The upstairs loft of the Barn in Seeley Lake became an intricate Montana State civics lesson on Monday, June 12 when the Seeley Lake Community Council discussesd tax revenue and grassroots movements.
Missoula County Commisioner Josh Slotnik presented a few explanations of Montana tax systems and talked about what he considers new perspectives on their uses.
“Not so much because people are mad about property taxes or unhappy about them,” Slotnik said. “But because of the language of property taxes. It is very much its own animal.”
Slotnik discussed the allocation of property taxes into public utilities and the different taxes applied to new homes vs existing homes and how that is split between different mills. Slotnik said because of inflation and the way Montana tax mills are set up, if the community does not continue to grow and build new structures to be taxed, then annual taxes will not cover the same budget year after year, Slotnik said.
“We’re in a grow-or-die situation just to meet our budget,” Slotnik said. “And yet new growth actually cost the existing homeowners money. It’s a crazy system.”
Slotnik suggested that taxes could be raised from the seasonal tourist industries to alleviate the growth that is affecting homeowners.
Missoula County reportedly is visited by roughly 3.5 million tourists per year. Each person stays between three and five days on average. Slotnik says the tourist population is causing a much bigger strain on infrastructure than the 120,000 permanent residents.
“That means we have to have more sheriff’s deputies on staff and we have to buy tires for their trucks,” Slotnik said. “We have to make sure the roads are upgraded when those folks are here, and they’re interacting with some pretty smart, friendly people who are products of our public school system that we all pay for.”
The idea of local option taxes, or resort taxes, was raised and discussed in some detail. The council mentioned that those options hadn’t been in public favor in the past because of the cost to local residents and tourists. Slotnik said that taxes can be applied to only certain goods and have seasonal provisions attached to them to prevent the cost from being on local residents.
The Council suggested that some parts of the tax structure may have changed since it was last considered in the area, and suggested holding another meeting and public forum to discuss the possibility of seeking local option taxes in the future.
The civics lesson continued with Hatton Littman, of SURF ATL, a consulting firm that will be crafting a question for upcoming Missoula County elections asking voters if they wish to utilize a state constitution stipulation about evaluating local governments and possibly making changes.
Littman explained that her current role is only to visit communities and get feedback to create the ballot question about conducting the survey. Only after the question has been posited and voted on will any kind of study be conducted.
Although the option to conduct this survey is included in the Montana State Constitution as it was rewritten in 1973, Missoula County has only chosen to conduct the survey once and then didn’t choose to enact any of the suggested changes.
Littman thinks this may be more attributable to the language used to describe the cost of the study than to the actual attitude of voters, so her rounds of community meetings are aimed to design the most concise format for the question.
The question of tourism’s effect on towns and residents stayed on the soap box for the meeting’s third presenter, Jenna Boltz of Glacier Country Stewardship Plan, which is a consulting and advocacy group that works to better relationships between Montana communities and the tourism industries.
Boltz explained that she helps small businesses and other entities find grants for stewardship programs and helps with consulting and marketing. She said she understands the problems facing communities and has seen some of the negative costs of the tourism boom, but is very hopeful about bridging the gap and making tourism industries more beneficial to the communities.
Owners who want to learn more about stewardship and the Glacier Country plan can visit partners.glaciermt.com
The newly formed Protect the Clearwater organization gave updates on the Elbow Lake gravel pit, which has passed all application processes and currently has authority to begin digging. Residents of Elbow Lake have formed this new organization to galvanize resources in a fashion similar to the way Save Holland Lake has in the Condon area.
Protect the Clearwater is currently seeking to overturn the application decision by arguing that the DNRC did not adequately investigate the proximity the gravel pit would be to year-round residents and the possibility that the application may not have been for the correct type of project given the distance between the gravel pit and the Clearwater River.
Seeley Lake District Ranger Quinn Carver then presented on upcoming changes to the Seeley Lake area Forest Service campgrounds, most of which will see updates and repairs this coming year. He said almost all of them will make a full switch to the online reservation system by Oct. 1.
“That we get full value every time,” Carver said. “A lot of times people put like two bucks or a buck-fifty.”
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