Opinion

Since the 2025 session convened, the Montana Freedom Caucus and other conservatives have been planning to expose HB231 and SB542, which are supposed to take effect in 2026. The Montana Chamber of Commerce knew it would impact property tax shifts to businesses, and that’s why they lobbied so hard against it. Legislators were adamant to pass something, despite the ramifications. Now we see some calculations of the estimated impacts. Phillips 66 Company had an increase for the tax year 2025 of $11,301,544, with an estimate for 2026 at $14,429,22, an increase of 21.6%. CHS Inc. had an increase for tax year 2025 of $10,024,563, with 2026 estimated at $12,107,432, an increase of 17.2%...

Editor,  Donald Trump, the president who promised us “No forever wars” has now begun something that looks, uh, kind of big, to some of us. And this not long after his Venezuelan venture. Is this a new, younger Donny? Or is it a Trump who is simply trying desperately to distract us from an...

Editor, Iran is not a nation friendly to the U.S., but we must acknowledge that this administration’s war is largely an attempt to hijack the global narrative and drown out the many failures of our current administration. This is a cold-blooded war of distraction….from the president’...

Last week focused on the myriad things we – as humans – can agree on. What started as a short list morphed into something more extensive, so much so that it encompassed two columns.  Turns out agreeing isn’t as hard as we tend to make it out to be. Who would’ve thunk it? But I...

Editor, With regards to Terry Falk’s letter to the editor (Dec. 3) and his idea that about one-third of the state windfall could be spent on prisons: a little surfing on the internet tells me that out of state prisons charge Montana about $90 per day per inmate, the state pays about $83 per day to c...

Did you get your elk yet?  This rifle season has been mild, and elk and deer have been widely dispersed and hard to find.  Is changing climate influencing wildlife and hunting?  While our weather is variable from year to year, Montana has been warming and drying with increasing greenhouse g...

A recent flyer distributed to Lake County citizens contains significant misinformation regarding the Montana State Budget. Americans for Prosperity (AFP), a special interest group based in Virginia, asserts that the State budget is “on fire.” This claim is unequivocally false. During the 2025 leg...

There are various possible responses.  Many people would invest a large majority of those funds into something or somebody that they trust. Generally speaking, this is referred to as sound financial literacy.  The state of Montana won the lottery in a sense by receiving an unexpected large windf...

The holidays are meant to be a joyous and celebratory time for the masses.  We jingle and we jangle. We carol and we herald. We send cards and decorate yards. We prep and we wrap. We elf on the shelf. We deck the halls and trim the tree with ornate balls. Our nights are bright with festive lights. We...

In 2023, an avalanche of out-of-state money drove home values through the roof. When the dust settled, roughly $270 million in property-tax burden had shifted onto regular Montana homeowners. A three-bedroom house in Billings was suddenly carrying a heavier relative load than the $30 million dollar mansions ...