Reversing the trend

It's week three here at the Legislative Session and things are off and running. For the last 16 years, the bureaucracy in Helena has been told from on high that the best way for them to affect positive change in the lives of Montanan's was to be intimately involved in most of the decisions we make as individuals, towns and communities. You see it every time you interact with government, these days it almost feels like you need to get a permit to sneeze. We are looking to reverse that trend in Helena, across the spectrum of State and local government.

To that end, we have several pieces of policy dealing first and foremost with the government response to COVID-19. We have legislation seeking to peel back the ability of local health boards to unilaterally make decisions that have far reaching consequences for local economies and Montana's economy as a whole.

To be clear, I think Health Boards have done their job during this pandemic, working as hard as they can to protect public health. Health Boards should have never been in a position where they were capable of shutting down or strangling local economies. In a Representative Republic, we elect individuals to make those full spectrum kind of decisions for us specifically because they have to take more than just one facet of our day to day lives into consideration when making those decisions, and because those elected representatives are directly responsible to us at the ballot box for the decisions that they make on our behalf.

We intend to return to that setup by making County Commissioners and City Council's the final arbiters of local Health Board orders. This may not change the final decision at the local level, in Missoula I usually don't hold out hope that the County Commission will make the right decision at any given time. But it will return decision making power back to the place our State Constitution envisioned, to our elected representatives.

At the state level, we will be reforming the unilateral power that the governor has been able to use during emergencies like those we have experienced over the last year. It doesn't matter which party controls the Governor's Office, emergency declarations by executives should not be able to carry on in perpetuity without legislative oversight and approval.

The next couple of weeks will see a lot of serious policy bills beginning to come alive and start to move their way through the process. Appropriation subcommittees are already beginning to go over their individual sections of the state budget, we are working on putting together what the implementation of the recreational marijuana initiative will look like and we are identifying redundant regulations in every department of government that we can do away with.

Despite all the challenges, we are going to turn this session into a real success for the people of Montana.