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Today, on March 3, marks the transmittal day for the 2023 session of the Montana Legislature. This deadline signifies the moment when most non-budget bills are discarded if they have not achieved final approval in at least one legislative chamber.
Without fail, the deadline prompted a surge of activity at the Capitol. According to my calculations, legislators scrutinized a combined total of 478 bills in committees during the week that concluded on Tuesday. Subsequently, they deliberated on a total of 319 bills on the House and Senate floors on Wednesday and Thursday.
After tirelessly keeping up with everything here at the Montana Free Press newsroom, we’re all feeling a bit tired. Instead of writing a lengthy and serious piece at the beginning of this week’s Lowdown, I figured I’d simply share a few other interesting transmittal break stats.
1,413
In contrast to the 1,313 proposals considered by lawmakers in 2021, the current count of bills introduced in the 2023 session is yet to be determined.
3,811
Number of votes taken on those bills by lawmakers, as counted by MTFP’s 2023 Capitol Tracker system.
802
As of Friday, the number of bills that had been cleared by either the House or Senate was 61% out of the total 1,413 bills. It is important to note that budget bills, constitutional amendments, and ballot measures have later transmittal deadlines, so it is expected that more bills will pass in the upcoming weeks.
7
Number of those bills that would put amendments to the Montana Constitution up for a vote on next year’s ballot. None of those amendment proposals, which face an early April transmittal deadline, have advanced out of their initial committees.
99
The MTFP newsroom has published web articles regarding the legislative session up until now.
Additionally, it is customary for lawmakers to take a short break following the transmittal period. Therefore, we anticipate that the news flow from our newsroom in the first half of next week will be considerably reduced, offering a more gradual stream of updates.
—Eric Dietrich, Deputy Editor
By the Numbers
Number of comments received in opposition to Senate Bill 497, a proposal by Senate Majority Leader Steve Fitzpatrick, R-Great Falls, seeking to change legal claims to prescriptive easements, which are commonly used by recreationists to access waterways and public land bordered by private land.
SB 497 swiftly made its way through the legislative process, being reviewed and approved by the Senate Judiciary Committee on Tuesday and scheduled for a second reading vote in front of the Senate by Wednesday evening. Lawmakers from both political parties carefully examined the content and procedures of the bill.
“There aren’t many things more dear to Montanans than being able to access their streams and rivers the way we’ve been able to do all of our lives, and the last thing we want to do is have a hearing yesterday or last night that most sportsmen and women had no idea was going on and then vote the next day to in any way jeopardize those rights,” Sen. Pat Flowers, D-Belgrade, said.
Sen. Jeff Welborn, R-Dillon, counseled Fitzpatrick against opening such a “sensitive piece of code” without bringing stakeholders along.
“If your phone has been blowing up today like mine has, I think that bell has been rung,” Welborn said.The Senate ultimately voted the bill down 14-36. As of a Wednesday morning bill messaging report prepared by Legislative Services, the bill had generated just 16 comments in favor compared to 220 in opposition.
—Amanda Eggert, Reporter
Happenings ️
Montana’s Office of Public Instruction is hitting the road once again this month as state Superintendent Elsie Arntzen launches a second series of community visits to K-12 school districts. For those who missed it, Arntzen traveled to four communities last December — Kalispell, Stevensville, Billings and Great Falls — to hear from school officials, teachers, students and concerned parents about the challenges they’re facing. The responses ran the gamut, from educator salaries not keeping up with the rising cost of living to misunderstandings about who has primary oversight of curricular and budgetary issues in public schools. Arntzen eventually parlayed those info-gathering sessions into a “celebration” of parental rights in the Capitol Rotunda on the first day of the 2023 Legislature.
Announcing part two of OPI’s community roadshow, Arntzen expressed that these listening sessions provide a platform to discuss legislation that will have an impact on our Montana schools and students. She eagerly anticipates joining Montana parents, school leaders, and legislators in prioritizing the needs of our Montana students.
Here’s a rundown of where Arntzen will be engaging with educators and community members this month:
March 6: 1-2 p.m. at Miles Community College, community room 106, in Miles City.
March 6: 4:30-5:30 p.m. in the Sidney Middle School gymnasium in Sidney.
March 7: Noon-1 p.m. in Montana State University Northern’s Student Union Ballroom in Havre.
March 7: 4:30-5:30 p.m. in the Lewistown Junior High School gymnasium in Lewistown.
March 8: Noon-1 p.m. in the Copper Lounge of Montana Tech’s student union building in Butte.
—Alex Sakariassen, Reporter
Viewshed
The Bonner mill, just upstream of Missoula on the Blackfoot River, began producing lumber and beams to support Montana’s mining tunnels in 1886, and grew into the largest lumber mill between the West Coast and Wisconsin during its heyday. When it closed for good in 2012, Missoula photographer Chris Chapman got invited to tour the grounds during its demolition. Two weeks of shooting produced a portfolio of large-format photographs documenting an industrial landscape in dramatic transition. (Much of the former mill site is now occupied by the KettleHouse Amphitheater, where the likes of Death Cab for Cutie and Les Claypool will perform this summer.) A selection of six Chapman photographs under the title “Bonner Mill: The Last Photographs” opens March 3 at the ZACC in Missoula, and remains on display through the end of April.
—Brad Tyer, Editor
Off Limits
Nonprofit criminal justice news outlet The Marshall Project has published a list of books banned in state prisons, and the Montana bibliography makes for a good read, and an occasional giggle. Among the 374 books on Montana’s banned list is a small library of self-evidently objectionable material for prisoners (“How to Disappear and Never Be Found,” by Barry Davies, for example) and a raft of titles that run afoul of policy prohibitions on nudity (“The Monster Book of Manga Girls”), security threats (“The Wikipedia Encyclopedia of Serial Killers”) and “racial” material (“The Protocols of Zion”). Also lurking in the off-limits stacks are more than a few books that wouldn’t be out of place in an airport bookshop or neighborhood little free library. Stieg Larsson’s runaway bestseller “The Girl Who Played with Fire,” for instance (tagged for being “sexually explicit”), or Phil Hellmuth Jr.’s “Play Poker Like the Pros” (“promotes gambling”). My personal favorite prison-banned book? “The Dirt: Confessions of the World’s Most Notorious Rock Band,” by the members of Motley Crue and New York Times journalist Neil Strauss, which contains verboten references to — surprise, surprise — “sex and drugs.”
—Brad Tyer, Editor
On Our Radar
Amanda — I loved the first line in this short illustrated piece on whitebark pine that mixes natural history with news. “Whitebark pines are unmistakable, with stout, twisted trunks that are shaped but not dominated by the wind and topped with bundles of needles on upswept branches,” Kylie Mohr writes for High Country News.
Alex — The national debate over election skepticism took a fascinating turn recently when the New York Times published a series of internal communications among Fox News hosts privately deriding some of the most prominent deniers of Donald Trump’s 2020 election loss. The paper’s coverage sheds new light on the network’s motivations for promoting allegations of fraud and what its top personalities really thought about the legitimacy of those claims.
Mara — After a disconcerting editorial by a former employee of a Missouri gender clinic published in journalist Bari Weiss’ The Free Press [no relation] last month prompted state investigations and blowback about transgender health services for minors, the St. Louis Post Dispatch hit the phones to fact-check those claims and hear directly from parents and patients. The findings are numerous, nuanced and well worth a read.
Arren — This gorgeous story from High Country News discusses the curious history of Butte’s Our Lady of the Rockies, and what that history says about the existence — often overlooked — of women in the West.
JoVonne — Buffalo have historically been an integral food source for Indigenous people of the plains. Now the Blackfeet Reservation has opened its buffalo range to the public. Check out the Missoulian’s story on the tribe’s first open bison hunt, which displays two different worldviews on the animal.
Eric — Forget “Yellowstone” — this old Super Bowl commercial does a waaaay better job capturing the authentic spirit of Montana politics.
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