A Montana Sales Tax? More Worker Housing, Daycare?

July 14, 2023

A Montana Sales Tax? More Worker Housing, Daycare?

In between the May 2 conclusion of the 2023 session of the Montana Legislature and the opening of a new session in 2025, interim committees will be at work gathering the latest information on a variety of topics and taking testimony from the public to help shape and inform the work of next session’s lawmakers. “During each legislative session, legislators identify issues they want to study in more depth,” according to the Interim Committees section of the Legislature’s website. “They appoint interim committees to conduct these and other studies during the interim between sessions. The House and Senate leadership decides on who will be on the interim committees for the interim. Therefore, the members of the interim committees serve one 20-month term. The committees often invite experts to present information to them. Members of the public also get a chance to have their say. Legislators use what they learn from the interim studies to make well-informed decisions about what bills to consider during the next session.” Through it all, NFIB Montana will be closely monitoring the work of the committees for any ideas they come up with, either helpful or harmful to small business. Each of the 14 interim committees (The Budget Committee has six subcommittees) has a ‘Studies/Topics’ tab that gives some indication of what they are looking at. In addition to the Budget Committee, the Economic Affairs Committee, which kicked off its hearing schedule, July 11, and the Revenue Committee, which started business July 13, are of particular interest to NFIB. NFIB Montana State Director Ronda Wiggers filed these notes on the proceedings:

“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.

Check your NFIB Montana webpage for future updates on the work of the interim committees and be sure and check your email for any Action Alerts NFIB sends calling on you to make your voice heard with the committees.