• “Economic Affairs Interim Committee met on Monday. This initial meeting was focused on choosing committee leadership and procedure, learning about the departments that they will oversee and choosing areas of study for the interim. Among other areas of study, the committee chose to look into the statewide shortage of daycares and workforce housing. Their intent is to identify possible legislative changes that could encourage more people to join the labor force by making daycare more accessible and housing affordable for workers.”

• “Revenue Interim Committee did not finalize its work plan at this meeting. However, it directed staff to draw up plans to spend time studying ‘modernization of Montana’s tax code.’ Under this title they intend to look at possible ways to lessen the burden of property taxes, both limiting future increases to taxpayers and lessening the local governments’ reliance on property taxes. They added a discussion on creating new classes of property to limit owner occupied, residential property taxes. This holds the potential of drastically shifting the tax burden to small business property and NFIB will be monitoring this study during the interim.

— “They also discussed other options for backfilling property tax relief and added a study of potential legislation to implement a sales tax in Montana. Although one proposal was to focus on local option taxes, this was abandoned in favor of studying a statewide sales tax.

— “During the Revenue Committee meeting, the Department of Revenue presented current revenue collections in comparison to last year. Employee withholding tax collection is up 8.2% over this time in 2022. However, estimated tax payments are down 9.3% from last year.