more than they already are?
That’s Montana’s policy, and now it is considering this huge tax break for one of the richest men in the world, when his lobbyist didn’t even testify at the hearing. Shouldn`t these corporate lobbyists publicly explain why Buffett, or any other billionaire, needs this giveaway?
Enough is enough. It’s time to make sure the Montanans aren’t subsidizing the Amazons, Googles, and Metas of this country, with a tax rate that hardworking Montanans would kill for. Let’s fix this giveaway. Call your legislators today and ask them to prevent the Warren Buffett giveaway in HB 424.
Beth Taylor-Wilson is a climate activist serving on the board of the Montana Environmental Information Center.