A lot happening in the Legislature

HELENA - There are now 900 introduced bills with around 100 or so already having been killed by committees. By the time the legislature ends, we should have somewhere around 1,500 bills having been introduced or having been drafted and had a hearing.

We are now coming up to the general bill title deadline. This means that bills that deal with policy without having dollars connected to them have to be passed through the chamber they started in by next week in order to transfer over to the other chamber in time, so look to see an avalanche of bill drafts being written up this week and moving through the process.

We finished up our infrastructure work in the committee I chair. I had scheduled the committee to finish up its work faster than it normally would so that we could get the infrastructure bills working their way through the legislature quicker than they normally would and I believe we are on pace to do exactly that.

We heard projects from all over the state since the beginning of the session. You can view these bills by looking them up online at the legislature’s website.

House Bill 5 (Long Range Building Program): The LRBP program deals with Maintenance and Repair for all of the State-owned properties throughout Montana and new large capitol projects. The bill contained funding for 80 projects/programs totaling $241 million. $62 million of that is what we call “authority only” which is basically us as a state giving permission to these state agencies to raise private money for the projects.

House Bill 6 (Renewable Resource Grant and Loan Program): The RRGL program deals with water projects that protects or improves a renewable resource. The maximum grant under this program is $125,000. The bill contains 76 water/wastewater/irrigation projects for a total of $8.9 million.

House Bill 7 (Reclamation and Development Grant Program): The RDGP program deals with reclamation projects. They are often based around cleaning up mines or soils around the state. There was a total of 11 projects for $4 million.

House Bill 8 (Regional Water Loan Program): The Regional Water program is one of the most fundamental programs Montana has to offer. This program deals with the building of actual water systems, delivering drinking water and allowing for irrigation. The program uses coal severance tax bonds to provide money for loans to the projects. There are nine projects totaling $22 million.

House Bill 11 (Treasure State Endowment Program): The TSEP grant program helps fund large water, wastewater, dam and bridge projects throughout the state. The bills includes 31 water projects, 21 wastewater projects, 3 dam projects and 14 bridge projects from all over the state, totaling 30 million dollars.

House Bill 14 (The Governor’s Bonding bill) House Bill 14 is the Governor’s Bonding bill for the session. This bill changes every session. I will expand on this bill more in a future update since it is a larger topic.

This is just the first step of the process for the infrastructure conversation. Now we move to the full House Appropriations Committee where I will start putting together what will end up being the Montana’s infrastructure package.

Thank you for allowing me to serve you in Helena!