- Hello, and thank you for joining us.

My name is Lee Banville.

I'm from the University of Montana School of Journalism.

And with me tonight is Jacob Baynham, a fellow professor of mine, and the students in our Covering Campaigns Election Class.

We've gathered here to fact check some of the things that we heard in the one and only debate between Governor Greg Gianforte, the Republican running for reelection, and Ryan Busse, the Democrat former gun manufacturer, businessman, who has been mounting a challenge campaign against the governor.

Tonight, we sat down and, with the help of these students, sort of checked some of the things that were said in the debate to see how much they hold up and what are the facts underlying the key arguments of the case.

So I'll throw it over to Jacob, and let's dig into things.

- Yeah, thanks, Lee.

Property taxes was an issue that came up early and often in the debate.

Ryan Busse was accusing Greg Gianforte of raising our property taxes.

My question to you is, how much blame does Greg Gianforte deserve in the state of our property taxes?

- So yeah, anybody who lives here knows, if they've lived here a couple years, that property taxes have increased a lot.

And so the question that I know the Busse campaign is really focused on is to say that the governor should have done more to address what they say is a crisis in the affordability of living in Montana.

And while it's true that the amount of money being raised from property taxes has increased enormously, it's also important to understand that the underlying tax rates have not moved nearly as much as our bills would indicate, that the core thing driving a lot of property tax bill hikes comes down to the value of our homes, right?

We all know that the sort of cost of living in Montana or cost of buying a house in Montana has soared in recent years.

Especially during and in the years after the pandemic, we have seen a lot of people coming to the state, bringing sort of outta state, you know, incomes that are supporting remote jobs.

And that money has made it much easier for people to buy much more sort of pricey homes or drive up the price of real estate.

As those prices have increased, what's happened is... Up until 2015, essentially every six years, all of our homes went through a process called reappraisal where the government would come in and say, "Well, okay, your house and property is now worth X."

And they would base the taxes on x.

What's happened since 2015 is now that process happens every two years.

And so what we have seen is over the last several years, every two years, that tax bill has jumped as the reappraisal comes in and says, "Actually, your house is now worth, you know, "$50,000 more than it was when you first bought it."

Now, what Ryan Busse says is, Greg Gianforte could have done more to address this, because part of that bill is set by the state.

About 1.35% of our property tax rate comes from a state fund that funds a couple different things including the sort of equity within our school system.

And in the 2023 legislature, there was a proposal to drop that to 0.95% so that as home prices increased, your tax bill wouldn't increase quite as much.

That was rejected by the legislature, which Governor Gianforte had encouraged that they pass it and they didn't.

He then afterwards adopted, or sort of created, a working group to try and address this issue in 2024.

And they have several proposals that he mentioned tonight, like the Homestead Tax Credit, that might start to address this issue.

But the underlying challenge is always gonna be that this is a mix of home values and like access to affordable housing combined with local government needs like schools or, you know, local services on top of then a state process that also adds to that tax bill.

So it's gonna be really hard for anybody to really move the entire number, but Busse is correct that the governor was unable to get that reduction of 0.4% through the legislature last session.

So at least that part of it, you could probably blame on Governor Gianforte.

- Okay, so we'll take it from the indoors to the outdoors now.

Ryan Busse talked about hunting, and specifically accused Greg Gianforte of opening up the state to his rich buddies to get special tags to hunt elk.

He also mentioned other parts of the state that are experiencing harvest rates that are higher for non-residents than residents.

So what was he getting at there?

- Yeah, I think, you know, it's part of a bigger message that Montana's kind of being overrun by rich outta-staters and it's kind of ruining the place.

And that's been a central message of his campaign.

I mean, in all honesty, both Mr. Busse and Governor Gianforte were born elsewhere.

And so, you know, there are a lot of people who have moved to the state.

But that underlying question of non-resident versus resident hunters is a central one that he has focused on.

And it is true that in the 2023 legislature, there was this proposal put forward to kind of encourage the development... Well, really what it was, was to help sort of guiding industries that had suffered a lot during the pandemic by ensuring that if people had been rejected for out-of-state permits or were unable to use them during the pandemic, that they would get credit, right?

You would get extra points so that when you went up for your next tag, you would have more in the bank and a better chance of getting a permit.

That bill turned into a pretty partisan one where Republicans were largely supportive of it and Democrats were largely opposed.

But what's interesting is since then, actually both resident and non-resident permits have dropped for elk.

But we have seen a significant difference in the numbers.

We had about a 25% drop for resident elk permits and only about an 8% drop for out of state, or non-resident.

So what we see when we see this is it is true that the permitting process has been a little bit cooked to help the sort of guiding industry, which is a significant sort of recreational industry in the state.

But what is probably less true is that that is, you know, specifically because of just the policies of the government.

A little bit of it is actual requests for such elk permits.

Now, when it comes to the mule deer, Mr. Busse raised the idea of Region 6, which is along the Hi-Line, and he said that non-resident harvesting of mule deer had outpaced resident harvesting.

And it's true.

In 2023, 51% of the mule deer harvested in Region 6 were harvested by out-of-state permit holders and only 49% by in-state.

And it's also notable that actually in the previous decade leading up to that number, the number of non-resident permit tags for mule deer, or for all animals, all big game in Region 6 had increased 96%, almost doubled, as in-state permit requests had stayed about the same.

And so what it does say is, yeah, there is something there in the sense that out-of-state hunters are continuing to make Montana a destination which does fuel an industry, but also may make it feel like actually hunting is becoming something that's more a pastime of wealthy folks from not Montana more than it is folks from here.

- Hmm, interesting.

Another issue that came up was just related to public lands in general.

And Ryan Busse claimed that Gianforte has been cutting off access to public lands.

He mentioned an old case of Gianforte suing to block a river access.

And Gianforte countered that actually, he's been increasing access to public lands during his time in office.

So who's right here?

- Kind of both and kind of neither.

So what we see is...

So this story about Governor Gianforte, then just Greg Gianforte, suing to block access to a part of the Madison River has been around for a long time.

It was in his first run for governor.

It was in all his runs for Congress.

And basically, the story is this.

That in 2009, Mr. Gianforte was increasingly frustrated that the Fish Wildlife and Parks Department wasn't doing enough to prevent people from sort of traipsing across his land to get to this Madison River fishing access spot.

He had requested multiple times that they come out.

They hadn't.

And so he essentially filed a lawsuit.

Although he didn't really pursue it adamantly in court, he did file a suit to say like, "More needs to be done to address this question."

And that was in 2009.

In 2010, FWP does go out, sort of marks off the land.

And by 2013, the suit's been dropped never having actually gone to trial because the issue that Mr. Gianforte had raised, he said had been addressed.

And so this sort of argument that had he cut off access, I mean he had threatened to, but he was arguing that essentially the state needed to do more to protect his property rights as someone who was adjacent to that property.

And so, you know, who's right, who's wrong, you could spend a lot of time.

And I'm sure the candidates could spend even longer sort of debating it.

What Mr. Gianforte counters with is, he's like, "If you look at my policies as governor, "I have increased access.

"I'm not someone who's shutting off access."

And he points to, one of his things is in the Big Snowys where he says that he increased access by 100,000 acres.

And it is true that there is this 90,000 acre BLM land that was very hard to get to because of the private land that surrounded it.

And they did enter into an easement for about 5,600 acres.

He did a couple other small purchases within the state, which actually did make it much easier for people to access that 90,000 federally controlled acres of land.

And so, you know, you can kind of...

This is one of those cases where you can definitely look at it and find support for both of your positions if you think Governor Gianforte is in the right or Governor Gianforte is in the wrong.

- Mm-hmm.

All right, well, the final issue we're gonna address here relates to, it's tangential to abortion.

Both candidates were asked how they would vote on CI-128, the Abortion Initiative.

And Greg Gianforte was clear that he would vote no on that.

He said he is not just opposed to abortion, but he also wants to support children by tackling the foster care crisis in this state.

And he said the number of kids in foster care in Montana has dropped 45% since he came into office.

What has Gianforte done in this area?

And what's been the effect?

- Yeah, so it is true that, I mean, the foster care system was, you could argue was in crisis both before and in the time since Governor Gianforte took office, a lot of it driven by, you know, meth and other sort of substance addictions.

As the number of kids increased in the foster care program, Governor Gianforte implemented a couple of plans to try and bring those numbers down.

One was a $7,500 tax credit to support those who would adopt children within the foster care system.

And there's a separate one for kids not in the foster care system of about $5,000.

But the hope was that if you incentivize people to adopt kids in the foster system, you'll reduce the number of kids in that system and find them permanent homes.

And it is true that we've seen a significant drop in the first three years of the Gianforte administration of the number of kids in foster care.

How much of that is connected directly to this tax credit, it's almost impossible to figure out.

But we have seen, according to our numbers... We went through the Department of Public Health and Human Services for the State of Montana.

And in those three years, they reported essentially a 35% drop, which is a little less than Governor Gianforte's claim, but still a substantial drop.

More than a third of the number of kids in foster care, that number has reduced.

And so that has seemed to be successful.

But to give you a little bit of sense of the scale of the issue, we looked at the Casey Foundation, which is a foundation that really focuses on moving kids out of the foster care system and finding them permanent homes, advocating policies that do that.

And by the end of 2022, the 2023 data, essentially, which looks at the year previous, even though the numbers had started to move in a really good direction for Montana, we were still third per capita in the number of kids still in the system.

And so it's not to say that, you know, that number has probably continued to drop.

But it just gives you a sense of the scale of the challenge the state has when they're trying to address an issue like that.

So we could spend a lot of time talking about a lot more issues.

But, you know, probably no one wants that, the candidates nor the viewers.

So I'll just say to my colleagues from thank you for taking the time to kind of dig into these facts and give some folks the context of the facts to make their own decisions about, you know, how they're feeling about the claims and the counterclaims of these two candidates.

And we obviously encourage you to.

You can go back and review the debate at Montana PBS or at NonStop Local where the debate will air again on Sunday morning, and, you know, continue to pay attention to these issues as we get closer to election day on November 5th.

So thank you all for joining us, and good night.